All Things Gravity Falls ✨

I’ve been on a gravity falls kick as of late XD

like a lot of others I got back into this show after the book of bill came out (I STILL DONT HAVE IT BUT IM DOING TO GET IT IF ITS THE LAST THING I DO!!) and wanted to FINALLY draw and post fan art of it. I just couldn’t decide on what. then the thought hit me

ME: Ah! I've been a library assistant for 5 years. Surely I can explain this in a reasonable and nuanced, yet concise way!

2 HOURS LATER:

Like, here are some VERY COMMON examples of personal breaking points that can come up in archiving:

Trans person whose friend keeps writing Harry Potter fanfic

Parent whose coworker loves drawing shota/lolicon

Uncle going down an anti-vax documentary hole

Mom pushing diet magazines on her daughter

Racist old dudes on school reading lists

True crime Youtube clickbaits

AI-generated Elsagate brainrot shorts

Comic books by a white guy posing as Asian

$2 exploitation porn DVDs

School shooter simulator video game

Guides on making explosives

LiveLeak content

Odds are pretty good that at least one of those made you, reading this, viscerally cringe and want to argue about, WHICH IS WHAT I MEAN. Every person has a breaking point, and THAT'S NORMAL.

The point of the library training isn't to make you into a unique person who has never, ever been reviled by or wanted to destroy a piece of media. It's to learn how to live with that feeling, step back, and work with your team to maintain the archive, anyway.

And sometimes, maintaining means recognizing that not every place IS an archive! I'm only able to maintain an archive space BECAUSE I know I have spaces where the stuff that revolts me is banned! It's okay to curate multiple spaces; tolerance is more than blind acceptance.

The library archives information, the bar should not be allowed to become a Nazi bar. The AO3 tags archive every fic, the Discord group chat isn't made to be a museum. You don't have to take everything home with you at all times to prove yourself.

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

but i do think the monstrosity was a prerequisite. in the same way that a straight guy is sexually/romantically attracted to girls: that doesn't mean he's attracted to ALL girls just for being girls—but if the straight guy forms an emotional bond with someone, if they aren't a girl, then that bond would never develop into sexual/romantic attraction.

I need every single person to understand how horrible tumblr’s tagging system is

I go into the tag for epilepsy and its all flashing lights. We can’t use our own tag because people without epilepsy fill it up with improper warnings.

Use ‘flashing’ in place of ‘epilepsy’ in your tags. You aren’t warning people of epileptics, you’re warning us of flashing lights. Please please tag properly. Epileptics say this endlessly and constantly and it’s ignored. You are risking lives by doing this.

Here’s proof of what I mean:

Uh. Happy pride month?