Oh! Oh :/

Tuesday, 13 August 2019 19:19
yvannairie: a version of the "this is fine" meme (pahvimeemi)
One thing I didn't realise about The Youth That Grew Up With Social Fandom is that reading through another person's backlog isn't, like, normal to them?

Like, somewhere like on Twitter that's understandable b/c Twitter is all about New Content, All The Time, but on Tumblr people get weirdly apologetic about reading back through other people's blogs and reblogging stuff from two-three years ago -- something I also started doing because I'm usually also dropping people a notice that I'm informally "following" them (neener neener my dashboard is clean and my RSS feed finally works as intended, thank you DW), which means that Your New Content is the only way people really find out about what you're into and what you're passionate about.

And, well, in the attention economy new content is how you make it and please the almighty algorithms/get eyes on your stuff, so it makes sense The New Stuff is the only thing people pay attention to.

... and that's. IDK. That makes me inexplicably sad.

I have a massive backlog for anyone who cares to go through it. I used to have a tag I used exclusively for reblogs if people wanted to know who I interacted with and how, or to browse around for what I used to talk about in my tags, I used to have a tag for comments I added on reblogs, I had three different personal tags (a tradition I'm continuing on this journal -- some of y'all are not here for my life, you're here for the Spicy Takes About Fiction), and I tag for fandom and topic pretty heavily.

I have a tags page. I even had a tag cloud once upon a time so people could find out what was "big" on my blog, although that no longer works for reasons unknown to me. And that's how I had it set up while I still had search turned off. Now I don't care -- if someone wants to hate-search my blog for content to complain about that's no skin off my back because I'm done posting original content on Tumblr anyway. Finding out what I am "about", what I like, what I think about and how I go about thinking about it is easier than ever, but... it's no longer the norm.

The majority of my content up until I quit using Tumblr for anything but self-promotion was original content. I was always posting in a way that would make my tags fun to read backwards through -- or if not fun, at least informative or expressive. One of my big joys was finding people who had interesting things to say, and reading through their personal or fandom tags and getting to know their opinions. That's why getting the hell off Tumblr and back into a more sensible journal-based site did so much good for me, because while I was never embarrassed to be a primarily self-post blog, at least I know that the people who are subbed to me here are here exclusively for my thoughts and not just using me as a tertiary filter on their experience of the internet.

Oh well. It's not like I need any more reasons to hate the attention economy.

Maybe reposting and backdating my stuff finally gives them the attention they deserve, too.
yvannairie: drawing of someone experiencing visible silence (why)
Ohhhhh man in the spirit of "I am not going to give bad posts notes, even just to respond to them", I'm gonna use my journal for The Purpose It Exists

and complain about a bad take I just saw

namely, a bad take inspired by the recent article about how the thin membranes between public and private spaces on the internet are causing children to stumble upon porn from kids' shows. Someone I follow reblogged a post saying that the obvious solution people are suggesting -- that parents teach their children responsible internet-usage and supervise them if necessary -- is not a good solution...

... because the OP has trust issues from their parents going through their internet history.

And, like, I'm sorry I guess? I'm sorry about your trust issues, but what do they have to do with kids needing healthy boundaries? If anything, I feel like that supports the point that parents should teach their kids about boundaries, because if your parents had adequately explained what you should do if you see something disturbing online instead of treating you like you had no right to privacy, you probably would have had much less adverse experiences online... right?

This treatment of parents taking responsibility for their kids' online habits being conflated with being a controlling helicopter parent is some prime responsibility avoidance in action, tbh. Just because your parents did a bad job with you, it doesn't mean that everyone else is now responsible for raising you. Learn to enforce your own boundaries like the rest of us, who just learned to click away when something disturbed us.

Look, just... eventually, we're all going to see or experience something that is going to disturb us. We are born with nothing, and need to learn everything, and that also includes learning about the unpleasant and harmful things we all genuinely wish didn't exist. And if you have parents who you don't trust and can't go to for support when that happens, that is genuinely rough. I know -- I practically raised myself, and I genuinely had some fucked-up ideas about how life worked because turns out a mentally ill teenager raising themselves is gonna make some mistakes.

But it's important to recognise that in that instance, it was your shitty parents who failed you (and possibly the person who sent you the thing that disturbed you, if it was done maliciously), not the person who made the thing you stumbled on. You can't just say "I don't know how to cope with this so you need to stop doing it". Telling other people to stop is not a coping mechanism you can sustain very far. This is why you learn boundaries -- learn to go "I never want to see this again -- please go do it somewhere else where I don't need to see it" or better yet, leave the space where people are doing it.

Not everywhere on the internet is for kids and we shouldn't act like it is. This is not just about porn of stuff kids watch (lest we forget, kids also watch stuff that is made for them and the rest of the audience) but also about other things kids aren't ready to deal with. (Graphic violence, for example. It's really convenient how everyone who talks about porn forgets about that.)

Ugh. Time to go watch some kitten videos until I stop being annoyed at being drafted to raise someone once they're already fully responsible for their own internet experience.
yvannairie: :3 (Default)
It really is something else to see someone you thought was eloquent, measured and thorough argue against a point you agree with and realise that you can't get behind anything they're saying because the tone, delivery and reasoning are so obtuse, and then realise you've agreed with them repeatedly on their reasoning on points you both disagree with.

Turns out I'm still very bad at listening to how a thing is said if I agree with the thing being said, which is incidentally why I was a baby radfem for years before growing an accountability organ spontaneously.

I s2g

Tuesday, 2 April 2019 18:50
yvannairie: drawing of someone experiencing visible silence (why)
Talking about the goings on with my friend, it made me realise that if there's something I wish was better understood to be a conflict of needs, is that indulging people's fear-based behaviour is not an option for some people.

Being treated as a threat, being treated like you're a bomb that might go off, has just as much of an effect of putting anyone even a little more outspoken who gives a shit about how they treat people in walking-on-eggshells mode. We should be capable of sympathising with anxious people without indulging their coping mechanisms if those coping mechanisms are maladaptive and harmful. Jumping, flinching, being startled all signal things to the environment, and unless contextualised, the person doing that is ultimately responsible for how they're received.

Someone projecting their inferiority onto me and apologising a lot as a result is harmful for me because it fucks with my read of and expectations for that person. Someone treating me like I'm out to take advantage of them has the same effect. Someone treating me like I'm aggressive and dangerous is literally doing the exact same gaslighting thing that was done to crush my sense of self when I was younger. These are not value-neutral behaviours just because they're defensive.

Just because someone is behaving defensively because they think their needs will not be accommodated doesn't mean their defensive behaviour should go entirely unexamined. Just because someone expects to be mistreated doesn't give them a pass for treating people like they're personally responsible for that trauma.

Poor self-esteem needs to stop being treated as a pass for a lack of prosocial behaviour. You get treated the way you treat others, and nobody is under obligation to wrap their own issues up just so they can treat you better.

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