give me characters who boast. give me characters that swear. Colourfully. give me characters who smirk, who look smug. Give me characters who sneer. give me characters who bite back. give me characters who stick out their tongues. give me characters that are sassy and ironic.
make them female.
give me characters who flirt, shamelessly so. give me characters who don’t blush. give me characters with exacerbated sexuality, who don’t care about using it to get what they want. give me characters that are confident in their own skins. give me characters who love dressing up. give me characters that love make-up. give me characters that hate wearing dresses and would rather go to a gala barefaced. even barefoot.
make them female.
give me characters who are angry. Frustrated. Enraged and sad. give me characters who are messy. who don’t know how to deal with their emotions. give me characters who want to learn, but they’re in too much pain right now. Give me characters who need love and support.
give me characters who know their emotions all too well, and can deal with them. give me characters who know they can’t do emotional labour for others. give me characters who would rather be rational, despite being in touch with their emotions.
make them female.
give me characters who are quiet, reserved. give me characters who don’t like speaking to strangers, who don’t like being the center of attention. give me characters who are sweet and loving and fun to be around, but would just rather be alone. give me characters who would go to a party and come home early to finish their book. or wouldn’t even go in the first place.
or give me characters who are shy and quiet until they are around people they know. give me shy characters that love going to parties but would also enjoy staying home drinking their favourite tea.
make them female.
give me characters with dry-humour. characters who are serious. characters who are the antithesis of laid-back. give me characters who don’t speak, they bark when they’re angry. give me characters who can be mean and nasty, but mostly quiet.
give me characters who are scary when they lower their voices. give me characters who don’t have to speak up, or even speak at all, to unsettle everyone in a room.
and make them female
give me characters who have suffered injustices. give me characters who are prepared for vengeance. give me characters who are determined, obstinate and deadly. give me characters who are observant, intelligent and cunning. give me minds that scheme against powerful men.
I wrote an incredibly long post on Dreamwidth about the Tumblr purges and what happens next! Here’s the first bit, which I’m quoting here as a little bit of a fannish history lesson for all you young’uns, probably it’ll get deleted, thanks Tumblr:
First: let me start off by saying that it is very probable that Tumblr will back out of this particular bad idea. They often do. The pattern of fannish archival catastrophes at the hand of corporations almost always has five stages: 1) a sale, or rumored sale, of the platform; 2) falling or nonexistent profits; 3) pressure from (pick at least one) governments, morality warriors, and/or advertisers/other corporate interests; 4) the actual fannish archival catastrophe, caused by a change in the TOS or in the enforcement of the TOS, which itself frequently comes in multiple stages; and 5) a second sale of the platform.
Strikethrough, for example, wasn’t a single terrible idea executed badly, it was at least two terrible ideas executed badly: first Strikethrough, which happened in May 2007; and then, following masses of outrage (particularly outrage from fans), some limited concessions from LJ management; followed by a second round of permanent suspensions conducted a little bit differently, a.k.a. Boldthrough, in August 2007. These tend to get lumped together in fannish memory, but I want people to remember that they were not a single event.
And those two events, themselves, are also not the whole story: Strikethrough itself followed on well over a year of rumors that LJ was changing its TOS/enforcement of its TOS, ever since LJ had been sold to SixApart in 2005, who were trying to monetize the site. Likewise, alongside those rumors, LJ’s adult content—which, unlike Tumblr, may actually have been predominately fannish, because I don’t think actual porn producers used LJ anywhere near as heavily as they use Tumblr—had been under continual attack from Christian pressure groups because it hosted material that they claimed was “harming children” [I can’t find a source on this, but I remember it very clearly—if anyone has a source, lmk in comments and I’ll link], what with all the fannish erotica with clear disclaimers on it that it was intended for adult audiences, frequently (as with pornish_pixies) posted in locked communities. There was, simultaneously, a lot of pressure being put on LiveJournal by the Russian government, because another group that heavily used LJ at the time was Russian political protestors. On top of that, there was a lot of rumor about LJ/SixApart’s advertisers getting antsy about blogs containing adult content [I can’t find a source on this either—if anyone has a source, lmk in comments and I’ll link].
So, in short, here is what happened to LJ: 1) LJ was sold to SixApart; 2) SixApart tried to monetize it; 3) SixApart got pressure from a) the Russian government, b) the Christian anti-porn police, and c) advertisers to bring its “adult content problem” under control; 4) LJ deleted a whole bunch of blogs, backed up and said “mea culpa”, and then… deleted a whole bunch of blogs; and 5) SixApart sold LJ to the Russians.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Following this pattern, here is what I suspect is going to happen to Tumblr: 1) Tumblr was sold to Yahoo (now owned by Verizon); 2) Yahoo/Verizon tried to monetize it; 3) Yahoo/Verizon got pressure from a) various governments, including Indonesia and China, b) the anti-porn/anti-sex-work/anti-shipping moral purity police, and c) the Apple Store to bring its “adult content problem” under control; 4) starting earlier this year, Tumblr deleted a whole bunch of blogs, backed up and said “mea culpa”, and then… changed its TOS and started deleting content [← we’re here right now]; and 5) Verizon will sell Tumblr to ? ? ?
It’s possible that we’ll have another couple rounds in Step 4. It’s not like 2 rounds in Step 4 is magic, or something; my point is just: Tumblr has already backed down once. You see where that gets us (fucking nowhere, that’s where). That said? The death throes are going to take a while. I was still reluctantly cross-posting to LJ in 2015; as late as 2013, LJ was still a lot of fans’ primary home. Six full years after Strikethrough!! Six! Full! Years! After they started deleting our shit, and banning our friends!!! And in that six years, all that happened was LJ’s TOS got continually and aggressively more restrictive, while the Russians were banging up all the political dissenters whose content they’d purchased into jail.
My point, here, is just that we have been here before. Exactly here. We have done this before, exactly this. Tumblr may take a while to bleed out, and they may try to triage it, but the writing is, in fact, on the wall: Tumblr will throw us off whatever cliffs they need to to try and eke out a profit for the morons in Verizon’s boardroom; and in the end, our data’s going to get deleted, or it’s going to get sold, because that is just how these things go.
So we need to figure out where we go next.
Please read/reblog/reply—I really do want people to weigh in! I’m not promising to keep tracking this on Tumblr (come to DW, the water’s fine), but I do want to hear what people have to say.
Ayup. Pretty much how it went down, how it’s going to go down, how it always goes down.
I nearly always tend to jump ship ahead of the iceberg, but I’ve been a passenger on at least half of the fannish freighters out there, and…yeah, this is just another in a long line of catastrophes. And at this point I’m practiced enough in the aftermath to know that I will NOT go down with this ship. I see a lot of folks claiming that they’ll hold on to their tumblrs to the bitter end, but as an old hand at this, I encourage you to ask yourself one practical, not emotional, question: do you already habitually and happily maintain a strong social presence on multiple platforms? Because if not, don’t kid yourself…you’re going to migrate wherever the greatest concentration of people whose presence you enjoy end up, and tumblr’s going to fall by the wayside. And that’s fine! But if you can see it’s going to happen anyway, jump before you’re thrown. At least you’ll get to pick where you land.
I completely agree. There’s no point in waiting. Get set up elsewhere as soon as you can. Gather as many contacts as you can while you’re still on tumblr, and then get out.
Personally, I’m of the camp ‘delete your blog behind you’ because I’d definitely like to send a message that this kind of bullshit is unacceptable. However, I realize they probably won’t care much, because corporations never do. So, delete your blog, don’t delete your blog…whatever works best for you. But do find a new home soon. reconnect with your friends. Don’t lose contact. This community is extremely important to a whole lot of us, me included. I need you guys.
Unless and until I can figure out how to archive notes and comment threads, I’m pretty sure I won’t be deleting my blog on the way out, because those things are important to me. But if a system for doing that exists, that would def change everything.
It’s a poetic contrast you overly-literal fucks. As dark as wine is red, so the sea is blue.
Counterpoint: Homer was fucking blind
homer was several people through the ages. one of them had to be able to see.
I thought this was about Homer Simpson and the poetic language and metaphors used in the early seasons of the show.
Cultures start with some basic colors (red is apparently early) but in Homer’s time there may not have been a concept of ‘blue’. (A contemporary hunter gatherer culture which has no written language and apparently no concept ‘blue’, when asked what color the sky was said, ‘White.’)
The color ‘orange’ wasn’t described as a specific color until after the English saw the fruit. Before that, something we would describe as orange was probably called red.
We don’t have any idea what was evoked for the listeners of The Odessey in the phrase ‘wine dark sea’ but we know they described color differently.
Guess I’m gonna be full of all kinds of fun facts this morning, but, here goes.
Like so many things, color exists as a continuum in the real world, in this case of wave length, saturation, and hue. Different cultures chop it up into distinct categories in different ways. Western societies chop it up based on wave length and pretty much ignore saturation and hue until we’re in gray, white, and black territory. Not all cultures do.
Across cultures, the children acquired color terms the same way: They gradually and with some effort moved from an uncategorized organization of color, based on a continuum of perceptual similarity, to structured categories that varied across languages and cultures. Over time, language wielded increasing influence on how children categorized and remembered colors.
In short, the range of stimuli that for Himba speakers comes to be categorized as “serandu” would be categorized in English as red, orange or pink. As another example, Himba children come to use one word, “zoozu,” to embrace a variety of dark colors that English speakers would call dark blue, dark green, dark brown, dark purple, dark red or black.
Looking at other pictures of pets that are the same breed or colouring as the one you have is weird because
They look almost exactly like the animal you live with
But you can tell. You just unequivocally know…. they.. are an imposter
WAIT WAIT WAIT wAAAAit just a minute.
Are you telling me.
That my face blindness.
Extends to ANIMALS?!!
I had a longhair Chihuahua for almost 17 years, and she had the classic coloring of a fawn-colored Chi. If you were to show me a pic of several very similar longhair fawn Chi, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one was mine.
Are you telling me this isn’t how everybody is? You really can pick your dog out of a crowd of the same kind of dogs? You just KNOW?!
I don’t know why I never thought of my face blindness as extending to animals, but the thought never crossed my mind. I just assumed most people were screwed if they lost their dog in a crowd of similar dogs and all of them came running when called :
Yes. Yes it does.
It extends to the differentiation of any specific example of a face from class of things that has faces. So, yep, the perception that it is this specific face of this specific Chi is one part of your brain, and the ability to perceive that these are Chihuahuas (with faces) is another part of your brain.
The recognition of this specific Chihuahua’s faces is primarily found in the fusiform gyrus on the underside of your brain. The fact that it’s a Chihuahua’s face is mostly in other parts of the temporal lobe. Yep, it’s so complex that the brain dedicated a whole region to that one thing. Wild stuff.
Hearseeno 