Gotta get married so I can avoid situations with a “oh sorry I can’t, my wife needs me home asap” and then go home to my beautiful wife
a fandom old's guide to how livejournal fandom worked (in super basic terms)
so people are talking about dreamwidth as a tumblr alternative, and the idea of a return to livejournal-style fandom is sort of exciting to old people like me. but it is also wildly, unthinkably different from tumblr and twitter fandoms, not just in user experience but in the actual fundamentals of fandom activity itself. so i thought i'd try to explain how livejournal fandoms worked!
your journal
the obvious comparison here is your tumblr blog! but there's a reason sites like tumblr were called "microblogging": the DW/LJ style journal is much more text-heavy. there's no mechanism for reblogging, and posting standalone images without a caption or story to go with it was not the norm. this is because most of the time when you're posting, you're hoping to actually start a conversation in the comments!
unlike on tumblr, comments were actually useful and useable. they nest, so it's super clear who is responding to whom, and you can have multiple threads of conversation in response to a single post. i'd argue this is where the core of fandom interactions took place!
some people made their journals entirely private, meaning you have to be mutuals or added as a follower to see their stuff. this made it much, much easier to curate your fandom experience by being able to post meta/thoughts/complaints just to a selected circle of followers and friends.
the posts of journals you follow show up on a feed just like your tumblr dash, in reverse chronological order. as I said, there is no ay to share a post on your feed, just comment on it or write your own post and link to it. random discoverability is... low. there are tags, but they are only used for searching within someone's journal.
so how do you find people, or get to know someone who has a private journal? well--
love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking
We need to bring back 80's style fantasy movies ASAP, it's the only way we can save cinema!
Grab a bunch of special effect makeup artists, synth music, hyper realistic puppets, matte paintings, scale models, and most importantly, a pop rock band that simply will never make it to compose the theme song based on just the title of the movie and nothing more.
Quick, guys, we need to save cinema!
I'm in favour of this, but then I might be biased as I did live through the 80s
This has been going around my work and friend group on other platforms, and I thought it deserved a place here too.
#it’s a good limitus test. take out the specifics of drinking or not drinking alcohol vs owning a dog or not #it’s basically 1) would you spend an evening laughing and enjoying conversation with someone and walking away like ‘that was good.’ #and 2) do you trust this person has a basic level of willingness and ability to care for others and repay your trusting in them? #it’s just getting you to tap into the unconscious micro-tells our brains collect about other people #which are by far the most accurate assessment tools we have to judge peoples’ characters on the fly and in general (via purplehawke)
Shoutout to that time someone posted this on one of my servers and multiple people were going “this is exclusionary to people who don’t drink/are allergic to dogs, also it is ableist to expect me to understand the concept of an analogy”
Like yes ok I would definitely have neither 2 beers with you nor leave a puppy with any of you
I think that if you asked Shaggy what his gender was he'd say "you're, like, livin' in a prison of your own creation, man" and then eat a huge sandwich in one bite
obsessed with this interaction
Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Planers, 1875
All hail Gustave Caillebotte, the only Impressionist who bothered to say “You know what this art movement doesn’t have enough of? Shirtless rough trade, that’s what!” And then he became the change he wanted to see in the world, and I think that’s beautiful.
This is being reposted, for the advent of American Thanksgiving, on November 17th, 2023. American Thanksgiving this year is on November 23rd.
If you are seeing this after November 21st 2023 do NOT come crying to me about it being too late. That ain’t my fault. I Do Not Control The Rate At Which Turkey Thaws
i love a good 90 minute movie. let's get this started and wrapped up in a timely fashion
I can only read “dogs” and only see anything in one other. I see nothing in any other.
8/10 but fuck, OW.
You
This post has gotten 18,000 notes in the last 36 hours. And you @bunjywunjy are patient zero.
WHAT CAN I SAY
EXCEPT,
It's so sad that I am hearing of Bosnian genocide survivors talk about how they are triggered by the genocide denial happening around gaza. That the rhetoric that is being thrown around in the media and the rationalization for killing thousands and the talk of "let's be careful of what we call genocide. Let's wait before we call it that" is repetitive of what they were hearing when they were living through it
And Holocaust survivors who were protesting in DC and feeling the burden of having to come out and protest another genocide being done in their name except the media has completely sidelined them because it does not fit the narrative.
I have no other words except how terrible this is but it feels comforting in a weird way that genocide survivors are standing with Gaza. Who needs the acknowledgement of governments when you have them
An interview with genocide researcher and survivor of the Bosnian genocide Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura
My initial reaction to seeing the destruction of Gaza — the videos of children being pulled out of rubble, the bodies of the dead — was that it reminded me so much of my own experience.
It was hard for me these past two weeks to go to sleep and sleep through the night. I would dream of Gaza. I would dream of Sarajevo, I would dream of Visegrad, I would dream of Srebrenica. I was seeing it all play out and it was terrifying. So my initial reaction was: Dear God, this is going to be a genocide.
We saw what happened on Oct. 7. The immediate reaction of Israeli politicians, government leaders and defense forces was to publicly and openly call for the destruction of Gaza. “We’re going to destroy them all.” “These are human animals.” “We’re cutting off food, electricity, water, aid.” That was the first red flag to me, when they said “we’re cutting everything off.” It instantly put me back to living in Sarajevo during the siege, when we were completely cut off from the world.
We had no way in or out. We were being bombarded every single day. There was not a day that they did not shell us, attack us with snipers, throwing grenades, bombs, whatever they could. There was not a single day where we were able to breathe. Knowing that the Palestinians in Gaza are going through this as well right now, it was difficult for me not to see those similarities instantly. What do you say when [Israel] cuts off their access to water, to electricity, to food, to aid, and then they bomb them? How do you not describe that as genocide?
.....
It’s been horrific to see the levels of dehumanization. That they’re considered terrorists, that they’re all extremists, that they got what they deserve. That sort of rhetoric is so similar to the Serbian propaganda prior to the genocide.
We were classified as terrorists. The Serb civilians were told, “If you don’t kill them, they’re going to kill you. They’re going to attack you.” Meanwhile, we had no plans of attacking. We wanted to live in peace with our neighbors, as we always had. We just wanted freedom, just like any other person wants. There wasn’t a systematic plan in place of the Bosniak Muslim population to ever attack any of its neighbors. But there was a systematic plan in place from Serb leadership to attack and exterminate the Bosniak Muslim population.
In order for any government to to commit a genocide, it needs the enablement of the population. We’ve seen in the Holocaust that people stood by and stayed silent while Jews were taken off to concentration camps, while their properties were looted, while they were forcibly displaced and put in ghettos all over Europe.
So, for any government to commit genocide, they have to push severe propaganda. It’s disinformation with the goal of making that population of people so fully dehumanized that when we start to bomb and kill and massacre them, the world just simply stands by, because to them these are not valuable lives. These are not human lives. They are animals to be exterminated, and if we don’t exterminate them, they’re going to attack all of us. They’re going to attack the sanctity of our life, of the way that we live our lives.
Read the whole thing
Every single time one group of people makes huge, systemic attacks on another group of people based on their identity or another shared characteristic, and we use serious, accurate descriptive terms like genocide or eugenics to explain what is going on, we see pushback and justifications, because accusing powerful leaders of genocide is apparently much worse than actually committing it.
Pretending it's not happening, that those in power have only good intentions while carrying out genocidal rhetoric and legislation, and that their victims have only bad intentions simply by virtue of existing, ensures genocide takes place. We live in an eternal state of "not yet; it's not bad enough to call it that yet," but as we're seeing, for many people, no graphic horror visited on an entire population counts as "yet".
And fixating on "not yet"-type arguments is convenient because it lets people skip over a very important fact: that the processes of genocide are not inexorable.
That's not my interpretation; that's the words of Dr. Gregory Stanton, who wrote The Ten Stages of Genocide, which you can read here. The thing that jumps out at me about this document is its humility and the fact it is not intended to be the end point of how we discuss genocide: he points out that "stages" is a term he regrets, because these are processes that can happen simultaneously, concurrently, and in any order after Classification. He notes that colleagues added to the list, and that there are likely other processes yet to be documented.
What comes up over and over is that what's missing in our thinking about genocide is the present tense. By insisting that genocide is always an evil from the past or a hypothetical future outcome, we cast present, ongoing events as dismissable and non-urgent, and witnesses to genocide both within and outside any country where it's happening permit ourselves to remain passive onlookers instead of actors.
Our tolerance of the present and ongoing genocidal processes in our own countries dulls our willingness to recognise it when it happens on TV, in front of our noses, with the support of our own countries' leaders.