my friend just told me that there's a secret second dashboard that solely contains posts from people you've turned on post notifications for, and when i click the link in the messages it opens it within the tumblr app, so the tumblr app also has a secret second dashboard for post notification blogs, and the only way to access it is to open the link for it within the app.

i literally love tumblr

i have a private pinned post that just has a link to this dashboard on it, it's great. two dashboards for life

wow! i was really hoping someone would organically reverse-engineer this and find that dash.

here are a few other "secret" dashboards:

these are all just taking existing feeds of content and putting them in a dashboard-like format... the "Stuff for you" tab/feed is the same idea.

I swear if the link in the original post is a virus I'll be so upset.

nope! i hovered over the link and this popped up on the bottom of the browser. here's all the links in order:

https://www.tumblr.com/timeline/blog_subscriptions

https://www.tumblr.com/timeline/crushes

https://www.tumblr.com/timeline/what_you_missed

https://www.tumblr.com/timeline/trending

https://www.tumblr.com/timeline/for_you

i am sure i am not the only person who have figured this out - there's probably a nonzero number of danmaku games that use it - but it still feels very... nice. to figure out.

we love unit testing!

The Zionist position doesn't make the most basic moral sense so you have to cover it up to keep from realizing that it's only remotely actionable because Israelis happened to get into a really great position to do whatever they want by force. I'd like to see how much Zionists in the US have repatriated their land to Native American tribes.

Sorry for the photo because I’m at work but what the fuck

Like the ban is bullshit but the US needs to fuck all the way off. ALL the way.

I'm home now so here's the link sans paywall.

fuck off. fuck off. fuck off. FUCK OFF.

Like. For context, for non Australians

In December last year Australia implemented a social media ban for kids under sixteen. Now, as someone who would have killed herself before her sixteenth birthday without the internet this is bullshit, but that's not the point here.

The United States has summoned an Australian citizen, acting in capacity as an Australian official, to answer to the United States Congress, as if it's any of their FUCKING BUSINESS what the AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT does ON ITS OWN FUCKING SOIL.

I never thought I'd want to rabidly defend the person who oversaw the ban to the point of wanting to throw hands but hey, these are unprecedented times.

The United States has been pulling this bullshit since they elected the orange fuckwit. OUR biggest scientific authority got a letter from the United States government demanding to know what they were doing to prevent trans people from getting jobs. The US government has been pressuring OUR government into destroying our PBS, which allows us to buy affordable medication, because it's not enough that they're killing their own citizens through medical bankruptcy they want to kill OURS too to "make America great again."

FUCK OFF.

"accessibility" needs to stop meaning "low-engagement"

"we are making our TTRPG more accessible!"

"oh, did you make the font bigger and more legible?"

"no we're just doing the next edition in D&D5e"

"we're making our video game more accessible!"

"oh did you add an option to remap the controls?"

"no we just added an option to remove combat so the game is just a bunch of cutscenes"

Doom letting me pick out the exact colour of the cross hair and a bunch of styles to pick out from so I can get one I can see best against the different colour schemes of the levels was fabulous. I am always resentful of games sticking with extremely fixed user interfaces.

Being able to change the color of HUD elements is huge for me too, pure "high visibility" #ffffff white HUD elements drive me crazy and feel like the burn into my fucking eyes and games that I already enjoy and play a bunch of keep adding them in updates with no way to revert them for "better visibility."

One of my more controversial takes is that while I don't think difficulty settings are a bad thing at all I do think that going too far in removing the difficulty from games where the difficulty has a clear artistic purpose and is meant to evoke a particular kind of emotion can fit into this as well.

For example, if a game's atmosphere is meant to communicate that you are lost in a dangerous world where you hold practically no power then it's a good thing if the gameplay reinforces that. Gameplay is part of the story, not just some irrelevant chore you do between cutscenes.

The feelings you get through the gameplay are a deliberate aspect of the game's narrative and if you remove them or make them irrelevant you can make the whole game feel very, very different and often even incongruous with itself.

Weird how no one ever does this to Swedes that answer a survey about not believing in God or not finding religion important in their life. Sweden even has an official state church and iirc a plurality of Swedes even get their children baptized despite being irreligious because of tradition but when it comes to Japan suddenly it’s all “visiting your grandparents grave means you can’t be atheist the Japanese people that answered this survey must’ve been confused”

the thing about 'tumblr reading comprehension' is that sure yeah often someone will read some nonsense you didn't say into your post but sometimes it's like 'wow how dare you read any radfem sentiment into my post about how men are inherently worse than women'

this post would be more epistemically virtuous and more hostile with examples but i don't have any to hand so this is the version you get

Same as when I would point out that the sealion comic straightforwardly says that you shouldn't confront racists in public, and people would get mad at that as an interpretation... When it's the most-obvious one!

Sometimes people horribly misunderstand a clearly-written post.

Sometimes what happens instead is that people notice implications about what the post is saying that the OP overlooked or even deliberately obfuscated. "If X was true then that logically also means Y and Z."

Sometimes people don't quite misunderstand a post so much as they misread it in bad faith so they have an excuse to attack the OP and possibly get people to harass them.

Some other times the OP was honestly just not well-written and fails to present the point it wants to make.

All four are common.

Cultures evolving and changing is morally neutral and a normal consequence of just existing at all in a world with shifting conditions and values. This isn't inherently bad in the first place. You can probably even think about at least 3 aspects of your culture that you'd like to change.

For example, I would like it if the role of paterfamilias died out for real. There's still a lot of fathers out there who treat their wife and children like their property.

I would also like it if society was a little bit less sexist but whenever I say that someone shows up talking about how their emotional support sexism is actually super valuable and must be maintained. This has happened more than once.

Me: Gender roles suck and I wish you could just do things without all these useless, made-up rules.

Some rando: I love following gender roles though.

Me: You can still do all the same things you're currently doing if you want, I just don't want to be forced to do the same or be classified as one gender or another based on how I engage with those things. I don't like that this is a widespread social force that has material consequences for your life (including being physically attacked for not conforming in more extreme cases).

Some rando: I still want those actions to be strongly gendered. Just feels nicer that way.

Me: Oh, this person doesn't seem to get it and is clinging to the same essentialist frameworks as my sexist dad who thinks cars are for boys and spending more than 5 minutes in the shower is for girls.

It seems like a common misconception that people seek fiction specifically as a form of escapism (but to be clear some people do).

There's many, many popular fictional settings that would be miserable to live in. Not everything is cozy wish fulfillment.

Rather than comfortable or pleasant, many of these settings are instead compelling, which is a very different thing. I find it much more engaging and fun to immerse myself in settings that are interesting rather than ones that would be nice to live in.

Not letting this stay in the tags.

While it's true that escapism isn't always about fluffiness, this is not the kind of setting I had in mind either. Power fantasies and wish fulfillment are not necessarily a part of these settings.

In fact I often find it more interesting and when fiction makes the audience feel disempowered or is capable of causing various negative emotions in a meaningful way.

This post was made in reference to people who say they play video games or watch shows to escape from reality and therefore it is somehow a problem when these things are not power fantasies. Like wish fulfillment isekai is the highest aspiration of art or something.

Arguably if there is a power fantasy in these things, it is the fact that with persistence and knowledge you can still sometimes overcome your situation and become stronger, but this usually still isn't enough to really switch genres or even necessarily get back at all the terrible people.

Join the incest army.

I am a gender abolitionist and I think even if my wishes were realized and we got a world without gender people would still want to transition, they would just describe the process differently.

"I want to have soft skin and boobs" rather than "I want to be a cute girl", for example.

This is what TERFs, who only pretend to be gender abolitionists for optics while going out of their way to enforce gender, don't seem to get.

They pretend that if there were no gender roles no one would transition and trans people would cease to exist.

What's more accurate is that "trans" as a category would become incoherent but people would still have preferences about their bodies and would benefit from modifying them in ways that our current world considers to be heavily gendered.

Personally, I think it would be all upsides if you did not even have to convince a medical gatekeeper that you are really a girl deep down and grew up playing with dolls and trying to wear makeup before you're allowed to have tits. You should be able to get those at your local pharmacy no questions asked.

@halberdwalrus said:

To which I have to ask:

1- Why exactly would it be a problem if some people were not euphoric about wearing dresses? Why would this be more of a loss than, say, not being euphoric about spinning cloth all day? Not being euphoric about eating vegan sandwiches? Not being euphoric about putting on the vaseline that says FOR MEN on the cover?

There is no shortage of pointlessly gendered things that most people, trans or not, simply don't feel that strongly about and that's okay. They can still do those things if they want but don't need them.

Society does not actually need to gender stuff like this.

2- These binary roles and gendered associations tend to put gender nonconforming and non-binary trans people in the worst position. Not all trans women want to wear dresses or shrink themselves into these roles, which few people completely fit in the first place. This is punished.

Someone in the notes said that gender is more than a straitjacket, but I feel that's only potentially true if you're talking about gender as an identity in your mind rather than talking about the social system that currently exists in real life, which is coercive, hierarchical, and arbitrary.

3- Crucially, it's all made up constructs that have already changed a lot over time. As I said in the notes, "being a man" and "being a woman" already don't mean the same things they used to mean and (at least in some parts of the world) the roles that still exist are less strict than they used to be. This is a good thing that results in more freedom for everyone, not just cis women.

These constructs are likely to break down even further as transition medicine advances and becomes more normalized, which is one of the big reasons why religious conservatives see trans people (and not ostensibly "gender critical" TERFs) as such a threat to their preferred social structures to the point that the supposedly "progressive" pope was comparing "gender ideology" (euphemism for trans people, among other things) to nuclear weapons in between covering up sexual abuse cases.

Trump: "Yeah, so we're going to be taking control of Venezuela and using its natural resources to enrich our oil corporations..."

A Disturbing Number of Deeply Stupid People: "Did you hear that? Venezuela is going to be FREE!"

You just know that they're going to sell off all of their public services to corrupt billionaires and gut the environment there, too.

officer-created jeopardy!

okay wow

Musk and Vance certainly do, it's hard to say whether Trump actually adheres to any ideology that goes beyond himself.

if u hate men i just want you to know that during the popularity of the “kill all men” hashtag multiple men i knew who were genuinely good people and allies went through major depressive episodes because they were exposed to death threats online and if you think that’s a good thing i don’t know how to explain to you that you are not a good person.

Men experience the same thing women do once and suddenly women can't vent anymore because what about the poor hyperbole-blind men :(

i think you misunderstand, even though i made it really fucking easy. men, people i knew, were facing DEATH THREATS. that is not a fucking “vent.” that is NOT NORMAL. for ANYONE.

women do not get to start sending people DEATH THREATS to random fucking innocent people because of their oppression / rape / etc. TO their direct oppressors? sure! absolutely! but not random fucking people on the internet

once again, i don’t know how else to explain to you that this is NOT OKAY

"hyperbole-blind men" lmao such a thin veil over hatred of autistics

the idea of "venting" it this discouse is so funny like. "yeah the problem with men is that they take the statements women make seriously rather than understanding that it's just hysterical ranting" -- feminism, I guess

watch normies discuss art with sex in it to immediately die

i guess to be fair it's not so much "sex" in general as it is either "horny elements without necessarily having sex ('fanservice')" or "sex, japan" but like im looking at discussions of the citadel (2020) and there's so much along the lines of "it may be horny but it does have some really good combat !" as if those things are somehow in tension