The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

if i had three wishes they would all be to make web 2.0 utterly illegal and go back to normal html

how do we explain to children that all our tech briefly worked perfectly and over time we threw it all away for sleek menus and corporate opacity

"we could give you a link to this mp3 OR we could run it in a proprietary player app that must connect to the internet every time you hit the resume button"

when i upgraded from a flip phone to an iphone and realized i could no longer record and set a custom ringtone because apple wanted me to buy radio pop ringtones, i realized, oh cool new tech isnt made for us it's made to exploit us and we are going to let it happen

ouch

"I know chatgpt is bad but you just don't really have any choice" you literally do. Don't use it. Have some moral backbone.

it's been like 2 years. i havent touched it. never needed to. "you don't really have a choice," are you so swift to forget the recent past? Bitch i still use itunes to download mp3s to so i have them forever and any song i want, then my sister burns them to CDs. When boycotts rolled out my other sister got no thanks to scan what products we shouldn't buy. i still use corded headphones not because "its older" but because it's easier. a fool criticizes those who buy candles 200 years after the invention of the electric light until the power goes out. become ungovernable. you are not immune to propaganda. you've never had Chatgpt forced upon you, the only thing forced upon you is the idea that Chatgpt is forced upon you. why claim you need something today that you didn't need yesterday. little bitch.

to my student who emailed me today asking if she should title her essay “what does grendel eat for breakfast? danish” or “no arm, no foul,” thank you. you don’t know that i was in the middle of hashing out how i’m handling your classmate’s intentional plagiarism, but receiving that email reminded me that some of you take your teenage rebellions in the right direction, and i love u for that.

Catherine Schell as Maya - Space: 1999 (1976)

I imprinted on this show SO damn hard.

(Don't get me wrong; it was terrible. That's not the point.)

kill me once, shame on you. kill me twice how did you do that

i grew up in a family of left leaning hippies (thank god) but i can't stop thinking about the one holiday dinner party where my teenage cousin said something about immigrant hotels and needing to stop the boats and there was like. a pause at the table until our grandpa, a very mild mannered man, just went "now where the fuck did you hear that?" Incredible aura. ive never heard that man swear before or since but man did he pick a perfect time for it.

I was at an ex's holiday gathering when one of his siblings said something about "all of the immigrants ruining the kids' schools" and their dad, the Sicilian patriarch of the family said "Like the immigrant you're planning on inheriting money from?" and I have never giddily sat through a more awkward silence.

Interaction witnessed at post office today:

Elderly lady mail clerk and young customer are chatting. Customer says, "oh! I'm wearing my boss's coat right now, give me something weird to put in the pocket!" Others within earshot all start looking for something because, hey, important quest. Mail clerk finally reaches under counter, pulls out a large roll of labels, and tears one off.

Twas this

Btw, if you’re every really bored and want to do something nice, there’s a website that lists about twenty-ish elderly people, a small blurb about them, and an address that you can send cards to. It changes monthly and you can write whatever you want (even if it’s short or just drawings). Been doing it all month and it’s such small thing that makes me feel so good and I know is making others smile. Random ass post, but genuinely is making me so happy every time I do it.

"ugh forced marriage? this plot is so toxic"

That's the kink

"they can barely/can't control themself from ravishing their partner? How is that portrayed as ROMANTIC??"

That's the kink

"why is the plot so fixated on how tiny the main character is compared to the love interest?"

Grisps your shoulders so firmly

Buddy you're not gonna believe this

-via Design Bloom, November 24, 2023. Very cool! Some excellent info on exactly why these will be so useful in the comments.

Here's the thing about Jareth from Labyrinth right?

He's made up.

That's not necessarily the same thing as not REAL. But he, just like all her friends who show up in her room before her adventure as toys and figurines, exist in relation to her, in response to what she wanted and needed. She told the story and there he was, there he always had been. But she's a teenage girl who doesn't know what she wants yet, and Jareth kind of pays the price.

"but the king of the goblins had fallen in love with the girl, and had given her certain powers." He's an archetypal oxymoron. He's both the dastardly baby stealing villain and the royal love interest trying to relieve the heroine's suffering, Cinderella style. He's fucked either way by being both. She doesn't know if SHE wants to be the villain or the heroine until he shows up and then she decides on the heroine, so he has to sneer and menace and challenge but it's too late for him!! it's too late, The King Of The Goblins Had Fallen In Love With the Girl, he's Cinderella's prince too and he has to try, he gives her a poofy dress and takes her to fucking goblin prom, sweeps her around the room like a music box with perfect posture and room for Jesus.

But it doesn't work buddy, it can't work. You're just a story for a teen girl to grow up in, and as the villain you have to be defeated. He's so complex because his tropes contradict themselves, and he doesn't understand why he has to lose when he was only doing the job he was given. In his last scene he is pale as death with shadows under his eyes, backing away and begging for his happy ending with nonsense mishmash promises that belong to both halves of him.

"I am exhausted from living up to your expectations of me." I'm sure you are, Jareth. No wonder.

If I thought there was no difference between what Trump is doing and what Harris would have done, I think I’d shoot myself in the head.

She spent her whole damn campaign, all 100 days of it, warning you that Trump would find any excuse to send the national guard into our cities and clamp down on protests, that he would weaponize ICE to instigate violence, that he would continue his destructive and bizarre path when it came to just taking shit from other countries with no regard for international law.

If you heard both of those leaders on the campaign trial and thought “there’s literally no difference whatsoever in what this country could look like for the next 4 years under either of these administrations” I would have ended it already, for real.

Blackhawk helicopters in the skies of fucking Minnesota.

Call me a Kamala dickrider all you want, I just don’t think Denmark would be warning our nation that if we invaded Greenland then NATO will disband, you know what I mean?

I just don’t think that I would be concerned about that right now.

Idk maybe I am insane for thinking Harris wouldn’t have staffed her administration with a bunch of people who seem hellbent on toppling multiple foreign governments in the span of a week.

Maybe I’m crazy for thinking Harris wasn’t going to warn Cuba and Colombia that “they’re next”. It simply isn’t something I thought I would have to concern myself with.

That does happen 👀

No googling, curious about something

Things are going well

Spoiler

Okay normally I'm on the side of "words mean whatever we need them to mean".

but guys, I don’t like the suggestion that it’s what is happening here. Being unfamiliar with the term, and guessing its meaning based on vibes, doesn’t mean you have equal authority on whether it’s “correct” with the community who actively use this word in a technical sense.

please do consider that if you haven't been exposed to the word in the context it's used in, "both are correct" and "you can interpret it differently" and “there is no right or wrong answer” and “it feels like it SHOULD be X” cannot be a fully realised take. Sure, linguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but “laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better” isn’t one of them.

You can do that with most words, especially slang, and shape them to the needs of the majority, but this isn't like... a fanfiction word, invented for fanfic and, like, solely used for injured hockey players where it doesn’t matter if the injured limb swaps sides 4 times in a sex scene and phases through a stomach. It is, in its context, a bit more load-bearing (ha) than that.

It's fine to be unfamiliar with the context, and it's fine for words to change, but do just take a quick second to hear it in a native sentence!

One of the most common ways of using this word is to assess four-legged animals. "Favouring" is a specific grouping of behaviour - a hesitancy in gait, stiffness, reluctance to put weight on a limb. It’s often inconsistent, as the animal tries to compensate or conceal the pain. It may not be a full limp or obvious lameness, since prey animals especially will actively try to conceal this; favouring is a subtle reluctance, and a useful word for a very specific recognisable behaviour that the animal is usually trying to lie about. (That’s probably why it’s used in romance fiction, as it’s an interestingly romantic and stoic way to react to pain, and doesn’t mean the limb is inconveniently disabled. A fictional character favouring a wounded leg can wince attractively when it’s jostled, but it doesn’t matter too much if the author forgets and has them run to the door suddenly - “favouring” isn’t incompatible with “running” in horses either.)

The sentence “Favouring the off hind” is equestrian jargon: it means “pain behaviour on the back right leg.” It does not mean “opposite-pain in the not-on deer” and is not confusing in its professional register.

If you've only vaguely heard of "myeloma", and most people in a poll are guessing it's a skin cancer, that doesn't mean that myeloma and melanoma can now readily collapse into the same word - they're under active use in their native contexts, where the people frequently using them do need to communicate the difference between skin and blood cancer.

A poll of laypeople misunderstanding “myeloma,” or non-horse-people misunderstanding “favouring,” isn’t quite enough to indicate a full semantic shift and change of meaning of the term. The community that uses the term “favouring” in the context of “limb injury” - vets, farriers, farmers, commentators, equestrians - knows what it means and uses it consistently in the same way. They’re not confused. because to them, it isn’t a vibesy, sex-scene-hand waving word. It’s a cluster of pain signals.

If you aren’t familiar with that usage, then that’s really more about your own lack of familiarity. Not all interpretations DO carry equal authority, especially when one is just confusion/unfamiliarity. You just haven’t met it before, and that’s fine.

Tl;dr: I’m all for words changing meanings, but we shouldn’t be too quick to declare that when it’s based entirely on unfamiliarity and vibes-based readings.