‘that’s pornhub, simba. you must never go there.’)
we all see plenty of posts about how adults on the internet need to remember that ‘kids’ (read: teens) are around and we must bear that in mind. and these posts are not entirely without merit. It’s important to keep conversations being held with teens carefully teen-friendly and appropriately distant. but the entirety of tumblr and twitter aren’t designed to cater to the safety of minors, and all the adult self-policing in the world won’t make all the kid-unfriendly content go away.
not all teens believe the internet should have gutter bumpers for them, either. but those that do have mystified me for a while … until I started to understand just how pervasive ‘helicopter parenting’ is in parts of American (and UK) culture, and how that affects the adolescents and young adults of today.
anonymous asked:
a thing worth noting re anyone who pulls the ‘you can’t blacklist on mobile, minors can still see it’ thing to say even tagged content isn’t okay: even if washboard didn’t exist, the tumblr app is rated 17/18+ in app stores. if people under that age get on the app and see things they shouldn’t, that’s on them and their parents/guardians, because they shouldn’t actually have been using the app in the first place.
agreed.
Honestly, though, the argument has moved past this in some ways. It’s not so much about whether or not teenagers are allowed to see this thing or that thing; it’s a well-known fact that most teenagers will break rules if it suits them and they can get away with it, and internet time is a prime space wherein they can do so.
What’s happened is that some adolescents – teens with parents that are overly protective and crowd their schedules with supervised activities, usually – have been taught by their life experience that:
all adults in their vicinity are there to protect them. and no wonder: the large majority of their contact with adults will have been as supervisors. Teachers, teacher assistants, instructors, daycare employees, and coaches are all adults who are paid to watch their activity and will be held responsible for the teen’s wellbeing by their guardians. when have they ever spent time with adults who aren’t in charge of making sure they’re safe?
any space they are in will be designed and maintained with their safety and comfort in mind (no matter how they obtained access). all spaces they enter are specifically meant to revolve around them: schools, sports, playgrounds, etc. The few occasions that they have to enter spaces not meant specifically for them (stores, etc) they are closely watched by adults and any harm they experience will be blamed on adults as a result.
if they can get access, it must be a space that’s safe for them. Having spent very little of their lives unsupervised, they have always been actively prevented from entering spaces that are not meant for them. They’ve never had to learn to set boundaries for themselves, so they naturally reason that if a boundary is not actively enforced, it must actually be a space they’re meant to enter.
they are not responsible for themselves. adults around them are responsible for them. if they come to harm, it’s because an adult wasn’t doing their job properly.
for teens of this mindset, ‘18+ ONLY’ warnings are merely a suggestion. Nobody is stopping them, after all, and it has never been their job to stop themselves. and if they can get access, the space is now theirs – because all spaces they are in are theirs. they couldn’t get there unless it was meant for them; that’s how it works, right?
This is why some teens are utterly flabbergasted by the idea that adults on the internet want to interact with fellow adults on an adult level in a space the teen can access. They’re here! That means the space is specifically meant to cater to them! The adults are automatically tasked with their safety! If teens do get into trouble, it’s because the adults weren’t responsible enough! that’s how this has always worked.
And when adults say ‘no, I do not take responsibility for your actions, the internet is full of things that may frighten or harm you and you must set your own boundaries,’ it’s distressing and scary all at once.
(no wonder so many people in their late teens/early 20′s want to still be considered as children.)
This explains a lot. I grew up with sane parents a long time ago, and as a result, I tend to assume that the world is full of things that could potentially hurt me, but that are very unlikely to if I exercise reasonable caution. This has worked out quite well.
So while it looks like he had some crazy adventures and disregarded Starfleet at every turn, that’s a lie.
Most of the time, he spent every other episode calling back, following the strictest of laws, going through proper motions and channels. Every other action was court-martialed and brought to trial. He was, for the most part, a dedicated captain following Starfleet’s rules.
Just because he is now the reason for about two dozen more rules, doesn’t make him the crazy madman adventurer we see him as. Of course he differed from his orders, at times. But those are the most excusable times, and even then, after disobeying, he laid himself up for proper discipline. He knew he’d done wrong in the eyes of his superiors, but his conscience wouldn’t have let him do any different.
Kirk was a rule follower and a rule maker. And only on special circumstances, a rule breaker.
This is as canonical as it gets: Kirk even says as much about himself when talking about his time as a cadet. Even with the Kobayashi Maru, supposedly his “defining” moment of “coolness” and rebellion, Kirk cheats because of how upset he is about the possibility of making a non-perfect grade. Like: he would only violate the rules to protect his GPA 😐
And rather than breaking into the grading system and changing his grade(which would be easier), or trying to finagle extra work/easier grading to make up for it(which would also be easier since everyone, canonically, thinks he’s a hotty), he changes the test so a perfect conclusion is no longer impossible, then achieves that still very difficult, but possible, solution. That’s a very lawful way to “cheat”(and, coincidentally, one that makes it obvious that he cheated since the instructors know the test was designed to be unbeatable. That he wasn’t drummed out for it shows how much Starfleet admires quick-thinking and pluck, so long as it doesn’t go too far).
I think people miss this because:
Movie Kirk is an almost totally different character from TV Kirk, and anyone born after the original run but before the prevalence of torrent sites(which is most fans these days) met Movie Kirk first. and
They don’t get how deeply Picard is a foil for Kirk.
I mean, they understand in a surface sense, in that Kirk is popularly seen as a “cowboy” and Picard is seen as a managerial diplomat, but it’s far deeper and more literary than that.
Kirk’s childhood is marred by horror. When he was 13 he was already off-world and lived through a planetary famine… and the eugenicist massacre the colony’s governor implemented to “save” it. These experiences had a huge impact on him and his morality, and shaped the grim, serious, humorless, friendless and by-the-books student he was in the academy.
His career after the academy, and particularly his time as Captain, taught him how to be himself; how to come out of the shell of duty he protected himself from others with, and the dark impulses he realized were within all humans, after Tarsus IV. And it also taught him the importance of his own morality; that while you honor the code of conduct and follow it as much as you can, sometimes adherence to its values and the “humanity” it is meant to instill and promote, require crossing those rules, even as it also requires you face the consequences of that violation.
Picard is the reverse. The shows and movies don’t go much into his early life, but we know he grew up in a loving and supportive, multi-generational family, who didn’t approve of his ambition to join starfleet. So Picard’s career began in an act of rebellion, and that quality of his character -his arrogance and willingness to spit in the face of tradition and convention; his propensity for running mad risks(because he didn’t really know what consequences were)- stayed with him through to graduation. Until his fight with the Nausicaans. A lesson quickly followed up with the Stargazer incident.
Picard’s life was safe until Starfleet, and his life in Starfleet taught him -at the edge of a knife; through his repeated near-death, and the deaths of his friends and mentors at the hands of unknown, unsuspected, almost unseen assailants- why rules existed and why caution, information-gathering, and diplomacy are so important. His early experiences in Starfleet taught Picard to temper his ambition and passion -his tendency to put himself and his assessments before everything else- with restraint, respect for others, and dutifulness to the ethics of his profession.
Picard had to learn to settle down, respect the fragility of life, and trust the rules; Kirk had to learn to be assertive, that hard situations require risk and sacrifice, and to trust himself. Both learned through Starfleet how to balance who they were and the things they believed in with the ethics and heavy responsibilities of their profession. This is a story about two people arriving at the same place(the most respected and trusted officer in the Fleet, entrusted with its flagship) from very different beginnings, and the sort of values and people Starfleet rewards. . . . . . . . . Though I’d have liked if they weren’t both farmboys. ST sure loves its agricultural origin stories :T
Onto the main cuz my maintuals all should know this.
Most white people, especially rural white people (I grew up in a town of 2000 in Ohio) don’t have any concrete culture, they don’t have a unique form of pottery, special wedding dresses, a musical style going back 500 years, special rituals and dances to celebrate things. They are completely reliant on corporate culture to provide them with a sense of identity and purpose, they don’t have Hanbok dresses or special flutes native to their peoples, they have Taco Bell, the Steelers, Applebees, deals on make-up at the dollar store, deal on shirts at TJ Maxx. They have thrown away culture for corporate capitalism, they are empty inside, a vacuity of soul, an emptiness that leads to narcissism and extreme justification in the face of all facts. They don’t want to admit, they are ‘hollow’ inside.
I don’t necessarily think this is untrue but I don’t know why the target has to be poor people in rural towns. At the very least it is definitely not “especially rural white people”
something really bothers me about this reduction of the notion of ‘culture’ to, like, specific artifacts that supposedly express the essence of some monolithic ethnos. ‘this pottery and these dances give me identity and purpose’ sounds more like the words of people clinging to a dying culture as it’s subsumed into the capitalist world-system than the way that culture works outside of that
like, it’s primarily in the retrospective view that these things take on the sort of meaning that i think is being attributed to them here. when you’re an archaeologist digging through successive layers of dirt, you say ‘each one of the cultures that lived here had its own distinct style of pottery’. but for all you know a person actually alive making one of those pots would have just said ‘this is a pot i made and it looks like all the other pots everyone else makes’. nothing distinct about it
there is a point to be made that white americans are primarily passive consumers of their own ‘culture’ rather than active participants in its reproduction, and that that’s probably a problem, but that would require acknowledging that (1) this is true of people in every capitalist country, even in those dark and mystical corners of the world where people still supposedly ‘have culture’, and (2) what’s represented as ‘real culture’ here, bitingly juxtaposed with a list of consumer goods, is in fact nothing more than a different list of consumer goods. hanbok dresses and special flutes can be mediated by capitalist commodity relations in the exact same way the steelers or dollar-store make-up are
Yeah this shit is a perfect example of an incredibly orientalist framework being masked as resistance to it. Non-white cultures spring from some primordial a historic “spirit” while white culture is grounded in a material history and power relations. If the person that wrote this were to attempt some sort of consistency they would be saying that no culture exists because all culture articles is embedded in history and societal relations (which make something “not-culture” because….?)
You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding.
And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice.
Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside.
Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to.
Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?
We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life.
There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.
The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many – of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there.
How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified?
Is nobody going to talk about how the Vulcans adopted a policy of “shoot first” against the Klingons and that that was what helped keep them at a respectful distance for such a long time because I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
It was only logical. The culture of war cherished by Klingons had helped them to win their place under the suns of the overcrowded Galaxy. As in a pack of wolves, the strongest is the lead. Vulcans had no choice but to prove they’re the force one cannot ignore. Also take into consideration the time when Klingon-Vulcan interraction took place. It’s the time of Earth pre-Warp-5, before Archer’s Vulcans – intolerable, arrogant, half-aggressive. The Kir’Shara was a myth most of Vulcans didn’t even believe to be true but a fairy tale (or a nightmare for Vulcan High Command). So, nothing surprising here.
I still haven’t watched ENT so I can’t say a lot about that time. It just baffles me.
A species that adopts complete non-violence shoots first. Like damn.
It reminds me of the debate of how to be peaceful and keep your peaceful culture when you’re being invaded? Aren’t you allowed to defend yourself? Where does the line of self-defense end?
It seems kinda like the fascism discourse around here right now (that a democratic society is uniquely vulnerable to democratically-structured bids for it to destroy itself)–Vulcan society couldn’t have withstood anything less than shooting first against the Klingons. The losses they’d have incurred attempting to argue logic with a wholly uninterested attacking empire would have just been too severe, and they probably couldn’t have figured out how to leave an impression on them anyway.
Georgiou’s thesis (and Starfleet’s) seems to be that they’re stronger than that–Starfleet personnel can die trying, can die in support of Federation ideals, because their society and the codes of behavior backing them are strong enough to withstand the Klingon threat WITHOUT compromise.
The Vulcans chose to compromise their principles locally in order to maintain them globally, because they decided (and I think) that they weren’t up to handling it any other way. They had to meet the Klingons halfway–Starfleet doesn’t.
I think Vulcans are more deeply resistant to violence than dedicated to non-violence no matter what. Spock doesn’t like to use violence, is even more resistant to killing, and is deeply disdainful of humanity’s “logical” justifications for violence, but is willing to both be violent and to kill if out of options. The Galileo Seven(where he concedes they might have to use violence but insists on exhausting the alternatives first) and The Devil in the Dark(where the creature’s hostility forces him to kill it) come to mind. Also there’s obvsl a range of opinions on violence within “orthodox” Vulcan society given the much greater ease Tuvok has with violent options compared to Spock, and how he doesn’t insist on exhausting other avenues first. Given Spock’s class position(his family seems to be Vulcan nobility from Amok Time, is involved not only in the Science Academy and setting Vulcan’s diplomatic policy but also with preserving and adjudicating Vulcan culture[or at least, I’m assuming that bit from the reboot movie was based on something in-canon; I never read the books or anything]), and the anxiety caused by his hybrid nature, I think it’d make sense for him to be a bit more “puritanical” about philo-cultural issues like pacifism than other, or even most, Vulcans.
So A Vulcan Hello didn’t strike me as far outside the realm of Vulcan behavior; I think they’d just be very careful about the justification for it and that there’d be disagreement and debate around the policy(this could have easily been one of the many things Spock and Sarek fought over, for instance). There are two threads within larger Vulcan logical axioms that I can think of right now that might have been used to justify such a policy.
“The Needs of the Many outweigh the Needs of the Few”: Mostly just a rehash of mbl up there. The idea behind this is basically that context matters: in RoK terms that, while it is illogical to throw away one’s life, it is logical when doing so is required to preserve a greater number of lives. Generalized, this idea could be restated as “It is better to allow for a minor, limited, specific abrogation of a generally correct principle that preserves the greater good, than to adhere to that principle without compromise, even when doing so both causes greater harm than violating it would, and contradicts the core concept of the principle itself”. Vulcans are pacifists because killing is illogical(that which is alive definitionally ought to be alive. There are other reasons obvsl but this is the relevant one). Approaching the Klingons non-violently consistently led to destructions of life which threatened to create a modus vivendi inimical to life’s preservation(a state of unlimited aggression between Vulcans and Klingons). Therefore, modifying their approach to allow for a limited amount of violence scaled to their understanding of the importance violence holds culturally for Klingons, only to the point and time when Klingons will engage in dialogue, preserves life, both Vulcan and Klingon, by both preventing immediate deaths, and eventually allowing peaceful coexistence and mutual autonomy to be established.
“Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination”: Vulcans recognize that their culture is not other people’s culture. Recognizing that, they would recognize that other cultures don’t conceive of violence in the same way. Recognizing that, they would logically display a willingness to be violent, if conditions dictated its necessity for establishing dialogue, or the response of their interlocutor required it to prevent loss of life. So, once they understood the central place of violence in Klingon culture, it wouldn’t be surprising if some Vulcans would argue that displaying violence themselves only to the point where dialogue could be established is a logical choice. But again I think they’d be very cautious with this reasoning given how easily it can get away from you.
Proportionality is the main issue here. I don’t think Vulcans would be cruising around, just opening fire on every Klingon ship and colony they find; it makes more sense to me to think of them as raising shields and returning fire until Klingon ships either leave, open dialogue, or are disabled, only destroying them when given no other choice.
to your point about differing views on violence outside “orthodox” vulcans, in the TOS episode “the savage curtain”, spock is in the position to fight alongside surak, the seminal figure of vulcan. and while spock, as always, is resistant to violence but willing to use it when necessary, surak is completely personally devoted to nonviolence, refusing to fight at all.
Thanks for the addition! I totally forgot about this ep, but luckily in a big fandom there’s always other folks to remember what you can’t ^u^
Yo, yall, I saw someone in the cherubplay tag asking about a guide for this and I like to think I’m pretty good at Dirk roleplaying, so let’s go.
I was going to try and keep this away from most “fanon vs. canon” stuff, but as a heads up, with both Striders it’s fairly impossible to avoid talking about that because they put up such fronts that get read as their actual character. (More on that in a sec.)
While on the one hand you have the misreadings of Dirk that result in desperate, clingy, whiny “looking for doms” bed starfish, on the other hand, you have the suave, domineering, puppeteer Dirks who control literally everything their friends do, are always in control, and definitely never panic in a bad situation. While both of those misreadings are bad, I’d actually argue the second is more OOC than the first, and this is a post about why.
Anyway, this is gonna be a really long post because I like talking about Dirk and his complexes way too much, so hit the readmore.
vampires getting the urge to be intimate w/ their partners while feeding is so fucking funny to me… like imagine you’re just sitting there eating soup but getting REALLY into it? you just. want to fuck, b/c of the soup. want to fuck the soup
kinkshaming vampires
It makes sense, I think, once you understand that the modern version of vampires started by English gothic literature are all about sex, metatextually, and that fans of vampire lit(obvsl stuff like The Strain takes it in a different direction) implicitly understand this. Let’s deconSTRUUUUUUUUCT!
Like, I haven’t read Stoker myself, but from how everyone adapts it and from what people who have read it say/write about it, it seems pretty obvious that a big part of it is tiresome British anxiety over “white women” having sex with “swarthy” Eastern European “foreigners”. Carmilla is an equally obvious and iconic expression of anxiety over both female sexuality in general and women loving women in particular.
Then there’s the cuckold angle to vampires. They sneak into houses(or, in more obvious cases, are invited by the women themselves while the men are unaware) and have intimate interactions with women who don’t “belong” to them under the noses of the men who they do “belong to”. Humans are natural xenophiles; most of them(secretly, neurotically, or otherwise) are titillated by the idea of both promiscuity in general and “alien” people having sex with people they also have sex with in specific, regardless of how monogamously and patriarchally they live their lives. And are equally titillated by the idea of having, possibly secret, sex with those “aliens” themselves, obvsl.
Then there’s the blood thing. Not to get into it too deeply, but women are socialized to be ashamed of “blood”, and to associate it with pain, corruption, adulthood, sex, and pleasure. Vampires don’t just like “blood”; they need it to live. The very aspects of female biology and sexuality women are brought up to think are shameful and disgusting -and encouraged to alienate themselves from- are vital, nourishing, and desirable to vampires. So vampires don’t just play into the conventional pain/pleasure association around blood and sex through feeding, they do so specifically by bringing the whole food/sex/nourishment/satiation/exhaustion thing into it. And in a way that doesn’t erase or valorize the objectification and exploitation of women; while usually rejecting the common “sullied” and “broken” virginity narrative in favor of one where feminine sexuality is life-giving and pure, the vampire is still, literally, parasitically eating up the life of the woman after all.
Basically, vampire-eating ain’t about eating, friend. It’s kinks all the way down. Becuss of the sbymbols.. The symbols hol dall the power.
balencia said: Technically, Dad Egbert/Crocker is also born normally.
See, I don’t know about that. If Dad Egbert was the biological son of Jane + random person and Dad Crocker was the biological son of John + someone, why would he be identical in both universes? And it’s not just the symbolic artstyle – John recognizes him immediately. The Nature Of Dad is a mystery to me.
Hmmm…
Some Headcanon Possibilities:
John and Jane are genetically identical? And so were the people they had Dad!Crockerbert with??
Was gonna suggest Dad might also be an adoptee, but isn’t it mentioned canon that Jane and John are his bio parents? Looking at the wiki just now maybe not, so he could be. 2a. It just occurred to me for the first time that, John and Dad!Crocker was not only John being given Jane’s Dad reunion, but also Dad!Crocker meeting his own long-dead father, but as a kid? Who he’d probably recognize pretty easily since Crockerberts keep photo albums and family mementos everywhere?? That makes the whole sitch even weirder, even if it does -partially- explain why Dad!Crocker would be so happy to see him.
John and Jane are genetically identical, and there’s something particular to paradox-goo-based-genetics that is overriding, ensuring that the offspring of Players are exact reiterations of themselves across all timelines and continuities, just like their parents.
Dad’s a Guardian and Guardians, due to the role they play in Players’ lives Pre-Game, are kept consistent across iterations by The Game. 4a. The prob with this would be that we see part of the Players’ responsibility in The Game is to create themselves, so presumably if this were the case John would have also been asked to carry out the tl engineering needed to create Dad in both Timelines.
Dad!Egbert and Dad!Crocker aren’t actually identical, just close enough in appearance to fulfill the same archetype in John’s mind at the moment of their “reunion”. John seems to be living in his house alone at the very end, so it may be that, with time, John noticed the differences, physical and otherwise, between Dad!C and his Dad.
Total story convenience and there actually is no textual, non-meta, explanation for it.
Yeah! I think it’s really interesting how Hussie textually represses things the kids themselves repress – it says it right there in the text you ARE John, you ARE Jade, etc etc. If that character is repressing it, it’s obscured from the reader as well, encoded in symbols and manifestations and word associations. Keeping things hidden really gives a sense of how resistant the kids are to certain ideas – the only thing is that since the 2nd-person artifice is ultimately false, you don’t always get to see what happens when the kids learn what you learn.
just moving along like everyone else 