Sacred Light Arrow 💫

o/ <- person waving

o7 <- person saluting

ol <- person raising hand

o1 <- person scratching head

\o> <- person stretching

Compilation of tumblr users getting upset at decoy videos/posts/links:

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what do you think of tone indicators in general?

unfortunately my thoughts on tone indicators are somewhat nuanced. fortunately, this is tumblr not twitter, so I can just write out my full thoughts in one post and be as verbose about it as feels necessary.

speaking as an autistic person (and I know there are other autistic people who don't hold this same view, this is just my perspective), I think as an accessibility tool, the extended set tone indicators in current popular use is fundamentally misguided.

the oldest ones, /s for sarcasm and /j for jokes, make sense. their notation isn't the most intuitive thing ("does /s mean sarcastic or serious?") but it's not too difficult to explain what they mean. I've had to spend my whole life learning by brute force what different tones of voice mean and what they change about how I'm supposed to interpret something, so I already know what "read this in a sarcastic voice" and "read this as a joke" are supposed to mean. my existing skills can be translated into the new form without too much effort.

the same thing applies to emoji and emoticons. I know what facial expressions mean, because I had to learn what they mean. figuring out if :) is sincere or not from context is a skill I've already needed to develop. it doesn't come naturally for me, but it's something I already at least somewhat know how to do.

most of the tone indicators in current use uh. don't work like this.

tone indicators like /ref or /nbh don't correspond to specific tones of voice. I don't have a "I'm making a reference" voice or a "I'm not talking about a person who's here" voice that I can picture the sentence being read in. these do not indicate tones, they're purely disambiguators. they clarify what something means without necessarily changing how it would be read out loud.

and on paper, that's fine, right? like, it's theoretically a good thing to take an otherwise ambiguous statement and add something to it that clarifies what you meant by it. the problem is that these non-tone tone indicators are not even remotely self-explanatory. it's up to me, the person who is being clarified to, to know what all these acronyms are supposed to mean, and how they change the way I'm supposed to interpret what something means.

it's, quite literally, a newly-invented second set of social cues that I'm expected to learn separately from the set that I've already spent my whole life figuring out, and it works completely differently.

sure, these rules are (in principle) less arbitrary than the rules of facial expressions and tones of voice and how long you're supposed to wait before it's your turn to speak, but they're also fully artificial and recently invented, which means they're currently in a constant state of flux. tone indicators go in and out of fashion all the time, and the "comprehensive lists" are never helpful.

in theory, I appreciate the idea of people going out of their way to clarify what they mean by potentially ambiguous things they post online. if it worked, that would be a really nice thing to do.

however, sometimes I imagine what the internet would be like without them. what if instead of using /s, the expectation was that if you're sarcastic online there's no guarantee that strangers reading your post will know what you meant? what if instead of inventing more and more acronyms to cover every possible potentially confusing situation, we just... expected one another to speak less ambiguously in the first place?

so, I on paper like the idea of tone indicators. I think it's good that some people are trying to be considerate by being extra clear about what they mean by things. but if tone indicators didn't exist, and people who wanted to be considerate in this way instead just made a point of phrasing things more clearly to begin with, I think that would be vastly preferable to even the most well-implemented tone indicator system.

also /pos sucks because there's something deeply and profoundly wrong for an abbreviation that means "I don't mean this as an insult, don't worry" to be spelled the same way as an acronym that's an insult

The Hollywood Reporter

'Avatar 2' Delayed Until at Least 2015, Says Jon Landau

James Cameron is collaborating with effects firm Weta Digital on an "underwater motion capture system" for sequences that will explore the o

Cant wait

"isnt bullying recognized as a form of abuse" the thing is, like, not broadly, societally speaking... i mean think of all the posts u see regularly that are like, "bring back bullying" etc. "everyone needs to get bullied a little it builds character." can u imagine people making these statements broadly about abuse? bring back abuse? abuse builds character? nah and that is because people do not think of bullying as abuse, they do not think of it as traumatic and i actually think this is in large part because it is seen as an issue that only affects children (not even true) and people still broadly feel that children's feelings and experiences do not matter

It's so important to remember that tumblr is bad. Has been bad. And will likely remain bad for the foreseeable future. And that is vital to our survival. If Tumblr was a good website that worked, it would get turned into a corporate hellscape like every other site. It's so important that Tumblr is broken and poorly run and impossible to effectively navigate. It's all that's keeping us safe.

I know I posted about Goncharov and Defunctland last night, but that was an earnest desire to see this trend examined under a microscope because it’s fascinating to see it escape containment.

However, while I know most folks are just having a bit of fun with it, the number of people complaining that others are “ruining” the joke by tagging it for unreality is too damn high.

I’ve answered far too many asks in private in the last 24 hours from folks with psychosis begging me to tell them if Goncharov is real or not because they trust me, someone they don’t know beyond my medical advocacy posts, not to lie to them.

So in case you need this: No, Goncharov is not real. It’s Tumblr having a bit of fun with a made up gangster story premise from the 1970s. Most of the gifsets you are seeing are from The Godfather and some other 70s and early 80s films. The musical scores are being composed by some very talented people here on Tumblr, as is most of the art and quotes.

I’m sorry if people are telling you it is real and are refusing to reassure you when you admit it’s causing you distress. Some people are just taking things too far for the bit and aren’t acting with kindness. I hope they will reconsider.

If you were unaware that the Goncharov is causing some people some considerable distress, that’s okay. Tumblr is huge and you can’t be expected to know everything, but please do tag all your posts and reblogs with unreality to assure people that it’s part of the site-wide joke.

If you’re one of the people complaining that tagging it with unreality “ruins” the joke, please reconsider and examine why your enjoyment of people’s distress is necessary to your enjoyment of an otherwise fun and crowd sourced bit that many people are having fun with without being cruel.

Anyway, go have fun you creative little gremlins. Just do it with more kindness.

I’m reading The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of America and the entire point of gay pride as a concept comes from police raids on bars, clubs, public restrooms, etc where gays were humiliated and outed in the newspapers (sometimes with their addresses!) and had careers ruined and lives upended by being associated with perversion and vice squads and all that and they responded by going “no I’m proud” and took that pride to the streets in defiance of the huge mechanism of shame that existed to oppress the gay community into obscurity and so the fact that people are now trying to apply conservative dogma to pride parades to make them “safe for children” or in other words “safe for people with oppressive conservative values” is simply insane

Can a full grown man aged 43 be a "discord kitten"

Kanye West, who was originally banned on Twitter for being openly antisemetic, gets unbanned -- because "free speeech" and all. He immediately posts a swastika. The tweet is up for hours, uncontested by twitter. EVENTUALLY it gets taken down (more in response to the public outrage about it than because of the tweet itself, it appears), but West's account is still active.

He then posts an unflattering picture of Elon Musk. Immediately gets suspended.

Further confirmation that at twitter, it's OK to openly support literal Nazism, but not ok to be mean to the twitter overlord.