#informal societies

[bethanydelleman]

Western culture seems to be moving further and further away from formality. I'm in my 30s now and I don't think I've ever requested that anyone call me "Mrs. Lastname" and rarely am I addressed as such. My children call their teachers at school "Mrs/Mr Lastname" and they use "aunt/uncle/etc" but that's about it. And while I don't really think about it much in everyday life, there is something very interesting about formal modes of address that is lost.

In Jane Austen, we see characters say and even think in formal terms before they establish friendships/relationships, in Mansfield Park Fanny Price for example, staunchly sticks to "Miss Crawford" even when Mary starts to call her "Fanny". Fanny is maintaining distance from someone she doesn't like, even in her head! She also is offended when Henry takes the liberty of calling her "Firstname" before she has accepted his proposal. He says he thinks of her as Fanny, which clearly distresses her. We also know that Edmund considers Henry Crawford a close friend because he calls him "Crawford." (not Mr. Crawford)

Marianne very rapidly drops Willoughby's "Mr." in Sense & Sensibility, and he even calls her Marianne, which leads everyone to suspect they are engaged. Yet though it seems acceptable for the Dashwoods to call Edward by his first name because of their family connection, Elinor only says his first name in her head and to her sister, not to him. She maintains this social distance until they are engaged.

I don't know if I want to advocate for a more formal society because I know I would mess up and offend people. But I love the idea of just saying, "Mr. Lastname" and establishing emotional distance. I love being able to discern the closeness of two people just by how they address each other. And the way it makes a given name all that more precious, something you give not just something you use.

[communistkenobi]

The deeply moralist tone that a lot of discussions about media representation take on here are primarily neoliberal before they are anything else. Like the shouting matches people get into about “purity culture” “pro/anti” etc nonsense (even if I think it’s true that some people have a deeply christian worldview about what art ought to say and represent about the world) are downstream of the basic neoliberal assumption that we can and must educate the public by being consumers in a market. “Bad representation” is often framed as a writer’s/developer’s/director’s/etc’s failure to properly educate their audience, or to educate them the wrong way with bad information about the world (which will compel their audience to act, behave, internalise or otherwise believe these bad representations about some social issue). Likewise, to “consume” or give money to a piece of media with Bad Representation is to legitimate and make stronger these bad representations in the world, an act which will cause more people to believe or internalise bad things about themselves or other people. And at the heart of both of those claims is, again, the assumption that mass public education should be undertaken by artists in a private market, who are responsible for creating moral fables and political allegories that they will instil in their audiences by selling it to them. These conversations often become pure nonsense if you don’t accept that the moral and political education of the world should be directed by like, studio executives or tv actors or authors on twitter. There is no horizon of possibility being imagined beyond purchasing, as an individual consumer in a market, your way into good beliefs about the world, instilled in you by Media Product 

[nelkcats]

The King's Informants

Many would say that the Infinite Realms were at peace, now that the ghosts weren't constantly attacking Amity. And in a way they were, but still had some problems.

The Infinite Realms were chaotic and usually didn't follow any rules, Danny's reign didn't change that. That was because death had its own rules and the Realms did their job, Pariah was just horrible at being a ruler and also horrible at making sure everything was more or less where it should be.

When the Ancients recorded a lost soul (which was more common than it seemed), which was neither a ghost nor had passed "to the afterlife" directly, Danny tended to ask the citizens of Amity Park for help, who were grateful with him for his ex job as hero and used to help him. Even if they weren't living in Amity.

Danny would sometimes communicate with them in their sleep, with some help from Nocturne, and explain what they needed to investigate (Danny felt they were some kind of secret informants, or spies, if he was being honest.)

This time, the Realms were in turmoil as "Jason Todd's" soul was missing (and no, Danny wasn't pouting about losing his friend), his soul hadn't registered in any other death cycles or Resurrection. So the King asked Dash to investigate about it and Dash, now a Policeman from Gotham, taked his job seriously.

The "no one is forgotten" network was made up of Amity citizens willing to investigate missing soul anomalies in other cities. This was mostly the Justice League's fault or to do with them, which was pretty frustrating.

Danny was wondering if he should pay them a visit when he was informed that the missing soul was in the realm of the living. The halfa sighed tiredly, he wasn't going to kill Jason to repair the "cycle of life and death" (because that would be hypocritical) but he had to solve the problems caused by said alteration. Being King was fucking tiring.

[palatinewolfsblog]

"The most violent element in society is ignorance." Emma Goldman.

[volitioncheck]

does near every single post-canon DE fic out there need to be tagged ‘Sober Harry Du Bois’? i’m getting so tired of it.

do i expect every single piece of fan content to have to fully delve into the often-depressing always-complex topic of addiction? not really. sometimes you just want to write/read a silly fluffy romance one-shot, whatever. i get it. but i think my issue is specifically with the fact that for nearly every sillyfluffy au out there, there almost must be a ‘sober harry du bois’ tag. and it does feel very slapped-on more often than not.

i think to me it is an unconscious statement that nothing *good* can ever happen to harry du bois until he is completely and permanently sober. before solving the next big case, he has to be sober. before quitting the force, he has to be sober. before falling in love with kim, he has to be sober. before accomplishing anything, starting any sort of recovery, making any life improvement, he must first be sober.

sobriety as a goal, as a journey, and honestly as a concept in of itself is not as cut and dry as so many people think it is. and i think it would serve a lot of people well if they did some introspection on the implications of how nearly every single post-canon fic that isn’t dealing directly with harry’s addiction have him as completely sober instead.

if the plot of the fic isn’t going to touch directly on harry’s substance use (and again, i’m not demanding that every single fic should), why does that mean that sober!harry must be the default?

i think i am just tired of reading a casefic, a smutty one-shot, a fantasy au, whatever, where it almost seems that before getting on with the plot, the author feels obligated to first assure us that the harry we’re reading about is a Sober Harry. it’s established with a couple lines in the exposition, probably about his improved appearance, a tag up top, and then never brought up again; a checkmarked box. like the societal image of An Addict has completely prevented people from being able to imagine a person just, continuing to live life, while still struggling with addiction.

life happens, with all of its backslides and achievements, mundanity and changes, to people with drug addictions just as much as people who don’t. is a post-canon harry who isn’t sober not worth writing about?

i think so. i think the game we all played thinks so too. in fact i think that sentiment is woven into the game’s very core. i just wish i saw that reflected in our fan content more.

[hussyknee]

I'm really not a villain enjoyer. I love anti-heroes and anti-villains. But I can't see fictional evil separate from real evil. As in not that enjoying dark fiction means you condone it, but that all fiction holds up some kind of mirror to the world as it is. Killing innocent people doesn't make you an iconic lesbian girlboss it just makes you part of the mundane and stultifying black rot of the universe.

"But characters struggling with honour and goodness and the egoism of being good are so boring." Cool well some of us actually struggle with that stuff on the daily because being a good person is complicated and harder than being an edgelord.

Sure you can use fiction to explore the darkness of human nature and learn empathy, but the world doesn't actually suffer from a deficit of empathy for powerful and privileged people who do heinous stuff. You could literally kill a thousand babies in broad daylight and they'll find a way to blame your childhood trauma for it as long as you're white, cisgender, abled and attractive, and you'll be their poor little meow meow by the end of the week. Don't act like you're advocating for Quasimodo when you're just making Elon Musk hot, smart and gay.

[gottaarc]

General students of Darkwick + Jin theory

Clarification: What's up with the general student populace at Darkwick? I'm pretty sure the answer is that they aren't ghouls in any way based on the fact sorting of new ghoul students is a big deal and 'sways power' in the beginning, and there's also this huge plot-point about the discrimination ghoul students face. But going back and reading some of the prologue chapters where the PC is first learning about Darkwick made me sort of curious about it. Reading the newest Mortkranken chapter, it's clear that there are general populace students going out to deal with anomalies frequently enough that they might need treatment for injuries and curses. But if they aren't ghouls, are they just recon? How are general education students allowed in? It's said Darkwick is super 'competitive' at one point but with what we know about Darkwick in general that's at best a loose-truth. Also, looking specifically at Frostheim for this- a lot of them are upper echelon students. Fair enough that there are plenty who come from different backgrounds, but isn't it funny that so many of them come from families in places of power and privilege? Are these families directly funding anomaly research?

Another point, less related to general students: isn't it crazy that Jin, the son of the guy running the whole Darkwick branch in Japan, just happens to have become a ghoul? I mean, maybe it's just a coincidence (because if Yuri's explanation of demon compatibility is to be believed, he just happened to not be allergic to demon dust) but that's pretty fucked up circumstantially speaking. They're already in a position of power, but what if it was something they wanted to make concrete? His mother died of mental illness, and his relationship with his father is strained. Was his father using his own family as test subjects for anomalous research? Did Jin make a deal with a demon because his father was pressuring it, or because maybe he wanted to save his mother (though he ultimately failed). If the stigma each ghoul gets is based off a desire they had, and Jin's stigma is the authority to force commands, what's more desirable to the heir of a powerful institution? How old was he when he even made the pact? Was he a kid who just wanted control, or was it a want drilled into him from a young age?

[goldkirk]

hey this isn’t aimed at anyone in particular but I’m saying it for the record here: if I tell you no, please stop messaging me about fundraisers and mutual aid.

I get enough messages that it’s impossible for me to keep up without devoting at least half an hour each day, when I’m not even on tumblr that long most days. Me having a boundary about this isn’t a moral failing, it’s a lifeboat for me on my own blog.

In my personal life I’m already advocating and donating literally as much as I can spare. This is not me not caring, it’s just me not willing to interact with that on the one place I go online to not interact with irl news and world events for the most part.

I cannot be upset all the time. I cannot be upset everywhere. I cannot use all my emotional and mental energy fielding my own upset from ongoing events. My options are to hold boundaries about this or stop coming online at all.

I’m all for sharing information and signal boosting to reasonable extents, but the scale of it this year is so large and so enduring that it is literally not possible to for me to participate on every account I have. I’ve previously shared links to Gaza eSIM donations and a major hub of verified Go Fund Mes here and elsewhere online. We, the online humans, know how to look those things up ourselves by now. There are many, many people choosing to do advocacy work, and right now, I can’t be one of them.

If you’re extremely upset when I tell you I can’t share/donate right now about a Gaza family or personal fundraiser you ask me to share here, just unfollow and block me. That’s what those buttons are for. Protect your own emotions and energy and get me off your feed instead of staying upset and continuing to engage with online people or content that upsets you.

Please don’t send repeated angry messages based on manufactured purity politics and moral outrage into my messages and inbox when I exercise the right to run my own blog.

[stupot]

I feel like, regrettably, this website needs a crash course in recognizing a particular brand of post about female martyrdom and suffering that is really, at its core, based on OP's views on a holistic level, a post about hating """men""" in disguise. Female anger is righteous and does come a from a place of personal and historical suffering, and should be expressed. I truly do think that. But I guess Tumblr's userbase sucks because then you go on these blogs and it's post after post about how men are ontologically evil and sex work should be criminalized and women are these broken shattered creatures unilaterally scorned by MALES with no hope for justice. Just the absolute most childish reductive way of analyzing misogyny in our culture that always boils down to racism, prejudice against sex workers, and transphobia

[lycanthroprince]

quick question - is there anything in dunmeshi canon actually supporting the idea that chilchuck is "middle-aged" besides his comment that half-foots can live up to 50? because IIRC one of the official guides also says that about humans. to me it sounds like a comment about how long they tend to live, not how long they physically can

[donthitanybody]

Do you understand how long I've had this song on loop trying to figure out what compels me to it?

It's fucking Spones!

[paper-mario-wiki]

There's such an interesting cyber-anthropological phenomenon in feeling a communal pressure to act a certain way, or use the platform a certain way, when joining a new online space. Not in terms of the types of opinions or political views that are deamed acceptable, but in terms of specifics of etiquette and posting formats.

Making a Tumblr post that sounds "like a Twitter user" is met with scorn or derision a lot of the time. And when asking someone why they react like that, typically the answer is some form of "that kind of comedy doesn't work here" or "it doesn't sound right to post like that on this website", which is essentially just "it doesn't fit with the traditions I learned in this specific place".

I will always find the ways social media platforms evolve naturally like societies interesting.

[antisocialxconstruct]

the rituals continue to be intricate

[ktlsyrtis]

middle-aged woman joins tiktok - 84 dead, 244 injured

[psychoticallytrans]

There are three main models of disability that are in common use. The moral model, the medical model, and the social model.

You may not have heard of the moral model before, but if you are disabled, you have felt the impact of it. The moral model is disability as a failure of character. It sources the problem of disability in the character of the disabled person. It's the people who insist that if you just tried harder, were better, had a better attitude, that you would no longer be disabled. It is a model that is used by ableists in order to conceptualize of disability as a failing of the individual. An extreme example of this mindset are the Christian Scientists, who believe that all illnesses and disabilities should be healed by the grace of their god and that if you are not healed, something is wrong with you. It is the the most cruel of the models, and the least successful at assisting disabled people.

The medical model is the model used by the medical establishment and by those who put their stock in medical authority. It sources the problem of disability in the body. It measures disability against a theoretical average person, and seeks to make disabled people match that average person more closely. This model works very well for disabled people with disabilities that can be measured, have a potential treatment plan, and want their disability gone. It does not work very well for people who do not match all three criteria. If they match the first and second but not the third, then strict adherents of the medical model often fall back on the moral model, stating that they are stupid, lazy, or selfish for not being interested in being cured. This also often happens if treatment fails to improve the condition of the disabled person.

The social model is a newer model, largely designed by disability activists and scholars and often defined in opposition to the medical model. It sources the problem of disability in the interaction between the disabled person and their physical and social environment. It argues that the solution of disability is to change the environment so that impairments are no longer an issue. This model works very well for disabled people who consider their disability not to be an issue when fully accommodated. It does not work well for people who consider their disability an inherent impairment and/or desire a cure. Strict adherents of the social model often fall back on the moral model when considering these people, stating that they are short-sighted or that they worship the medical model. These are the people who state things such as that depression would not exist in a world without capitalism.

When a disabled person fails to behave as expected by the model a person has of disability, the moral model is almost always the fallback position, because many people cannot conceive of why someone would disagree with them other than a lack of good character. This is a problem, because the moral model proposes no solution but to ignore or abuse the disabled person until they behave as expected.

Another notable interaction is that adherents of the medical model can often be persuaded to support the more traditional parts of the social model, such as providing large text resources to people with impaired vision, so long as there is empirical research backing it. However, they rarely support more radical arguments that challenge how we define disability and how society should be structured or restructured.

All three models have major failure points. The moral model fails every disabled person it is applied to. The medical and social models both fail different disabled people when adhered to strictly. The best approach at the moment seems to be hybridizing the social and medical models, so that they cover each other's weak points and fit the needs of the widest spectrum of disabled people. The main barrier to this is that they are often defined in opposition to each other.

[vanesawye]

robin & steve | pure energy