#so maybe getting into internet discourse on the internet discourse site in the middle of a depressive episode for a show i dont even

[lordoftablecloths]

man these people really have nothing better to do than send shitty asks

[rancidrubysoho]

it's been said a billion times before and will be said a billion times more, but there's something so deeply miserable about how much the internet and social media have been consolidated.

when i was a kid, i was on the GameFAQs forums. i posted as a very obvious child-- i would argue in the threads on games i was obsessed over, obviously lie about things to get attention, and just generally was kind of an obnoxious nuisance. the most engagement i ever got was people calling me a fucking asshole and correcting all my obvious lies about how you could totally unlock a lightsaber in Halo Reach or how Shadow was gonna get his own game called Shadow Unleashed or whatever.

even if i never outright said "i am a child in the fifth grade", it was most definitely obvious to everyone around me that i was a kid. they all treated me as such-- i distinctly remember more than one thread ending with the other person going "it's past your bedtime" or "go do your homework" or whatever. sure, maybe it was rude, but i was just kind of a mean kid online.

even before then, i had my own corner of the internet. i went to Homestar Runner and Flash game sites, i didn't have "social media" until fourteen, when i joined the Undertale Amino. i was in these niche, quiet corners of the internet where i was either totally left alone or surrounded almost entirely by people my own age.

there's middle-schoolers on Twitter now. at any given time i could join a public Discord server and be the oldest one there by half a decade. there's no separation anymore. my twelve-year-old cousin has a Facebook.

so we wonder why there's so much bitterness and discourse online anymore, mostly about incredibly pointless, petty things-- it's because half the time, we're arguing with literal teenagers. there's no solution-- you can't cut kids out of the internet, the smart ones will get around it and the rest will just be isolated. and you can't age-restrict the internet successfully without massive breaches of privacy to basically every user.

so instead you sometimes really do have to see the opinions of a 15-year-old.

[thedreadvampy]

On the other hand, and moving away from direct Mechanisms Discourse (which I prefer to not get over involved in tbh but also this ISN'T about that it's just jumping off it) - it absolutely is deeply classist to assume that somebody is illiterate or ignorant because of poverty/assumed poverty, and that's a huge problem. but also I think on a broader social level (at least in the UK) there is an idea in the left that it's classist to acknowledge the connection between poverty and illiteracy, while the truth is that illiteracy is a problem of poverty (poverty not in the sense of just Not Having Money but in the sense of system denial of adequate resources). Poverty doesn't = illiteracy but illiteracy is very much a problem of poverty - not a failure of a marginalised individual but a failure of the system marginalising them.

Adult illiteracy is a surprisingly large issue in eg both rural and urban Scotland, but it's not because poor people are stupid, ignorant or unwilling to learn - it's because schools are inadequate or inaccessible, classes are managed not taught, teachers are stretched thin and schools are underfunded so don't have resources to help struggling students, if you get to secondary school still unable to read and write you're completely locked out of the educational system unless you can access a school with the resources to teach you individually, and because of this, classism and a lack of support, poorer kids are more likely to switch off school as early as possible.

Social geography is also a big issue. In urban areas, schools in poorer areas get bad reputations, so they're underfunded, so they do worse, so they're funded less, etc, until they're a bare minimum of staff just trying to get through the day in collapsing buildings with no resources and five textbooks. Where better-funded schools can afford teaching assistants, 1:1 support for struggling students, decent food provision for kids, follow-up on children in need of support at home, more teachers for smaller classes, maybe counseling and psychological support, maybe Special Educational Needs classes for older kids to work on basic literacy and numeracy to catch up, worse-funded schools have one underpaid unsupported teacher trying to manage a class of 35 kids with wildly different needs. They don't have the resources to help support kids with issues that might affect their schooling, like parental abuse or neglect, trauma, a parent in prison, care responsibilities, hunger, homelessness, neurodiversities that affect their ability to learn in the prescribed way, learning disabilities like dyslexia, physical health issues including visual or auditory impairments...all things that when supported are highly surmountable but when unsupported often end up with children being perceived and treated as stupid, disruptive or evil. The problem then compounds itself because the kids are badly treated which makes them more disruptive and less able to learn, and more and more work is needed to help them which teachers continue to not have any capacity or resources for.

Rural poverty comes with its own schooling issues as well, in that poverty is generally correlated with remoteness. Poor rural communities are often hours away from population centres, so either you have tiny highly local schools serving a handful of families where a single teacher needs to invent lesson plans that somehow balance the needs of 11 year olds and 4 year olds of all abilities, or your kids need to somehow get into town every morning before you get to work, which may mean dropping them off at 6am, having to part pay for buses, taxis or ferries, sending them on their own, or leaving them with friends and family, and realistically the way that often shakes down is that they don't go. You teach them at home, and they may not even exist for the truancy office to know about.

Literacy is also connected to family culture. Both my parents were people with degrees from educated families, and my mum was a full time parent, and the result is that school didn't teach me to read - I was already a confident and enthusiastic reader. Even richer families may hire tutors for small children, pay for extracurricular learning, etc. The poorer a family is, the more likely neither parent is available to spend time reading with their kids, because they're working full time - at that economic level a single income household is almost entirely unviable so either both parents work or there's a single parent working extra hours or they're just exhausted from worrying about the bills and what's sold to them as a personal failure to look after their family.

One thing it's easy to forget is that while people in the UK still do drop out of school in their teens to work, a generation ago it was almost the norm for a lot of communities (especially the children of farmers, miners and factory workers) to have left school well before the end of compulsory education, both because of school being a hostile space and because of the need for an additional income. Now as well as then, a lot of kids drop out to work as unpaid carers, disproportionately in poorer families that can't afford private care or therapeutic support. Literacy aside, generations of leaving school with no qualifications doesn't tend to teach you that formal learning is as important as experience and vocational learning, and you don't expect to finish anyway so why put yourself through misery trying to do well? But it includes literacy. I grew up in a former mining area and a lot of people my dad's age and older were literate enough to read signs and football results, but took adult classes in middle age or later to get past the pointing finger and moving lips. and if you're parents don't or can't read, it's a lot harder for you to learn.

There's a lot of classism and shame tied up in the roots of illiteracy. Teachers and governments and schoolmates will often have vocally expressed low expectations of poorer students; a rich child who does poorly at school has problems, a poor child who does poorly at school is a problem child. They're often treated with hostility and aggression from infancy and any anger or disinterest in school is often treated not as a problem to be solved but as proof that you were right to deem them a write-off. Poorer or more neglected children (or children for whom English is a second language) will often be deemed "stupid" by their peers, and start at a disadvantage because of the issues around early childhood learning in families where parents are overstretched.

Kids learn not to admit that they don't know or understand something, because if you start school unable to read and write and do basic maths when a lot of kids your age are already confident, you get mocked and called stupid and lazy by your peers, and treated with frustration by your teachers. So kids learn to avoid people noticing that they need help. That means that school, which could help a lot, isn't somewhere you can go for help but a source of huge anxiety and pain - more so when you factor in the background radiation of classism that only grows as you get older around not having the right clothes, the right toys, the right experiences, my mum says your mum's a ragger, my mum says I shouldn't hang out with you because you're a bad lot - so again kids switch off very early and see education as something to survive not something helpful.

The same is very much true of adult literacy. A lot of adults are very shamed and embarrassed to admit that they struggle with reading and writing - a lot of parents particularly want to be able to teach their kids to read, but aren't confident readers themselves, and feel too stupid and embarrassed to admit out loud that they can't read well, let alone to seek out and endure adult literacy classes that are a constant reminder of their perceived failure and ignorance (and can also be excruciating. Books for adult literacy learning are not nearly widespread enough and a lot of intelligent experienced adults are subjected to reading Spot the Dog and similar books targeted at small children's interests). Adult literacy classes also cost time and also money, so a lot of people only have the space for them after retirement, if at all.

And increasingly, illiteracy (or lack of fluency in English) increases poverty and marginalisation, and thus the chances of inherited literacy problems. Reading information, filling out forms and accessing the internet in a meaningful way are all massively limited by illiteracy, and you need those skills to access welfare, to access medical care, to avoid exploitative loans, to deal with any service providers, etc. Most jobs above minimum wage and a lot below require a fairly high level of literacy, whether it's office work or reading an instructional memo on a building site or reading drink instructions in McDonalds. Illiteracy is a huge barrier between somebody and the rest of the world, especially in a modern world that just assumes universal literacy, and especially especially as more and more of life involves the internet, texting, WhatsApp, email, and so on - it's becoming harder and harder for people with limited literacy to be fully involved in society. And that means the only mobility is downwards, and that exacerbates all the problems that lead to adult illiteracy.

People who can't read after the age of 6 or so are treated as stupid. People who can't read fluently when they're adults are seen as stupid and almost subhuman. There's so much shame and personal judgement attached to difficulty reading, but the fact that illiteracy is almost exclusively linked to poverty and deprivation is pretty conclusive. Illiteracy isn't about the failure or stupidity of the individual, it's about the lack of support, care and respect afforded to poor people at all stages of their life. Being illiterate doesn't make you stupid - many people are highly intelligent, creative, capable, thoughtful, and illiterate. I know people who can immediately solve complex engineering problems on the fly but take ten minutes to write down a sentence of instruction. It isn't classist to say that illiteracy is caused by poverty - it's both classist and inaccurate to say that illiteracy says anything about the worth, intelligence or personhood of the poor, that it's a result of a desire to be ignorant, or that it's evidence that people are poor because they're stupid, incapable, ignorant or bad parents. The link between poverty and illiteracy is the problem of classism and bigotry, no more no less, and we deal with it by working against the ideas that both poverty and lack of education are a reflection of individual worth.

Illiteracy isn't a problem of intelligence, it's a problem of education, and that matters because education is not inherent. it's something that has to be provided and maintained by parents, by the state, by the community. you're not born educated. you are educated. except more than a quarter of the Scottish population isn't educated, because the system doesn't give a fuck about them and actively excludes them or accidentally leaves them behind.

[idk-my-aesthetic]

Ok you can discuss how ppl have gotten into the habit of trying to turn everything into a symptom or w/e the current discourse about mental health talk on this site is w/o mocking adhd/autistic ppl. Y’all know that right?

Like. Look i get that it’s annoying when ppl try to ask if having a favorite color is a adhd/autism thing. But I did the same thing when I first found out adhd existed. I was so fucking excited to learn that “hey maybe I’m not a lazy fuck up, maybe there actually is something different about me” that any scrap of proof I could find I held close to my chest. Especially with all the people telling me that there was no way I had adhd- that I was too smart. It took me 6 years of constantly asking to get a formal diagnosis. And I needed all those little validations to keep fighting.

Idk. Maybe it’s not the best thing to try and psycho analyze every little thing about yourself. But I don’t think it’s the huge deal ppl make it out to be. I think it’s smthn a lot of kids do and will eventually stop doing. I think it’s just part of growing up, especially when your nerodivergent

And I definitely don’t think it’s turning ADHD into a trend or getting ppl to misdiagnosis themselves or whatever tf ppl are saying. Like seriously grow up. You think it’s a bad thing that ppl with adhd are getting too much attention or whatever? Like seriously go to therapy. So many ppl irl still see adhd as “ohh squirrel disease” and there’s literally no positive representation for us in traditional media. Why are you so mad ppl are finally getting the chance to discuss their struggles with other ppl like them

And if your argument is “well everyone online says they have adhd so clearly it’s just a fad”. Online spaces like tumblr are like catnip to ppl with adhd. They’re more accepting and accessibile, it’s easy to indulge hyperfixations with fandom, they’re constantly stimulating, if something doesn’t interest you all you need to do to find something new is scroll, and they’re generally free of the bullies that have mocked us for being nerodivergent. Such a fucking mystery why a lot of nerodivergent ppl would converge here. It’s literally like when everyone was saying “well everyone is gay now bc of the internet” and ignoring the fact that gay kids were in online spaces bc they were safer, had communities of ppl like them and had information/resources

Like fuck guys. I do think there are some problems with how we talk about adhd on this site. For example a lot of adhd symptoms are relatively normal things taken to such high of a degree that they become debilitating. A lot of symptoms of adhd overlap with a lot of other things. These are both things that need to be remembered and aren’t recognized as much as they should be.

But I basically never see criticisms like that I literally just see NT ppl mocking ppl with adhd like we’re back in elementary school. Like go do something productive instead of being a dick head.

I’ve honestly seen more ppl mocking adhd or saying the way we talk about having adhd is problematic than I have seen ppl actually talking about having adhd.

And like, worse case scenario, someone misdiagnoses themselves as having adhd. What are the world ending consequences? They go to the dr and find out they don’t? Or find out they have something else? Hell maybe they find out they don’t have anything but questioning if they did got them to start going to therapy and improve their lives

Like y’all freak out that we’re “confusing ppl” or w/e but shouldn’t everyone do some introspection? Check to see if they feel different bc everyone feels different or if there truly is something different about how they’re wired. Why is this the worst possible thing for you guys

Or is all of that justification so you can make fun of ppl with adhd like elementary and middle school bullies. Literally grow up.

I really feel like the way ppl talk about mental health on tumblr has shifted. One way is how we stopped romanticizing mental illness- which is a really really good thing. But now I feel like discussing nerodivergence at all is like cringey. Ppl used to talk about their symptoms all the time and there were communities of ppl that supported one another. And now I feel like the only time we talk about it is when you guys are once again mocking ppl with adhd and autism. Anyone with basically anything else you ignore. Which is fucked up btw fucking listen to psychotic ppl, ppl with different forms of depression, ppl with personality disorders, etc. it’s really not that hard

TLDR: stop being dicks to ppl with adhd. You can comment on and critic how ppl talk about adhd without being an asshole. Listen to all types of nerodivergent ppl.

[shadowfae]

There's gotta be people who lie in the middle ground between otherkin and copinglinkers, right?

This just reminds me of the "can people choose to be trans" discourse and personally I've never found the value in trying to find a clean dividing line between people who "choose" to be trans and people who "are" trans, like obviously some people feel dysphoria much more than others and it's important to recognize that, but that doesn't mean theres some "how miserable would you be if you were forced to be cis" test that can decide who is a Valid Trans Person or not. It feels to me like it might be the same with the broader otherkin spectrum, but admittedly I don't know much about the community?

That said, the otherkin community has been really cool and like, when I go digging in early internet history I often find beautifully preserved histories and narratives from otherkin blogs about communities and sites that people frequented. And that's something I'm forever grateful for. I'm glad that there are still folks out there who pass on that history and find value in those communities.

Okay so I waited until I’d officially gotten out of bed (yes, everything I’ve done today was on my phone in bed) to answer this properly.

The thing that I’ve never much mentioned in my place of this argument - and I feel that if I’m going to, I should have a few personal essays to publish first in order to make my point clearly - is that at least for me, my kintypes and my linktypes feel so different there is absolutely no way I could mistake them for each other.

That’s why I’m not calling whatever’s going on with the Xweetok stuff a linktype, because there’s no choice there, it’s just me getting hit in the face with Xweetok animality and trying to figure out what it all means.

My kintypes are intrinsic to my personality. If you leave me alone for a bit, or put me somewhere where I feel totally, completely safe, I go so feral it’s not even funny. I growl. I hiss. My ears, tail(s), and wings do all my body language for me. I walk as digitigrade as a human is capable of. I settle into the mentality of an animal, except for when I slide into dignity and divinity, or when you hand me a piece of technology and then I’m as gruff as a pirate and humming to lyrics nobody else can hear.

My linktypes? Something happens. Panic, anger, fear, terror. I am [insert linktype here], here is what it is correct for me to do, here is what I will do, I navigate my way out of it with grace, I handle it as my linktypes would. Things hurt and I settle into their skin, if only for a little while. When their skin is hard to settle it, I simply change it. Being Kiyoteru was a way for me to understand my own sexual awakening when I’d never been safe enough to recognize my own animality, until I fused it with Luteia kinfeels into the world’s worst coping mechanism (don’t do that, kids) and did some things I’m very much not proud of.

Being Yukari was an answer to dysphoria and social ostracization that served me for quite a long time, and that I no longer need, because I am slightly more comfortable in my own skin. It was a matter of personality and aeslinking: she was a moon-girl who liked warm tea on snowy days and pretty poetry and rabbits. I never had her connection to rabbits, they’re just pets to me, but when I needed it I could pretend to be near a bunny the way she probably was bunnyhearted, and I could be a moon-girl until the sun came up for me.

My kintypes are deeper than that. Ranisson and Pale do seem a matter of personality, being as they are the closest to human, except for all the places where their experiences built them from the ground up. As Pale I was a Devil without his powers that didn’t quite know it enough to stop reaching for more power. As Ranisson, I was a girl in a war that was going to end with everyone I cared about dead, and I almost didn’t care, because we’d all be in the hivemind and I’d never be alone again.

Kiyoteru and Yukari were not that way. They were blank canvases that I could change as I needed to, for the purposes of saving me from myself. Even if they’d had actual stories, even if they were more than pretty faces and aesthetics, I would have made them do as I pleased to get me through.

From the inside, linktypes and kintypes seem so fundamentally different to me that I honestly find it hard to see a middle ground there. I’m not everyone, for some there absolutely is a middle. For some, they really can just ignore their own nonhumanity and walk away unscathed. There will always be a gray area, a fringe case or seven, a middle ground where nobody can define where it stops. And I’m not going to be the one to lay down what that middle ground is, because it is antithetical to my entire existence and experience, and it’s something I will never understand for my own.

I insist that everyone be clear about the terms that fit them to the best of their ability because I don’t like being lied to, especially after I’ve placed my trust in people to tell the truth. I don’t trust a salesman, but I’ll try any answer on StackOverflow once. You give me an answer on SO to a complex problem that fucks up my computer, I’m going to be pissed. You lie to me knowingly about your nonhuman/fictional identity in our tags, I’m going to be pissed.

If people say “this is an identity and I don’t know how voluntary it is” I go “yeah okay fair enough.” If they say they’re one or the other, I say the same. If they say they’re one and their experiences match the other, I’ll point that out. If they proceed to insult me and tell me I’m a gatekeeper, I am going to be pissed.

And then if they proceed to throw death threats in my face, I will be furious. I think I have every right to be in that case, and I have no use for those who would side with that sort of person. That’s all anyone’s been asking. Be where you are but be honest about your experiences, and we’ll find a place for you. Even if you say “I’m a linker, but I feel better in this space for otherkin, are we cool with me being here?” the answer will be yes, and then we’ll probably bring you our questions about your experiences. That’s what we do. We ask about others’ experiences and we nitpick how they work because they’re fascinating.

We preserve our history because we have to know where we come from. We have to know we’re not alone. I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to read the history of the community they’re from. Now maybe it’s that I have no ties to my own heritage by blood, and those who do aren’t so interested, but if anything happened to our history I don’t know what I’d do. We need it to say no, if we’re crazy it’s not for this, that this is truly what we are, that we are not the first to have walked this path, and that those who came before us survived to tell the tale.

I am what I am. Everyone else is what they are. So long as people say that, then I have no issues with anyone about it.

[pochapal]

rank every year of the 2010s from best to worst i want some pochapal lore

[warning for discussion of my fucked up mental health and my myriad traumas. we’re really opening the pandora’s box here gang]

ok time for me to overshare on the internet again! super long post because i can’t shut up and you asked for it. anyway, by objective ranking: 

#1: 2012 - halcyon era, my personal peak. spent the whole year writing hunger games oc fics with my deviantart fanfiction besties whom i still think about all the time and always hope are having the best possible day. if you were here for this era understand i still hold you so closely and dearly in my heart <3. 

#2: 2013 - god i was such a good example of a human being back then. was the year my writing like actually took off and i had a healthy balance between creative stuff and a social life (said social life consisting of spending lunchtimes at school breaking into classrooms and discussing fandom shit with five other people. reading homestuck updates in the music room on one person’s really shaky mobile data...legendary). highlight of the year and maybe my life was in the april of 2013 when i got out of failing to submit a hard deadline essay by telling my english teacher i wrote a whole novel over the two week break and then producing said novel. god i wish i had that level of like. fucking confidence back me back then knew what i wanted and how to get it. 

#3: 2010 - the last year of childhood. i was 12 and played pokemon all the time with my friends and went places and had a moderately successful youtube channel and it didn’t matter that i was bullied so badly at school because i was basically high off life. summer of 2010 was so good specifically. i’d used to get the bus with a friend and go see movies and break into historical sites and get into normal childhood mayhem and maxed out my pokewalkers twice a month and i was buzzed because i had two (2) whole friendship groups to choose from and that was such a huge deal to me the terminal social outcast. it was so simple and carefree and even though everything and everyone involved in this era grew up to suck except for one specific person i kinda really miss it.

#4: 2018 - this was the first year i wasn’t depressed to the point of nonfunctioning. it was 20gayteen, i was on antidepressants, i was as close to thriving as i got at uni (going into town with people once a week, attending art and culture events, getting good grades across the board), i started to write for fun again, i got my cat whom i love dearly, i was exhibited in my uni’s city’s literature festival, GOD i actually nearly attended a pride event that year can you imagine. this year was basically my life’s second peak. miss getting the 8am train and daintily sipping on a cherry coke to keep me from passing out. wish this time could have lasted longer.

#5: 2019 - kinda absolute middle of the road year not for lack of anything happening but because the overwhelming amount of good and bad things cancelled each other out. so like there’s the fact that i was at the top of my uni game this year, was basically making the first steps into a professional writing career (covid i will never forgive you for killing all that dead </3), finally saved up enough to buy myself a gaming pc, and the summer after the homestuck epilogues, but equally 2019 was the start of the Pochapal Gender Fiasco which is by far the most horrible thing i am still currently undergoing and i burnt myself out mentally about halfway through the year (being stuck overnight in a hospital for a panic attack absolutely horrible horrible irredeemable) and then got like super death plague flu that i was sick with for three months (literally recovered less than a month before rona hit. god’s cruel karma.). so like...it kind of averaged out? the good shit was good but not as great as other years and the bad shit was awful but nowhere near as terrible as it could have been. gotta give a shoutout to 90% of my current mutual cohort for following me in 2019...omelette route gang make some noise !!

#6: 2014 - oof. this year essentially marked the start of a four year long downward mental health spiral because everything fell into awful alignment. i’d just turned 16, finished secondary school, had all my friends up and ditch me at once, was home alone for a whole summer, and was hit with Sudden Intense Body Image Issues that i couldn’t explain until uh. after very recent developments lmao. this one goes out to the me of july 2014 who did nothing but lay in bed and listen to the same two marina albums on a loop because fuck i’m attracted to men and also my facial and body hair are really starting to come in and if i think about this for too long i will literally kill myself because oh god i can’t handle getting older which is clearly and definitely the issue going on here. my brain fucking broke super hardcore and it’s a miracle that an overeating disorder was like the worst thing i walked away with. 

#7: 2015 - downward spiral year two!! i was so volatile this year it was such a mess. i was totally socially isolated after a brief stint of falling in with a group of people at the start of my first year of sixth form until january where in quick succession a) it turned out every single one of these people was friends with the person who sexually assaulted me whom i obviously had a lot of complicated feelings towards and b) baby’s first crush came out as bisexual but in the “women and also trans women” kind of way which tore me up so terribly in ways i couldn’t begin to understand. no words for the experience of seeing a girl kiss a boy and crying so hard at night you threw up because you could never be her no matter how much you wanted it. actually kinda get the sense what was going on there was bigger than just some crush lmao. then after that i was so mentally ill i basically attended school less than half the time and it was the only year in my life i failed my exams. i ended up having to resit my entire set of first year a level exams because jesus christ was i in such a bad way it was a miracle i even showed up to them. all i did was either have anxiety attacks or enter bedbound depressive slumps for weeks at a time. but it’s okay because it gets worse.

#8: 2016 - downward spiral act iii: the spiralling. prefacing this by saying that i actually had two whole good months (april - may) in that i was functioning enough to do my exams and finish school with decent grades. the rest was super extra mega terrible. my school attendance for year 13 dipped below 65% and literally the only thing that kept me from being kicked out was the fact that i was naturally smart at the subjects i took and also because the school would have a lot to answer for after letting me get to that state despite having a hefty file on how damaged i was. keep in mind every single part of this was fully untreated btw - i was just floundering around and letting it all fester. i spent three solid weeks going to school but locking myself in the bathroom all day every day and having mental health episodes then going home like nothing else happened only to continue the breakdown that night. then things got kicked into fucked up overdrive when i moved out to uni and was cut off from what little support structures i did have. it was so bad all i did was cry all the time and never went anywhere to the point where three separate sources recommended me to the wellbeing and crisis counselling service that i stopped going to after two sessions because i was fucked up in ways cbt techniques could not even touch. at least i tried to make an effort for the first two months of uni which like. good for me?

#9: 2017 - what lieth at the base of the spiral. helltrench year. i was at literal rock bottom. i stopped going to class, i didn’t hand in a single piece of work. i lied to my parents and would book trains each day only to go back to my student flat and sit there and contemplate suicide. like i would just slump on the floor in a catatonic state and vividly contemplate one of four or so ways i could end my own life. i only didn’t because i wanted to wait until the summer to collect my last student loan and transfer it to my parents as an apology for my death which obviously didn’t end up happening. honestly i can’t remember much of the first half of 2017 that’s how bad it was. i remember taking a gender studies class and the teacher made it Weird that i was the Only Male Student in the room and then she sent me a scolding email after i walked out halfway through a class and never returned. apparently i got into a lot of online discourse in this year but i don’t remember anything other than being put on a blocklist by the milkfic author over ace discourse which is funny if you have the context. mostly i just baited terfs and weirdo freaks to get them to say horrible things to me as what i guess amounts to some kind of digital self harm. anyway breaking point came in late august when i got kicked out of university and then nobody could ignore it any more so there was no choice left but for me to seek out help and recover enough to function which luckily i did. i really Do Not remember 2017. you could tell me anything about that year and i’d probably believe you.

#10: 2011 - extra circle of hell for this little fucked up gem of a year. on the surface it wasn’t actually that terrible, until the Summer 2011 Domino Effect Of Bad Shit. up until like may/june it was a pretty all right year! i was 13 and had a surprisingly successful youtube channel uploading pokemon soundfont remixes to an audience of i think ~350-400 subscribers at my peak? anyway then i got hit with the early summer triple combo of childhood friends moving away, cute and quirky sexual assault at the hands of a person in my friend group, and then having some Really Great and Super Appropriate interactions with adults on deviantart. like obviously there’s the actual ptsd-inducing event which totally disrupted and killed the person i was right up until that moment and reshaped every facet of my life for better or worse (there’s an alternate timeline where that didn’t happen and i got into electronic music and/or coding instead) but really it’s the events that followed in its wake which were kind of more fucked up. so like all of a sudden i was super aware of my body and me growing my hair out and being mistaken for a girl in class suddenly became this Less Innocent thing and i ended up spending hours overnight going to transgender questioning forums and looking up hrt timeline videos and having the wikipedia article on tracheal shaving saved because it was a life raft to me whose voice was imminently gonna deepen and i was simultaneously reeling with constant trauma flashbacks and the whole thing was so so fucked up. then i was on deviantart and i don’t remember exactly how but a small group of furry guys ten to fifteen years older than me started messaging me and encouraging and requesting me to produce nonsexual fetish stuff for them and talking to me about stuff like if i’d ever thought about growing up to be gay and i didn’t think anything of it for a long while because they called me a very talented writer and it felt so good to have someone be nice to me after being so alone and isolated for months on end. anyway the only reason i got out of that before it got bad was because they invited me to one of the big furry sites and i was weirded out because i thought it was a porn site and thinking about sexual stuff was a huge trauma trigger so i just ended up blocking them all and pretending like it didn’t happen. at the time half this shit didn’t bother me but in retrospect holy fuck 2011 was such a damaging year. to think if like three events didn’t happen i wouldn’t be the fucked up mess you see before you today.

god fuck this turned out super long but i’m not apologising because this was a therapeutic exercise for me and also constitutes as one of the biggest pochapal lore dumps of all time. come get your food or whatever.

[frostiifae]

hi i’m not gonna engage directly with that post about masculinity and the pressures it’s put under growing up bc i am much too fragile for that, but also my feelings on that post wind up going out to jupiter and back instead, so sorry about this but --

I’ve been mulling over the idea that maybe social media, as a whole, is a bad place for social discourse (shocking, I know). The core idea of it is simple - you take a statement like “men are overly sexual”. This statement is at least glancingly true, but not ironclad. It is true enough to make a specific point in context, but it isn’t true enough to project outward into the world without context.

People with more authority than me have already done plenty of research to demonstrate how modern social media is designed specifically to present ideas free of context. It’s virtually impossible to have a meaningful conversation in the open space of Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook, for varying reasons - but the sites do their best to trick you into not noticing. 

In a post I exchange between my two best (female) friends, we may cajole about the horrors and ugliness of men, saying things we don’t really believe, partially tongue-in-cheek, partially to make fun of the radical ideas that say these things without the requisite irony. But it would be so very easy for someone - even someone that knows me, someone I care about - to stumble upon that post and misunderstand. In reality, that post wasn’t really meant to be public. It was just for the three of us, because we have a shared context that changes and colors the way our words are interpreted, and without that context - the things we make look alien, or worse.

How easy it is for this simple misunderstanding to repeat itself at progressively larger and larger scales. Isn’t it amazing how Anita Sarkeesian attempted to say something hardly controversial and completely understandable, but a lack of context drove an entire counter-cultural movement and drove a wedge into the heart of the community she wanted to speak to. Incredible how, even as we all rally behind the cries Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, we still have people claiming to be races they aren’t, asserting themselves over marginalized voices without thinking - and how, even as I do my best to keep my mouth shut, I can’t help but wonder if something is being missed because I can’t find the words to ask the questions I wish I could ask. 

I keep wondering, what if I could just pluck one of those horrific alt-right reddit meme boys from their chair and sit on a park bench with them, offer to get them lunch, and just talk about our visions for the future. Surely, we’d disagree on a lot of things, but I’m used to that. I’ve always been a weird kid, and I found solace in understanding the why of people’s beliefs - people’s reasoning always made more sense to me than the conclusions they would reach because of that reasoning. And I really feel like we could find a lot in common, if we could break past the surface layer of what we believe, and instead talk about the experiences that led us there. After all, I, too, was once a disenfranchised middle-class white male on the Internet, whose favorite pastime was to lose themselves in an emerging culture of chaos and creativity that seemed impenetrable from the outside. I, too, was once frustrated with the posturing of feminism, with the idea that men ought to be judged demographically without regard to their individual status. I still am frustrated with that idea, even now that I’ve come to grips with why it keeps coming up. I can’t say that it’s false. But I can’t say that it’s true, either. 

I wish I could explain that it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false - that it never has mattered - that none of this was ever about telling people how they should think, or what words they are and aren’t allowed to use, or how they should volunteer their assets in the name of the less-privileged, or how they should sit at the back of the bus to make way for the flavor of the month. I wish I could explain that I understand how it seems from the outside, I really do, because I was there once, and it seems like such a mess of contrarian nonsense that can’t even find time to agree with itself, but you have to understand, it’s not about rules and regulations, it’s not about a strict moral or social code, it’s just about trying these ideas out in a public space and seeing if they make things better for people, because the way the world is now isn’t working. 

But I know what would happen if I tried that: I would get told, “And what about me?” and, well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? What about you? 

Is it selfish to focus on one’s own problems? Is it “male privilege” to listen to a talk about feminism and ask “but what about us?” Does that make you a pillar of the patriarchy? I feel like the answer is so obviously no, but we keep reacting that way, because when some dude comments on a feminist post and all we have to go off of is a name, an anime avatar (and believe me, I love anime avatars, so don’t think for a second I’m going to judge you for having one) and a single off-color remark, we have to come to some kind of judgment and it’s never going to be accurate. We tried so hard to teach everyone to think about the person behind the screen, but at the same time the Internet evolved in such a way that we know less and less every day about the screennames we come into contact with; the mountain is being built higher and higher ahead of us as we climb. 

I think the solution is to just stop. I really, really do. 

I was educated in feminism by a person who sat down with me in a series of one-on-one conversations and answered my questions as patiently as they could. I’m not friends with that person anymore - we wound up having a lot of disagreements on finer points, even besides the way we actually treated one another - but I deeply appreciate that time they spent with me. I refined my knowledge of feminism by taking those conversations to other people I trusted, and seeing how they felt about those ideas, further whittling away at this chunk of philosophy I had been given, turning into a thing I, personally, could believe in. This is the way human beings learn: we find a teacher we trust to confide in, we find a place to practice that feels safe so that we can try things out, and we build up confidence in private before taking our findings into the open. 

What do we accomplish by taking two people who have already cemented their convictions and bashing them against each other in a public space? Spectacle. That’s really all there is to it. Hate to sound like an old batty cynic but social media really is built around social spectacle. Twitter’s Trending tags, fandom discourse, political pages on Facebook mocking each other in memes that spread through social circles while dissidents look on in quiet disgust. The point of the whole model is to turn human culture into a hadron collider. This is not the place for nuanced debate. We should all know better. But, somehow, we don’t. And all the worse for the younger people caught in the crossfire that don’t understand what’s happening. 

It’s funny how you hear about things happening to other kids, parents and teachers and principals setting rules that seem completely ridiculous and unfair, and then you grow up and start to realize that - even if you still disagree - there’s a hint of wisdom in there. I dunno, maybe we should be withholding the internet from our kids until they’re adults. Not because they’re not mature enough for the Internet, but because the Internet isn’t mature enough for them. 

ᵒⁿᵉ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉˢᵉ ᵈᵃʸˢ ᶦ ᵍᵒᵗᵗᵃ ᵐᵃᵏᵉ ᵐʸ ᵒʷⁿ ˢᵒᶜᶦᵃˡ ᵐᵉᵈᶦᵃ ˢᶦᵗᵉ

[aro-ace-advice]

What advice would you give someone who is struggling with identifying their sexuality?

Georgia says: hey anon! First off, you don’t have to put any pressure on yourself to pinpoint your exact sexuality and it’s okay if things change. I thought I was bi before I realised I was asexual. You’re allowed to change how you label yourself so you can find something that fits. So if you’re struggling with identifying your sexuality, it might be easy for you to start with the “basics”. I’m not sure how old you are anon, so depending on your age you might not even “get” sexual attraction (it took me until I was about 16 to realise what sexual attraction actually meant) but having an understanding of sexual attraction (or even just being aware of it) might be helpful, as if you feel like sex is something you’re into, then you’re probably not asexual. What helped me when I was figuring things out was seeing a chart that had a short explanation of a bunch of different sexualities. It’s a pretty personal thing to figure out internally so be kind to yourself

ree says: well… i suppose it would depend on what identities they might be considering? i wouldn’t give someone who’s questioning if they’re ace or aro the same advice that i would give to someone who’s questioning if they’re gay or bi. if you’re thinking you might be on the aro/ace spectrum, i already have a whole lot of asexual / aromantic questioning advice on this blog, so here’s a few links to some of my previous posts on the topic! x x x x being gay or bi or pan is a lot different than being aroace, which is where my own personal experience and expertise within the lgbt+ community is at, so i’m not really at a place to give detailed advice about other identities. you’d likely be able to find someone who can just by looking around here on tumblr. you can always start by talking to people who list their sexualities in their bio, and send some asks to some other lgbt+ focused blogs! there’s loads of resources, and i think the most helpful thing for you to do would be to find a positive community and start talking to other lgbt+ folks about their own journeys.

(please be careful if you choose to find an internet community. tumblr is full of exclusionists and discourse, and you might end up feeling less comfortable and secure with yourself if you dive too deep into that rabbit hole. it can be hella toxic. it’s not healthy to surround yourself with all of that negativity, even if it doesn’t directly apply to you. positivity blogs are a good place to start, and they’re not too hard to find. you could also try looking around for a community on pillowfort, which is another social media site. message me on my personal blog @cerydwynn if you’d like to try that, you need an invite link to make an account since they’re still in beta testing.)

however, i’ve done my own fair share of questioning, and i definitely agree with what georgia said. don’t rush it. there’s no time limit to figuring out which way you swing (if you swing at all). if you’re feeling anxious about it and eager to know definitively, take a mental break and try to internalize that it’s okay to be unsure and that you’ll find what you like through time and experience. there’s no right way to question your sexuality, no right label to choose. it’s also just fine to use no labels at all. be safe in your exploration of yourself, and don’t do anything that makes you super uncomfortable. while stepping out of your comfort zone can be a good thing, putting yourself into a potentially harmful situation or choosing to participate in something that you don’t like is very different from trying something new and maybe a little risky that isn’t within your bubble.

for a lot of people, questioning can be something that brings a lot of stress and anxiety. but please be aware that no matter what you eventually decide you identify as, be that gay, bi, pan, aro, ace, poly, queer, straight, or label-less, whatever it is you like, there are so many people in this world who have also gone through what you are going through now and who are going to accept you and be there to help guide you through this. you are not alone. questioning and being part of the lgbt+ community is not a sin, it’s not wrong. you are loved and accepted. this community was built and is here for us to support each other. so while questioning might be scary, remember that you have a support system, even if it seems distant or impossible!

if you want to talk more in depth about questioning or you’re feeling alone, you can always message us again, or shoot me a direct message on my personal blog, which i linked up there in that middle section (again, it’s @cerydwynn in case you don’t wanna go hunting for it in all the words).

[starwalker03]

You know what I find really sad about the aspec community on tumblr?

Our identities are always the source of discourse, and it leads to us having no sense of community.

If you search aspec, aroace, asexual or anything to do with the aspec community you get post after post about discourse and other things relating to it. There’s no jokes, fun art, stories, nothing. Aspec images are all small ones with over communities, which is fine I live the solidarity, but why isn’t there fun aspec imagery like when you search ‘wlw’, ‘gay’ etc. why aren’t there as many fun times?

I know it the dragons and cake jokes and the ‘space ace’ and ‘ace card’ jokes, why can’t we have more fun like that? Why can’t the Aro community have jokes like that? Do they?

I have never spoken to someone who identifies as demi, or aro, or gray, or anything. And it’s really kinda sad.

I’ve interacted with one fellow aspec individual, who only recognised me thanks to the ace ring I wear. She was younger than me and seemed to love my little friend group. Her eyes lit up when I stated that, yes, the black ring on my right middle finger is an ace ring. She was immediately happy to find a fellow aspec. And so was I.

I want to see jokes and terms and fun stuff. as an asexual I want to learn about my Aromantic buddies and have fun conversations with them. I want to meet fellow aspec peeps and build a little community of friends. I want to build a bridge between the aro/ace communities and the agender communities.

I can really only communicate with fellow aspec people on the internet cause no one outside of it knows about us. The one girl I know in school is years younger than me, I feel like the only relationship I can have with her is the ‘mentiring ace’ who’s been aware of their identity a bit longer and has already gone through the year or so of uncertainty. It’s a role I’m happy to fill, but where are my fellow aspec friends?

Our identities are so often a source of argument and debate that we never get the chance to explore it ourselves. We’re like children with argumentative parents who play good cop, bad cop, and both of them have their own perspective on what we should do and be. The sooner we, as a community, take the reins the sooner we can start to support ourlselves on this site and work past the exclusionists.

Why can’t we just have a fun community that builds itself up?

I think the sooner we start thriving in spite of the discourse the sooner we can become a more recognised and stronger community.

And that can only help, especially those who are new to the community, youngsters who just want to feel safe in the term they’ve found resonates with them, those who deal with enough spite when those outside the internet continue to harass and make fun of them for their identities.

It may seem naive, but I guess it’s always been naive to hope.

Tl;dr

The aspec community is in a rocky stage, it needs support and foundations. Maybe 20 years ago was the perfect time to start this conversation and get the ball running, but the second most perfect time is now.

[kerouacsrevenge-blog]

The true importance of good spelling

Gone are the times of secretarial composing pools and hardback work area word references. Presently, we lead quite a bit of our every day business by brisk flame finger-hitting on minor screens. Be that as it may, ever-littler innovation, and an expanding weight for ever-faster reaction times with the appearance of email, implies it's possible a grammatical error will crawl into our composed correspondence, or more awful, autocorrect will embed an improper word.

We've all been there. Sites and online distributions are covered with grammatical mistakes and even world pioneers once in a while don't delay to check tweets before squeezing 'send'. Who can overlook President Trump's scandalous covfefe tweet?

While some spelling slip-ups are innocuous and amusing, many aren't. The unassuming grammatical error not just has the ability to cause us to seem less insightful than we are. Poor spelling can likewise make disarray, lost clearness and meaning and in extraordinary cases it can cost millions in botched deals and occupation chances. It can possibly wreck client connections and even ruin your opportunity of discovering love on the web.

Yet, in the event that nobody is resistant and innovation is tending to make terrible spelling ordinary – take the ascent of 'content talk' shortenings for instance – is immaculate orthography no longer of significant worth? Also, is it OK to incorrectly spell words?

Spell-check: some portion of the issue

Spell-checking apparatuses may appear the appropriate response, however they additionally make another issue, cautions Anne Trubek, a specialist in new composition innovations and originator of Belt Publishing in the US territory of Ohio.

A long haul examination of blunders in college understudies' papers in the US observed that spelling used to be the most widely recognized mix-up. Be that as it may, the new number one mistake in understudy composing is presently utilizing the 'off-base word', clarifies Trubek. "Spell-check, as the greater part of us know, now and then rectifies spelling to an unexpected word in comparison to planned; if the composing isn't later edited, this PC made mistake goes unnoticed."

New innovations, for example, Apple's Siri work, additionally add to the rising aloofness toward right spelling. "On the off chance that you take a gander at the advancement of advances, regardless of whether it's plume pens to wellspring pens to ball direct pens toward consoles, the objective is to go quicker in light of the fact that you need to coordinate the pace of the thoughts in your mind," says Trubek. "Siri does that the best."

Autocorrection is most likely why an official White House press explanation as of late called for 'peach' in the Middle East, instead of 'harmony', says Simon Horobin, educator of English language and writing at the University of Oxford. "There are a wide range of issues that are going to come up in the event that you think you have a totally safeguard strategy. Regardless you must figure out how to spell," he says.

Already, composed material experienced a procedure of duplicate altering and editing to strip out blunders, yet now online substance goes up in all respects rapidly and there are frequently botches, says Horobin, writer of Does Spelling Matter? also, How English Became English. "Individuals see their transient messages as vaporous, however indeed, some portion of the capacity of the web is that it's consistently there so years after the fact individuals are as yet understanding it," he cautions.

Indeed, you're being judged

An overview of 5,500 American singles in 2016 by web based dating webpage Match.com found that 39% passed judgment on the reasonableness of up-and-comers by their grip of language structure – positioning that more significant than their grin, dress sense or even the condition of their teeth.

What's more, inquire about demonstrates that when individuals detect a spelling botch on a site they'll frequently leave it since they dread it's false.

Organizations know that a bit of their picture settles upon right composition and spelling, says Roslyn Petelin, partner teacher recorded as a hard copy at the University of Queensland in Australia. "Nothing can cause you to lose validity more rapidly and appear to be uneducated than a spelling botch, and that incorporates punctuations," she says.

There have been a few court cases rotating around spelling issues, she says, including the as of late settled instance of Taylor and Sons in the UK – where a multimillion-pound fight in court was pursued over a misstep including a solitary missing letter.

To be sure, an absence of a specific degree of capability might be a hindrance to finding a new line of work by any stretch of the imagination. A ton of managers in Australia presently request that applicants step through composition exams, says Petelin. "Youngsters leaving college may have all the privilege relational abilities, yet on the off chance that they can't compose intelligibly, managers won't give them an occupation."

A 2015 overview of UK managers utilizing by and large more than 1.2 million individuals, led for business hall bunch CBI, found that 37% of bosses were disappointed with gauges of proficiency and utilization of English among college and school leavers.

"It would be an error to tell youngsters that spelling doesn't make a difference in this industry, or in this occupation, in light of the fact that those fundamental abilities are a genuine door to different jobs or to creating different aptitudes," says Pippa Morgan, the CBI's head of instruction and abilities.

Spelling abilities are required like never before, she says. "In case you're managing client administration enquiries by means of Twitter, that may be the one connection clients have with that organization thus the nature of that message, the utilization of language, is extremely significant. It may be similarly as significant as a well disposed face in a store or voice over a telephone," says Morgan.

At the point when it's OK to change spelling

Now and again however, mistaken spelling, truncations or shortening of words is OK. "We for instance use 'business' in our tweeting as shorthand for business," Morgan says.

Furthermore, in certain unique circumstances, casual language is required. "On the off chance that you send an email to a 21-year-old VP that says 'Dear Mr Jones' and you're utilizing excessively formal word usage, that could be an issue," says Trubek.

Be that as it may, even – or maybe, particularly – in the realm of internet based life, self-broadcasted 'punctuation Nazis' will get out spelling botches. Others attempt to cover themselves when messaging from their cell phone by including a rider, for example, 'Sent on the fly by iphone. It would be ideal if you pardon any grammatical errors.'

Where once there were concurred shows for letter composing, the online condition has made another in the middle of type of talk where we don't exactly recognize what the standards are, says Horobin. While loosening up the guidelines of spelling, language structure and accentuation may be satisfactory on Twitter or in a Facebook post, email is trickier to measure, he says. "Email can some of the time sit between the formal and the casual."

Similarly as we adjust our discourse contingent upon whether we're giving an address, taking a prospective employee meeting, or visiting to companions, we have to change our utilization in the computerized world, says Horobin.

So what's the best way to deal with embrace meanwhile?

"Fail on utilizing the customary shows and ensuring that your spelling is adequate. Generally individuals will pass judgment on you on it. That is the cruel reality," says Horobin.

"It's smarter to be correct and to appear to be marginally particular and fusty than it is to attempt to seem to be progressively loose and wind up annoying someone since you've made a type of essential mistake that they feel incredibly unequivocally about." If you are looking for more information about spelling visit Spanish Spell Checker right away.

[yr-bed]

Referencesreferencesreferences

Lauren Oyler is my favourite living critic, and I’m excited to read her debut novel Fake Accounts. I’ve been reading a lot of the press around it, including this interview with The Atlantic where she answers the question “ To what extent do conspiracy theories and fiction relate to each other?” thusly

To great extent! You could say conspiracy theories are like bad fiction, which attempts to tie everything up and explain it all. Neither leave room for randomness or pointlessness or meaninglessness. But life is full of all these, and our desire to eliminate them leads us down narrower and narrower paths.

There’s also a tendency to read symbols and metaphors in life the way we read them in fiction, which creates all sorts of problems. When you read symbols and metaphors in fiction, you know where they came from: the author. If you find a symbol or metaphor in life, you might start freaking out about where it came from and what it really means. The specifics of the stories conspiracists tell tend to camouflage the more interesting elements about them, which to me are all about (1) motivation—why am [I] being told this?—and (2) their unstable relationship to the real: Some aspect of this could actually be true, or come from something real. Both are essential elements of fiction as well.

Which, first of all, is a characteristically incisive read on the proliferation of conspiracy theories within modern western political discourse. It also resurfaced in my mind today, a couple of weeks after I first read it, whilst scrolling through the Genius entries for songs from Black Country, New Road’s hot-off-the-press debut album, For the first time.

I really really like For the first time. Opening your debut album with an instrumental called “Instrumental” and ending with a song called “Opus” are a sandwich of baller moves. “Track X” is what a love song written by Steve Reich might sound like. I’m not the only one to notice that considerable changes had been made to the lyrics and arrangements of pre-album singles “Athen’s, France” and “Sunglasses,” the latter of which was one of my most-listened songs in 2019 and 2020, if Spotify’s records are to be believed. Not being smart enough to figure out the changes for myself, and heeding Jarvis’s First Law, I went over to the often-ironically-named Genius with the expectation that the site’s membership may well have crowd-sourced annotations which would do the heavy analytical lifting for me. 

[Adam Curtis voice] And then, something strange happened. Well, maybe not strange, but sort of interesting. The problem with Genius has been well documented by more intelligent documenters than I, as are the potential pitfalls of crowdsourcing knowledge in general. In this particular instance, the phenomena I happened upon wasn’t the proliferation of white boys clumsily trying to pick apart the internal rhymes and culturally-specific reference points of trap songs, but a form of context collapse typical of a lot of so-called cultural critiques you get on the Internet of 2021.

Talking to everyone and talking to no-one has lead to a curious reading of Black Country, New Road’s lyrics (part of a verbose, hyper-referential scene that primarily exists in my head, alongside Squid). Rather than drawing on the specific socioeconomic and cultural context the band exist in, and which they often directly call out in their music, there’s a grasping to read symbols and metaphors in an almost wilfully literal and dull fashion. And imho it sucks!

Above is a representative example from the Genius page for the single version of “Sunglasses.” It’s a song which wields the cultural signifiers of comfortable middle class existence in modern Britain with equal parts disgust and familiarity. Amongst The Guardian-friendly reference points are Nutribullets, single malt whiskey, complaining about mediocre theatre and, in the killer of an opening line, multi-part Danish crime dramas of the sort that air on BBC Four. All of these work in concert to produce, in the words of frontman Isaac Wood, a portrait of a family of “wealth or affluence.” Crucially, however, not one “written from a critical or even external position,” which is one of the more interesting aspects of the song (and the band in general), occupying as they do a self-reflexively privileged position not dissimilar to the Metropolitan Liberal Elite’s satirical voice of choice, Stewart Lee. It makes things slipperier, harder to gain purchase on. The mix of the specific and abstract in the song is intentional: you’re never going to uncover a “true meaning,” but you can at least get a sense of what they’re trying to communicate.

What the ironically-named Genius annotators choose to focus on, however, is not this fairly obvious deployment of cultural symbols amidst an otherwise allusive and elusive set of lyrics, but unpicking precisely which six-part Danish crime drama is being referenced. I will charitably admit that yes, perhaps there is a specific show Wood is referencing in his lyrics here, but: who gives a shit? That’s besides the point! “Knowing” that he’s singing about something called The Jack of Hearts doesn’t add anything to the song (it also belies a further cultural ignorance in that the phrase is clearly used here, paired with The Fonz, as a somewhat-ironic iconic “Cool Guy”). Susie Sonts would be spinning in her grave if she got anywhere near this shit.

In “Against Interpretation”, one of the foundational texts which informed my way of thinking about art and criticism and I would argue is crucial in navigating the anaemic and non-confrontational symbol-chasers of today, Susan Sontag rails against the “contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation [...] often prompted by an open aggressiveness [...] The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys.” 

This is the dominant interpretative style of now. From politics to indie rock, there is a harried, prescriptive and literal approach to making sense of things, of settling on rote and superficial readings. A symbol has a literal meaning; A means A; references are not poetic allusions, but puzzle boxes to be cracked open and, once they have, mastered and then returned, inert and unusable, to the shelf. There are fewer attempts to approach texts in good faith, or to acknowledge the broader context in which people act and create, a bastardised deployment of Barthes which makes the word significantly less interesting, as opposed to the other way around. Do you think the couplet “Trips to B&Q with your other half / This is how the other half lives” in Squid’s “Houseplants” is part of a similarly vicious-yet-complicit takedown of middle class life, or calling out Jacob Riis’s 1890 work of photojournalism “documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums”?

There is a disengagement with context and, in its place, an analytical approach which -- in this instance -- appears to me to also shirk engagement with the “randomness or pointlessness or meaninglessness” of some of the cascading cavalcade of references, veiled and otherwise, culturally and personally specific, which is one of the most entertaining aspects of Black Country, New Road’s music. Instead it’s about finding a definitive meaning, often through the filter of other reference points which are not actually appropriate or relevant, as a sort of attempt to assert dominance over a text. As the conspiracy theorist incorrectly applies close reading to chaotic reality in order to create a kind of order, so the Genius annotator manages to lack the ability to apply close reading to a chaotic text. To further co-opt Oyler’s words, the paths ought to be sprawling off in all directions, rather than narrow and meticulously signposted.

Anyway. Back soon to actually talk about the changes made between the single and album versions of “Sunglasses” and “Athen’s, France,” with reference to Evangelion and Car Seat Headrest’s Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror)/ (Face to Face)!

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Hyperallergic: “Documentary Reporting Has Become So Rigid”: Adam Curtis on Storytelling Today

Stills from HyperNormalisation (all images courtesy Adam Curtis)

Around the turn of the 21st century, civilization was in distress. The Middle East was embroiled in war. Far-right movements were growing or even taking power in the West, culminating in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in the United States. The consequences of events throughout the 20th century were piling on top of one another. The institutions seemed to be failing us. The people found that the old sources of information were lacking. Hungry for answers, they began turning to alternative sources. Some found that the work of a certain man, a British filmmaker, made sense to them. His documentaries stood out for their unusual editing and use of music, an approach to history that defied convention, and his distinct manner of narration — you may even be reading this now in his voice. That man’s name was Adam Curtis.

Curtis has been an established, respected journalist in his home country for decades, but didn’t garner much attention in America until his films began circulating online in the 2000s and ‘10s. Now his popularity has exploded, with uploads of his newest film, HyperNormalisation, cumulatively getting millions of views. Many journalists have tried to “explain” the Trump phenomenon, but few have done so by connecting it to a broader picture involving the failings of neoliberalism and a drastic shift in the discourse of democracy.

Now, Curtis is coming to America to present “Into the Zone,” a weekend-long film series at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles. The program includes Starship Troopers and Blow Out, and other films that express themes commonly found in his work. Hyperallergic was able to speak on the phone with Curtis about HyperNormalisation and his other films, as well as the slipshod reporting around Syria and Russia.

*  *  *

Dan Schindel: HyperNormalisation has raised your profile here in America. Until now, a few of your series have gotten DVD releases, but never any theatrical run or airing. Your work has been spread around in the US mainly via the internet, mostly with uploads that aren’t strictly legal. How do you feel about that?

Journalist and filmmaker Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis: I think it’s one of the realities of the modern world. I am neutral about it. What I’ve noticed right from about the year 2000, 2001, is that you put out a film live on television, and within about five or six minutes, it tends to appear on YouTube. The BBC squeal about it and then try and get it taken down, then it turns up again. I just accept it.

I like the idea that you make a film, it goes out, then it turns up on the internet in various forms and people go and find it. I’m happy with that. The BBC would hate me for saying this, but I don’t mind. It’s partly because also I work for the BBC and it’s a public broadcasting organization. I feel that the public should be allowed to see it in as many ways as they like. The BBC don’t like that, but it’s inevitable these days.

DN: They’re already sort of cutting out the middle man there. Your last two films, HyperNormalisation and Bitter Lake, premiered directly on BBC iPlayer.

AC: The interesting thing about online is that you can do things that are more complex and involving and less patronizing to the audience than traditional documentaries, which tend to simplify so much because they’re panicking that people will only watch them once live. They tend to just tell you what you already know. I think you can do some more complicated things, and that’s what I’ve been trying.

DS: I’ve seen people share political documentaries on video sites like they’re tracts, passing them around on social media.

AC: I’ve noticed with HyperNormalisation, in the United States, it’s got passed around like an underground thing. I think that’s not a bad way to publish a thing. I’m not trying to make a traditional documentary. I’m trying to make a thing that gets why you feel today like you do — uncertain, untrusting of those who tell you what is what. To make it in a way that emotionally explains that as much as it explains it intellectually.

DS: Both Bitter Lake and HyperNormalisation are much longer than films you made before. Before, you would have to cut them into multiple parts for airing, but now you’re free to expand.

AC: It has disadvantages too, in that you’re off live TV. But cumulatively, I’ve had very big audiences for both films, far more than I would for a live television showing. One of the reasons I like online is that I have this image that a lot of the people will watch it on their laptops with headphones. If you do that, then you can make the music and the noise and everything you do visually more involving.

DS: How so?

AC: What I’ve discovered … it’s a bit like going up a ladder on a computer game. For a long time, I knew about the BBC archive, and I could explore it and find hidden stuff. Then I met a cameraman who works for the news department in the BBC who was spending his spare time going around our bureaus in foreign countries — he started with Afghanistan. He was literally going to the cupboards in the back of the offices, taking out the original rush tapes, digitizing them, and bringing them back home. No one wanted them, so he gave them to me. He gave me Afghanistan. You know, when you send out a news crew, you’ll use 10 seconds of what they get. There’s usually about two hours’ worth of material, because the camera people film all sorts of things. As you look through it, it was just amazing.

There was one shot in the Afghanistan rushes which was of an assassination attempt on the president, Hamid Karzai. I timed it, the news used 10 seconds of it. I used about four minutes of it in Bitter Lake, but the actual shot lasted about 15 minutes, and it’s just extraordinary. The camera is walking along next to a car, and then there’s shooting. You can’t see really what’s happening. The camera goes and hides as complete chaos breaks out, but then the cameraman comes up very bravely and just films everything — the aftermath, the car speeding off. You get a real sense of what it must have been like to be there. I thought, “I’m just going to run it.”

I’ve noticed that people really like stuff like that, because news reporting and documentary reporting has become so rigid, so formalized in the way it edits shots that you don’t even look at that 10 seconds that they use anyway. You think, “Oh yeah, okay. That’s the way they’re doing it.” It’s like you don’t look at the Mona Lisa any longer. You just say, “Oh, that’s the Mona Lisa.” What audiences really like is just getting a sense of letting something run. I want to do more of it. In Bitter Lake, I was experimenting with just letting things run so people get a sense of what it was like. You can make your point visually and emotionally at the same time as you are saying it intellectually.

What I was saying in that film is that when we were going to Afghanistan, we thought it was a simple country full of goodies and baddies. Actually, it was a world we didn’t understand. I wanted to get a sense of drifting through this world, almost like a drug experience that comes in and out of focus. Using the rushes allowed me to do that. It made my point in a much more powerful way than me just saying it or interviewees saying it. If you notice, I had practically no interviewees in that film; I’ve just let the footage tell the story. I’m just lucky I got these rushes.

DS: How do you pick the music you use?

AC: The BBC has a blanket agreement for music rights, so I’m at a very advantaged position of being allowed to use a lot of music that I wouldn’t if I was making something by myself. That is the joy of working for a large and bureaucratic corporation. I have a contrary attitude to music. I like things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. I tend to shy away from the big pieces of music that you would not normally be allowed to use. I just go for what I feel is right.

The thing I find about a lot of factual films these days — it’s as true in America as it is in Britain — is that the use of music tends to be either very clichéd or very boring. It’s as if the editor or the director doesn’t get out enough. They choose music which is completely predictable — if they’re making a film about bankers, they’ll put Pink Floyd’s “Money” over it. Your heart sinks. Whereas I like the idea that you choose music that feels not appropriate literally, but emotionally to what you’re trying to say.

Part of the function of journalism if you’re using music and images is to create an emotional platform from which you can draw people into the argument that you’re trying to put forward. It’s not a manipulation. It’s just: “Let me tell you a story.” As you tell a story, you draw people in. Music is so important in that.

DS: You collate a lot of history and culture into each of your films, often without any annotation explaining the references or documents to the viewer. How do you choose what to incorporate and how to present it?

AS: The thing that really pisses me off about a lot of television-making is that it deeply patronizes the audience. It treats them like they’re making an educational video for a class of 13-year-olds — which is not to denigrate 13-year-olds. I decide that if I know something, then the audience will probably know it. If they don’t, they can pause the film and look it up on Google. I have this attitude, instead of patronizing the audience, you say in a nice way: “Come on, come on, catch up.” You make them part of your excitement at the story you’re telling. You treat them as grownups. I try not to over-densify it where it’s unnecessary. Maybe I get it wrong sometimes, but that’s what I try to do.

What I’m doing is like writing an essay. I’m saying, “Look, we all know at this present moment that we feel uncertain. We don’t trust what we’re told. We don’t trust those in power over us. We don’t trust that they actually know what’s going on. We know that they know that we know. We’re caught in this loop of distrust.” I wanted to explain how that happened. To do that, I go back and I find a number of stories. I put them together, and I say, “I think this means that. This is how I think it happened.” I’m not saying this is a comprehensive history. I’m just saying that these are elements which go back to some of the main roots of why you feel as you do. It’s almost like I’m trying to make you go up in a helicopter and look at your own time a bit more.

Most journalists, most political people, and most think tank people just react like, “Oh my god, there’s another event happened. Oh my god, it’s this.” No one ever tries to put it in context, explain it. That’s what I was trying to do. To do that, you choose stories that you think dramatically illustrate what you’re trying to argue. For example, I think that with Syria and what is happening in Syria now, the roots of that give you a great insight into what has happened to our trust in politicians. So I decided to tell that story [with HyperNormalisation]. Also because no one has done a proper history of Syria.

DS: Do you usually find that a film comes from wanting to explain some feeling or aspect of life, or from examining a specific event and then working backwards to the root of it?

AC: It comes from finding a really good story. For example, I made a series called The Century of the Self, which was all about the rise of the idea of the individual self and how it’s intimately related to the rise of consumer capitalism over the last 100 years. That’s not how it started. It started when I simply found out that Sigmund Freud’s nephew, a man called Edward Bernays who lived in America in the 1920s, started public relations as a profession — using, he claimed, his uncle’s theories of the unconscious. I thought, “That’s really interesting. I didn’t know that. If I didn’t know that, probably lots of people didn’t know it. I want to tell that story.” After that, as I discovered more and more, I built the series.

I’m a simple creature — all journalists are. We like stories. If we find a good story, we use that thing because journalists know that people like stories too. When you have those documentaries where a man or a woman turns up on the screen and starts telling you great generalities, I just go ahead and turn off.

DS: You spoke about wanting to explain Syria with HyperNormalisation. Was there a specific story having to do with Syria that sparked that?

AC: I realized that the father of the present president, President Assad Sr., back in 1975 was furious with Henry Kissinger for not making a comprehensive settlement between Israel and Palestine. A lot of people who’ve studied this argue that the failure to achieve a comprehensive settlement at that point in the 1970s, when the Americans could have done so, has led to a lot of the problems you now face in the Middle East. It’s not the only reason, but it’s one of the most powerful reasons. I’m not arguing pro- or anti- Palestine or Israel. As Assad Sr. said to Kissinger at the time in fury, “You are going to release demons under the surface of the Middle East.” You could argue that is what has happened.

I wanted to try and explain why the horror in Syria is happening. I know it’s very difficult to report from there, but there is a tendency to assume that it is a seriously weird place where seriously weird people are doing seriously weird and horrible things to each other. It’s not like that. It’s a complex society. It’s as complicated as yours or mine is.

I just was trying to explain the roots of this, and the role that we in the West have played in the Middle East. I didn’t put this in HyperNormalisation because it goes too far back, but one of the earliest coups the American government did through the CIA was in Syria in 1949, when they tried to “bring democracy” to the country. We have a long history there. So much of the reporting at the moment is ahistorical. It’s, “Oh my god, it’s another horrific thing that’s happened.” The other idea lurking under it is that it’s full of evil people doing evil things to victims — a goodies-and-baddies mentality, which I think is a very, very dangerous thing for journalism. It’s the sort of thing that led us to invade Iraq. We just think that there are evil people subjugating innocent victims. It ain’t like that.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some evil people there. But some people are neither good nor bad. There are complex struggles for control going on there. That’s the other thing I really think about the misreporting of the Middle East by the West: It’s as if no one discusses power. Ever since its modern borders were set in 1920, Iraq has been a society driven by complex struggles for power. It’s like Game of Thrones, but even more complicated. The same is true of Syria. It’s as if we don’t talk about power any longer. Because we’re encouraged to think of ourselves as totally independent individuals, the language of power has gone into disuse. But there are complicated struggles going on, and through looking at that, you can better understand things.

DS: You speak about not wanting to go back too far in HyperNormalisation. Where do you decide to draw that line when you want to go back to contextualize current events?

AC: You can argue that the roots of anything go back a millennium, but you have to start somewhere. The basic story I was telling in HyperNormalisation is that, as the postwar liberal idea that you could create a predictable world began to collapse, out of that came all sorts of forces which have now led partially to the uncertainty we feel today. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s was the reason I decided to start in 1975.

In your country, I start in New York, which is where power began to shift from politicians toward the world of finance. In Syria, that’s when the failure to solve the Israel-Palestine problem began to unleash all sorts of forces within the Arab world who wanted to challenge it. Remember that when Osama bin Laden held his first press conference in 1997 to announce his alliance against the West, the thing he went on and on about was Israel and Palestine. It’s so deep in the Arab mind, and we just don’t realize that here. 1975 is when a shift in power happened in the Middle East at the same time as the shift in power away from politics toward finance began in the West. It’s arbitrary, but I chose that moment because those two things are at the root of a lot of other things we have today. It’s a dramatic moment.

DS: What sort of film do you think you might make next?

AC: I’ve just now been given everything the BBC ever shot in Russia for the last 60 years, which is extraordinary. I’m fascinated. It would be more about our complicated relationship with Russia. I’ve got this theory that we continually project onto Russia — and not just with the Cold War, but after it and throughout history. We create a simplified, fake version of Russia and ignore what’s really going on there. Vladimir Putin is not a nice man, but he is part of a complicated struggle.

I was watching a film about the John Birch Society in the 1960s, at the time of the Barry Goldwater campaign. You see they are obsessed with Russia. The journalist turns back to the camera and says, “This is really strange. It’s almost like these people, who are anxious about everything, about the decline of the middle class, the fact that they have no hope in the future, they’ve projected it onto the other.” He’s talking in 1964 about right-wing, middle-class people in the suburbs of Southern California

Now we’re doing it again, but this time it’s the liberal middle class doing it. Underneath, there’s something even more complicated. It’s like we continually reinvent Russia. There’s this strange alliance between the liberals and the CIA, who are convinced that Russia is behind Donald Trump. It’s almost like it’s a desperate attempt to avoid having to face that possibly it was their fault they lost the election.

Beyond that, I just think that it’s about time to do something comprehensive about Russia. This footage I’ve got, some of it is so beautiful and so amazing. I don’t know whether people would be interested. Right now, liberals are so anti-Russia that I think you can’t do anything. The mood is not right yet.

DS: I think that means it’s the perfect time for a corrective. That rhetoric just gets worse and more hysterical. I heard the great comparison that the way liberals talk about how Russians supposedly connected to Donald Trump are dying is identical to the conservatives’ “Clinton Body Count.” It would be great for someone with a platform to get people to question how we’re thinking about this.

AC: Funnily enough, I sort of want to do that. There is a dark demon within me wanting to say this, or to produce something that says: “Look, look at what you’re doing. You’re trying to avoid the fact that whether Russia actually hacked into the Democratic Party computers or not, it didn’t truly affect the outcome of the election, because what they produced was so boring. The election was lost because you had a bad candidate and a load of other people were presented with a big button that said ‘Fuck off’ and pressed it. That’s the reason. You’re flailing around trying to blame it on Russia.”

Beyond that, it is interesting, the alliances that are forming. For 40 years, the liberal middle class hated the CIA, and they had good reason to. The CIA’s done some really bad things. But suddenly the CIA are noble heroes. It’s very weird. That’s why any film I make about this shouldn’t just be about Russia. It should be about the relationship between the West and Russia, as it offers dramatic insights into the growing lack of confidence in the liberal mindset. I think the route that mindset is going down is potentially quite dangerous. I’d like to play with that.

The trouble is if you do that, they’ll turn around and say, “Well, you’re just like Donald Trump.” Do you see the problem? If someone comes along and says, “Hang on, let’s look at the joint intelligence report about the supposed Russian hacking. Actually, there isn’t very much hard evidence in it,” you are immediately accused of almost being an ally of Trump. That’s not very good, is it? It means there’s something very peculiar going on. I haven’t really got my head around it, but I would like to do something about it.

DS: Have you seen the Adam Curtis Bingo Card?

AC: Yeah. It’s not as good as The Loving Trap. That’s much better parody. It gets my voice. It pins me down beautifully.

“Into the Zone: A Weekend with Adam Curtis” takes place March 17–19 at Cinefamily (611 North Fairfax Avenue, Melrose, Los Angeles).

The post “Documentary Reporting Has Become So Rigid”: Adam Curtis on Storytelling Today appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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