#vagueblogging about school

[lizard-speed]

On the one hand I know doing a history degree means I have to read a ton. On the other hand I simply do not want to read!

[smallblueandloud]

going through instagram and part of the sadness is seeing people from my high school and knowing i'll probably never see any of them again.

[wedding-shemp]

I think it's so funny when you see someone making incredibly hacky clichéd posts and art and whatnot about having Super Angsty Ex Catholic Trauma and Ooh Stained Glass And Stigmata and Mary Magdalene and you're like oh I'm so sorry about you're upbringing and they're like. Oh I wasn't raised Catholic I just went to a catholic private school. And you're like oh was it a bad school where they were mean to you. And they're like no it was fine. I just thought it was silly that I had to take a catechism class.

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

From the creators of “this meeting could have been an email”, I bring you “this 10 page questionnaire could have been an email also”

[nogallantstags]

Today in “I hate my stupid boss”

How that related to what I said. Today is today??? And Unforeseen Circumstances are happening. No one is blaming you for the unauthorized speed dating. Can I please turn the damn AC down

[thewoolyworm]

So frustrating to see a webcomic you enjoy very obviously losing steam and just glossing over anything that can lead to interesting conflict/character interaction.

Also having most relationship development happen off-screen purely to start slapping the characters into pairings post-timeskip. It's so unbelievably lame

[florallychaotic]

I mean this genuinely if you demand a level of empathy from someone that you aren't willing to return, you really need to be rethinking your choices

[mixelation]

once again I must vagueblog. please don’t make your academic achievements in grade school your entire personality. this is a post about “former gifted kids”

[theladyragnell]

G foooor Alion/Tiriel or, if you really wanna stretch option, Lilly/Elsbeth? ;)

(Look, I love Alion and Tiriel, but did you really think you could give me an excuse to try writing these two and I wouldn't immediately leap on it? Anyway, a brief moment from right after the magic pearl. (For the confused, these are two NPC allies of the party in the game I am running, I really should do a little primer on this game sometime since I keep vagueblogging about it.))

“Any word?”

Tuesday evening shifts at the library are usually pretty quiet, which means Lilly tends to spend a lot of them doing her homework. She’s still kind of deciding how she feels about the fact that Elsbeth has figured that out, and started stopping by for a few minutes on Tuesday evenings, even when she’s got a party to go to. Like, she likes it. She just also is kind of not enjoying the return of her embarrassing freshman year crush. She’s in her last year and applying for grad schools. She’s supposed to be cooler than this.

This isn’t about her crush, though. This is about her friends, who keep doing things so scary she can’t look at them head on, so she puts down her textbook and looks at Elsbeth, all bundled up in her winter coat, leaning against the counter in the same spot she always leans. Like it’s her spot. “Other than that they’re back? No.”

“Assholes,” says Elsbeth, in a tone of voice so fond Lilly wants to do something stupid. “I hate waiting for news enough when it’s Uncle Gildo and he’s just taking on a few mimics in a well-mapped dungeon.”

“It hasn’t happened that much,” says Lilly, but that’s just stupid, because once things like this start happening to people, they keep happening. They happen to Lilly too, sometimes, now. And this one was big, and Morye’s god is involved somehow, and she really wants a whole lot of details and also doesn’t want any details at all. “And you were with them, for the crab thing.”

Elsbeth frowns and shoves her hands in her pockets. “And you were with them in that factory.”

Lilly has nightmares about the Quicksilver Soda Factory sometimes. About good people dead for stupid reasons, and about how they all almost died when she was supposed to be team leader, supposed to have the information that would keep them protected. If Morye’s god didn’t love him, she and they would both be dead. “I know that.”

“I wish I’d come with you,” Elsbeth says, straightening up from her lean, and talks over Lilly before she can even start saying anything, catching the way she’s shaking her head and getting ready for it. “That’s what I do, and what I’m going to do. None of you had ever been in a situation like that before, and I should have just canceled everything and gone.”

“Everything’s okay now,” Lilly says, like there’s not a faint white scar on her breastbone, a little circle of branching lightning that keeps her from wearing her nicest date top because people ask questions and they aren’t ones she wants to answer on dates.

Elsbeth just looks at her. That’s fair. Elsbeth’s got a few physical scars, but they both know the worst ones are inside, and that she knows better than pretty much anyone how it’s never really okay. “You think they’re okay?”

Lilly has been doing a lot of research on magic pearls, since they sent her a message. They’re not malevolent, but they are a once-a-century phenomenon that are dangerous to defuse and even more dangerous to ignore. “We’ll check in on them. Just like you’re checking in on me.”

“I guess so.” Elsbeth shifts a little, not quite her confident lean but not quite awkward either. Just watching Lilly like she’s waiting for something Lilly doesn’t know how to say. Or maybe Lilly’s reading too much into it, because a second later she’s straightening, taking a step back. “Anyway, just wanted to check in, see if they’d told you more details yet, but sounds like they want to sleep it off first. Stay in touch, okay? I might not be helpful on the research jobs for them, but I don’t mind listening.”

“You’re always helpful,” says Lilly, too fast, too honest, and definitely not believed, judging by the way Elsbeth’s mouth quirks. “Stop by anytime, though. And I’ll tell them to tell you too.”

“Only if they want,” says Elsbeth, and backs up another step. “And only if you want. Have a good shift, Joy. I’ll catch you later.”

That’s new, and enough to leave her speechless for a second. “Joy” is for talking herself down, for scolding herself, for being encouraged by her grandmothers and begged for another story by her little brother. It’s just the second syllable of her name, but it’s intimate, and Elsbeth’s got to know that, because there’s something a little tense in her shoulders, like she’s waiting to see if Lilly is going to say anything about it. Maybe she would, if she could think of anything to say. “Catch you later,” she promises, a little strangled, and it seems like it’s good enough, because Elsbeth is off, ducking back out into the cold, leaving Lilly at the desk with her usual list of tasks to complete and no attention left over to do them.

[cleverthylacine]

Okay. Wow. (also feel free to circulate this post to people even if they don't like me)

I didn't want to make a post like this but things have gone too far. I am still not mentioning names. If you know you know, if you don't know, ignore this post and be happy that you don't know.

Yesterday I went on a blitz of blocking people I was told had been sharing my private DMs and talking shit about me behind my back with an artist who is freaked out that I told them I wouldn't take down a reblog, and then explained that they are popular with RavWave shippers, and that I didn't know who they were until other shippers sent me their stuff, because their art does look shippy to us.

It seems that a lot of the people who are really mad about this (and you're welcome to share this one post of mine with those people, though I do not appreciate that their friends have been stalking my blog in general) think that I was trying to ARGUE with that person.

Much as their motivation in drawing the art was not to depict my OTP, my motivation in telling them that they accidentally did was not to argue with them about how they should view the relationship. It was information about why people get what is apparently the wrong idea about their art.

If I were writing or drawing something that was being misinterpreted all over creation, I would want to know why.

Then I would be armed with the knowledge to decide whether or not I wanted to do things differently in the future.

"I don't care what those people think" is a valid decision. So is "hmm, maybe she has a point." Whichever decision I made, I'd want to make it as an informed decision.

I feel a little sorry about this giant misunderstanding, but I'm absolutely disinclined to apologise because:

Their first message to me was insulting. Many people believe that it was a "polite request". But polite words can be used in a thoroughly rude and nasty way. There is no nice way to tell someone that you think they're so nasty you don't want your public posts appearing on their blog.

Saying no to requests is a thing that people are allowed to do.

Their second message to me, which evaded my block because it was sent to another account, was blatantly offensive and went into the quality of my family and relationships. I didn't respond to that because I'd have gone off.

They have their friends stalking my blog and have admitted to doing so, and have responded to venting on my part by vagueblogging in my own blogs by telling everyone that they're the person I am annoyed with and here are the receipts. Seriously, wtf?

I only know this because I'm trying to block all the assholes who are reposting my personal conversations with them, a thing i only know because a friend of mine told me so after receiving a demand they unfriend me.

This person and their friends are sending anon asks to my friends, or in one case, publicly demanding in an RP community, that people who want to interact with them unfollow me, because they will not interact with anyone who interacts with me. Go the fuck back to high school, Regina.

Don't put icing and sprinkles on a pile of shit and tell yourself you gave someone a chocolate cake. This person has never been "nice" to me.

Under the cut: why IDW Ravage would never allow herself to be handled like a pet cat, and why RavWave shippers feel the same way about the Earthspark deleted scenes, even though we know that's probably not what the showrunners meant us to think.

I have come to the conclusion that's it's just another case of antis thinking that if you can see two people in a non-platonic relationship that they think of as family, you're just nasty. Especially if the feline shaped character is being handled like a pet cat.

But the person who said "I look disrespectfully on anyone who ships this, that's just a goof and his cat" has missed the entire point of these characters' relationship. Soundwave would never treat or handle Ravage like she was a pet cat.

Anyone else who says RavWave shippers are nasty because "it's NoRMaL to handle your cat that way" is fundamentally not getting who Ravage is and how she feels about being touched.

Ravage is a sapient adult mech with a full range of sapient adult feelings, and touching her like she's an animal is a microaggression or a macroaggression, depending upon where and how you touch her. The oppression of beastformers is a big fucking thing in IDW 2005. Other beastformers also complain about constantly having to deal with unwanted and disrespectful touching. (Fortress Maximus is a known offender.)

IDW Ravage is sleeping in Megatron's bed throughout MTMTE (when she's under it, she's guarding him). She only allows him to touch her neck in front of others...because behaving like a pet cat increases the chances that people will treat her like one.

(She almost cut Nautica several times. That's another character I ship her with, because what would be funnier than her realising that this actually is a whole ass person and if she can't stop touching her, she might actually be attracted to her?)

(Note: Canonically, Ravage in IDW uses he/him, and I do know that. However, about half the fandom writes Ravage as female. I'm in that half.)

BTW, I feel exactly the same way about the Earthspark deleted scenes. Every RavWave shipper on the planet does. We've talked about it. We realise that the artists and showrunners probably intended it to be innocent on the grounds that she is a cat. But we are also people who like to write her as an adult Decepticon officer with agency and self-respect who wouldn't behave like that in front of other people unless they knew he has privileges they don't.

I am aware that half the fandom draws Ravage art that's basically cat memes. (I hate that so much. But as a proshipper, I recognise people have the right to depict characters any way they want. That doesn't mean I haven't had to vent to people like @bitegore and @miner16 to keep myself from saying something.)

Also, I strongly suggest that people who get this worked up about misinterpretations of their art or writing do not become professional creators. As a member of fandom since the 1970s, I'm kind of super extremely aware that most of what fandom does is counter to what the creator intended, and frequently that's the point.

I'm also kind of super extremely aware that if you don't have loads of people reinterpreting and remixing your work and your characters, that actually means nobody cares about your work enough to have blorbo feels about your characters.

(The side poll, which came from another blog and mentioned no names, was an irritated attempt to find out whether people really do think it's normal to cuddle your mom that way, because the second message insinuated that my mother and I must have a terrible relationship because we don't touch each other like that. I kinda wanted to know what people who were not predisposed to take my side and did not know what was going on would think of that idea, because I really do not think most people touch their mothers like that; their mothers aren't nonsapient animals and would thus consider it weird and inappropriate.)

[anghraine]

Totally vagueblogging, but:

"Death of the Author" did not originate anti-intentionalist approaches to reading literature. It's not true that the literary world was mired in biographical readings of literature until Roland Barthes came along.

This isn't to deny the significance of Barthes's work, but there's more to it than the basic idea that the author's stated intention need not determine interpretation of a work, which shows up in literary theory much earlier. In 1946, for instance, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley pretty famously argued in "The Intentional Fallacy":

"The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public."

Wimsatt and Beardsley refer in their article to various other scholars who are also discussing this, twenty years before DOTA was published. It wasn't as mainstream as it would become later, but it was definitely an idea that was already out there and being seriously considered by entirely different schools of literary criticism.

[lizard-speed]

I got into kcl 😝

[lighthouseas]

not a vaguepost, just a. Comment on the fandom Again.

okay i'm gonna be completely honest here and i also shouldn't even have to say this but whatever. no matter how "bad" you deem someone's opinions or how deep whatever fucking beef you may have with them runs, that doesn't justify outright being aggressive towards people. it just. Doesn't. you don't tell people to kill themselves because they have an opinion you don't like. hell, you don't even tell people to go fuck themselves if they have a take you don't like, okay. i Cannot Emphasize This Enough: YOU DON'T KNOW THESE PEOPLE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN. they are still people. they are still just Living Their Lives, like you. bullying is not cool even if you think you're in the right about whatever obscure take you're arguing for. harassment is not cool. because at the end of the day, these are just strangers on the internet. no matter how much you think you may know them based on the stuff they post that you personally don't agree with. like, instead of harassing people. why don't you just. Block. Move On.

multiple people on here have literally deactivated because they've been bullied off. only for even more people to jump the gun and shit on them. GUYS. do you. not see the issue with this. You Would Not Do This With Real People. listen. there are plenty of people on here who i disagree with. but instead of wasting all my time and energy vagueblogging and sending hate to these REAL ASS PEOPLE, i just. block. filter. unfollow. do whatever i need to curate my space. i'm not gonna waste my energy hating on random internet strangers, because it's not cool. it doesn't make your argument sounder. it just makes you look like a dick!!!!!

and also, while we're at it, since this fandom has also had an issue with calling big blogs "celebrities" can i just say that this also applies to repeatedly hating on random specific people with bigger platforms ??? like. that's still weird as fuck . like putting people on a pedestal but the opposite. it's not cool. you don't know these people and if they're not actively hurting anyone, why the fuck do you even care????

anyway. be nice. be civil. this is tumblr dot com not a middle school playground. jesus fucking christ

[46ten]

Historians and Hamilton (or a brief defense of Michael E. Newton)

There is a post out there that's something like "don't believe Michael E. Newton - he's not a historian and he's a finance bro." (I'm not deliberately vagueblogging - I just can't find the post and it's been weeks.) Now I'm not a Newton fan, and last I checked he was promoting an hour long youtube video on Alexander Hamilton's kindness (or some such nonsense), but he's conducted original research that merits review.

My concern with the post was two-fold:

That's just the old ad hominem fallacy;

2. Finance bro? - who do folks think Alexander Hamilton was?

There was a discussion on here about 1-2 years ago about who was/wasn't deserving of the title historian. "Historians" come from a variety of departments - journalism (Ron Chernow, financial journalist), English (Fawn Brodie, famous for biography of Jefferson and introduction of psychobiography), economics (Broadus Mitchell, still the gold standard Alexander Hamilton biographer) and so on. What ultimately matters is if they present their work for scholarly evaluation, and Newton does that. I have issues with some of his interpretations - though most are very limited anyway -but he's put his own or crowd-funded money towards finding and piecing together documents and put it out there for anyone to evaluate, as far as I can see (disclosure - I briefly interacted with him about a specific question about his research and he provided responses). The facts he's presented about Hamilton's early life are either right or wrong. He's also accepted by others wearing the historian hat, among them Richard Brookhiser (as the editor of National Review, maybe he's dubious, but he's certainly gotten awards and funding for history studies) and Stephen F Knott (can't really question his bona fides).

Now the great irony of Newton's discoveries about AHamilton is that they demolish the very argument that finance bros most want to make about the background of the man - that he was self-made, someone who rose up through his own merit, someone whose unfortunate background led to a lifetime of striving for the public good. Newton's AHamilton is a descendent of one of the wealthiest families in St. Croix, his mother - even post-divorce - had middle class wealth, the members of his extended family were the wealthiest people on St. Croix, he became a sort of business manager for an international shipping firm based out of NYC, he's gifted 15x the average salary of an American laborer by a relative, he arrives in the American colonies and goes to live with two of the wealthiest men in the colonies and attends schools that the wealthiest people in the colonies send their own kids to, and continues to receive opportunities through West Indian/American connections. And later, poor guy, his half-brother leaves him over 10x the average salary of an American laborer. This is not someone working their way up from the bottom, engaged in a struggle to overcome hardship and poverty. This is also not someone who is going to be personally insecure about his status. Compared to the average Anglo-American white man of that time period, heck let's even define it as the average Anglo-American middle class white man, Alexander Hamilton led a very privileged early life. But to repeat, that's not what finance bros - or those who love the Hamilton musical - want you to know about Alexander Hamilton, which makes Newton's work pretty interesting.

[peridot-tears]

Vagueblogging again!

I think a lot about the argument fandom racists make. It's always "fandom isn't activism," "go do some real activism," etc. etc.

Like, one -- I think quite a few of us have done "real" activism. Organizing, protesting, fundraising, information-sharing, all that good stuff. Especially in these past few years. You can't be Asian American without having at least brushed with activism lately.

Two -- telling someone that what they said hurts or disrespects your culture is not activism. That's literally just an everyday interaction. You could have learned something and accepted it, but the moment you dismissed it and dug your heels in, then yeah, you're making it a way bigger deal than it has to be.

Three -- Asian Americans have always organized, protested, and advocated for better rights on all fronts. The bill in Florida recently passed is part of a years-long effort to make Asian American history part of school curricula (its effects are for another post entirely), Asian Americans in various organizations have been tirelessly doing research, petitioning and lobbying for better healthcare and economic aid access. The burst of Asian American shows like "Beef" and "Everything Everywhere All At Once" are part of a DECADES-long push to have our stories told in ways that aren't stereotypical and degrading. Not to mention to make sure we get equal pay in the workplace.

People have always committed hate crimes against us, but because of COVID, it jumped to a point where there was actual media coverage outside of the community. It got so big, no one could ignore us anymore. It was good to get aid from outside the community, but even now, the people organizing self-defense classes, patrolling Asian dominant neighborhoods and walking with elders so they can go places without being attacked, the people organizing food drives for those of us who are lower-income, raising money for the victims of hate crimes, fighting for us in our court cases against attackers, pushing for our voices to be heard, are us Asian Americans.

It's a lot of work. It's also a lot of work to rally people to our cause, because so many people outside the community, especially white people, will not listen, let alone help in any meaningful way, unless you convince them why they personally should care. To be BIPOC at all in North America is to do the emotional labor that white people think you owe them.

So tell me. If true activism is so important to you, why aren't you doing it?

And you know how I know you aren't doing it? Because if you can't be bothered to listen to an Asian person in small, casual, everyday interactions, what makes you think you're equipped to help us advocate for large social change?

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

I can relate to what the last two anons said I could never make friends in the queen fandom and I see others making friends on here so easily that I feel like there is something wrong with me or I'm just an outcast because I'm shy or weird but the fandom feels very cliquey sometimes

Aw, no, there’s nothing wrong with you for not making fandom friends. All fandoms are cliquey to some extent, and I feel like it’s even worse in small fandoms, such as the tumblr Queen fandom. If you don’t fit in with a clique? Good, it means you’re acting like an adult lol. Seriously, the cliquey shit is so not worth losing sleep over. I had longtime followers unfollow me after I finally got fed up with an extremely immature and cliquey user hate-reading my blog and vagueblogging about me for years lmao, so fandom cliques will turn on you for the dumbest shit and if you say anything against the big name fans—very high school, isn’t it? In general, internet fandom cliques can encourage really petty and abnormal behavior, and I don’t last in them because they get mad the minute someone says, “No this is nonsense and really Online, actually.” It’s like how I left a group chat on insta back when I had my Queen account because I didn’t feel inclined to go along with the crowd in *checks notes*….saying Brian hates Freddie and is homophobic towards him. Really, listening to Online garbage is not worth being in a clique!

Some people do seem to make friends in fandom easily, but keep two things in mind that I previously mentioned: the first one is that it might seem like people are besties on your tumblr dashboard because they reblog each other’s posts and tag each other and stuff, but their online relationship might actually be superficial, and fizzle out the minute one or both joins a new fandom (or those friendships might end easily over really dumb fandom discourse!). The second is that even if you make an actual friend online, they can disappear from your online life pretty abruptly and with little explanation one day, maybe because something happened, or they don’t use tumblr anymore, or whatever.

I know this might not be the answer you were looking for, but all of this is why people should invest more in irl friendships than internet friendships. I’ve been reconnecting with irl friends recently, and man, it feels good. Like I said in another post, too, I feel a lot better keeping to myself on tumblr now, so trust me, getting to know people in fandom isn’t always a good thing lol.

If someone genuinely makes a real, longtime friend through fandom? Great! I just think it happens a lot less often than people think, so don’t feel bad for not having any.