Geekdom, Nerdom, Fandom

the-real-numbers:

you were not shadowbanned. you’re never shadowbanned. apps are buggy and your content is boring. sorry.

thespookylibrarian:

“Law librarian Emma Wood (n.d.) reminds us that libraries are “one of the last pure forms of community space.” In the “ache of absence” caused by pandemic closures, “[m]ost people have gained a stronger appreciation for their third places,” she says. She goes on to predict that “library support and advocacy are poised to grow in response to renewed interest in social space and programming.””

— Five Steps of Outcome-Based Planning and Evaluation for Youth Services

funnytwittertweets:

tippenfunkaport:

there is something so darkly comical about tumblr potentially outliving twitter

tumblr, which is held together with duct tape and madness, run by three raccoons in blood stained Yahoo! hats and a handful of crabs, its only discernible source of income the sale of shoelaces from an inside joke so inside no one knows the original source anymore and fake blue checkmarks… that website still lives on

truly the cockroach of social media and I love it for that

liberalsarecool:

Health care includes abortion.

ferrousferrule:

capricorn-0mnikorn:

redsixwing:

capricorn-0mnikorn:

fullhalalalchemist:

itwasntasingle:

No but I am seriously wondering how the world is going to change if Twitter is getting down.

It will be horrible. How many global movements and connections did we see on there? I mean the palestine/Ferguson comes to mind.

Indeed. I remember when Twitter started; before Twitter, “Citizen Journalism” wasn’t a thing (or it wasn’t a big enough thing to change things on a global scale).

I have a gut feeling that this is the kind of thing that can alter the course of civilizations.

Yeah. For as much as it’s fascinating (and frequently hilarious, when the muskrat lines up more rakes to step on), this is a major event, and it affects a lot of lives.

I’ve been around the internet long enough to have seen (and been involved in) multiple community collapses. In many cases, the platform on which the community was built is still online today. This may not be The End of Twitter, but it is almost certainly cruising for a major outage. The uncertainty won’t help people who rely on it now.

So what do we do about it?

Same thing we always do. We route around the damage.

Grab your mutuals’ contact information if it’s out there. Make your own avaiilable to those you trust with it.

Use other platforms. The toot site, DW, reddit, our own blue hellsite. Discord. Your encrypted messenger of choice. Email.

We have a lot of ways to keep in touch now.

We can do this.

We can do this.

Yes, we can.

As I said: this is the kind of thing that can alter civilizations. Not, however, end them.

I’ve seen the failing of LiveJournal, and Yahoo!, and MySpace, and GeoCities, and Prodigy, and I’m not sure how much Usenet is still around.

But the people are still around. Humans build communities. It’s what we do.

That said: Twitter has become bigger and more globally influential than all those other networking platforms I just listed. When a government blocks Twitter, it makes international news.

So whatever happens, Something is going to Change.

Facebook was theoretically largely responsible for kicking off the Arab Spring, and now it’s for old people to share videos of their grandkids and yell about fox news conspiracies. There are other platforms out there. It will take a while, absolutely. But maybe this will help other platforms build resiliency as they examine their own policies for weaknesses.

leaveittomybpdbaby:

Call me out next time why don’t you lol

yellenabelova:

A tragedy in 2 acts

archivespace:

Some things from work today. The room with floor to ceiling shelves is the vault that connects one building to the other and houses most of the library collections. The title page with the drawing is of a book from 1599! The oldest one I’ve worked with so far.

eveningdawn222:

idk something that really bothers me about fandom culture is the urge to just. ship everything. yes namor is hot but all these namor x reader/shuri or ‘i could fix him’ girlies are like completely missing the point?(i think) most of them don’t even examine the politics and history and nuance of the film, they just …see a hot guy who is 'bad’ and say omg it’s loki clone # 437 !!! so hot im gonna write a bunch of fics where he’s a stereotypical bad guy but! not for me!! and look, i have no problem with people enjoying characters and stuff and it’s obviously not my place to tell people how to enjoy things but please get out of your shipping brain for one second and have some critical thinking skills please.

Exactly. Not to mention, she is somewhere between 17 and 23, whereas he is over 400 years old…. but doesn’t look a day over 40. The age difference alone is insurmountable.

Two characters are allowed to have chemistry and for their relationship to be platonic.

caroldanversenthusiast:

lupita nyong’o as nakia in wakanda forever?? no i will not be over it

She is the best part of the whole movie, hands down.

roach-works:

lisafahrenheit:

been thinkin about how my ethics professor back in undergrad was like.

look. there’s no such thing as perfect altruism. you’ll always get something out of helping or being kind to others, whether it’s a stronger relationship or returned kindness or just the feeling of having done good. there’s nothing inherently bad about getting something from doing good either, especially since it’s completely unavoidable. people being rewarded for putting love into the world doesn’t make the world a worse place. so just do as much good as you can and don’t worry about being “selfless” while doing it, because being truly selfless is in fact impossible.

and like man did that take the pressure off of Being A Good Person!! you’re allowed to enjoy helping people! you’re allowed to be kind without worrying that you’re maybe secretly just doing it for yourself!! it’s okay if you are doing it for yourself because you’re still being kind to others!!!!!

if it makes you happy to help people then actually you are helping two people

lizardsister:

good god when the onions and garlic hit the olive oil……….

dontmeantobepoliticalbut:

Copy-pasted from Portlander who prefers to remain anonymous. This pretty much sums up the trouble in Portland two nights ago:

“There’s already a lot of lazy reporting about what happened in Portland last night. It was not a ‘clash of protesters’.

A large group, maybe 200 people, gathered at a mall in a nearby county. They formed a caravan of mostly large, jacked-up trucks, displaying pro-Trump and American flags. The people wore various t-shirts, hats, etc supporting Trump but also with fascist and neo-Nazi symbols. Many of the trucks had additional people (usually men) in the beds.

They were armed with guns, pipes, knives, and other visible weapons. One can reasonably assume there were also concealed weapons. The trucks were also weapons.

They drove from the mall, toward downtown. All along this path, local law enforcement (police, sheriffs) facilitated their movement, stopping traffic so they could stay together as a caravan. This includes the Portland Police blocking off other traffic on a bridge that leads into downtown.

Once downtown – they did NOT go to the area where there have been daily protests for many weeks. No, they drove directly to and through a busy mixed residential/retail area, with people walking to the grocery store, sitting at outside bars, walking their dogs, etc. Yes, some anti-fascist, anti-police brutality protestors came to that area in response to the caravan.

But this is what the Trumpers did: They indiscriminately assaulted pedestrians in this residential/retail area. They shot them with paintball guns, yelled sexually violent things at women, jumped out of their trucks to physically attack anyone who verbally disagreed with them, brandished their weapons and threatened people. They drove their trucks through groups of people.

They laughed while they did it.

Later in the evening, in a different part of downtown, someone was shot and killed. That death will overshadow and cloud the story about the caravan – which is the part that should chill you to the bone.”

Basically, a group of misogynistic white supremacists from Eastern Oregon, Eastern Washington, and Idaho all gathered at a mall in outside of Portland drove together as a caravan to drive through and terrorize innocent people minding their daily lives in Downtown Portland in an area that has had nothing to do with protests and has already been hit hard by the pandemic and economic double catastrophe.

By the way, the guy that got shot? Every anecdotal story I’ve heard says that he shot first and missed. And the perpetrator? Later hunted down and murdered by federal police. They claim he shot first, but he’s too dead to provide his own side of the story. Chances are good that we’ll never know what really happened.