I don’t get it, man. why. why do we have to homogenize everything. why does every product have to look and behave and feel the exact same way. why can’t tumblr maintain its individuality? why can’t it lean into the things that make it a unique and refreshing offering instead of scrambling to make it a carbon copy of twitter? sucks, man. sucks.
it’s just like. this broadcasts loud and clear that the people behind the curtain have no pride or faith in this site at all. that tumblr, as a whole, has no worth or merit unless it’s somehow tricking the larger internet community into thinking it’s actually another site. and the users are supposed to celebrate this? where’s the dignity? where’s the self-respect? where’s the joy? it’s disheartening and embarrassing to be forced to conform. smh.
the impulse to hide what I’m doing at my computer still sits so deep even tho I’m literally never looking at anything objectionable , the door will open and I’ll hurry to close the page like oh fuck no one can know I’m looking at the Wikipedia page for the Balkans
it is insane how fucking tiny these buttons are did they not like. consider the concept of UI scaling like at all. did they not consider what theyd do if someone had a big monitor. what is this shit
why asre there two post buttons. why do i get little numbers next to ‘home’ and 'following’ when btoh are giving me the exact same information. why is it that when you open the account view you have the exact same information on both sides of your screen. why is it that the activity popup obscuires the dashboard now instead of the 1000000 miles of empty space on my god damn desktop. did they not consider the concept of UI scaling at all?????
when i first saw people p[ostp about this i thought maybe they were overreacting because they hate twitter and change but like. whatever you think abotu the concept of 'putting all this shit on the left side of your screen’ as a bold UI innovation or whatever in concept this shit is like. just straight up unfinished. like i legitimately dont understand how this was considered ready to roll out to users
why does the activity popup open on the ONE part of my screen i DONT want to be obscured when im using tumblr dot com!!
no seriously why is this information displayed twice one inch apart. im not being snarky when i say this genuinely just seems actually unfinished
dont talk to me or my three (3) 'activity’ buttons that show up when you’re already on the activity page ever again
Like, I’m not gonna say that the X-Men and their various imitators are anything like a perfect allegory, but “it’s a bad allegory because super powers really are dangerous” has never held water for me. Like, are we really just gonna uncritically accept the implicit assumption lurking in that argument that bigotry is only wrong to the extent that its targets lack the ability to threaten the status quo? Hand-wringing over whether certain minorities are inherently dangerous is – and, critically, always has been – a smoke-screen for the real conversation about who has the right to possess the capacity for violence, and you can’t engage with that conversation if your opening move is to concede that the only legitimate victim is a powerless one.
To underline what I mean about “the right to possess the capacity for violence”, let’s peel back the allegory and bring it back to the real-world issues that are allegedly being allegorised.
Every time the cops roll up and shoot some poor guy thirty-seven times in the back because the cell phone in his pocket looked kind of like it might be a gun, the public conversation always centres around questions like “are the police telling the truth about thinking it was a gun?” and “were the police reasonable to assume it was a gun?”
These are not the right questions to be asking.
The right question to be asking is “so what if it was a gun?”
Would the public execution of a guy who was literally just walking down the street have been justified then?
It’s not accidental that stories of this type are most popular in America, where the people who can be counted on to argue that cops are behaving correctly when they kill on sight every time they see a member of a visible minority who looks like they might be packing are the exact same people who argue that carrying concealed automatic weapons without a permit is the God-given right of every red-blooded American man, woman and child.
This is not hypocrisy. They know exactly what they’re doing. It’s not about who is and is not dangerous: it’s about who has the right to be dangerous.
Is anyone else ever a little baffled by the cis women who consider women’s restrooms and locker rooms these safe havens from abuse and sexual harassment?
Like I feel like there are two options here:
1. They did not have mean girls in their school
2. They were the mean girls in their school and didn’t realize all the shit they were doing to the other girls in the locker room was absolutely sexual harassment and sometimes assault
I would only nuance this with two other possibilities that work in tandem with these:
3. They’re probably skinny and able-bodied with no significant scarring on their bodies
4. They didn’t grow boobs as a preteen
I will add:
5. They were lucky. (It actually does happen!) and
6. None of the above apply but they have been as adults able for one reason or another to align their understanding and experience and even memory of Women’s Bathrooms to be a) that this is the case and b) that even if very occasionally it’s not it SHOULD be and those times were mere errata that will get Horribly Worse if anyone is allowed to even question the idea of the sanctity of the space.
The latter one is important because it’s genuinely important to remember that people edit their memories, and also that with time memories fade and don’t leap to mind, and that beliefs strongly held can sometimes overwhelm them, especially if they’re not stopping to question the immediate surface recall.
And I bring both these options because I’ve seen them happen - I’ve both met women who were just genuinely the kind of lucky where their year at their school didn’t suck even THOUGH they developed boobs at 11 and quite literally had constantly visible scarring due to spilling coffee all over the side of their face and shoulder as a small child*.
And I’ve also met the people who have one set of superficial memory-beliefs about a lot of these things where they’ll say a thing and then you ask them some friendly, interested questions, and they suddenly are going “ … wait, well, I guess not - ”
(Remember how that happens for toxic childhoods? Where people are like “oh my childhood was fine, x never affected me, I never had bad times” and then for one reason or another this gets prodded at and there is the realization that eg “mom throwing out all my toys because I backtalked her one day, screaming at me while she did so” actually isn’t fine, and wasn’t fine, and is still having affects? etc? That applies to peer shit in school too. Same process.)
*she was also just That Person Everyone Loved. Statistical minority! But extant.
