Elisha

me: some of these kids are either so smart or so dumb with fictional censorship and stuff. that said i have sympathy for the latter considering i too was an idiot back then. i probably said some censory shit back before i got comfortable with kinks.
me: ... though i was always some kind of dead dove edgelord
me: hmm what was i doing at age 19.... [thinks]
me: ......
me: l o l rp'ing crack hilarity as a fictional rapist (tor vizla, star wars eu)

not the most tasteful thing i ever did to be sure, but i had loads of fun with a select group. :P it was a different internet. it makes me think how i've always thought of myself with a mind of a tumblrer but the heart of a channer.

"what would it take to prove you wrong" feels like a worthwhile, if emotionally difficult question to ask yourself about any topic you hold dear since it posits the mere possibility you might be wrong (gives you the grace to be wrong if that makes sense?), as well as giving you a rigorous critical thinking avenue of exploring where the common lines of argument (with evidence) are.

idk thinking about Stuff.

just finished a truly fantastic book about academic controversies that will go unnamed and staring into the distance at how:

a) so many of these academic controversies are started over people being upset and boneheaded about What Somebody Else is doing sexually (almost always as a kink, almost always a minority).

b) so many of them are eerily textbook similar to the 50+ kink artist cancellations i've witnessed in the last ten years. similar enough i'm comparing notes to my cancelled resources page, at least.

jfc

genuinely considering building my own personal web scraper to feed into my RSS feed reader because finding consistent RSS feeds for the sites i actually like (in particular the media tab for art) is becoming sharply more annoying/difficult in the last month x.x

in some ways i sympathize because i think a lot of it is that the ai scrapers use similar infrastructure that RSS feeds do, but at the same time there is absolutely *no way* i am making accounts (and giving data to) three fiddy hundred different sites. we're downsizing here baby, not up.

in terms of tech projects, i need to get my phone fixed (the back case is falling off) first and also get see if the local computer repair store is up to fixing a custom linux since there's also a few keys falling off there too lol...

i've been reading voraciously again; complex, controversial nuanced books. feels good.

it's been making me think about the "context collapse" of discussions online versus the "context flourishing" that i feel like books naturally inhabit. was talking with the muse last night - he coined 'context flourishing'.

-> online - sometimes all you see is a throw-away tweet where half of the discussion may have been in private. or alluded to. or unspoken in the person's social group/social bubble of choice. even if it's a fairly educational thread, it is simply impossible to fit anything more in the sheer space, much less with the defensive way people write public thoughts now - most tweets/short form text are made with some kind of urgent or emotional impetuous - something we all know is absolutely dreadful for nuance. dreamwidth/blog-length essays are slightly better but even essays (even with links) can't capture all of one person's thoughts on a social movement.

-> in books - most timeless books anyway - the author doesn't assume the reader's knowledge. you typically get a more lengthy history to ease yourself in. clarifications; the author and editor have had a chance to sit and review the text of the book from start to finish and ponder if there's something the reader might misinterpret. how something that might be mentioned in the beginning would be referenced at the end. dedicated chapters to squirrley chapters or long winded tangents than just a footnote.

like planting a plant knowingly in an oversized pot - there's more space for the topic to grow into as needed.

an example of context collapse recently that i can't stop thinking about is when a bunch of people on bsky mistakenly thought an .ai file (adobe illustrator, a file type that has existed for twenty years, is an industry standard, and easily googleable) somehow meant "ai" in the artificial intelligence sense... and doubled down on it. honest mistakes are one thing, but the doubling down (probably because it made them feel embarrassed) is the troubling part.

it feels linked to the above thought in a subtle way - where these kinds of mistakes are so much more common because there's no room for these kinds of gentle, patient explanations - whether emotional or physical room.