Racing Turtles

"Not beating the ___ allegations" is such a 'now' turn of phrase, implying as it does a world where everyone's behavior is always on literal trial by a guilt-presuming judge and jury that consists of anyone who happens to be paying attention.

Not beating the panopticon allegations

I've been on tumblr since 2011, and this is technically a sideblog. My creative focus shifted over here, to - I guess what could loosely be referred to as fandom space? It was Homestuck's fault - many years ago, and I more or less consciously decided to shift the original blog's purpose from writing little bits of poetry about weird birds to finding bird videos on other platforms that I thought could go viral and reposting (stealing) them. (Always credited, of course. I'm not a monster.) This worked pretty well, and now I have 6000+ followers over there. Since I never use it to promote anything or for any purpose beyond birdposting I feel OK about this as an experiment. I mostly use it to people-watch.

The latest video I have gaining traction over there is one my friend Rat sent me (one of many friends who either found me through birds or Homestuck and each is equally plausible) in which a pelican at a petting zoo is forced to cough up the gosling it was attempting to swallow by a handler who has clearly had to deal with this many times before. She then frogmarches (birdmarches?) it away by its beak. Good stuff, and very on brand, as I've been warning people about the horrors of pelican vore for ages. (I even got my very own pervert for a while, an anon who kept badgering various bird blogs to write about what it might be like to be swallowed.) When something I post starts doing numbers I like to watch the notes and tags, because it fascinates me how people like to make the same jokes, over and over and over. Not even their own jokes. I have never fully understood this but it's undeniably foundational to the way the internet works. Like, I get dropping References in conversation - social glue and all that, fun and funny - but in a public forum? Where you could literally check and see how many people have said the same thing before you got to it? Baffling. Universal.

Anyway. We started slow with this one, and we had some discerning folks doing Democracy Manifest bits - succulent avian meal, and all that. As references go it's a pretty good one, as it has its own wikipedia page and everything, and it's timely with Jack Karlson's recent passing. There were a few I am Forcibly Escorted From tags, which is nice, since you don't hear that one much these days. A bunch of quotidian "she's so done" or "like a toddler being dragged by his ear" observations, mostly uninspiring, although the specificity of one person's "my mom dragging me into the church bathroom to whoop my ass" was worth sharing. A little bit of the classic concern trolling you get with any animal video - why indeed is this bird being kept in the same place as all these edible little guys? But, inevitably, because it is the perfect time to use it, most people went with "put baby in pelican mouth."

And the thing about this is that I know the person who wrote the original "put baby in pelican mouth" post. We met through tumblr. She was absolutely inspired by my pelican posting to write that piece, and I know that because we ended up dating. It ended badly, and I still have regrets about it, and now, every time I make a pelican post, I am treated to a choir of strangers - literally hundreds of them - repeating a joke which was written by my ex-girlfriend. It's straight from the ironic punishment division, really. But birdpost I must, and tagwatch I must.

Anyway, Nikki, if you're out there, hope you're doing well.

Yates & Peacock, 2024.

I don't think people in the notes understand what this tweet is saying. It's not saying it's impossible to be born with a mental health issue, but that the issue isn't set in stone. Bipolar disorder can be trauma induced. Schizophrenic people in less individualistic, more accepting societies hear kinder voices. These are actual things you can look up.

I thought for the longest time I would feel nothing but suffering because of the dominant narrative surrounding mental illness. My parents were literally told by a psychologist I am "a severe case" and have no future. But guess what? When I got away from my abusive parent, it was incredible how much became more manageable than before. I'll never be "normal" or even be able to live alone, but I feel better than before. And I need everyone to know there's hope for you when you never expect it, even if you were in part "born like that".

from "gender outlaws: the next generation"

image transcript:

Let me break it down this way: some lesbians and gays feel that their issues are more important than transgender issues, because transgender people are freaks. Some transgender people—often, but not only, transsexuals—view transsexual issues as more important than the issues of, say, cross-dressers. Some among the more genderqueer portions of our community look down upon those who opt to live in a more “normatively gendered” space. There are even groups that cross-dressers feel superior to: sissies, drag kings and queens, “little girls,” and so on. Yes, I’m sure that we could follow even each of these groups and find that, eventually, everyone has someone they view as a freak.

This is a human phenomenon, and one which occurs especially, it seems, among marginalized groups. Trekkers versus trekkies versus people in Klingon costumes, or furries versus fursuiters versus, oh, plushies. I’m sure if I looked at model railroaders, I’d probably find that HO gauge fans look down at N scale, or something like that. The taxonomies are endless, often circular, and are usually graded to a fineness that would be invisible to any outsider. We just want to identify the “real” freaks, so we can feel closer to normal. In reality, not a single one of us is so magically normative as to claim the right to separate out the freaks from everyone else. We are all freaks to someone. Maybe even—if we’re honest—to ourselves.

#(not the point but yes for all 5 of you wondering most HO scale model railroaders do think HO is the best scale#and N scale think HO is pretentious)

GENUINELY delighted to know this information

good read for teachers.

I’ve been yelling this for years

Hi yall, author of the piece here. Medium instituted a pay wall so here is a link to access it for free:

"ummm you know the writer only included that because they have a FETISH right?" is always so funny to me as a disparaging comment, because imagine if people spoke that way about nonsexual interests. "the lord of the rings? didnt the author only write that because he was interested in linguistics? thanks, i'll pass" "yeah, i used to love spongebob as a kid, but i can never see it the same after finding out stephen hillenburg is a marine biologist :/"

This website is elite. This website is the blueprint, it's the pinnacle. There is no website like it. I lwill never leave this website

I just read an extremely interesting article on the cultural context of gruesome civil war still-life medical photos but unfortunately it was contaminated by severe media studies brain. that discipline should be subsumed into history and sociology asap because otherwise it has no empirical anchor whatsoever and just becomes tarot reading

there was a lot in there that I didn't know, about the public and artistic sentiments around amputation in the postwar years, and it gave some interesting examples that I want to check out. but every couple paragraphs there would be some shit about the Foucauldian metonymics, subversive Northern chauvinism, and homoerotic gender dynamics of this photo of a pile of amputated feet.

it's a pile of feet! it needs very little other explanation than that the surgeon-photographer thought "holy shit, I just cut off nine legs in three hours. this is probably worth memorializing" and then he did that. I don't know that it needs to be read as having a deeper intention than "jesus fucking christ that's a lot of feet"

or at least have the decency to arrange your article in order of least to most wild and unprovable assertions.

@loving-n0t-heyting Replied to your post “why are people persistently, coordinatedly wrong...”:

Yeah, I think what I really want to get at here is not "why don't people just look it up because surely all these misunderstandings can be corrected in minutes" but that I really don't see people acting like this is true. I mean, like the conventional wisdom among their friends is something like a rumor mill.

like the ignorant masses, of course they just believe whatever bullshit they happened to have heard. But me and my friends, we're smart and educated, so we believe the conventional wisdom among smart, educated people, which is generally believed to be far superior. ANd I think it is on topics where our education can be used but not in general. (Make that can be and has been used, someone has to do the calculation)

At least on the history of physics, it's like, not entirely wrong, like there's no entirely fictional figures (at least in the last few hundred years), and most of the big events really happened in some form, but it's still quite mythologized and I don't see people like, treating it like it's as mythologized as it is. They still repeat stuff in the tone of a fun fact rather than a fun story.

And people have this completely unwarranted confidence about what was said in books they haven't read. "Bohr believed that..." "Sadi Carnot used the assumption that..." Have you read these? No. Someone told you. Everyone acts like that's a good substitute, but it's like every time I read a primary source I get a new example of why it isn't.

It gets really weird when people try to analyze or draw lessons from this stuff. Kind of esoteric, like interpretations of bible stories. Like, it's not really a firm foundation for building a worldview, but people seem to act like it is.

A bit of "they say that..." like a NPC telling you the local legends about the nearby cave would do some good I think.

I think it's helpful to understand that this is a social mechanic? Like: these are not really epistemological acts, truth-related behavior, they're social acts.

Ppl believe their friends or the books they read as a display of politeness/in-groupness/friendliness(same reason ppl claim to read books they haven't; it's the "in" thing to have done), and then their recitation of those "facts" becomes a social-identifier/in-group-code, like using the ~right~ interpretation of a specific bible verse with an evangelical.

This is part(obvsl ego's involved too) of why ppl often find it rude when you correct their anecdotes(even though, CLEARLY, someone correcting you on something you're wrong about is them HELPING you and being a GOOD Friend; I've always appreciated correction, and it annoyed me as a kid that most ppl got offended by it |:T); they read it as a rejection of their extended friendliness and thus as a hostile/competitive act.

You can see it my word choice, like saying avoiding MSG is a "superstition", or calling the unsourced anecdotes about important scientists that seem to get passed down to every generation "mythology". I think that educated people and uneducated people, modern people and ancient people, believe false things for similar reasons, that the false beliefs are the result of similar processes. That these processes, like mythmaking, or the formation of superstitions, were active then and are active now, are at work in the uneducated and the educated.

can't help but think that a lot of the issues with how insular online communities conceive of neurodivergence stem from how the discourse necessitates the imagined existence of a mythic group of ‘neurotypicals’ cogently and unambiguously free of the social knottiness that certain neurodivergences can entail (“all ‘neurotypicals’ experience X,” “no ‘neurotypicals’ experience Y,” etc) rather than understanding neurotypicality as an enforced social norm to which we are all expected to comply and fall short of to varying degrees

I have a friend who is a med student of neurobiology and she said that there really is no such thing as a "neurotypical" and the term is extremely unhelpful. There is no "typical," but there is an average, however it's very rare for somebody to embody that average. To put it another way, if one person has 4 apples and another person has 6 apples, the average is 5 apples, however neither of these people has 5 apples. And considering that the brain has millions of factors going on, it's unlikely that any individual would be average along every single one of those axis. What we consider "neurodivergence" is being outside of the commonly accepted range of deviation from the average. What nondisabled people think of as mental disability is when that deviation from the average impacts other people. What disabled people consider disability is when these deviations cause personal distress regardless of proximity to the average and would be distressing even with environmental changes.

She went on to say that even people who fall within that neuro average aren't the ones making the rules for what is typical, and unofficially dubbed them neuropowerful. Once people have power, they can impose their ideas as the standard regardless of whether it's the average or not. They're outliers whose experience (both internally and externally) has been allowed to set the standards by which many (even most) people fall short, even those close to the "average." The same is true for physical characteristics. If more than half the population is "overweight," who determined what the acceptable weight is? Because it definitely isn't *average* to the population. I know a lot of disabled and neurodivergent people flock to each other, but sometimes you realize everyone you know has some kind of major divergence, and nobody is in fact "neurotypical."

This isn't to say that all a "neurodivergent" person needs to be okay is a different environmental/cultural/societal structure. For some, ADHD/Autism are disabling, but for others, it isn't, even if it's the same level of deviation in the same environment. For me, personally, it's a bit of both. I would benefit greatly from shifting cultural expectations as far as being able to meet my obligations, but my ADHD would still hurt me in moments when I want to do something for personal enjoyment and executive dysfunction will not let me get off the couch. I would benefit from a world that is not so depressing all the time, but I would still have days when I struggle to get out of bed because my brain is physically not set up to do serotonin.

tl;dr, human brains are way too complex to fit into categories like "neurotypical," "neurodivergence" is simply a more extreme deviation from the average, and we do not even use the average as the actual standard of what our brains are expected to be.

Makes me think of the 99% Invisible episode about averages, and how they mess with our sense of what averages are.

I’m gonna have to sit with that for a minute.

"So YoU'rE sAyInG mEn HaTe OtHeR mEn?"

Yes. Yes I am. And you can ask literally any marginalized man and they will tell you American Patriarchy hates them, too, specifically because they are being men in the "wrong way".

Like fuck, this is feminism 101.

Edit: it's non-radfem feminism 101.

Just look at the way that manosphere wierdos talk in reference to other men: they are competitors to be dominated either socially or with explicit violence. The whole grift is built on selling men the idea that they can climb their way to the top of the pile

^^^ This. It's like a pyramid scheme of abuse. "If you throw fifteen men under the bus and convince five of your friends to throw fifteen other men under the bus, you can Win at Patriarchy, we promise!"

I can't agree enough with this, and it's something more and more men are speaking up about, even if our voices aren't being heard.

Man box culture, as some call it, starts when we're young. It's pervasive - the competition to be a real "man" as defined by violence, dominance, and this absolutely fucked up concept of emotional detachment. It's a raw struggle to not appear weak, and it starts with how adult men treat male children - the toxic values they instill, sometimes with words and sometimes with fists. And even if you grow up in a less toxic and more loving environment, you're never really free from it. Your male role models, male adults like teachers and such, but especially male friends who are your age, all get caught up in this toxic system of abuse. And "real men" don't have emotions, right? So you have to bottle all that up rather than understanding any of it because it's *weakness.* All of that tends to come out in the one emotional state that men allow each other to display: anger. Shit, by the time most boys reach high school, they've been struggling against each other for years. All that hate, that anger, that uncontrollable rage? That's been taught to them long before teenage testosterone hits. And by that time, it's gotten worse because the patriarchy has defined how "real men" see and treat women. Underneath everything is this deep, deep fear of failing and becoming the weak punching bag. There's so much shame to it all.

It isn't always like this for every boy growing up, but no one is left unaware of its existence. And the only true way to stop it begins when we are young.

This is fucking heartbreaking.

One of my friends in law school once opened up to me and a few other people in our mixed-gender friend group that he didn't really have friends before he knew us, even though he thought he did. We sort of nodded like, yeah man, we're glad you're our friend too, sorry people back in your home town were shitty – and he stopped us like, no, you don't understand. He told us that he thought he had friends, and that those people thought that they were his friends – but that his all-male small-town social circle constantly hurled abuse at each other, and that they all thought that that was normal. He told us that he used to go out partying with them, and whereas when we'd go out, we'd talk each other up – like, man, nice shirt, love what you did with your hair, I bet chicks are gonna dig it, etc. – back in his old circle of friends? All they'd ever do before going out was talk each other down. You're dressed worse than your friends? You look like trash. You're dressed better than your friends? Why do you care so much about you're appearance, are you gay? You're dressed exactly the same as your friends? Wow, look at this loser copying other people's look. You could never win, you could never even break even, and you were expected to not only put up with this, but to participate, because that sort of normalized constant stream of verbal abuse was the main way that you and other men your age socialized. He literally did not realize that men could have actual, real friendships – with women, sure, but also with other men – until he met us, because to him, the act of hanging out with people who you weren't dating was so deeply intertwined with toxic competitive expectations that he flat out didn't know that there was a different way to be until he moved halfway across the country for law school in his late 20s.

It's incredibly fucked up, and men should be able to talk about what a patriarchal culture like that does to them without being silenced.

Yeah, and even when it's NOT the anger, and NOT the violence it's just... Nothing. Like: allot of men(spcl older generations, like Baby-boomers) who recognize the problems with all this, who HATED it as kids and have no intention of perpetuating it as adults, still LACK the emotional skills needed to raise their kids in a better way. So, most of the time, they're just not there.

Sure they may be there PHYSICALLY and FINANCIALLY, but they just don't interact with their kids, or connect with them emotionally, out of a fear of repeating the abuse their fathers committed. And this further poisons the whole family because, of course, our society teaches ppl that fathers are supposed to be "the disciplinarian", and men like this absolutely ABHOR the idea of being that, but to the wife, who ends up having to do the majority of the parenting because the father is too afraid of HIMSELF to interact with his kids outside of the most positive situations, this looks like him "holding up their end" as a parent, leading to arguments and resentment. And of course, because of these abusive ideas these men have of what a father is supposed to be, this feels to THEM like the person they love most in the world pressuring them to become what they most despise. So the wife begins to resent the husband and the husband the wife. And who do they have to talk about this, about how even the idea of raising their voice to a child makes them feel like throwing up because of the abuse they themselves suffered, when they've ALSO been taught their whole lives that talking to other people about your feelings is "dumping your baggage" on them?

Patriarchy fucking sucks. ~Traditional~ Masculinity is toxic and destructive to everyone but the authorities and institutions who perpetuate it to perpetuate their power.

Actually, I want to do a study of regret rates for Harry Potter-themed tattoos versus regret rates for gender confirmation surgeries, because my naive suspicion is that the former are considerably higher at this point.

it's wild that virtually all modern digital infrastructure is built to constantly spy on us and harvast our data for advertising yet online advertsing is still basically worthless and nobody seems to actually be benefitting from all this

a vast rube goldberg machine of privacy violations all working together to deliver the most precisely targeted ads straight into my adblocker

Note: This is a decade old study. I couldn't find newer. The findings aren't exactly positive though, and they suggest that more sophisticated algorithms would be worse rather than better.

Note: This neglects the cost of constructing targeted ads and of acquiring the targeting information. Unless the cost of acquiring people's information, purchasing it from data scrapers, processing that data, developing targeted advertisement to match that data, and communicating with targeted advertisers is <= 1.5x the cost of totally untargeted ads, this is a net negative loss for advertisers.

[This is definitely a net-negative loss for advertisers.]

The whole thing, in all its privacy destroying rot, is fully unsupported by any evidence of net profit.

Also even if there were net profit, the opportunity cost of not doing something else more valuable is certainly immense. Reinvesting the money for targeted advertisement in product improvements, stock investments, worker retention, worker investment, etc, would almost certainly give better returns.