rynling | Entries tagged with twitter

But Kathryn, you may be saying, why do you stay on Twitter if you hate it so much?

The truth is that I don't hate Twitter. Most people I interact with on Twitter are interesting, intelligent, and kind, and some of them are extraordinarily clever as well. I've discovered a number of writers and artists through Twitter, as well as small lit mags and calls for submissions.

Also, thanks to Twitter, I now know what Bowser's dick looks like.

https://twitter.com/akkoarcade/status/1380764674656858117

A word of warning, don't click on that link unless you're sure you want to, because the image is right there.

To put this in context, a 3D modeler who specializes in video game characters got a cease and desist notice through Patreon regarding a model of Bowser's dick, and people have been joking that Nintendo claiming this model specifically as their intellectual property is tantamount to them saying that this is canonically Bowser's cock.

Thank you Twitter.

Twitter is garbage, and so can you.

This gets really interesting for about ten minutes around the twelve minute mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aWz8q_IM4&t=2s

I'm going to get myself super canceled for a moment and say that this is one of the main reasons I stopped posting on my book review blog.

The truth is that there are horrible inequalities of power in the publishing industry, and these inequalities lead to a lot of mediocre work being highly praised and publicized, often at the expense of more interesting and (I think) more deserving work that is frequently ignored by everyone, often including the press itself. Unfortunately, the internet hate machine has now gotten to the point where saying something like "this translation isn't great" can be regarded as full-stop problematic when the original author isn't white, even if the translator, editor, and publicist are all straight white American or British men who are using "diversity" as a mask to legitimate work that would otherwise be extremely objectionable.

And even when reviewing a book I actually enjoyed, to offer a small criticism like "there's a touch of transphobia in the treatment of a certain minor character" can become a discursive landmine. I know this because it happened to me, and both my delicate feelings and my sense of identity as a nonbinary gay person took serious damage in the process.

I'm not trying to suggest that sensitivity to issues like cultural relativism isn't pertinent to reading stories originating outside of mainstream North American corporate media, but rather... Idk. I've seen people on Twitter get in prolonged debates over whether not allowing people to wear agehao clothing covered with goofy manga orgasm faces at anime cons (that aren't actually happening this year because of the pandemic) is "cultural appropriation," and I just don't think these sorts of absurdist flamewars benefit anyone other than Twitter itself.

Anyway, best line: "Actually *wink* it's about ethics in fanfiction."

Did you not like:

(a) my drawings of plants
(b) the cute animal illustrations
(c) the visual recreations of pre-Anthropocene landscapes
(d) the stylish lesbians in period clothing
(e) the sharks and/or Godzillas

I’ve recently been trying to keep my social media very chill and relaxing, with one or two daily links to free online lectures and digital comics from diverse voices, as well as biweekly tweets about indie-published books I enjoyed.

Based on my gradually declining follower count, people do not seem to like this.

I don’t want to leave Twitter, as it’s how I get most of my information about the world these days, but I’ve been trying to train myself not to be so angry all the time. And it’s hard! It’s easy and instantly gratifying to be angry and critical and mean, but it requires diligence, emotional discipline, and high-level mental gymnastics to be interesting and relevant without indulging in negativity. I think a lot of people equate kindness with a lack of intelligence, but this just isn’t true.

Even more distressing, I think a lot of people only value “diversity” inasmuch as it confers social clout. It’s a worthwhile project to express solidarity with groups of people who have suffered violence and systemic injustice, but I think it’s an even more worthwhile project to offer longterm support to individual members of minority groups and celebrate them when they’re actually doing okay, producing good work, and living their best lives. Social movements like #StopAsianHate and #BLM and #TransVisibility need to be an everyday sort of business, and there’s no reason why this business shouldn’t be pleasant and joyful.

The way social media commodifies identity in temporal units of “engagement” has become increasingly transparent as time goes on, and I think it’s only because anger is so privileged on social media platforms that people can’t see this exploitation for what it is.

The incident in Georgia upset me, and the way this incident was reported somehow managed to be equally upsetting. This hit me hard for various reasons; and, because I was feeling vulnerable, my experience of being on social media this week was not great. There are certain things that I don't want to hear about unless I deliberately prepare myself to seek them out, and there are certain emotions and attitudes that - while entirely justified - I cannot be exposed to on an ongoing daily basis without getting hurt. I am a very delicate flower right now, and self-care and boundaries are important.

I've been thinking about my social media brand. I'm getting the feeling that "digital terrarium," the name of my store on Etsy, is as good of a brand as any. I post long essays about difficult topics on my personal blog and my book review blog (and perhaps on Medium in the future), and I want all of my takes to be thoughtfully considered, ice cold, and not readily available to people with no reading comprehension skills. Meanwhile, I want my social media feeds on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr to be as chill and relaxing and positive as possible.

So my brand will be: video games and plants.

Did the mindset of white Southern Christianity result in yet another needless tragedy?

NO!!!! Video games and plants.

Does the Southern Christian media insist on calling aunties and grandmas sex workers?

NO!!!! Video games and plants.

Is American media in general filled with offensive stereotypes about Asian women?

NO!!!! Video games and plants.

I have no intention of being silent about any of this, and I am going to continue the work relating to education and social justice that I've dedicated my life to doing. In the meantime, however, I refuse to add fuel to the fire of the internet hate machine. My rage is precious, and I will not use it to drive "engagement" on predatory platforms.

I need to devote more time to maintaining a presence on social media, but it’s difficult.

( Read more... )

The problem is that I don’t know what’s “interesting.”

Like, does anyone want to hear about the uxorilocal marriage customs of the Heian period? Does anyone want to know about the super spicy romance novels Natsuo Kirino wrote before she started publishing crime fiction? Does anyone want to hear about how the developers of The Wind Waker originally programmed Link’s “wind waker” to be a theremin before Miyamoto vetoed it?

I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’m not really an “interesting” person.

My husband is a fan of European football, and he spends a lot of time scrolling through football Twitter under a pseudonymous throwaway account. Most of the accounts he follows are British. He got annoyed with not being able to watch the region-locked videos people linked to, so a week or two ago he set up a VPN. (If you’re curious, he uses ExpressVPN, which is $8 a month and seems to be working nicely for him.) His computer now registers as being in the UK, and he employs this for the nefarious purpose of watching a few minutes of football videos a day and being amused by the British ads that Twitter shows him (mostly for snacks).

Even though he doesn’t use it much these days, my husband never stopped paying for his Netflix account, and it recently occurred to him that, with a UK address, he could watch British Netflix.

So the other day I was standing in the kitchen waiting for tea to brew, and my husband was sitting on the couch looking at Netflix UK. I asked him if he’s found anything to watch, and he started complaining that Netflix keeps trying to show him animated movies. He told me that they look Japanese.

I was like, “Okay, yes, go on.”

And he was like, “Have you ever heard of Studio Ghibli?”

It took me a few seconds to understand what was going on here, but when I did I spit out my tea.

https://twitter.com/13033303/status/1360892432305426435

Fucking wholesome content right there mates.

Being the innocent and delicate flower that I am,

( Read more... )

Anyway. As much as I complain about Tumblr, I'm happy I kept my account there. I usually don't spend much time on the site beyond checking in for ten minutes every morning to schedule a queue, but it's been really nice to decompress while immersing myself in an endless stream of video game screenshots and fan art.

I saw a Chandelure gijinka on Twitter, and damn.

https://twitter.com/cynphonium/status/1070873019416043520

This is so specific to my set of interests that I feel almost offended 1.6k other people liked it.

(Here's a link) to the Buzzfeed article if you're interested. Although the writer doesn't come right out and say this, it's mainly about how people in their twenties and thirties can't afford to live in cities anymore and feel intense loneliness and anxiety about feeling forced to relocate to the suburbs.

While I completely understand that it's horrible not to have the agency to choose where you live, and while I understand that it's emotionally devastating to be torn away from your friend group, I agree with the artist that the specific anxiety concerning "living with your parents" is largely based on an ideology of "independence" that's socially constructed by a very small subset of people.

I don't think this is a "white" thing, necessarily, but it's definitely an American thing. A lot of other cultures, including most cultures in Europe, see the American insistence on single-generation households as not just absurd but actively pathological, and honestly, I tend to agree.

I had to block someone on Twitter last night.

I watched the trailer for Final Fantasy XVI and liked it. I liked it a lot, actually.

( Read more... )

It's really insulting that someone would look at all the amazing and important work done by female and queer creators in the gaming industry, as well as all the powerful representation in both triple-A games and indie titles, and say, essentially, "That's not good enough because it does not interest me personally."

Like, I'm sorry that you feel the only place you can go for representation is a four-minute promo trailer of a game that more than likely won't be released before 2023.

But I couldn't say all of this in a Tweet, so I just blocked this person. If nothing else, it's super rude to invade someone's space for the sole purpose of engaging in performative wokeness.

~~That being said, the Harry Potter game can go fuck itself.~~

I guess what I’m trying to say with all of this is that there is real shit going on in the world right now. People are still dying in a pandemic, Black people are still getting evicted and being shot at, and enormous parts of the country are literally on fire because of climate change that has not abated even a little despite major social shifts. It’s extremely distressing to see people devote so much attention to bullshit that doesn’t matter.

( Read more... )

I just don’t think this sort of scapegoating is an effective exercise of social justice. It’s exhausting, and it’s not helping anyone.

Also, Twitter bears a large portion of the blame for facilitating this sort of mess in the first place. If I could say one thing to young activists and socially engaged creative people, it would be to take care to use the platform while not being used by it. Sharing your voice on Twitter is empowering, but you can’t let Twitter take advantage of your anger to compel you to do meaningless work in order to increase consumer engagement with the app and website.

I’m writing about this because I saw the effects of this sort of discourse on Hillary Clinton, and now I’m starting to see it with Joe Biden. Neither Clinton nor Biden is blameless, and we all deserve better, but that’s just how American politics currently works, unfortunately. These politicians aren’t and shouldn’t be treated as religious icons; they’re imperfect building blocks that we can use to build a more perfect system. When I see the sort of discourse surrounding Stevenson and Biden on social media, and I think about all the shit we’re living with right now as a result of the 2016 elections, I just get so fucking angry.

Like, can we do a Netflix Sign Five BIPOC Showrunners Every Month 2020 Challenge. Can we play a fun Inktober style game where we tweet art and memes directly at our representatives every day for a month to reform the electoral college because it’s the fucking twenty-first century already.

Can we all just, for the next two or three months, stop wasting our collective energy on treating public figures like idols and scapegoats and start actively working to dismantle systems of injustice and inequality.

I Know I'm Late
https://medium.com/@rebecca.albertalli/i-know-im-late-9b31de339c62

So why do we keep doing this? Why do we, again and again, cross the line between critiquing books and making assumptions about author identities? How are we so aware of invisible marginalization as a hypothetical concept, but so utterly incapable of making space for it in our community?

Let me be perfectly clear: this isn’t how I wanted to come out. This doesn’t feel good or empowering, or even particularly safe. Honestly, I’m doing this because I’ve been scrutinized, subtweeted, mocked, lectured, and invalidated just about every single day for years, and I’m exhausted. And if you think I’m the only closeted or semi-closeted queer author feeling this pressure, you haven’t been paying attention.

As someone who was disowned by my family after being outed at fifteen, and as someone who was very recently forced to leave a stable job after disclosing a disability, my position on the matter is clear: Personal identity is complicated, and no one should be made to feel pressured to disclose sensitive personal information in a public venue. This is not social justice; it’s real violence performed against people in vulnerable positions.

Also relevant:

I talk about politics more than enough in my day job and professional writing, so this isn’t really a political blog, but one issue I’ve been following closely for the past two years or so is the movement to grant full legal rights to sixteen-year-olds. This movement was sparked by incidents of gun violence in American schools, and it was especially strong in DC, where sixteen-year-old activists could and did actually show up in person to various political offices while campaigning in highly public spaces. Many of the activists have come from BIPOC communities, and the movement started to spread more widely as it became linked to BLM demonstrations this past summer.

As it currently stands, the argument is this: If sixteen-year-olds are considered “essential workers” during the pandemic, and if they’re paying local and federal income taxes, and if they’re being teargased by the National Guard while they engage in civic protest, then they should be allowed to vote. In addition, if high school students are being asked to risk their lives and the lives of their teachers by returning to school, they want to be able to hold their elected leaders accountable.

( Read more... )

I’ve also started to see Tumblr-style accusations directed at these activists along the lines of, “You claim to be anti-capitalist, but you’re going to college, which is a CAPITALIST INSTITUTION” and “If you claim to be anti-capitalist, why do you HAVE A JOB” and…

…and I just have to check out, honestly.

I know I keep saying this, but I’m tired of the tools and language of social work and social justice being weaponized to attack minority voices and marginalized communities on social media. Who does this benefit, exactly?

On one hand, I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly and have been preaching it since 2016.

One the other hand, I do think that, if you have a sizeable enough platform, you have a responsibility to use it wisely.

On my third hand - and this is the hand stretching directly out of my anxiety-ridden heart - I think it's scary how social media has blown issues relating to commodification and responsibility wildly out of proportion.

( Read more... )

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while I believe it's important for people who have a large following on social media to be held accountable for their words and actions, the fact that a poorly considered offhand comment can become a matter of public discourse on an enormous international stage is frightening.

Late last night I had some Zelda fandom feels and went scrolling through Twitter, where I stumbled across this tweet. I'm not used to people saying nice things about me (especially not about my meta posts), and I almost cried.

I'm really nervous about the talk I'm supposed to give at Otakon Online tomorrow afternoon. I don't know whether it will be just myself and the five people producing the event, fifty people, or five hundred people. I don't know whether the streaming software will work properly, or whether someone in the audience will ask some kind of crazy question that I have no way of answering.

Also, as much as I'm honored to be able to give this talk, I'm also hyper aware that I was invited at a relatively late stage for an online event that - while very fucking cool tbh - is probably only seen by most people as a temporary substitute for the real thing. So I feel a little weird.

And, given that this is streaming on Twitch, I hope there's not going to be anyone trolling or hate-watching. I try not to think about this or let it affect me, but it's still a real possibility, and it's still scary - although perhaps not as scary as the possibility that no one shows up at all.

So when I saw this tweet, it was the most amazing thing. Like, maybe I'm not just shouting into the void, and maybe there are people who might be interested in what I'm doing. This person has no way of knowing this, but their random tweet is such a powerful act of kindness that means the world to me.

During the past few days, I deleted about four hundred posts on Tumblr:

Posts where I reblogged people’s stories, meta, and art with supportive comments and tags, posts of original art and stories and jokes I made for people’s ideas and headcanons, and reblogs of people’s creative projects and commission info.

I applied the same level of attention to weeding my blog on Tumblr that I’ve devoted to developing my island on Animal Crossing, and it was incredibly cathartic.

I don’t need to see a snapshot of myself going out of my way to be kind and friendly to someone who thought it would be a good idea to send me a message asking if they could commission me to drink an entire bottle of NyQuil and pass out with a plastic trash bag over my head, for example.

I was never friends with any of these creeps. It never happened.

For me, the purpose of Tumblr is and always has been to create a small garden of things that make me happy. I scroll through my own Tumblr when I’m stuck in a waiting room, or during some impossibly long train or car ride, or when I’m exhausted but can’t sleep. “Interesting but relaxing” is the vibe I’m going for, and I think I’ve gone a decent job, for the most part. After all, I’m fairly skilled at catering to myself as an audience of one.

I’ve never been comfortable with the expectation to behave like a brand; and, regardless, activity on Tumblr has declined rapidly during the past month or so. I’ve gone from getting well over a thousand notes a day at the beginning of the year to getting less than a hundred a day during the past three weeks, and it only takes me about fifteen minutes to scroll through an entire day’s feed – if I even bother, which I mostly don’t.

What has ultimately come out of my social experience of fandom on Tumblr are lowkey but lasting friendships with professional artists and writers who have mostly moved to Twitter. I understand the value of online anonymity, but I think there are benefits to allowing yourself to be a real and fully-rounded person online. There are also benefits to being able to mute people, as well as being able to choose never to see certain tags and keywords. I’m not saying that Twitter is a good platform, because it’s objectively awful, but it’s become a much easier place to manage the social aspects of fandom.

To be honest, it’s because of Twitter that I no longer think of “fandom” as a discrete area of my life that needs to be contained and concealed as a shameful waste of time. I am a writer who writes reviews and critical essays about media. Sometimes I write fiction and draw comics. This is who I am, and I’ve found it much easier to interact with people when I don’t have to hide aspects of myself. I’ve also found it much easier to pick up the sort of high-quality freelance assignments that enabled me to quit the soul-crushing job that was making me sick.

Maybe it took me a little longer than other people to find my voice and surround myself with a supportive community, but I’m happy I’m here now.

On "Fandom Moms"
https://out-there-on-the-maroon.tumblr.com/post/620585756682027009/fandom-mom-used-to-a-jokey-affectionate-term-for

I can finally afford to attend conventions regularly, pay amazing artists for great work, delve into more detailed media analysis, appreciate symbolism and homages I didn’t understand as a teen... and I should give that all up now? Because I have a job that makes me cry from stress, do my own taxes, and should be Looking For A Husband Now?

Oh gosh yes. Wow.

For me, as a queer nonbinary person, I was really only able to do things that made me happy once I had a stable source of income. I got kicked out of high school and then kicked out of home for being gay a few months after I turned sixteen, and the following twelve or thirteen years were a constant struggle just to survive. I couldn't watch television or play video games because I had to work all the time to pay rent while putting myself through grad school on a fellowship that was generous but not quite enough to live on. If I had time to "have fun," it was time I needed to spend networking by attending various parties and other social events. I couldn't afford to go to conventions, and I certainly didn't have energy to devote to developing my skills at creative writing and visual art.

I was 27 or 28 before I had enough breathing room to even think about doing something that wasn't work, and getting involved in fandom felt (at the time) like one of the best things that had ever happened to me, not in the least because I didn't have to pretend to be a serious adult.

So when I was accused of being a creepy older person (when I was 32, which I maintain isn't actually that old, not that it matters) for existing in a fandom space that was shared by people of various ages, it precipitated an incredible jolt of anxiety, like, what if it actually is Too Late for me to enjoy myself and follow my dreams? I had been getting this message from various places for my entire life - even when I was in college! - and it was a serious blow to suddenly start getting it from a previously supportive fandom community as well.

Also:

I don’t care if you’re also trans, “I only gender you appropriately if I like you” is still misgendering and transphobic.

I've also experienced this. I've conscientiously not disclosed my gender and used they/them pronouns since I got on Tumblr, but I've noticed that people won't hesitate to use female designations if they decide they don't like me.

I'm so relieved that this culture is fading... or has at least moved to some terrible far corner of Twitter.

Okay, I'll admit it. There's one thing Twitter is extremely useful for, and that's organizing grassroots protest movements. I wish, though...

...and I’m not saying that everything needs to be SERIOUS BUSINESS all (or even most of) the time, because lord knows life is hard and we all need a break, but...

...I wish that conversations about social justice on social media were less about attacking people who like "abusive" fictional characters and more about sharing concrete resources (not to mention specific times and places) for civil disobedience. I'm so fucking scared of mentioning anything even remotely related to race and gender and sexuality and disability in fandom that sometimes I forget how incredibly empowering it feels to actually be a part of a real social movement.

That being said, I'm happy that I'll be moving to Philadelphia, where community action and organization tends to be easier to access and join in person. I'd like protest to be an aspect of my daily life, not something I can only learn about and join when I get the news that something is happening on Twitter.

As a bizarre side note: This was a weird time to learn, without doubt, that J.K. Rowling does in fact spend time on TERF blogs and forums. Yikes. I hate call-out culture when it's directed against independent creators in marginal positions, but this is the sort of thing I would in fact like to know.

I just saw a prominent feminist game critic tweet that she doesn’t understand why people like Bowser, because Bowser is literally Donald Trump. I just kept reading this over and over without understanding.

On one hand, Bowser is literally a giant turtle monster from a series of Japanese video games meant for children.

On the other hand, this is literally a straight woman saying that she doesn’t like an element of gay culture that she doesn’t understand. If I were her PR manager, I might advise her to tone this down.

On my third hand, according to the canonical series lore and the Word of God from Shigeru Miyamoto himself *deep sigh* all of the characters in the Mario games are actors putting on a silly drama for the amusement of the player, which is why they get together for tennis and so on during their days off. Saying that Bowser is literally an evil tyrant is like saying Idris Elba is literally a drug dealer from Baltimore, which is a comically misguided understanding of how fiction works.

On my fourth hand – and I actually have six hands, but I’m using two of them to type this – Donald Trump is literally Donald Trump, and there are better ways to be politically active in advance of the upcoming presidential election than to make angry and self-righteous vaguetweets about gay teenagers drawing fan art of Luigi crushing on Bowser.

On my fifth hand (I’m typing with one hand now, sorry), I really like Twitter’s messaging system and vastly prefer it over Whatsapp and Discord, but I hate the radioactive waste that always seems to be not-so-silently glowing bright neon green in the background.

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Rynling R&D

Entries tagged with twitter

Re: Listen She's Not Wrong

Listen She's Not Wrong

Exit Survey for My Former Twitter Followers

Digital Terrarium

Re: Hustle

My Jaw Literally Dropped

Happy Valentine's Day

This Isn't a Political Blog, but Goddamn

I Think I Have A Type

It's True and They Should Say It

Final Fantasy XVI

Re: Commodification and Responsibility

Voices Are Not Commodities

The Discourse Strikes Again

Commodification and Responsibility

Digital Stage Fright

Social Media Self-Care

What Internalized Sexism Looks Like

Re: A Golden Mean

Don't Be Mean to My Husband