Assigned Peepaw By Email

I find it kind of epic I find it kind of rad

the memes in which im pwning are the ones that make U mad

I love being a popular Tumblr user so I can give my failmutuals 10-20 more notes on their posts

lets go team hey wait what was that last one

I think so many problems online can be solved by either going "damn, not my problem" or simply sending a screenshot to a group chat

"Would you peel an orange for me?"

I would peel a pomegranate for you.

Gone fishing! 🐟🐟🐟🐟

i don't understand why body builders go to the gym and lift the heavy weights when the lighter ones are easier to pick up. are they stupid?

Hey, let's talk about anons like this, because I know some people haven't been in a position to see the patterns these play out in on broader scale and may indeed not spot the trap.

And it is a trap.

An ask like this has several purposes.

First, it uses social justice language in passive aggressive and manipulative ways to try to coerce a behavior. In this case, the desired behavior is usually for the recipent to participate in community shunning and/or harrassment. The language above is intended to put the recipient on the defensive where, in the haste to disassociate themself from the Bad Thing, they quickly disassociate themself from the bad person, often with no particular fact checking or evidence.

The message is also intended to create a sense of being surveilled and judged by an unknown amount of people with unknown amount of social power and an unknown amount of relevance to your life.

Notice that these asks are usually framed as if they are coming from a follower or potential follower, someone who is addressing you personally and who cares about your opinion and who your blog has an effect on. However this is usually.... very much not the case. If you've ever had the misfortune to watch a gossip campaign from like this from the outside, you will very quickly notice that messages like this get sent in mass batches to dozens and dozens of strangers. (You can often turn these up with a tumblr search, if you look.)

The sender does not know you and probably does not follow you. They have a person they don't like (possibly for their stated reason and possibly not), and they are going through the reblogs of a post from that blog and mass messaging *everyone* with a form letter. They will not see your response and they will probably never even see your blog again.

Which brings us to the second goal of whisper campaigns like this:

Notice that I blacked out the names above? That's because when the recipient answers anonymous asks like this, they provide a platform for the opinion on their blog. An anonymous message like this that gets posted doesn't just spread gossip and apply pressure to the recipient, it is spread to the recipient's entire community.

The *goal* is to get access to your community. The *goal* is to use you as a soapbox.

Is the information accurate? Did anyone check? Does the anon have an ulterior social motive? BIG SHRUG

If you go into the comments on one of these whisper campaigns you will see that *most people never bother to check.*

They assume good faith from a follower, they're off balance defending themselves, and they jump straight to conciliation.

It's a really, really effective form of social manipulation, and really really commonly misused.

This is what bullying on social media can look like especially in left-leaning/social justice minded circles. This is how otherwise caring people get roped into participating in harassment campaigns.

my absolute favorite of this, a while back, was this ask which i can't find anymore, but someone sent jumpingjacktrash a note about how they liked his writing and wanted to recommend it to people and so on, but they weren't comfortable with it because of his continued reblogging of posts from the-real-seebs, a known homophobe, and they just felt like if he'd block me and stop reblogging my posts, they would be comfortable recommending his fanfic to people. and since jesse is a gay man, it stands to reason he would be shocked and horrified to find out he was associating with a known homophobe.

ultimately, i think, the thing that decided him on this question, and led to him accepting the possible loss of fame and fandom, was that we'd been married for over twenty years at this point.

get a red tie that says "DK" on it

It somehow just dawned on me that video calls didn’t exist in the 1960’s and the that the transmissions they were showing in TOS would have been revolutionary, ‘cause whenever they have to videochat with admirals or whatever I’ve always just been like “Kirk ‘n the boyz on Zoom again”

Sometimes those things hit me while I'm watching yeah! The "sliding door" only really started in the 60s and automatic doors with sensors like in star trek only really hit off in the 70s!

The first pilot uses a fax machine basically in the first scene which to us looks crazy old, but the first "telephone Fax machine" was invented in 1964 and was crazy new idea at the time

Uhrua's Bluetooth earpiece she uses in the communications desk beat ours too, which came out in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Even the communicator basically being a wireless phone! Those weren't around in the real world until 1973 apperently

It absolutely blows my mind how much of tos' revolutionary tech exists today

In Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, published 1932 but set in an unspecified vaguely 50s future, videophones are in common use.

However, a character has to go to the village post office to use one, because Gibbons did not predict that phones would be ubiquitous in people’s homes.

it's always amazing what people get right, or wrong.

One of my teachers back when I was doing IT (a decade+ ago) was a Trekkie, and insisted more than once that: "The technology they've shown in Trek absolutely already exists, it's just not consumer ready."

While at the time he didn't want to 'delve into the specifics' regarding Replicators, I bet this guy lost his fucking mind when 3D printing with organics became a thing.

I don't fuck w nerds, the moment I can smell lore correction coming I'm like "Oh Neptune" and I gotta call my mom and ask her to pick me up

If I'm like "I really liked the scene where Gandalf learns the truth about the Ring in the first movie" and someone's like "Oh you mean when he was in Minas Tirith, originally known as Minas Anor when it was first built in the Third Age?" I am pulling the nearest fire alarm

Them: Pelargir prospered further under the reign of the the Ship-kings, and Tarannon Falastur, 12th king of Gondor, built a home there, though Berúthiel, his wife, didn't care for it

Me, sweating: D. Did you know that. That Viggo Mortensen really broke his toe. In that one scene

hey quick question, probably not important - how did you know all that stuff to put in the hypotheticals

[Throws smoke bomb down on the floor] [When the smoke clears I am still in the room with you but lying facedown, possibly dead but more likely unconscious. There is a visible dent in the nearest door.]

people who don't wear glasses don't get the added benefit of taking off your HD eyesight for a while. just. fuck it! i'm done. 240p vision time

I've seen enough.

so my tumblr app is doing this fun thing where it just shows me empty posts sometimes, because why not. and this one just really worked for me.

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

If Sam hadn't interrupted, fully convinced Brennan would have found a lore-consistent way to justify this whole speech