E-MORTALITY / @blueskies-bluescreens / Status Of A Steam User / Death, Virtual Grief And Your Digital

E-MORTALITY / @blueskies-bluescreens / status of a steam user / death, virtual grief and your digital footprint by kelley edwards and johanna j. lunn / STurner4077 on twitter / the new forms of mourning: loss and exhibition of the death on the internet (2016) by julie alev dilmaç / description for all the ghosts in the machine: illusions of immortality in the digital age (2019) by elaine kasket

already got a blazed marvel post. the adpocalypse is closer than we think so heres your daily PSA

don't interact with corporate tumblr accounts

yes even to dunk on them. i don't care if you have the sickest burn of the century lined up, don't even give them the time of day

the eventual and inevitable fall of twitter marks a change in the advertising industry, and tumblr is unclaimed territory. if we want tumblr to remain the social media bastion it has become, it needs to remain as unappealing to corporations as possible. do not engage. in a marketing strategist's eyes, any kind of attention is good attention. don't "silence, brand" them. don't kungpowpenis them. don't send them hate anons. don't hate-follow them. corporate tumblrs are not a single entity and they will not be harassed off this site. we only have a shot at repelling them because of tumblr's lack of an algorithm. so turn off recommended posts on your dashboard, put it chronological order, and install an adblocker. if you don't seek out these blazed posts and actively ignore them when they happen upon you, the corporations will starve. in this case, the best kind of protest is a silent one

I really hate the concept of “little t trauma”. Hate it.

“Big T Trauma”, the logic goes, is for things that are “actually bad enough’, like war veterans or rape survivors. Or people who survive natural disasters or terrorist attacks or car accidents.*  “Little t trauma” is said to be for things like “interpersonal conflict”, infidelity, divorce, “financial worries or difficulty”, “legal trouble”, “death of a pet”, “bullying or harassment”, “loss of significant relationships”, or emotional abuse.*

And it’s bullshit.

*Examples taken from various articles on the subject I just looked up in preparation for this rant.

Plenty of people survive car accidents and sexual assault and war without lasting mental health issues.

The perceived severity of the traumatic event doesn’t actually matter. What matters is how your brain reacted to it.

You can have PTSD or other serious traumagenic disorders from bullying at school, or “just” emotional abuse, or neglect, or just from not having your needs met. If you’re marinating in stress long enough, it causes SO MANY problems.

Poverty is extremely traumatic! Your brain doesn’t necessarily understand the difference between “someone is routinely causing me serious physical harm” and “we run out of money for food by the third week of the month”. It just knows to interpret these things as threats to your continued survival. They cause you to produce stress hormones and other physiological responses. I’ve probably known people who have severe, ongoing issues due to just about everything on that list!

Your brain is trying to make sure you don’t die, and all the fucking logic in the world about “Well I wasn’t ACTUALLY in danger” or “Well she wouldn’t really have hit me” or “it was just kids being kids” doesn’t change that.

Every single trauma survivor I’ve ever known has thought that what happened to them Wasn’t Bad Enough to Count, because Other People Have it Worse. Every single one.

I think we’re so close to starting to realize that, as it turns out, a whole metric FUCKTON of people have experienced traumatic events and it’s affected a LOT more people than we initially believed. We’ve started to understand that it’s not just war vets who get PTSD.

But it’s like we’re desperate to come up with a reason that no, actually, it’s not that the systems we have in place routinely damage people severely - or that a lot of very common parenting techniques cause serious harm. We have to subdivide it further into little categories, and you should stop being so dramatic. OBVIOUSLY it that wasn’t bad enough. To be clear, I understand that this terminology was PROBABLY well-intentioned. “Look, a whole host of experiences can be trauma! We should acknowledge that!” - or at least I hope it was. But it’s that implied “[but obviously it’s not as bad as the people who have REAL problems. Don’t you know some people had to deal with TERRORISM!?]” that makes it bullshit.

People who are really struggling with awful, serious things already have enough trouble being taken seriously and taking their own pain seriously.

This concludes your irregularly scheduled rant about how mental health is discussed.

when people on twitter or tiktok say "yeah tumblr is bad, its always been bad and gross and problematic" do they know its always been completely self-curated too or are we gonna leave that part out

Oh no are we doing the "popular children's program is BASICALLY COCAINE and will LITTERALLY ROT YOUR CHILD'S BRAIN" again?

Didn't happen with teletubbies, didn't happen with spongebob, isnt going to happen with cocomelon. Also instances of childhood neglect leading to noticeable and severe developmental delay like "cant write cus ipad" (in my day it was "cant write because texting") and "cant talk because tv" (that once hasn't changed) remain rare and is not something the majority of kids are ever going to experience. Even when they do, there is usually an underlying cause and the problem would still be there without the presence of the technology, for example a child with speech delay may well engage in echolalia simply because that's how their brain works, and of course its going to relate to YouTube if they watch YouTube. If they didn't they'd copy something else but they wouldn't be speaking in full original sentences. (And lets be real plenty of these are just people jumping to blaming technology instead of accepting that developmental delay is normal and happens. People want to blame things, they don't want to accept they have a child they see as broken). Maybe the evil ipad stopped your kid tying their shoelaces or maybe its actually a hard thing and some people, LIKE ME FOR EXAMPLE, cant do it.

This same scaremongering happens every generation and is always overblown crap. This generation its evil ipads, for mine it was TV. For my mother's it was physical affection. Its bullshit, calm down.

(Also kids are being expected to do things younger and younger when it isn't developmentally appropriate. Like being expected to be physically developed enough to write by hand neatly at nursery age. Which is physically impossible. Thats not ipads their bones haven't grown enough yet. So maybe chill)

(Also also, you might wanna consider how much is you clinging to ways of living just because its normal to you. It took me a while to accept that my child's difficulty with writing does not need to be considered any kind of delay because its 2023 and we have keyboards and screens now. This "problem" actually has zero effect on it ever since adults stopped losing their minds over it. We dont live in a world that requires handwriting anymore. White teachers have also been losing their minds over kids "regressing" during covid for "forgetting how to use knives and forks" when like. Bitch these kids are Indian. They know how to eat they just do it differently and didn't have to assimilate for a year. That's not something to worry about!)

Tl;dr you're falling for the "technology is corrupting the youth and now they are different from us" again.

it is. so weird to me that I'm having to say this again after a real-life cartoon supervillian already once ran for president on a platform of hatred & fascism and won, but.

it's November, please fucking vote