“‘Don’t feed the trolls’ also ignores an obvious method for addressing online abuse: skilled moderation and the willingness to kick people off platforms for violating rules about abuse. At one website I used to write for, everyone constantly remarked that we had the most amazing, thoughtful commenters. How did we achieve this? Easy: a one-strike policy. Complete zero tolerance. Did people complain? Of course they did. But it stopped people with bad intentions from being a part of the community, and it kept all the well-meaning people on their best behavior. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. It also a took a ton of effort on the part of the entire writing team. We had to ignore the other popular sentiment of “don’t read the comments” (which is largely about trying to maintain sanity while staring at the void) and embrace a jaw-droppingly obvious fact: what truly derails any given thread or conversation lies not in a given response to trolls, but the very troll who is trying to derail in the first place. The second you treat them as a ‘constant’ or inescapable part of your community, you have given them permission.”
It frustrates me, because back when I was on forums the reason people were told “Don’t feed the trolls” was to make it easier for the mods and admins to do their job and ban them. And we just collectively dropped the bit where you have a moderating team whose job it is to make sure that the majority of users have a good experience in exchange for some kind of free-for-all where everyone ends up bruised and bloody and the only people enjoying themselves are the trolls. It’s the antithesis of how to foster a good community.
My doggo, Ezri, who rarely barks and mostly borks.
When I got her, she’d been abused and would cower and pee at almost everything, and had been mistreated when she’d barked, so she never would. One day months after I had her she got excited on a walk and borked at a bird, and then immediately cower-peed. I had to re-teach her to bark by gathering her whole human pack and having everyone bark and howl and feed her treats and pet her till she got excited enough to join in, and then got more treats. Took a while but I was able to teach her to bork on command (and she’s gotta be excited or she just stares at me like “Sorry, the bork system needs charging”) and she’ll do it happily when she’s excited to go for a walk or upon seeing a friend, and at birds. I love her croaky borking, especially when she started off terrified of making a joyful noise.
What kind of dog is Ezri? I love her!!
I… did not expect this post to blow up this much but I am delighted at all the tags and replies and Ezri has been told the internet thinks she’s a Very Good Dog. 😀
She’s a German spitz – in the same family as keeshonds and pomeranians. She might be crossed with something else as her freckled coat, non-pointy nose, and personality are not standard for her breed (they’re usually a lot more high energy and excitable – she’s super laid back and chill). She’s a bit less fluffy than breed-standard too, mostly because she’s grown out from her spring/summer trim (not usually necessary/good for her type of coat but she gets terribly itchy otherwise). It also makes her look like a puppy of a large breed:
Ezri’s best friend is Murder Cat, who is a gentle friend to humans and Ezri, but does things to mice that would make Hannibal Lecter go “Isn’t that a bit much?”
I got Murder Cat as a kitten, and she used to try to nurse on everything when she was small. Eventually, she settled on her favourite thing to nurse on, Ezri, who has never had puppies and a little confused at first but eventually went with it. She grew out of it, but they have stayed snuggly buddies ever since.
New Years here is full of fireworks outside and Ezri gets Vry Scared. I usually set her up somewhere with a snuggly spot right by me, and Murder Cat comes and does this all night:
She goes everywhere with me in my bakfiets (cargo bike) and lets me warm my hands in her fur on cold days.
And her ears disappear if I say her name to get her attention.
ok so great thanks for coming to my TED talk about my dog, good night, drive safe
THIS TED TALK WAS NOT LONG ENOUGH I NEED MORE INFORMATION!
i arrive at the gay bar in full butch getup and i look like super hot like trust me and i start buying chocolate milk for the femmes at the bar…..between my striking good looks and my generosity concerning tasteful dairy products i have impressed them greatly and after an hour of chatting I make my move. i reach into my pocket and remove a large, gorgeous lichen affixed to a piece of bark from its protective herbarium packet that I have concealed in my pants pocket. “it’s a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae,” i begin,
You say shitpost but I swear to god I would pick up the U-haul on our way home from the bar don’t try me
this is true!!!! we still dont know a whole lot about how it interacts, though. it fucks me up because you would think that the exact correct combination of microscopic algae and fungus coming together to germinate into a weird psuedo-organism would be nearly impossible, but yet it happens all the time everywhere on earth….and now there has to be a yeast, too?? so you gotta have the correct exact species of microscopic algae, fungus, and yeast coming together on the correct substrate by no one’s control but the wind and rain or else whoops, no lichen???? how does that happen??
This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.
A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.
Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic? She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing. But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great. She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success. So – what gives?
His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear. Jeans, blazers, dresses – everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles. He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses. You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on. Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered. He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit. That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.
I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way. I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did.
It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this. But no one ever told me. I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes. No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.
I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed. I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to. No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to. I guess I just didn’t know. I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.
I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.
I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.
So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while. But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not. Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.
This post is one of those things that I will reblog every time it appears on my dash. This is so important, and no one ever tells you about it.
I almost didn’t read this but then I did and I’m really glad that I did.
Super important
I wish someone had told me this when I was a 4th grader crying in the dressing room because I had to wear “misses” aka adults clothing.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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