deadryn.

'From Compton to Congress
Set-trippin' all around
Ain't nothin' new but a flu of new Demo-Crips and Re-Blood-icans
Red state versus a blue state—which one you governin'?
They give us guns and drugs, call us thugs, make it they promise to fuck with you
No condom, they fuck with you, Obama say, "What it do?"'

this sounds more evocative than i mean, but the apple i knew has died.

look, the apple i knew has died several times over. i'm still not over the years of "the most advanced keyboard" which broke after two weeks, i'm still bitter about headphone jacks, and i'm sure you've all have your moments of disappointment with apple, and will continue to do so.

it's just apple used to be a company that postured itself "for creatives", and i only realised just now how untrue that is, how untrue that's been for years. i just never thought i'd see apple do the full heel turn on their 1984 advert and proudly announce "we crushed everything that brings joy"

from at least the late 80s through the 2000s, apple's advertising focus was on individuality, personality, creativity. i need not cite the late-90s-early-2000s ads that were literally just videos of people dancing that told you nothing about the product; apple sold us on living life full for decades. now they are a company about Productivity. it is obvious why this happened.

a few years after the iphone came out, apple quietly became aware that 99% of emails sent by executives said "Sent from my iPhone" at the bottom. a couple years after the ipad came out, apple quietly became aware that virtually every retail establishment in the US that was not part of a chain was using them as POS terminals. so apple is now a company that makes productivity tools. often for business, but not always - sometimes it's just about personal productivity, tracking your X, finding your Y, always being in touch with Z. apple makes products for workers to help them work better. this is depressing.

but let's not be disingenuous here: it is because a couple massive advances in technology - primarily: multi-gig NAND flash, but also wireless broadband - eradicated the consumer electronics industry overnight, years ago. during the obama admin, and not even towards the tail end of it. there will never be another Walkman or Discman or iPod or iPod video because all of those things were the product of escalating storage capabilities, and storage is now a solved problem, forever. there will not be a new hill to crest; 128GB will still be a lot of storage 20 years from now. the same is true for all the other technologies relevant to consumer desires.

all the music you've ever heard is in your pocket, brand new hollywood movies and TV shows can be called into existence in the middle of the forest, and you have a camera that (speaking to the average user) exceeds your skills or desires as a photographer or videographer and has functionally unlimited storage. there is nothing left to sell to the pure consumer. consuming is a solved problem, it is effortless and works incredibly well. the instrument is as good as it needs to be for 95% of people, they figured out the form factor over ten years ago, and there is nothing you can add with an accessory or peripheral that nearly anyone would want. they can't even show you the headphone wires jangling in space because they got rid of those, years ago, way easier than anyone ever could have imagined. in fact, most of their 2010s+ developments come down to what they removed rather than anything they added. we're mad about them removing the headphone jack and making the device thinner, but it's because there is nothing left to add, so they are forced to subtract.

consumer technology happened, and is now over. a macbook from 2012 is all the macbook most people will ever need in terms of normal, everyday tasks. apple has not come up with anything in over a decade that they can add that anyone really gives a shit about. M1? what, like your intel mac didn't run for like 8+ hours anyway? like it felt slow doing the things you typically do? the M chips are amazing, but as far as most people are concerned, they're marginal improvements where they aren't simply invisible. if you disagree, it's because you're part of an incredibly small group, to which Apple is now advertising exclusively, because what else can they do. there is nothing left to advertise other than features hypertargeted at professionals. there's nothing left to invent that will make a billion dollars off the everyman.

we are all lucky enough to be alive to witness the end of consumerism, at least as the last six generations have known it. the problem is that it is not going gently into that good night.

it just drives me crazy bc there are a dozen different low-effort ways to build this place from a mess into a Functional mess but they keep pressing forward on things like patreon 2 which By Their Own Admission will almost certainly operate at a loss

artist's alley is a very small step in the right direction but it also feels so begrudging. like ok fine here's your ad space are you happy now. we're putting it here in this little corner where nobody will see it. the perfect opportunity to more or less revive the idea of project wonderful And immediately populate it with ad buys and its just shunted over into a classifieds page. i guess at least it's got filters

like there's literally a user-created script to hack the cohost corner (an intrusive and mostly useless feature that isn't updated often enough and should be in the footer) into an artist alley display . people who use this website are literally breaking it open because they Want to be served ads by their peers and the website has no interest in accommodating that. its unreal

You've probably seen this piece of Tumblr lore around. I don't think it's true, for any meaningful value of "true," and I thought the process of deducing that might be a fun post about media literacy and critical thinking.

So, starting from the beginning, what we have here is a declaration, or allegation; a statement of purported fact. Specifically: "In the 80s, lesbians who were more interested in cuddles and kisses rather than sex were called bambi lesbians." It seems fairly unlikely that a tumblr (founded 2007!) user with the handle "nonbinarysapphic" was an adult in the 1980s, so where did they learn this from? And when?

Googling brings up a significant clue - this wiki cites a 1990 book called The Alyson Almanac.

As it happens, it's on the Internet Archive and full-text searchable. And so, on page 61, in the section of the book titled "A Dictionary of Slang and Historical Terms," what do we find, between definitions of "BALLS" and "BASKET?"

Do you notice what's different here, compared to the original tumblr post?

First, there's no indicated gendering of the term. As other entries in this section are specific when referring to (sigh) (only, most of the time) gay men or lesbians - the definition for CLOSET starts with "The place where gay men or lesbians hide, figuratively speaking" - that's curious. It seems like the writer of the original entry didn't intend in any way to suggest that this was something specific to lesbians.

Second, there is no indication of when, in what context, or by whom this term was ever used, compared to the tumblr post declaring that the time period in question was "in the 80s." This book was published in 1990, and this section covers antiquated historical terms like HOMOPHILE, COUNTERJUMPER, MOLLY, SWAFFONDER, and PUNK (the latter extremely not in the context you're probably thinking). It's not clear in the slightest whether, in 1990, this would be terminology in contemporary common parlance.

Second and a half, I suppose, entirely speculatively... hey, you know Disney's Bambi - almost certainly the source of this, given the connotations - is a boy, right? A very feminine, queer-coded boy? It's kind of a whole thing, in the fucked-up gender politics of this 1942 adaptation of a 1923 novel (I can highly recommend this podcast on its production history), that to become A Man, Like His Father, Bambi has to be dominant and violent.

So again, just hypothetically, what seems more historically likely? That "Bambi" was used as a term of self-description by ace lesbians, or as term applied to femme gay men by others? In the absence of further corroborating evidence, I feel like one line of speculation seems as plausible as another.

Except... as it turns out, there is more evidence. May I introduce Toronto's former monthly local queer community newsmagazine, one that would eventually become the periodically-updated Xtra:

In the December 1979/January 1980 issue of The Body Politic, also on the Internet Archive, there's a letter to the editor, criticizing an article in the November 1979 issue. (I read it. It's not interesting, and the only mention of Bambisexuals is quoted in the screenshot.) And, lo and behold - what was the first mention of Bambisexuality here? It was cited in a derogatory, shaming way, applied to men (specifically men!) the author felt to be insufficiently kinky. And then, what's the second mention? Whoever's signed their letter as the Bambisexual Liberation Front, my word, in this letter to the editor, asserting that they oppose the "straight identified (STIFF) gay men's scene."

It's amazing where checking citations gets you, isn't it? Here, in "Bambisexual," we have what's clearly a term of derision (reclaimed by at least one letter-writer!) applied to insufficiently kinky gay men, when it was in common enough parlance to be mentioned in a community news source in 1979. By 1990, someone's compiling a glossary of historical slang, and the political edges have been worn away; "Bambisexuality" is memorialized in a simplified, twee, cutesy way that omits any specific mention of its application to gay men or lesbians.

And - here's where I'm hypothesizing again - I think I know exactly where nonbinarysapphic made the connection that this referred to lesbians, specifically: this 2012 Autostraddle article. The text is clearly (and cited at the head of the article!) drawn directly from The Alyson Almanac, 22 years later. But now the context has been stripped away, because Autostraddle - a lesbian-focused publication - compiled this brief excerpt. And Autostraddle - a lesbian-focused publication - must surely always be discussing lesbians whenever it's not specified otherwise, right, and...

So, yeah. The fact that there are people right now who identify as Bambisexual, and they're principally ace or aro-spec lesbians - I think that's new. That was invented fully anew, sometime in the 2010s, with an incorrect historical sheen. And, last part aside, that's great! More power to anyone for whom that term vibes. But - just speaking from the perspective of a history major and lawyer - I think it's important not to invent fictitious queer history, or erase real queer history, generally.