pictured above: a tomodachi party desu

Come join me at twitch.tv/michelledraws at 1:30 PDT, we're going to commiserate and build the most atrocious roller coaster you've ever seen

Warnings for: flashing lights, blood, death, car accident.

Summary from Letterboxd:
"A sentimental journey through vintage game aesthetics: a character with a pitiful life is granted a wish, having a lovely singing voice."

(For people wondering about this series fate: i repost those on both twitter and bsky, so it's not going anywhere any time soon)

I think it would be really, genuinely cool if we had a network of RSS feeds from Cohost users so we can keep Posting. It wouldn't be super difficult to implement, but it does require some level of technical knowledge, unless someone is just mirroring a blog to RSS, which isn't quite the same thing, and for a lot of people, Posting is when they push the button and make the Funny Jokes. So, here are a few proposals:

[this has been sitting in my drafts for a while, and upon taking another look at it, it seemed infinitely more postable with the removal of just a single line, so here]

it shouldn't simply be assumed that someone you're responding to, especially if they appear to be making an effort to present themself as acting in good faith, is actually engaging in bad faith / deliberately acting stupid or only pretending to miss something they're skirting around / not going to listen / incapable of growth / unworthy of clarity — someone more “worthy” of your energy is already listening.

for everyone's benefit, it is always better to prioritize being constructive and sympathetic vs. non-constructive and rude. the latter is not your only option, nor your strongest option, and if the former isn't worth employing, neither is the latter.

showing direct anger and hostility toward people via posting online is always a choice you have time to think over before hitting submit, and is one that I feel should essentially never be made, as it often provides an avenue for escalation and derailment, distracts from opportunities to communicate more constructively, and can hurt silent observers in unexpected ways.

depending on who your words reach, prematurely disengaging before establishing a mutual understanding could have negative downstream effects.

I think a very important thing to note about bullying / shaming is that those most affected are sensitive to how you feel, or at least to being perceived as having drifted away from your values. if they care about how you feel / visibly aligning with your values, it was probably possible to find a more benign way to work with them instead. if they’re more resistant to it, you might just be entertaining a troll.

I participated in / observed more than one space that started off merely “rugged”, but gradually became outright toxic and threatening, because as the worst actors drew attention from outsiders, guilt by association started to come at a higher social cost, so the voices of reason that challenged those who ought to have been kept in check were pressured to distance themselves. post–brain-drain, the communities radicalized, and they either calcified around those least fazed by how they were perceived, or they kept attracting people who amplified their toxicity and volatility... or people who weren't tolerated in less-toxic spaces which they might have initially preferred the general attitudes of, despite those spaces being broadly unsympathetic to their values, who were then won over and radicalized by the toxic sympathetic.

it seems undesirable to let ideological opponents be the ones to form bonds with people who you could have reached before they headed down a troubling path, and be the ones to give them space to express their honest thoughts for others’ consideration.

obviously, repressing someone's expression doesn't change their underlying experience of truth. low-effort shaming without an argument to back it up might convince the shamed to shut up for a time, but as no lesson is really learned, that leaves them to be someone else's problem later, or maybe to seek out and hunker down in radicalizing venues.

consider offering some good, relevant reading material, if you can't be bothered to write much yourself.

if, for whatever reason, you determine hostility to be warranted, it's best to be precise with who you target, not sloppy.

it should be your responsibility to move your crosshair off of the people you don't intend to hurt before you pull the trigger, not the responsibility of those you're aiming at to take bullets intended for others.

utilize the time you have to consider how your words may be interpreted, practice empathy for those under your crosshair, and learn how to aim around unintended targets, so no one has to wonder whether the bullet was pointed at them.

for the record, though I don't consider this post to be like an attack, I am aware that I've got Anyone Who Says Mean Things On The Internet under my crosshair behind people who actively encourage doing it up in front, and a sizable portion of those in the line of fire are people I like and/or people who have had their patience tested harder than I ever will, in all likelihood.

in any case, I don't think flippant hostility should be rationalized as virtuous, and I find it alarming that certain people evidently find that contentious. I don't think “always try your best to maintain a baseline image of respectful conduct, even when it's hard” should be too controversial of a take, but it feels stressful to put here, and the fact that it's stressful to say that seems like a bad sign that makes it worth saying.

these feel like sensible principles that people want to find excuses to avoid adhering to — excuses which are sometimes elaborate, and superficially sturdy from certain angles, but which remain unconvincing to me.

the suggestion that lashing out at a person is meaningfully productive beyond brief catharsis isn't congruous with what I've personally witnessed leading up to anything I'd classify as a genuinely preferable outcome of addressing tensions online.

I know tone- and many other language-policing sentiments aren't exactly popular here, but it's felt like I've been peeking through my fingers cringing as I've watched language drivers clip side mirrors on road signs and swerve into pedestrians and otherwise get into avoidable accidents, wishing they'd just take their foot off the gas and pull over to collect themselves.

I chat all day every day, and sometimes weigh in on discussions that people can get heated about, and sometimes have a lot to say about them.

I can't think of a time in recent years where I said something just because I wanted to make someone else feel worse. I can't think of a scenario where that would've been a smart thing to do. it has not been hard for me to avoid sending insults to people. I can remember outright insulting people in less-recent years, and I still feel embarrassed looking back, as one does.

... okay fine I remember one instance of at least partly hoping my words would make someone feel worse from just last year:

and I'm about out of words

so

tl;dr it's Literally Possible to not say a mean thing, you can even delete a mean thing after you type it, you can just not be mean! you'll probably always not regret not being mean on the Internet! I'm not even kidding! you can just not! always!

now to let this sit in my drafts for weeks until no one has said anything mean on the Internet recently

if you see this post it means people stopped being mean, so what's even the point now, it's just a relic from those halcyon days of people still being mean on the Internet