I problem I feel causes a lot of discourse(tm) is the fact that people are unable to graduate to like the 201 course on the topic, hell not even a 102 course sometimes.

What I mean by that is you can learn the basics of something, attempt to build on top of that and move forward... And people will rush in to argue the basics.

To compare this with my time as a college tutor, I fucking loved helping people with essays at that point in their life. They had learned the basics in high school and by the time they got to me they understood construction and punctuation, and I got to tell them that now was when they could break the rules and start developing a style. But I'm imagining if instead of that I had to simply belabor the basics only, no it's never appropriate to use an em dash in an essay actually. You can't get personal, etc.

Things become so completely reductive because I may understand the basics of a topic I'm discussing, hell I'm usually in agreement with them, but I'm wanting to find different ways to engage with things or engage despite those pitfalls... And I get people getting mad and telling me things I already know?

The purpose of learning is to challenge your way of thinking or help you grow and view things in a new lens, not to block off paths saying, no- only bad people talk about this.

Particularly in public-facing Gender, Writing, Game Making / Game Hobby discourse, we have been stuck in the Forever Eternal 101 Course for decades. Every 2 months, a new crop of Expert Freshmen (and some bad-faith actors posing as wide-eyed freshmen because it's super easy to do so, apparently) rush in and start tearing down every attempt to move on to a 102-level conversation.

It is wearying and sometimes I wonder why I'm in any of these spaces anymore.

This also leads to you to the REALLY FUN aspect of writing where you have to do a paragraph or two before anything to try and show that yes... I understand the basics. I feel like this is part of why so many pieces are forced to begin with writers showing their credentials even if those are just "hey im queer" to show that you have some experience because if you don't do that people will just assume you crawled from the primordium with some take.

It's not exhausting at all when you want to express some way you are feeling or share a design you think is fun and then immediately have to start going okay, what do I need to add to keep people from tearing this down? How can I make people understand I know the base level topics they are going to bring up. It's so much extra work you have to do because people CANNOT engage with good faith and as exhausting as it is, it is also so much better than dealing with getting torn down?

But the work is still exhausting and it leads to you frequently looking at something you wanna write and getting burned out at the thought of it. It's better to not.

This also explains why the moment you start talking about whatever the subject is in non public forums - in person, in private chats, in smaller groups - the conversation almost immediately gets more nuanced and interesting - it’s because presumably you’re doing so with people who might not agree with you but are at least at a similar level of understanding.

The problem is partially is the 101 version of things is often the most polarizing version of it. I mean, how often do trans people get told “it’s biology 101” and then actual scientists who are beyond 101 go into all the edge cases.

But that applies for everything. Because the 101 version is meant to build a foundation for you to then add nuance, it’s simplified. Because it’s simplified, it’s more likely to be black and white. Because it’s more likely to be black and white, it’s easier to become polarized on it.

And as was pointed out above, before the old 101 class can even graduate, there’s a fresh wave of freshmen who are learning from the old 101 class to be more polarized. Then some people also make the 101 understanding their personality and so refuse to learn more because it challenges their sense of self, so they start pushing the idea that nuance is Bad, Actually.

And the cycle continues.

I wish I had a good fix for this, but the problem is most social media is structured to ensure this cycle continues because that’s what keeps people on the site and arguing where the advertisements can be seen.

people always meme about how like companies like Yamaha or Samsung or Hitachi make a million different disconnected things (Pianos, motorcycles, self-propelled artillery guns, excavators, guitars, cell phones, etc etc) but no one ever mentions how there's a Mitsubishi (Pencil Company) with the exact same logo as the car Mitsubishi but no relation

✨ If you were in Steven Universe fandom around the period when the episode "Bismuth" dropped, you were at ground zero for one of the ugliest fandom meltdowns I've ever seen in my life. If you're wondering what the genesis of so much of the noxious rhetoric that got us people like Lily Orchard composing multi-hour bad-faith screeds against the show was, "Bismuth" is very much the flashpoint for it. It was where a lot of people, many of whom had specific motives for wanting to see the show fail or who made careers off of peddling outrage to fandoms for both clout and financial gain, found their chosen wedge issue. And in some ways, it was the perfect spike to drive into the fandom. However, it didn't actually divide people along political lines, or at least I don't believe it did, since pretty much the entire fandom skews pretty hard left, but rather divided the fandom into two camps: those who appreciated an attempt at nuanced emotional storytelling, and those who felt that giving emotional nuance in a situation they felt was clearly a black-and-white moral conflict was disingenuous.

I'd like to actually discuss this. We're about 7 years out from this episode now, and I think largely, fandom reactions to it and the series as a whole have cooled-off enough that it's possible to have an actual conversation about it without it devolving into immediate hair-pulling. I want to tackle this from a couple different angles, and I want to give voice to both the complaints against it, and provide my own counterarguments. It's my intention to try and be fair to the discussion, but I also want to articulate why I think a lot of the controversy surrounding it was, to be blunt, wildly-overstated.

So let's get down to Bismuth. (Sorry, sorry. I'm allowed ONE of those.)

✨ people are starting to reopen the critical conversation about one of my favorite shows of all time and thus it is also time for me to unearth all my coldest, deadest takes

Honestly? The key point of contention about the Breaking Point itself and interstellar war in what was still a kids' show is…yeah exactly, I think you nailed it.

computer ports should be funny colours again

🤔