S e n t e n t i o l a

dinoquark replied to your post: At work at the moment I’m doing an urgent but…

The people thinking about the year 2000 were doing a much better job than early programmers and computer engineers I guess.

So it seems!  I guess it’s forgivable in a way — computer technology develops so rapidly that you can sort of understand people not expecting their work to last more than a few years, whereas legislation can remain in force for a very long time indeed (as we’ve seen!) and the people who draft it try to make sure it keeps working for as long as it’s needed.

dinoquark replied to your post: Why was there a space before that last full stop…

W e m a y n e v e r k n o w .

So I saw this reply on the Tumblr Android app earlier and it had spaced it out like you clearly intended, with the spaces increasing from one letter to the next, and it was funny and I laughed.

But apparently actual internet Tumblr has ‘corrected’ it to exactly one space between each letter because it hates comedy and laughter and joy.

Just to be clear, the surprising part of this story is not that Tumblr did something annoying but that the app didn’t.

But the actual point of the story is that I saw the proper version and it was good.  :)

dinoquark replied to your post: There are a few people who use “bisexual” as “attracted to all possible genders,” claiming that the “bi” can refer to “people with genders like yours” and “people with genders not like yours.” But they’re also usually the people who deny the rights of others to identify as pansexual, so I’m wary of the logic, as it seems to come from a place of dictating how other people should identify!

I don’t see bisexual as being any more binarist than heterosexual, homosexual, gay, lesbian, or straight. I guess I don’t see why bi is usually what’s brought up here while all those others tend to be ignored.

I’m with you there.

Well, I guess ‘homosexual’ is less questionable since the proposition that someone is attracted to people of the same gender as themself doesn’t imply anything at all about how many other genders there may be.  And ‘lesbian’, if it means ‘woman attracted to other women’ (which I think is how pretty much everyone uses it?), is similarly okay although oddly specific.

But basically I think Kinsey Hope is right to say that our set of terms for sexuality, taken as a whole, is to a greater or lesser extent underwritten by heteronormative cissexism.  If we were starting from scratch we’d probably develop a completely different set of descriptive terms that would clearly distinguish between, among other things, sexual preferences based on physiology and sexual preferences based on gender identity.  But we obviously can’t just ignore the existing set of terms, awkward and unhelpful though they may sometimes be: we can’t ignore them because those are the criteria by which oppression is exerted.  One can say ‘oh hey I’m not homosexual because that implies a conceptual type of sexuality and actually I just really like dicks of all genders and none and in fact the dick I currently enjoy on a regular basis is attached to my girlfriend’, but that isn’t going to make that person safe from anti-‘gay’ bigots.

So apparently my conclusion is that it’s all quite complex and messy and non-ideal?

blackenedbutterfly:

sententiola:

What I’d find quite handy is a way of saving Tumblr posts to my browser bookmarks / favourites straight from the dashboard without having to open them in new tabs / windows.  That’d be nice.

a) do you use Missing E?

b) you should be able to right click the upper right corner of a link, and ‘bookmark this link’ should be an option

a)  Yes — has it got a function that helps?

b)  As in the upper right corner of the post, where it folds over if you hover over it?  Right-clicking that only gives me ‘Open link in new tab’, ‘Open link in new window’, ‘Open link in incognito window’, ‘Save link as…’, ‘Copy link address’ and ‘Inspect element’.  That’s in Chrome; maybe it’s different in other browsers?

Also  dinoquark replied to your post: What I’d find quite handy is a way of saving…

I don’t know what browser you use, or if this is a good solution or not, but on firefox I can just click and drag the upper right corner of a dashboard post to the browsers bookmark button.

Hmm…  In Chrome I can get drag the corner to drop the URL into various places but I haven’t got anywhere I can drop it to make it a bookmark.  It is a neat new way of opening a new tab, though, so thanks for that!

(via bblackenedbutterfly)