Michael Kindt's Blog, page 404

reading your recent reblog, which i think has a lot of good points, then led me to read the staff article. whilst i have visited pro-ana/SH blogs in the past (something i'm not exactly proud of) and i think controlling the pro-ana/thinspo blogs is good and

Ha! Well.

For my part, such blogs are odious. If you've found help thru some, great. I've never lingered long enough to see any good, and didn't want to. I hadn't the belly for it.

If these types of blogs vanish from Tumblr, yay. They suck and are destructive, but what about pro-drug blogs? I have seen one extolling the virtues of meth on here. Is that next? Tumblr should make CRYSTAL clear (har, har—get it?) what they intend to do regarding these self-harm blogs (never gonna happen). Censorship is a slippery slope.

In response to your reblog about good points and all that, I have to disagree. If you're venting, you're venting, you're talking about your problems, if someone says they're going to kill themselves and we flock to their blog it's not suddenly going to be

Yeah, one would hope. That person was wondering about the line. How black and white will it be? What is the definition of "promoting" exactly? Etc. I think those are good questions. Tumblr talks down to us quite a bit. Read the FAQS regarding featured tags and editors, for example. They say things like "If your post is awesome, Tumblrbot will find it!" as if we're all middle schoolers or something. Their staff post regarding this self-harm/ED thing was more transparent, but not transparent enough, in my opinion.

Anarchyandscotch is right. Tumblr is a private organization and is not the government, but we live in an age of corporate feudalism. Private organizations and corporations are just as powerful, and some would argue, more powerful than the government. Like a feudal king, the government is becoming more and more symbolic, and weaker and weaker in the face of rising corporations, interest groups, and media entities. Someday, it may be little more than the Queen of England.

In response to your reblog about good points and all that, I have to disagree. If you're venting, you're venting, you're talking about your problems, if someone says they're going to kill themselves and we flock to their blog it's not suddenly going to be

Yeah, one would hope. That person was wondering about the line. How black and white will it be? What is the definition of "promoting" exactly? Etc. I think those are good questions. Tumblr talks down to us quite a bit. Read the FAQS regarding featured tags and editors, for example. They say things like "If your post is awesome, Tumblrbot will find it!" as if we're all middle schoolers or something. Their staff post regarding this self-harm/ED thing was more transparent, but not transparent enough, in my opinion.

Anarchyandscotch is right. Tumblr is a private organization and is not the government, but we live in an age of corporate feudalism. Private organizations and corporations are just as powerful, and some would argue, more powerful than the government. Like a feudal king, the government is becoming more and more symbolic, and weaker and weaker in the face of rising corporations, interest groups, and media entities. Someday, it may be little more than the Queen of England.

In response to your reblog about good points and all that, I have to disagree. If you're venting, you're venting, you're talking about your problems, if someone says they're going to kill themselves and we flock to their blog it's not suddenly going to be

Yeah, one would hope. That person was wondering about the line. How black and white will it be? What is the definition of "promoting" exactly? Etc. I think those are good questions. Tumblr talks down to us quite a bit. Read the FAQS regarding featured tags and editors, for example. They say things like "If your post is awesome, Tumblrbot will find it!" as if we're all middle schoolers or something. Their staff post regarding this self-harm/ED thing was more transparent, but not transparent enough, in my opinion.

Anarchyandscotch is right. Tumblr is a private organization and is not the government, but we live in an age of corporate feudalism. Private organizations and corporations are just as powerful, and some would argue, more powerful than the government. Like a feudal king, the government is becoming more and more symbolic, and weaker and weaker in the face of rising corporations, interest groups, and media entities. Someday, it may be little more than the Queen of England.

In response to your reblog about good points and all that, I have to disagree. If you're venting, you're venting, you're talking about your problems, if someone says they're going to kill themselves and we flock to their blog it's not suddenly going to be

Yeah, one would hope. That person was wondering about the line. How black and white will it be? What is the definition of "promoting" exactly? Etc. I think those are good questions. Tumblr talks down to us quite a bit. Read the FAQS regarding featured tags and editors, for example. They say things like "If your post is awesome, Tumblrbot will find it!" as if we're all middle schoolers or something. Their staff post regarding this self-harm/ED thing was more transparent, but not transparent enough, in my opinion.

Anarchyandscotch is right. Tumblr is a private organization and is not the government, but we live in an age of corporate feudalism. Private organizations and corporations are just as powerful, and some would argue, more powerful than the government. Like a feudal king, the government is becoming more and more symbolic, and weaker and weaker in the face of rising corporations, interest groups, and media entities. Someday, it may be little more than the Queen of England.

And some good questions/points.

vitlers—hagina:

I think it's good but also harmful. I don't know if i'm considered a "pro SH blog" first of all. Does this mean we can't post about self harm at all? But second of all "joking that you need to starve yourself after Thanksgiving or that you wanted to kill yourself after a humiliating date is fine" If they're such serious issues tumblr, why would it be okay to joke about it? If you're so fucking worried about people promoting and and saying it's serious why can you joke about it? You're totally setting yourself up for failure here. I think it's good to take away to pro ana, pro mia, pro SH stuff. But If i want to post a photo of someones arm, does that count as a fucking pro  SH thing? Because it's not, it's me expressing my feelings. If I were to talk about SH, will my blog get deleted? If I say I want to cut will be blog be deleted? That's bullshit. I have this blog to vent and that's what it's for, you're taking that right away from me. Probably time to find a new blogging website.

An open letter to everyone who is about to start complaining about Tumblr's proposed plan to prohibit self-harm blogs:

anarchyandscotch:

I took a peek at some of the comments on the recent post that Tumblr is considering banning blogs that promote things like eating disorders and suicide. Predictably, many people are whining about how Tumblr is taking away their right to free speech.

If you are of this mindset, please note the following:

Such a policy does not encroach on your First Amendment right to free speech.

Tumblr, as a blogging platform, is literally incapable of violating your First Amendment rights.

The First Amendment, like most of the Bill of Rights, is a restraint on government. It does not grant you the right to free speech. It presumes that right, and specifically forbids Congress from taking it away. Via the Fourteenth Amendment and the doctrine of incorporation, that restraint has been expanded to the states.

Tumblr is not an arm of the government. It is a private entity and it is well within its rights to determine what type of content is or is not permissible on its bandwidth. If you find such restraints unacceptable, your options are twofold:

Suck it up and deal.
Stop using Tumblr.

Yours,

Someone who has actually read the Constitution

And a thumpin' good'un, I'd wager.

And a thumpin' good'un, I'd wager.

Report on Operation Wine & Tapas

Nothing at all interesting happened last night, so this report is likely gonna suck. Here goes anyway.

There were five of us, two men and three women. I was one of the men (barely) and you may continue to refer to me as Mike, but I will rename the others to protect their identities. One of them reads this blog, I think.

Let's call the women Harvey, Kyle, and Satan. The man we'll call Tina. We met at Satan's downtown apartment, which was extraordinary. A true loft. I had already felt like I was a character in a tv show, but this apartment really drove it home.

"Do Joey and Chandler live across the hall?" I asked her.

We had drinks. Tina wasn't there yet because he was still at work. We were waiting for him, drinking. Satan gave me a black and tan, a mixture of porter and pilsner, saying, "I assumed you'd like something like this."

She was right.

The most interesting thing that happened at the tv show apartment was the discovery of Satan's fascination with gore. In the the course of the conversation, she let it all out—how all she does on the internet is look at murders and suicides and corpses and rotting flesh. She seemed surprised when no one else shared her interest.

"Really? You guys wouldn't click on a link that says MAN GETS BEHEADED IN SLO-MO?"

"Um, no," we told her.

Satan is extremely pretty, and her look is quite dark. Black clothes, black hair, pale skin, striking make-up. Although in her late 20s, I could tell she was a goth girl at some point in her life. This obsession with gore seemed a no-brainer to me.

Once Tina arrived from his waiter job at the trendy restaurant across the trendy street, we finished our drinks and headed out to the trendy wine bar for some trendy tapas. In the preface to this report, viewable here, I had stated that the trendy wine bar was downtown, but I was mistaken. It was clear across town, on the west side where they keep all the rich people.

It was called Uncork'd. Seriously.

Inside, it was just like Central Perk from Friends—open, bright, and colorful. There was a small stage that should've held Phoebe singing "Smelly Cat", but it held instead a silent fake plant. We sat down anywhere because the place was empty.

Our waitress was incongruous. She was not dressed up at all. Uncork'd is a very nice, very upscale place, but our waitress was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She looked like she was out running errands or something. It was not in keeping with the vibe of the place.

"Rachel off tonight?" I asked her.

"Huh?" she said.

"Nothing."

The food was outstanding. Truly amazing, and worth the high prices they were charging, which is hard for me to admit. Everything was pesto and bread and olive oil and vinegar and brie and artichoky cheese. I ate the living shit out of it. All the dishes were garnished with leek leaves and I became a curiosity to Harvey, Kyle, Satan, and Tina by eating them all up, too.

"You can eat those?" they asked, watching me nibbling away at them, rabbit-like.

"Hells, yeah," I said. "They're the bomb. Try one."

"No, thanks. That's garnish."

Snobs.

"More for me."

Instead of having wine like everyone else, I stuck with beer and drank a few Newcastle Brown Ales. My palate had adjusted to the bitterness of man's best friend back at the apartment and wine would only taste weird to me now.

Provided on the table, for our entertainment apparently, was a little notebook labelled "Wine Tasting Notes". It was filled with comments, reviews, demands for lower prices, and numerous requests for ranch dressing. Unsurprisingly, the ranch requests often contained spelling errors.

"I CANT BELEVE YOU GUYS DON'T HAVE ANY RANCH. GET SOME!"

"NO RANCH DRESING BLOWS!"

"THIS PLACE NEEDS A JUKBOX WITH SOME TOBY KEITH ON IT AND RANCH!"

"I'LL PUT A BOOT IN YOU'RE ASS IF YOU GUYS DONT GET SOM RANCH DRESSING!"

There were no wine tasting notes at all in the wine tasting notebook. It was, however, quite amusing and I read it aloud, to much laughter. I even contributed, filling up an entire page raving about the leeks.

I made it home around midnight, buzzed and stuffed to the brim. I skipped the rye whiskey and went straight to bed, dozing off to my Season Two DVD of Friends.

Tapas & Wine

Tonight, I will be going out for tapas and wine. This seems ridiculous to me, like something a person on tv would do. I am not unfamiliar with tapas. I am an avid cook and baker after all, but their current trendiness is just….silly. What's even sillier is me going out and having some.

Ten bucks says they're overpriced.

I view tonight as an "experience". I will gather with friends—well, people I kind of know—go downtown to a trendy wine bar and eat some trendy tapas and look at all the trendy people being trendy and then maybe we will go down the trendy street to the trendy hookah bar and smoke some trendy artificially-flavored tobacco and talk about how we're all on anti-depressants and no one understands.

I will internalize the nuances of absurdity and poignancy and barf them out on paper while drinking rye whiskey later. Rye whiskey matches my wry humor and stings just the same.

What will I wear, I wonder? Will everyone be dressing up? Shall I don a cravat and hat worn at an angle that can only be construed as jaunty because, let's face it, there's nothing else for an angle to be?

What will we talk about? I have nothing to say. I will only sit and observe. Perhaps, if I drink enough wine, I will forget who and what I am and enter the immediate dimension, the tapas and wine dimension, the fun times with newly made friends dimension. Buzzed, I might forget myself a moment and just be, all zen-like and crap.

The great and mighty bastards who put this world together, who gave it its ways and means, its arrangements and rules, are nuts. What were they up to that I can eat Spanish peasant food for too much money in the frozen Midwest of a dying America?

I intend to find out. Expect my report.