This is the master post for the 4 Minute Window Advent calendar 2021! (*boggles*) As always, my goal is to tell a little bit of story each day (knock wood) between the Immaculate Conception and Christmas. Explicit eventually, the rest as it comes. Times being what they are, we might be even more loosey-goosey than normal. Apologies if I come in late or there are typos etc. but I’ll get it all done and patched up eventually. As always, feel free to send me your hopes and dreams and I’ll see what I can do!
I note also that this year there’s a secondary, related project being posted on Tumblr called “4 Inch Window” - @melllacita is building a DOLLHOUSE REPLICA of the Coney Island Design & Construction building where Steve and Bucky work and live. She’s posting pictures of it in progress and telling you lots about how to build awesome dollhouses. The prologue is here or you can follow @melllacita’s tumblr for all the 4 inch window updates.
Modern fandom went awry when people stopped learning how to avoid content that upsets them and instead starting actively seeking it out.
I mean this in the kindest, most loving way possible, but babes you’ll be so much happy when you stop focusing on what other people are doing and instead focus on what you like.
You’ll never be able to stop people from liking what you hate, and the best way you’ll find any peace of mind is properly utilizing blocking, blacklisting, and muting tools. Take it from someone who used to run a shipping discourse blog, fandom is supposed to be what you enjoy, stop focusing on things that upset you.
It wasn’t entirely their fault.
LJ went under and the younger crowd didn’t jump to DW but to sites that had free image hosting and reblogging: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on.
And all of those sites are deeply invested in pushing you at content you don’t want to see. All of them try to push you at content based on keywords, and “I like this” vs “I hate this” aren’t relevant to that: if you’re interested in Twilight or Sherlock or BNHA, it pushes you into contact with posts about those, even if they’re the exact opposite of what you like about your fandoms.
If you watch or make Avatar: The Last Airbender content, you’ll be thrown at Legend of Korra content. You might even be shown Trollhunters or She-ra content, because “err this is like anime but it’s made in the US” is going to be considered similar enough. But you won’t get law blogs thrown at you, even if you’re also interested in the copyright status of doujinshi. You won’t see religious activism blogs even if those were the episodes you cared most about. You won’t see rooftop vegetable farming tips even if you loved the cabbage guy best.
The algorithm isn’t looking at your actual interests. It’s looking at marketable interests - it’s trying to sell your attention to advertisers, and the safest way to do that is with lateral interests in the same medium. You like a cartoon? It will give you more cartoons. It doesn’t care if you’re watching the cartoon for medieval costuming; if you don’t also follow medieval costuming blogs, you’re stuck with cartoons. (And of course, since there’s an endless stream of cartoon content that you might be interested in, it’s harder to leave that and seek out the other aspects of your interests.)
And we who have been around online for decades have no way to explain: It wasn’t always this way. You had to FIND the content you liked; it wasn’t fed to you. The web was huge and chaotic and the stuff you cared about was rare precious gems so you held on to it hard.
…The stuff you care about is now blasted at you like a fire hose, and you know that the parts you really like are still small and treasured, but it’s so hard to see them in the swarm.
So people lash out against the parts of the swarm they don’t like, instead of nurturing the parts they do. They think that if they squish enough of what they don’t like, then what they care about will be easy to find and keep.
It doesn’t work that way.
You will never run out of “stuff I don’t want to see.” It will always be there. The web will never have fewer people making content you find abhorrent.
You need to curate your own experience, not try to squash other people’s activities. Not just because it’s arrogant and presumptuous to tell other people how they should internet - but because you will never run out of them. You can spend your whole life trying to get rid of what you hate and leave yourself no time to enjoy what you like.
If that’s what you wanna do with your time, you’re allowed to do that. (The relevant question is, “Is that the hill you want to die on?”) But don’t expect support from the people who built fandom spaces for those who were trying to find what they loved, not destroy what they hated.
If you point out that mass produced vegetable crops destroy land and flood the ecosystem with poison you’ll always have someone saying that an omnivorous diet is still ostensibly worse because “most corn is grown to feed cows,” and on a related note, there’s still a popular narrative that cattle are responsible for more climate change than anything else.
But here’s the thing: Cows are not supposed to eat corn. They can’t digest it. Feeding corn to cows actually makes them produce abnormal amounts of methane to begin with, and we do not at all need to feed corn to cows either. We actually just over-produce corn so badly that it gets used as animal feed just so the corn lobby can dispose of it all at a profit.
This land used to sustain buffalo as far as the eye could see, far more biomass than all of America’s cattle put together. Buffalo ate nothing but grass and wildflowers and all the shit we now consider “weeds” and poison to death. Nobody had to feed them corn for them to exist and the environment only thrived in their presence. Most of the carbon they produced was sponged up by the healthy meadows and wetlands and old growth forests we’ve since turned into the fucking cornfields, artificial toxic lawns or just big grey valleys of dust.
There are so many things wrong here interconnected so many ways I couldn’t even keep this on the track of “stop feeding corn to cows” we just built our whole American society like the biggest fucking idiots we possibly could
The thing thats getting me here is that apparently, a lot of american society, and I guess by extension the global economy, seems to be set up to appease specifically corn growers (corn barons?). Also cheese producers? I don’t understand, why do these people have so much power the world has warped around them, what did they do
It’s a complicated history, but decades ago when America was still undergoing massive economic growth, many businesses saw it as the time to strike; the time to put everything they had into aggressive marketing and lobbying, hoping that their products would come out the other end of the boom as ubiquitous to our culture as toilet paper and soap.
Unfortunately, several succeeded on nothing but money, power and luck. They weren’t actually the best products or the most efficient to produce, but they were good at making deals with other industries and even government programs.
When it comes to food, the Corn Lobby is pretty much an unstoppable evil dictator. Only a small fraction of corn (something under 10%) is eaten by human beings directly in its natural state and almost everything people buy at the grocery store is made with some combination of corn filler, corn oil or corn sweetener even if it actually makes the product worse. It’s environmentally damaging, it requires so much fertilizer that the resulting pollution also causes an estimated 4,300 human deaths per year(a quarter of all air pollution deaths), it significantly increases diabetes and rots teeth worse than any other source of sugar but the lobby is also wealthy enough to wage non-stop war against the ongoing publication of unfavorable data so those are just the things we’ve had the chance to hear before it was bought and buried.
This monopoly over so many markets and so much sheer land is insidiously
the very thing that keeps cheaper, healthier alternatives from being
able to meet the demands necessary to threaten corn’s supremacy in the
first place, and it’s SO bloated, so powerful that its impact spills out into the rest of the world. Corn is one of America’s only major exports besides beef, which as established also has a forced dependency on the corn industry, and because we make enough corn to basically throw it in the garbage without losing money, we can export it cheaply enough that hungrier, poorer countries are forced to depend on it as well. Unable to compete, their own local farms either sell out to U.S. corn themselves or slowly die.
It’s like a running gag that I hate corn because I also just find it gross as food but for anyone who doubts that it’s this bad for society there’s plenty more resources out there. The real worst part is that it’s one of only several things that have this kind of megalomaniachal empire going on, like food equivalents to the fossil fuel industry.
And then you get into corn ethanol being used as fuel in the Midwest…
Late January 2021: Reddit collapses the stock market
Late March 2021: Big fat boat disrupts international trade
Late May 2021:
‘Minions’ meme leads to universal healthcare
Late July 2021: Sentient drones unionize, bankrupting Amazon Late September 2021: The blue man group eradicates coronavirus
