when Lemony Snicket wrote “I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you everyday” that hurt me
Full paragraph hurts even more.
“ (…) I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close… I will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else and I will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all. That is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”
not to feel positively about tumblr in 2020 but the tag function really is like. the thing they got right, huh? i love reading ppl’s little notes and organizational systems and i particularly like it when ppl speak to me directly in the tags to be like. “raquel you complete asshole i love this thing you’ve done i’m crying and i hate you.” i thrive on the quiet validation it fuels me
Interesting librarian lore: The way tumblr’s tagging system works actually has a name! It’s called a folksonomy, based on the word taxonomy, i.e. creating systems to classify information so we can fucking…find it later. The reason it has the prefix folk- is because it is created “by the people (who use the system)” and not contained by something called a “controlled vocabulary” where you have to fit whatever your tagging into per-defined tags.
Three clear examples from fandom-land I can give to demonstrate different tagging systems:
Controlled Vocabulary: Fanfiction.net uses a (really terrible) controlled vocabulary. Whoever’s responsible for the CV does not change it often and it’s hard to fit content into the containers, and users have no creativity or control.
Folksonomy: Tumblr. You can say whatever tf you want in the tags! Which is very cool and makes for whole new ways of engaging! The drawback is that it’s frankly AWFUL for finding content. If you tag #star wars and your friend tags #SW they will not show up and there is no one combining those tags.
Hybrid: Ao3. Say what you want about Ao3, we have it made in the fucking shade over there. You can tag things however you want! But Ao3 also uses those tag wranglers you’ve heard about to track trends in tags and suggest a responsive controlled vocabulary. So if you tag Character A/Character B but others tag Character B/Character A, the wranglers combine those tags into a preferred term that Ao3 suggests when you start tagging your work. But Ao3 also lets you chat away in your tags, bringing the best of both worlds.
Anyway I spent 2 years getting a masters in library science and am 40k in debt, just to share this information with you. So go forth now armed with the knowledge that there are reasons some tagging systems are…better than others.
Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.
“The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible.”
