The Awesome Coffee Club

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

ultimmmmmp asked:

what is your opinion on throwing tea into harbors?

I’m all for it.

My only question would be: For whose freedom do you throw the tea into the harbor? If your revolution fails to liberate the most vulnerable and oppressed people in your social order, is it a successful revolution?

The United States of America abolished chattel slavery 61 years after Haiti, 42 years after Chile, and 31 years after the British Empire. Was our revolution really that successful? Was it even good news for the most marginalized–the Black and indigenous Americans who were dehumanized by our Constitution?

So, yes, let us never be afraid to throw tea in the harbor. But let us be careful whose tea we throw into the harbor, and consider not just the thrills of revolution, but also the governance that must come after.

The weird thing is that tumblr has–seemingly through mostly communal norm-setting and self-regulation–transformed itself into a vastly better space (at least as I encounter it) than twitter, even though twitter had all the money in the world to spend on developing norms and regulations.

It really fascinates me how good tumblr has become, how (relative to twitter/reddit/etc) careful people are of each other, and how generous the overall vibe of the place is now.

It’s like if the United States emerged in fifty years as a progressive nation-state with universal healthcare, preferential support for the poor and marginalized, and world-class women’s AND men’s soccer teams.

john green quit tumblr because of the cock monologue

No, he didn’t.

This all happened a long time ago, and my memory is imperfect, but here’s my memory: The cock monologue certainly hurt my feelings! But when people are trying to force someone out of a virtual space, they sometimes resort to behavior that is similar to bullying except it’s not completely identical to bullying because the person they’re making fun of has a lot of power. (As someone who got bullied a lot in school, the feeling was similar in 2014 but it wasn’t identical–because I was aware of the fact that I was okay, that what was in danger was certain aspects of my identity/self-value that I treasured but not my entire personhood itself.)

Anyway, it hurt my feelings, and still hurts my feelings when I see it shared (it feels to me like a joke about my sexuality, although I understand other people don’t see it that way; but yeah, you don’t know much about my sexuality and I don’t really want you to but it feels like a joke about that to me, which just bums me out). 

But all of that stuff is a side effect of my job and having been successful at it, and I like my job. It is a great job. All jobs have aspects that suck. My job has fewer such aspects than other jobs I’ve had.

So yeah, I did not quit tumblr because of the cock monologue. (I also did not ask tumblr to make reblogs un-editable.) .

I quit tumblr because a few people started to make extremely specific threats. One might, for instance, send me an ask that featured a google streetview screenshot of my home alongside a plan for breaking into it.

I was super scared of these people (or possible person pretending to be a few people?) because they seemed to have a lot of knowledge about me and my family. We lived in a normal middle-class neighborhood in Indianapolis and I felt very exposed and nervous all the time in my real life, and eventually the freaked-out feeling just got too big and that’s why I quit tumblr.

(Edited to add: I am aware that prominent people sometimes use death threats against them to portray themselves as victims and protect themselves against justified criticism for their bigotry or abusive behavior or whatever. I don’t want to do that; it’s important to note that I have a lot of resources and power and so was able to, for instance, move to decrease the threat, which a lot of people can’t do. But I also feel like not talking about the experience honestly has not really helped me or anyone.)

I SHOULD’VE quit tumblr much earlier–I needed to realize that people weren’t comfortable with me in their virtual spaces and that to them I came across as cringey or even creepy, but at the time, I wasn’t nearly self-aware enough to leave for any of those reasons, and plus there was a lot of pressure from movie studios etc to stay on the social Internet so I could continue to promote my books and the stuff around them. So I didn’t quit when I should’ve, and as a result had and caused quite a few negative experiences for people. I’m sorry about the role I had in causing those negative experiences. I should’ve had a better understanding of not just how I experienced myself but also how other people might experience me. That’s something i’ve worked on over the years but still come up short on sometimes.

At any rate, I might delete this later because it makes me feel a bit like all my nerves are exposed to the air but I did just want to clarify that the, like, Tumblr Legend of this whole thing is at minimum a bit over simplified. 

image

For people who are new:

I am a (very good! shockingly good!) coffee company that donates all its profit to charity. But it turns out “I” functions oddly in that sentence, because corporate social media presences are not actually sentient; instead, companies are made of people, even if capitalism attempts to elide the essential humanity of coffee and other products humans consume.

Anyway, companies are made out of people, and this company’s tumblr is made out of author and vlogbrother John Green. It’s simple, really: I am a company who is a person who is me who does the marketing for the awesome coffee club, which provides you with the world’s best coffee and donates all its profit to reduce maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone.

p.s. Occasionally I am not a coffee company. Occasionally I am a person who answers questions about my books or other work. Other times, I am a sock company. Like the rest of us, I contain multitudes.

coffee company is that tag i follow

the-jedi-ninja asked:

Dear unpaid intern,

How do you feel about the fact that Neil Gaiman is reblogging your dumb coffee and sock memes on tumblr dot com?

I love Neil Gaiman, and I am grateful to him for many things, including

  • being the first person with an audience to support our YouTube channel. Way back in March of 2007, when two or three hundred people were watching vlogbrothers, Neil blogged about one of our videos, and doubled our audience instantly.
  • his books
  • his tv shows
  • his support of Hank and me and so many other writers and artists over the decades
  • his organizing and support for the WGA and other unions
  • one time he played Carnegie Hall with us for $0 just because he is nice and wanted to play Carnegie Hall with us.

catsandcramming asked:

Dear Mr. Sizzling Sandwich,

Have you ever read Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag? Once when I was very sad I went to the library to cope and found myself on the floor reading that book in one go. I had also been listening to the anthropocene reviewed and it occurred to me that a lot of the things Sontag discussed reminded me of your videos and podcasts about tuberculosis and some of the ideas in TFIOS. It also seems likely that, as an author and person who seems to read a lot of books, especially on the subject of tuberculosis, it would be statistically likely that you had. Anyways, I thought that book was very interesting and wondered what you thought (if you did read it after all).

Sincerely,

A regular sandwich

Yes it was very important to me when writing The Fault in Our Stars, especially. Here is a passage from the opening of Sontag’s essay:

“My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill —is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.”

And this is how I wanted to approach TFIOS if I could–to write with a hyperawareness of how people metaphorize, and how the lurid metaphors of cancer especially have shaped (and in many cases harmed) the lives of cancer survivors, but try to find a way not to metaphorize the disease itself, which as Hazel repeatedly says, is just a disease.

But I also relied (and rely!) so much on Illness as Metaphor because of the way it connects historical constructions of tuberculosis to contemporary constructions of cancer. Cancer now is seen in much of the rich world as the most capricious disease, the “robber of youth” (as TB used to be known), as the illness that you may survive through positive thinking or clean living or whatever–which all used to be how we thought of TB.

(This is why the band in The Fault in Our Stars is called “The Hectic Glow,” which is something Thoreau said about TB when romanticizing it as a beautiful disease.)

Of course, our current metaphors around TB are very different–TB is now constructed as a disease of dirt and filth and poverty. In time, the same may become true of cancer–already cancer is killing more people in low- and middle-income countries than in rich ones. So the other thing I take from Illness as Metaphor is that the lurid metaphors of disease are not stable or fixed, nor need they be. We can change them together. I tried to contribute to that in whatever small way in TFiOS, but I don’t and can’t ever know if I succeeded, because that isn’t up to me; it’s up to the ongoing readers of the story.

cancer sontag illness as metaphor tb