the secret to not getting harassed on tumblr dot com?
– 90% having anon turned off. tumblr bullies are cowards, most of them will scitter off like a roach in a dairy queen if they click your ask to send you hate and see they can’t do it without their name attached
– 9% being confident and taking no one’s shit. they prey on the weak! if you show that you are secure in yourself, people are less likely to bug you because they know they won’t be able to affect you like they would someone who they see being affected by people being mean
– 1% acting so batshit unpredictable in your posting habits that they’re more afraid of you than you are of them. this is not mandatory but the kind of people who openly admit to wanting to get choked with a belt by mothman one minute and happily talk about the casserole they made for their grandma the next rarely get harassed and i think there’s something to that. people are less likely to attack you when they are unable to predict your response. are you going to cry? are you going to yell? or are you going spam their ass with zootopia abortion comic themed memes and rewrite the entire bee movie script into a story about them? if they don’t know, they’re not going to risk finding out!
So one of our new vocabulary words is “malus”, meaning “bad”, and I asked my students if they could think of any English derivatives, telling them that just about any English word that begins with M-A-L is going to mean something “bad”.
I’m expecting stuff like: malice, malcontent, malnourished, or even malware or Maleficent.
Instead I get this one girl in the back of the room say “male” with the most dead-eyed expression.
This has the same energy as two years ago when another student said she remembered “vir” meant “man” because “it looks like virus, and men are a virus”.
One of my Latin students, whenever I’d ask if they wanted a couple extra minutes to review before a test, would always say, “No, we die like men.” And so finally I asked her why it was always ‘like men’. She said, “We die like men, unprepared and useless.”
