The manga does eventually make him (basically) Sailor Earth, and he's got a thematic name from the beginning just like the Sailors (Earth Protector, 地場衛)! but I think I actually like him better in his dubious but helpful weirdo guise.

This is how I feel about David Tennant in Jessica Jones.

One of my favorite lines from Richard Powers’s THE OVERSTORY is “Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.”

yeah producing quality decentralized social media is a real ongoing experiment in both tech development and shared norm development and that second absolutely lags after the first. And the first is not straightforward!

Ok you are perfectly correct but that also doesn't diminish the existential threat to Bluesky in these fascist circumstances where the rule of law has factually broken down.

Which is partly why I've been browsing from @moderation.blacksky.app on the web!

See this is what people don't understand about smoking as ritual

I'm on the verge of busting out everything I ever read in grad school about gossip, circulation, and social truth and knowledge creation

Oh yes to be clear I actually completely agree bsky.app/profile/erik...

Anyway 6th-grade language studies need to be teaching about circulation and extextualization, change my mind

100% agreed, just, "these words could not be construed as a threat in context" ignores the circulating nature of posts and the way posters hope that someone will see your death wish and feel fear knowing how much they are wished dead by so many. (Which is also the problem with KYS.)

YES THIS TOO

Yes, this, but pretty much all social media posting is the former, is it not? If you meant it to be secret, you wouldn't post it.

Because a even a locked social media post is inherently meant to circulate at least a little and by virtue of being written and posted for others to view, is made to be de- and re-contextualised readily in ways that make it back to targets (and are usually intended to circulate exactly this way.)

It gets very edgy depending on how much you might expect talk to make it back to the intended victim, or normative statements to spur action in others, even if the actual text itself does not seem to commit a threat on its face. Which is how social media statements of "X should die" become threats.

I've been thinking about the power of shunning for awhile now, and I'm very much missing the 19th century concept of "not receiving" people.

Because the threat is the speech act?

I think the problem with Bluesky is that they opened with an implicit promise to be better and a lot of people took that to heart in some naïve ways that really don’t hold up in 2025.