Coyote's Dreamwidth Blog

Halloween (1978) is, if nothing else, a movie about labor. This is something I think has at times been missing from horror genre analysis and commentary, as well as subsequent genre send-ups like Scream (1996) and Cabin in the Woods (2011), which lean on “you can never have sex” while leaving out the salience of what those early slasher victims were supposed to be doing instead. Michael Myer’s primary victims were not just teenage girls, but specifically, teenage girls tasked with jobs—and not just any jobs, but jobs that had become a flashpoint of societal anxieties.

I am of course not the first person to point this out. The connection has been explored, for instance, by Murray Leeder and Miriam Forman-Brunell in their books on Halloween and babysitting, respectively. What I'm looking to do with this post is pull out this particular thread and give it the limelight, presented as a counterpoint to a more simplistic focus on abstracted sex.

When read through the lens of childcare as labor, Halloween presents a cautionary tale about workers who slack off on the job. Neglectful babysitters in this movie live up to the stereotype of irresponsible teenage girls who spend more time chatting on the phone and fooling around with boys than minding the children. By focusing on personal gratification and letting their guard down, they allow the telephone to become a vector of distraction, and they fail to identify a lurking threat that eventually spells their doom. The threat they face, crucially, stems from outside of the employer family, thereby deflecting attention away from the hazards of predatory employer-fathers. 

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site. 

If you’ve been around long enough, you have most certainly encountered some very bad outlooks on conflict. Some people out there like to stir up conflict recreationally for its own sake, aiming for outrage on purpose, while others turn up their noses at the idea of ever getting involved, casting nigh all disagreement through the lens of trickery and petulant antagonism. In response to the ubiquity of bad takes on the subject, I want to try and articulate something of my own philosophy: that only by distinguishing problems from trouble can you recognize the uses of trouble for problem-solving.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. 

If you have any doubts, then you're the target audience of this guide. Many people hesitate or even write off the possibility of making a website due to common misconceptions, poorly-written instructions, or simply feeling unsure where to start. So to help you over those hurdles, this guide is designed to address some of those misconceptions, walk you through resolving certain mental blocks, and present you with some tutorials to help get you on your way.

The first misconception to address is the idea that you don't already have what it takes to begin. Many people hesitate because they think in order to make a website, you need to spend money (you don't) or that you need to engage in advanced computer wizardry that a normal person could never possibly understand (this isn't true either). There are only a few things you truly need:

• the ability to connect to the internet
• an email address you can use to sign up for services
• the ability to read and handle looking at large amounts of text

If you can check off all of those boxes, then you have all the prerequisites you need to follow this guide.

Crossposted to Neocities and Pillowfort.

Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.

By now a lot of people have been lured to Bluesky with a mistaken impression of what they're in for. Foundationally, the reason Bluesky was launched in the first place was out of a desire to do less moderation, and so Bluesky's approach to moderation is all about creating excuses for offloading responsibility. This approach has predictable consequences.

Spelling all this out is unfortunately necessary because of how widely Bluesky has been touted as better about moderation. Identifying the red flags should have been the job of journalists who do this sort of thing for a living—and with few exceptions, far too many of them have fallen down on the job, instead hyping up the place as "safe" and "fun" as though there's nothing in particular to worry about. Can't be any worse than usual, right?

So let's set the record straight.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For offsite linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.

If there is anything about Cohost that you think is worth replicating, then it's worth understanding why it folded in the end. In the wake of the shutdown announcement, I've seen several competing narratives and explanations for what happened, and sorting this stuff out matters for figuring out what kind of lesson to take from it. So in light of that, this retrospective is my attempt to log and detangle some of those narratives, starting with a brief recap to bring you up to speed.

Crossposted to Pillowfort.

When websites encourage their users to rely on unmoderated tag searches as topic subscriptions, they run the risk of encouraging the pasta convention paradigm. The pasta convention paradigm originates from Tumblr but is liable to crop up on sites with similar features with regard to bookmarking tags. Bookmarked tags, in these contexts, become treated as makeshift community pages, but they lack any of the appropriate tools for moderation, which sets people up for needless frustration and disappointment.

Crossposted to Pillowfort.