175: I Am I Am I Am (Annoying)

[Isfahan]

Any creative type who dies young will be idolized to some degree, and bonus points if some sort of counterculture message can be assigned to that death. James Dean and Kurt Cobain are two other good examples of this. Teenyboppers latch onto the romanticized ideal of your image staying as it is now, forever, untarnished by the fall from grace that comes with aging and compromise.

Elvis died in his forties, an overweight drug addict trying to push out a huge log of chalky stool. If he'd died in 1958 in a switchblade fight, however, he'd be enjoying a similar legacy today.

[Agent (gobble, gobble) Coop]

This is what many scientists refer to as the "Seth Putnam" effect

[Cat Planet]

Seth Putnam was a modern day Peter Pan, a person for whom calling someone "gay" as an insult never lost its charm

[Tiny Prancer]

as someone with an account on tumblr that I use too much and that I will never ever EVER be linking here, I can explain something about tumblr's tagging system that might explain something about this episode: the tag system is set up in such a way that even if you don't write in something specifically as a tag, if you mention the thing in question, it'll show up under that tag. So, if I have an untagged post that I mention bullying in, it'll show up in the bullying tag, because the tag system is terrible. this also causes a great deal of strife on tumblr because people will make a post saying something like "I hate dragon age" and leave it untagged to try to not bother people who like it, and it'll then show up in the dragon age tag anyway and people will yell at them for putting their hate in the tag, when they actually tried not to. Fun fact, it was also not clear this was happening at first! This is something people had to discover over time.

Anyway, this is a likely part of why there's so many things showing up in the sylvia plath tag that mostly only give a brief mention of her in the post in question: it has her name in it, therefore it's in the tag.

Also, the discussion of what the pilsbury doughboy would taste like caused me to remember being really into crescent rolls with pepperoni baked into them as a kid and I ended up buying some crescent roll tubes and pepperoni at the store to try it again. They weren't as good as I hoped, but now I have a decently unhealthy thing to snack on while I stay up to finish an essay. Thanks, FPlus!

[Puppy Time]

Technically, there's two "tag" setups on tumblr:

There's the easily-accessed "search" function, which will pull up any post that has whatever you search in there.

There's also the "tag" list function, which is nigh-impossible to find, and which will pull up a list of posts tagged with whatever.

Tags are mainly used for three purposes:
1) Organizing things within a blog (hence tags like "mine," to distinguish personal writing from something another person wrote)
2) Tagging things for someone else to block with third-party software (hence the various warning tags or cases like "bald," since there's a general assumption that SOMEONE out there is upset by pretty much anything, so it's considered polite to just vomit every single thing mentioned so you don't inadvertently Trigger anyone)
3) Adding personal notes.  I don't know WHY this started; possibly an effort to keep posts from becoming massive with responses, or to avoid an original poster seeing one's personal reaction. 

In summary, tumblr is terrible as a social media platform but nobody wants to go anywhere more suitable because it's where all the cool kids hang out.

[Macho Masc Sangy Savage]

Is there going to be a follow-up episode where FPlus reads all of the entries tagged Sylvia Plath on Livejournal? At least the Kriss Kross joke would be temporally appropriate.

[Sherman Tank]

Cindy Williams was the other one from Laverne and Shirley.  Which surprised me, because I thought it was Tyne Daly, but she was on Cagney and Lacy, not Laverne and Shirley.  The other one from Cagney and Lacey was Sharon Gless, just for the record.

Please don't ask me who the other one from Kate and Allie is because I don't know who either of them were.

[Boots Raingear]

Please don't ask me who the other one from Kate and Allie is because I don't know who either of them were.

The other one is Susan Saint James. Jane Curtin was the one you were supposed to remember.