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Complex Numbers #1084315 added February 24, 2025 at 9:07am
Restrictions: None
Mystery
First, an Exclaimer! ▼EXCLAIMER
(explanation/disclaimer)
The theme for this round of Journalistic Intentions is "Banned Instagram hashtags! All of these will get posts shadow banned on Instagram." So there are a few things my readers should know:
#1- I do not have, have never had, will never have, an Instagram account.
#2- Consequently, I have no idea what a shadow ban is or what it entails, only that it has something to do with suppression of posts with the indicated tag.
#3- I do not acknowledge the pronunciation of the octothorpe (#) as "hashtag." That symbol is either "number" or "pound," and that's more than enough definitions for one character. Anytime I see the # with letters following, I pronounce it pound, which made #MeToo way more hilarious than it should have been.
However, I hold the belief that I can write about absolutely anything, regardless of prior knowledge. This contest round tests that conceit. All entries, including this one, were selected at random from the list of 16 prompts provided.
#tiktokgirls
Today's title, which is pronounced "Pound TikTok Girls," might seem like it could push the boundaries of this item's Content Rating. What if I said that, in this case, they're asking TikTok Girls to volunteer at the pound? Or that, like it or not, "girl" can describe any female-presenting human or other animal, including adult specimens, as in "girlboss," "Golden Girls," or "cowgirls?" And my cats are good girls, even though they're seniors now. As in "old," not "about to graduate."
So yeah, I'm not advocating violence on anyone underage. Well, unless they steal something from me, but that's not the case here.
In any case, "pound" or otherwise, I'm not going to look this one up. I'm pretty sure doing so would put me on a List, and that's even though I could use a VPN, private browsing, adblock, scriptblock, etc. "They" will find a way to find me just for typing tiktokgirls into a search box.
And, as you might imagine, what I said in the Exclaimer! above about Instagram goes double for DikDok. This has less to do with its ties to the Chinese government (it's not like Instagram's owner is any better) and more to do with just how vapid and insipid (both really fun words) all the KitKots that escape into the wild are, and their insistence on promoting the use of vertical video. My primary connection to the internet is via a laptop, which has a screen in landscape mode. And even when I'm using my Android, I prefer to hold it in that orientation on the few occasions when I watch videos. We've spent several generations training ourselves that landscape mode is the correct orientation for moving pictures, and suddenly the newer generation thinks they have the right to change that? No. They do not.
"Oh, but that's just the style these days?" Yeah? So are Crocs; that doesn't mean I have to like it.
Which, just to be perfectly clear, doesn't mean I want the government to ban either one. No, I want something far more difficult than that: that people decide, all on their own, that things like Crocs and vertical video are stupid-looking and shouldn't exist.
Meanwhile, I'll continue to pretend that they don't.
Consequently, while I continue to assert that there's no such thing as useless knowledge (especially for a writer) and that deliberately maintaining one's ignorance is an affront to Nature and humanity, I'm going to have to maintain my ignorance on this particular tag. It goes into the nearly-empty box in my brain labeled "Things I Don't Really Want To Know." It's in good company in there with "how does it feel to go through a wood chipper" and "what's really in the sausage I just had for breakfast."
So, what the tag is about, and why it'll get a post banned from Instagram, will remain mysteries to me unless someone else wants to tell me. And that's fine; what's life without a little mystery? |
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