Squelch! Squelch is the technical shorthand for noise gating. Your antenna will constantly pick up ambient noise, which is useless and annoying to listen to all day while you wait for a call. Squelch tells the radio to mute the speakers if the overall power of the signal coming through is below a certain level. You twiddle your squelch until it just cuts out ambient noise, and when someone tries to talk to you the extra power from their signal will go above your squelch setting and it’ll unmute so you can hear whoever’s calling you.
You know what? Fuck you. *untwiddles your squelch*
she twiddle my squelch till i end up abandoned and unidentified at a local museum
Let this be a living example that knowing the beliefs of any individual who wrote any piece of text- be it literature, articles, or posts- can and should drastically alter your perception on what the text is actually communicating, even if that knowledge has, on its face, changed none of the actual printed words. This is how application of real-world context works, and this is how it applies to any recorded medium.
It reminds me heavily of a quote from video essayist Jacob Geller, regarding the 1938 film Olympia- “It’s different when Nazis do it”. Olympia is a film that, on its face, simply depicts an artistic documentation of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. But within the context of its production taking place during the Nazi regime, with its director being a well known Nazi propagandist… The way the movie fixates on the power and elegance of the human form and Ancient Greek statues quickly shifts from being completely innocuous appreciation to the worship of what is perceived as the ideal forms of the “Aryan race”. Suddenly, you understand the movie not to be a pretty inoffensive documentation of a historical event, but a propaganda piece.
Understanding the time period in which something was made, as well as the setting it was produced in/for, and whatever ideologies an artist may hold and experiences they’ve had is absolutely critical to getting a full understanding of anyone’s work. There are some things that are near completely anodyne on their face, but the revelation of what the author thinks and feels about other people and the world around them totally redefines every word on the page.
This image is such a prime example of why context matters. This opinion, laid bare, stripped of context, is both inoffensive and nonsensical. No one’s ever thought it to be lame to create your own nickname… But on its own, that’s a harmless kind of wrong. … But with the addition of them being marked as Anti-Trans (red) on Shinigami Eyes, a browser extension dedicated to crowdsourcing keeping track of Trans Friendly and Transphobic creators… Suddenly, “Nicknames” doesn’t mean “Nicknames” anymore. Suddenly, you realize that “Nicknames” is code for “Chosen Names of Trans People”.Suddenly this isn’t about thinking choosing your own nickname is lame, this is about thinking that trans people shouldn’t have the right to name themselves. Suddenly it’s about invalidating identities, thinking they’re worth mocking. Thinking that people who identify as trans are “just trying to be cool”, and that they’re not actually what they say they are, because you don’t get to choose your gender nickname, that’s something already decided for you.
Suddenly, you realize, it’s not about “being lame”.
It’s about Transphobic Violence.
This is why you cannot ignore when an artist, author, essayist, developer, musician- so on and so forth- is bigoted. This is why you can’t ignore the context behind their upbringing. This is why you can’t ignore the context behind their lived experience, their ideals, their goals, their message. Yes, it may appear innocent on its face. Yes, it may look fine stripped from the context of it being written by an inevitably flawed human being. But what’s really being said here? What do those words mean… To the one who wrote them?
Anonymous
