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just to reiterate as well - atticus's brain tumour does not exist. i attended medical school and i would feel comfortable standing up in court and attesting that, based on the story he posted about his diagnosis, atticus does not have a brain tumour. there were a number of holes in the story that would've made me raise an eyebrow even if i hadn't already known about the extent of his lies.

so you do not need to feel guilty for 'abandoning' him while he's sick. you do not need to feel sorry for him for being seriously unwell. you do not need to second guess your feelings of betrayal and wonder if you should make allowances for him bc he's going through something scary. whatever health problems he may have, a brain tumour is not among them. it's just another thing he lied about and another way that he hurt people that only ever tried to be kind to him.

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!!!!

CONTRAPOINTS

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Ghosts | Russian Rules pt 1

(pt 2 & pt 3)

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Ghosts | Russian Rules pt 2

(pt 1 & pt 3)

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Ghosts | Russian Rules pt 3

(pt 1 & pt 2)

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HAPPY 3 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

I will never ever forget this <3

Happy one month anniversary to the greatest kiss in the history of tv shows, cinema and streaming platforms

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In light of the pccp bullshit, I wanted to write something detailed about con artists, because spotting fraud used to be a big part of my professional life. But my brain hasn't been braining very well, uh...for all of 2025, so I can't put that all together.

So I'll just say something short: from what I'm reading, pccp was engaged in affinity fraud. That's a term you usually hear in relation to Ponzi schemes and such happening within close-knit ethnic, religious, or other social groups, but what is fandom if not a close-knit subculture in its own right? And what all affinity fraud relies on, every time, is the bonds of trust between community members.

In other words, the race-faking and the plagiarism were all of a piece: he used the former to ingratiate himself with the community as someone with special credibility, and the latter to establish himself as a big fandom voice through the sheer volume of his output. Then he was able to use each half of the con as a shield hiding the inauthenticity of the other.

So to everyone who feels stupid because this dickhead fooled them: Don't. The things he took advantage of and relied upon are fandom's finest qualities: community, friendship, and yes, trust. So if you were targeted, well. There are worse things to be noted for.

I also don't think that one bad actor particularly calls for any big changes in how we function - that'd more appropriate if we had five or ten pccps, or if they started organizing.

But if a smaller adjustment is made, I hope it's this: that we trust each other enough to feel safe calling out a future pccp more quickly next time, and that we ensure that safety for each other.

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no, I'm gonna say it out loud actually:

Cliques and circles forming in fandom is normal. People with similar tastes and opinions will naturally flock together.

This is because for most people, fandom is a fun and relaxing thing they engage with in their limited spare time. Most people do not want to spend that free time obsessing over things that annoy, anger, or upset them.

It might therefore seem like something is uncontroversial when it in fact is not. But, again, most people do not spend their days endlessly complaining about things they hate because, to most people, this sort of constant negativity is draining. It is much more fun and rewarding to engage with things or people we like.

Eventually, most people will develop a tendency to simply ignore, filter out, and block the things/people that annoy them, because engaging with those things very quickly gets frustrating.

Yes, that does create an environment where a certain type of fraudster can thrive. This is not a flaw; this is every human community ever. Unless, of course, you are surrounded by people who are extremely hostile towards and suspicious of everyone around them. That wouldn't be much of a community though, would it?

Because, and I cannot stress this enough, most people do not go around scrutinizing the backstory and personal life of everyone they meet. We generally believe each other, and not doing so, as default, is deranged. Suspecting everyone who writes fic you find distasteful or has opinions you dislike of being this much of a fraudster is not a healthy attitude to have. Extending goodwill and grace towards your friends is normal.

Again, yes, liars and manipulators will exploit that. But that's not the fault of the people being lied to.

If you perceive only yourself and the people you like as individuals with nuanced opinions and everyone else as a hostile hivemind out to get you, you might have a tiny bit of a persecution complex going on.

If you make this situation about your silly little shipwar, then idk what to tell you.

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when people write about why ofmd is important to them usually they talk about representation, mostly, and why it's such a big deal, and why ofmd's approach to it is different from most other tv, even stuff with overt & obvious queer themes. in particular stede's arc through s1 tends to resonate deeply with queer people on a metaphorical level; most of us are not abandoning our kids to pursue a life of violent crime but nevertheless coming out, especially later in life, does tend to feel like you are throwing your entire perfectly nice life away and betraying everyone who's ever cared about you in order to do something stupid and ridiculous that's probably just going to get you killed, and yet it's what you have to do if you're going to live honestly as yourself. (and, i mean, for a lot of queer people that's less of an exaggeration than it sounds like, especially before VERY recently.)

so anyway that's all true and important but i'm not going to talk about it here because many many other people have already said it better, instead i am going to talk about something that really impresses me about season 1 of ofmd on a pure writing-craft level, which is how it handles the tone shift.

you're watching the first episode for the first time and it's this funny little workplace sitcom about pirates and it's enjoyable in its own right but you do not think for one second that it's ever going to make you sad, right? and you can proceed through seven or eight episodes continuing to think that, and then the last two hit and you suddenly experience like fifty different shrimp emotions you are absolutely not prepared for, and right as you are absorbing that it ends on a cliffhanger that is completely focused on the relationship you have just developed a bunch of entirely new feelings about.

i know this is the point where i got weird about the show, because i have this very distinct memory of watching the first nine episodes - yes, all nine, even after the kiss - and liking it a lot but in a basically normal kind of way. and then after the tenth i remember just sitting on the couch kind of stunned for a minute and then going outside to walk the dog and being unable to stop thinking about it and just feeling like i was going insane, which i guess i did because i am still here talking about it.

the weird thing about this is how much the shift doesn't feel jarring, though? like there's other media i can think of that goes through a dramatic tonal shift. anime does it more often than western tv for some reason; puella magi madoka magica and the original 1998 trigun anime both famously start out very light and happy-go-lucky and then proceed to break your heart. but those don't really feel like what ofmd's doing. in both of those cases it feels like a change in the story - a sudden one for madoka, more gradual for trigun. but with ofmd it feels more like the curtain is being pulled back to reveal what was always there.

when i rewatch season 1 of ofmd i always feel sort of like i am watching two narratives at once. the first one is the surface-level story, which is a goofy sort of adventure-comedy about a silly frilly rich man and his absurd guybrush threepwood quest to become a mighty pirate. and then buried underneath it, the entire time, is this much more earnest and heartfelt story about queer self-discovery and romantic melodrama.

in the first episode that subtext is buried so deep i don't think anyone would see it if you didn't know it was coming, it lives mostly in the image of a little boy bullied for liking flowers and derided by his father for his inability to do "a man's work." but it's there, this dark space at the center of the story that no one's allowed to name, a silhouette you can barely make out lurking under the water, and for the rest of the season it gradually, relentlessly draws closer and closer to the surface: not all beards are beards and then jim's reveal to the crew then i was just uncomfortable in a married state then you want to do something weird? then we don't own each other then you wear fine things well then take your sword and run me through then this is happening.

and then calico jack says you two buggering each other?

and that's the subtext kicking the door down, that's the thing nobody was willing to say out loud before that point. izzy thought they were already fucking and lucius thought they should be fucking but neither of them would say it, but jack didn't know the rules, now he's said it and you can't put the genie back in the bottle, the subtext has become text, after that you get the chain and what makes ed happy is you and pining for his boyfriend (that's another word nobody was allowed to say out loud before this point!) and his name is ed.

this is a trick you can only do once; season 2 really could not possibly have repeated anything similar even under ideal circumstances, and in fact that's part of why the season opens on a scene you could see on the cover of a romance novel, to indicate that we're done with subtext and we're living in romance world now. (and despite this a lot of viewers seemed to buy into the surface-level story so completely that even after the way season 1 ended they're still confused by the shift; you can see this in several of the mainstream reviews of s2 that liked the season but sound genuinely baffled by stede suddenly appearing to care much more about pursuing true love than about his pirate ambitions. sorry guys the piracy was always a metaphor!)

anyway that's the thing i really admire about season 1; it's so carefully constructed around that one elegant trick, and i don't know if i will ever be able to pull off anything like that in my own writing, but i think from here on out i will always be trying.

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Hah! Called it.

Wassermann ist vom 21.01. bis 19.02., da fällt der 14.02. rein :)

Ghosts_de has posted the third set of zodiac signs:

Joachim: Capricorn

Joachim is determined, dutiful, and very business-minded. As a Capricorn, he would focus particularly on success and structure, even if he sometimes seems a bit stubborn.

Emma: Aquarius

She's creative, curious and a bit eccentric. Her new life with the ghosts doesn't faze her—in fact, she sees it as an adventure. This is a perfect fit for an Aquarius who is known for his openness and unconventional way of thinking.

Friedrich: Pisces

A romantic, dreamy poet—if that isn't a Pisces, I don't know what is. Pisces are emotional, artistic. and often live in their own world, just like Friedrich.

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I so desperately want adelheid to be the closeted storyline of german ghosts because I just think it would be so wonderful to have an older woman accepting herself in such a way similar to the captain of bbc ghosts. Just the repression and the angst and the way she reacted to the wedding in episode 5, I've seen some people say her interactions with claudius are setting up a future relationship (which i wouldn't be mad about if that did happen) but I interpreted them as him suspecting that she may feel differently than she let's on (his gaydar is going OFF)

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Hi, I'm from a country with public healthcare, and I also work in healthcare. Our "medicaid" does in fact pay for a quarterly supply of incontinence materials. Including shipping it to your house. It also pays for any additional treatment, like surgeries, that might help. Incontinence is nothing to be embarrassed about, if you get old enough, it will happen to you too! It's fine.

Insurance pays for trans-related healthcare, too.

Hope this helps :)

We need to end this madness. #MedicareForAll

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25 Free Typesets!

New achievement unlocked! I've finished my 25th public domain typeset, and you can find all 25 unimposed pdfs for FREE here! (Personal use only! Use these to read, bind, burn, or ignore at your pleasure!) I'm so excited to post this collage of all the title pages I've done for pd texts thus far. I started getting into typesetting earlier this year, and that journey started with googling "what is typesetting???" 😅😆. Since then, it's been fun exploring literature and the designs surrounding text. Anyway, thank you to everyone who's stopped by this blog! It's meant a lot to me, whether you liked/reblogged/followed, or just took a look!

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a collection of my favorite tweets regarding the Ever Given in the Suez Canal

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Specifically about the racefakery:

I'm primarily seeing the conversation around All This focus on plagiarism (which makes sense) but I wanted to say some things as one of the handful of Black people I'm aware of that hang out around here:

1. Discord makes my brain itch and I've been afraid to go to OFMD bluesky after how bad OFMD twitter was, so I'm often one of so few Black people on here that you can count us one hand. I wasn't especially close with Atticus but I did like knowing that someone else was gonna be loud about racist Ed takes from a "position of authority" as it were. That knowledge made shit feel a lot less lonely over here and this motherfucker took that from me. That's what I feel betrayed about. That's what pisses me off about the racefaking in particular. Things are now unequivocally going to be harder for me around here than they were before and I hate that he was able to put me in this position.

2. I'm not aware of if he plagiarized any of my fics because they're mostly 100% canon compliant or in one case, too weird to effectively copy, but I'll never know because 100+ middling fics is too many to check through. I'm okay not knowing because the stilted way he wrote about Ed's hair and Ed's race are not things I wish to subject myself to anymore. But for the record, his fics are one of the places where the racefakery shows the most imo because writing makes you tell on yourself in unanticipated ways.

3. Maybe this next point will get me blocked by even more white people in this fandom but here we go anyway. I've struggled to come up with a more diplomatic way of saying "white people are too polite/conflict averse" but like, white people are too polite/conflict averse. This has literally come up in this exact fandom before, around a less fraught issue but still. It had ugly fallout then and it's had ugly fallout now, and while I understand not wanting to come at somebody you perceive as a person of color where everyone could see it, I do wish we had an environment where people who did have suspicions about him could have come forward. The amount of harm he was able to do is directly proportional to the amount of time and space he had to do it, and even before you start talking about the racefaking he was up to shady shit that I certainly had no idea was going on. Which leads to my next point.

4. I can recall a couple times where my race-related spidey senses tingled, but any unease I had was easily lost in the constant din of race-related shit that comes with my existence both in and out of fan spaces. To borrow from scarrletmoon (I miss having you here!) it's like background radiation. Also, there was always the "maybe it's just bad writing" excuse, or the "it's not my place to say but the way he writes about Judaism isn't quite like the way Jews I know talk about it" excuse. There was my (continued) inability to imagine why some white person would bother, because no amount of clout is worth what it's like to be Black on the internet. There was also probably some kind of aversion I had to the idea of losing "one of us" on here, which honestly might be something he was preying on but it's not productive for me to try to get inside the mind of someone who would do what he's done.

And if I was falling into those particular traps (around the racefaking in particular) myself, there's no way the rest of y'all could have known anything was up. Certainly not in isolation. Now I can't help but wonder if being seen interacting with me gave him some kind of legitimacy in any of your eyes, which is lowkey horrifying if true.

Anyway, those are the things I have to say now, after processing for a bit. It's still not worth my sanity to spend more than 30 seconds at a time looking at Discord, where I know a lot of this sort of thing gets discussed, but I can't help but wish I'd known about this sooner.