mydarlingvioletta

[mydarlingvioletta]

Watching an interview with games journalists from 2003 and they're asked their opinion on Nintendo and one person says "they can't change with the times". In 2003

[mydarlingvioletta]

Reading about the GOG preservation program and I find it somewhat funny Myst is on that list bc Myst is so easy to find. The only copy of Myst I've owned is a rom of the Saturn port and I wasn't even really looking for it.

It's technically nothing new, more a writeup of their progress in doing this. Regardless, still happy as ever to see it.

It does make me wish I'd known about it sooner bc I own new vegas + all of its DLC on steam and also vampire iirc and those are 2 of my favorite games (although I could have done without Honest Hearts). If going full physical was at all financially or spacially feasible I would go for that, but that's not the reality I'm living in.

I like to own games on platforms other than Steam because I'm increasingly displeased with the choices they make, but also sometimes I can forget just what I own bc they're in different places. Do I own Night in the Woods? Yes, but I forget this sometimes because I bought it in an itch.io bundle like four years ago along with a trillion other games.

I'm also not a huge fan of how Steam bundles certain titles. You can't remove a single title from your library if it was a part of a bundle. I don't wan't fallout: tactics, but if I want to keep fallout 1 I'll need to keep it. :/

[mydarlingvioletta]

if you're capable of recognizing that "it was about states' rights!" or "i just care about ethics in game journalism" etc. are obvious covers for violent bigotry then you should also be able to understand why "lmaooo WHY would you think i'm a terf i literally hate terfs 😂" is not sufficient grounds for the dismissal of scrutiny re: someone who has repeatedly displayed an alarming level of transmisogynistic hatred in their politics

[mydarlingvioletta]

never trust a tme trans person who makes being afab like a central part of their identity

[mydarlingvioletta]

“I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society. It’s a very hermetically sealed world with very unattractive features, including racism.”

— James Baldwin, from a 1984 interview given with Richard Goldstein, in the Village Voice

[mydarlingvioletta]

oh were people mean to you about your email job.

[mydarlingvioletta]

someone posted a screenshot of the museum of tolerance in jerusalem wikipedia with the part how it was built upon a centuries old muslim burial site and i can't find the post now but it reminded me of how the canadian national museum of immigration celebrating the "immigration" of europeans to turtle island was built upon stolen land (kjipuktuk or great harbour) that has been a sacred site to the mi'kmaq people for thousands of years lol

screenshot source

[mydarlingvioletta]

[mydarlingvioletta]

Analog horror series about your friend getting a boyfriend

[mydarlingvioletta]

hey if you call ICE on anyone for any reason whatsoever you should fuckin kill yourself.

[mydarlingvioletta]

"Sea of Cortez Aquarium," Parque Central, Mazatlán, Mexico,

Courtesy: Tatiana Bilbao Estudio

[mydarlingvioletta]

Technical Library, by G. Bichiashvili (1985).

Tbilisi, Georgia.

© Roberto Conte (2015)

Follow me on Instagram

[mydarlingvioletta]

Kautokeino Cultural Centre, Norway. Per Morten Wik of BOARCH.

[mydarlingvioletta]

Glenealy, Hong Kong

[mydarlingvioletta]

In 2005, the tellingly named studio After Stone wall Productions released a film titled Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World. Featuring interviews with various LGBT activists from different countries outside the West, spliced up and lumped together haphazardly, the film delivers the following overarching messages: that it is not safe to be queer in the "developing world," that what queer spaces do exist in the "developing world" are to be found in certain metropolises: Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro—and that these sites trace their genealogy to the Stonewall riots. Furthermore, according to the film, queerness/gayness and sometimes transness (when it is acknowledged) were invented in the West. Epistemic breaking points such as the Stone wall riots and canonized locales such as San Francisco and Greenwich Village are the originating points of this innovation against the backdrop of a timeless, pervasive heterosexism. This cosmopolitan gayness/queerness then "spreads" from the metropole to the periphery, forming a web from city to city This coincides with Jack Halberstam's (excruciatingly white) analysis in his book In a Queer Time and Place: the idea of "metronorma tivity" that "the rural is made to function as a closet for urban sexualities in most accounts of rural queer migration" and that "the metronormative narrative maps a story of migration onto the coming-out narrative" (2005, 36-37). We can extend Halberstam's analysis further and see the ways that the closet/rural/(post)colony as well as out/urban/metropole get col lapsed onto each other—the queer is always pulled closer to the heart of capital.

The overarching savior narrative occurs towards the end of the film, when each interviewee, in clips spliced together, tells his or her story of emigrating to the West. After a particularly heart-wrenching story of Ashraf Zanati's departure from Egypt, the narrator comments that "Ashraf Zanati left Egypt. Ashraf had become part of a planetary minority." Although the film purports to care about the status of queers in the "developing world," it actually forms a wounded attachment that fetishizes displacement and bifurcates the queer from his or her society. This narration of non-Western countries as inherently unsafe for queer subjects produces the very displacement it describes, in a manner similar to the ways nine teenthcentury colonial archaeology laid the foundations for Zionism and the dispossession of Arab Jews. Writing about the European "discovery" and destruction of the Cairo Geniza—a building that had housed pieces of paper documenting centuries of jewish Egyptian history—Shohat (2006) shows us that the discursive/ archival dislocation of Egyptian Jews by the forces of European/Ashkenazi colonialism anticipated the later dislocation of Egyptian Jews. This dislocation would form part of the backbone of Zionist historiography's production of a "morbidly selective 'tracing the dots' from pogrom to pogrom." The fetishization of queer displacement, as projected by Dangerous Living, performs a similar historical flip to the one Shohat documents: "If at the time of the 'Geniza discovery' Egyptian Jews were still seen as part of the colonized Arab world, with the partition of Palestine, Arab-Jews, in a historical shift, suddenly became simply 'Jews'" (Shohat 2006, 205). Through various colonial practices, there was a discursive bifurcation between the "Arab" and the "Jew"; in the case of case of Dangerous Living there is a similar bifurcation between the "Egyptian" and the "Queer."

Papantonopoulou, Saffo. “‘Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv’: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1/2, 2014, pp. 278–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24364930. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.

[mydarlingvioletta]

Hi, can I ask you to share this story if you are interested? I don't have any proper platform for myself and I also want to stay anonymous for my safety.

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If anyone is curious about how 4B movement actually went in the end, here’s the first hand report from a South Korean trans woman who has been DIRECTLY participating in radical feminist community. 🧵

I’ve been a member of WOMAD from 2016 to 2017, when this radical feminist online community was operated semi-anonymously. WOMAD was the forum where 4B movement acutally stemmed from, and this forum origianlly employed membership system, before it migrated into a completely different website which operated in a fully anonymous board system.

2. I was also active in second WOMAD for a short amout of time but only partially, and left soon because the nature of the community changed so fundamentally (of course, in a bad way). This thread is going to focus on this change between the first WOMAD and secon WOMAD.

3. First WOMAD had it’s own venom (i.e. homophobia, racism, etc.), but wasn’t particularly transphobic or showing hatred toward sex workers. This was possible due to the strict regulation by the moderators. The one of the primary rules applied to the entire forum was not to discuss anything political outside feminism. The moderation wasn’t perfect (that’s why the homophobia and racism persisted) but still at least succeded to prevent the transphobia and hatred toward sex workers from spreading (it particularly stopeed the development of the hateful rhetorics disguised as a discussion, like the usual ones, “all these ‘transgender’ things, aren’t they actually harmful to women, in the end?”, “do we really need to defend or even care about so-called ‘sex workers’ when they are fundamentally reactionary and harmful to normal majority of women?”, etc.). I could even participate in OFFLINE protest without huge problems. After the protest, someone posted something like, “one of the participants has suspicious voice”, on the forum and I replied, “sorry for the inconvinience, I am a trans woman, I also really hate my voice”, to that post. And like, the majority, at least 70 percent of the reactions to my reply were positive, and only other 30 percent were negative. But even those negative reactions were not really straightforward hateful comments against me (just something like “i don’t get it”, or “still kinda uncomfortable” kinda things). Moreover, other members actually FOUGHT against those negative reactions in the comment sections (I know. UNBELIEVABLE to the today’s standard).

I was also one of the top active member in the first WOMAD community. Many of my posts appeard on the front page of the forum. I even gathered an offline feminist study group for myself independently. No one batted an eye to my identity. I could participate without any major hinderances.

4. The problem started when the head administrator of the forum got doxxed. She was suspected to have ties to a real life leftist political party in South Korea, and soon stood down from her position. This was the moment the migration to second WOMAD website began. The new moderators of the website didn’t regulate any political discussions. In the blink of an eye, this radical feminist community totally shifted its position to alt-right.

5. As far as I can speculate, the original administrator’s political position was what not only prevented the major hatred from spreading, but also defended the community from alt-right infiltrations. From here, I think the fact that adamant transphobia that got possible would be kinda pretty obvious and don’t need any further explanation. There WERE active alt-right infiltrators spreading not only transphobia or any other kinds of hatred but also literal conspiracy theories and misinformations about real life South Korean political landscape (I will not delve further into this, since it’s whole another story, but let me just say it was just something on the level of average QAnon bs). In previous WOMAD, the post that tried to start an argument about which South Korean political party they should align themselves to surely would’ve got banned. The second WOMAD board on the other hand, they could just blatantly post, “actually I think our conservative party cares more about women’s rights than the liberals”.

I mean, it was still an anonymous board, so I could surely participate in this new website if I wanted to (without mentioning my identity or discussing any topics about trans, of course), but I didn’t see any use of that since the level of the discussion in the board got SO low. They were unironically discussing whether the recent trend of chinese cuisines in South Korea was communist infiltration or not.

So the conclusion is,

Is 4B movement inherently transphobic?

No. Is radical feminism incomparable with trans individuals? I don’t think so. I could participate in all these activities without serious exclusions in the first period of WOMAD.

2. Is 4B movement prone to transphobia?

Yes, it is. 4B movement not only have an innate possibility to adopt transphobia for it’s own main agenda, but is really vulnerable to alt-right tendencies.

In second WOMAD I witnessed the exact same person who posted her suspicion about my voice made a comeback post, saying, “I’m glad you guys got your common sense back. When I pointed out this tranny and you guys were not having my back, I felt like me, a real woman was being replaced by some kind of bodysnatcher.”

3. Does it mean 4B movement should not be tried?

Not at all. But this entire thread is a warning for the ones who are newly trying to adopt this movement. The lesson here is that this movement is very precarious and CAN be turned into something really dangerous. The transphobia in South Korea never been this serious right now. And the current state of 4B movement? They literally turned themselves into the ‘feminist’ version of crypto bros. They seriously think women’s liberation will be possible through the stock markets. I’m not joking at all. Their capitalist belief is now inseparable from the Elon Musk bootlickers. Very recently one of the pioneering gurus from the 4B movment opened a PAID offline lesson for “how to win in online arguments”.

And yeah, no one actually take 4B movement seriously outside of internet spaces currently. But the rampant transphobia remained and penetrated into the feminist discussion very substantially in a popular level.

So, please beware while attempting to adopt this movement. Proper moderation will be what’s most important. Always be cautious of the movement’s current direction. You can be radicalized into far right in a matter of second if you don’t be careful. That’s all what I’m asking.

ps. I saw some people saying things like “US people need a ‘different lens’ when they consider the phenomenon in South Korea and I dare say if you seriously think you need ‘different lens’ to analyse us, you are absolutely being orientalist here. We are just a worse version of you guys, in a capitalist sense, a cultural sense, and also a feminist sense. We imported Andrea Dworkin, Susan Faludi, but ALSO Sheila Jeffreys and Catharine MacKinnon.

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I got really wary watching 4B movement spreading into US recently, and would be really really glad if this story could at least be helpful toward current depressing circumstances even for a bit. I don't want you guys to follow the same footsteps we already went through. Because the impact of what happens in US for South Korea is HUGE, and if you follow our footsteps, we will amplify every problem at least ten fold again and fall into much serious state.

⠀

[mydarlingvioletta]

bingo