#(referring to a Japanese janitor)

[starjunkyard]

@pinepickled OP YOURE OUT OF YOUR MIND . THIS IS SOOOOOOOOOO . YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That one sentiment that everyone references.... that whatever suffering and trials and tribulations God puts you through is because he loves you and wants you to get through it so you can become worthy enough of entry to his heaven... and the criticism that sentiment faces because of how backwards and cruel and irrational the reasoning behind it is....

The way it almost parallels how House treats his patients......... treats them with such needless cruelty... but in his eyes, is just what needs to be done for what he views as the "ultimate greater good"....... He hurts his patients He puts them through horrifying traumatizing life-threatening situations and procedures to grasp at whatever straws he can find because House would not be as respected as he is if he didn't have such a high success rate . If all his cruel awful callous behavior didn't amount to something . God and God's word is undefiable and law and unquestionable because God has and will never be wrong . House can never ever be wrong

In every situation, House always gets the last laugh-- is right eventually, in one way or another; and so House will do anything it takes just to be right.

Because if God is wrong-- if God makes a single mistake; can't come up with anything to disprove the fact that there is no "higher meaning" to all the suffering he causes-- he'd be just as revoltingly mortal as the rest of us, and we'd have no reason to get on our knees and pray and beg and surrender ourselves to the mercy of something as pathetic as a human capable of fault

Hes so fucked up .House does such outrageously horrifically fucked up shit but its because he cares because he Needs to be Needed and he Cant be needed unless he manages to prove that he is always right in spite of all logic and reason-- because what is a God without his worshippers?

House will die if he is discarded-- If ever a time comes where people don't believe him anymore; because a God only exists and lives on for as long people believe in him

Watched that episode where wilson compared house to god and icarus before house bitterly remarks that god doesn't limp then stalks out of his office . Hey what the fuck you guys

I FEEL CRAZY? LIKE I WATCHED IT LAST NIGHT AND HAVE NOT STOPPED THINKING ABOUT IT SINCE

Why does wilson start crying after house leaves . What was "god doesn't limp" supposed to imply . Does it imply that his leg is the only thing that proves he's just as fallible and mortifyingly human as everyone else and house resents himself for it . Does house resent himself for being human

"If we told you that you'd solved a case based on zero medical proof... you'd think you were God. And... I was afraid that your wings would melt." Are u fucking CRAZY

Their entire relationship revolving on how wholly and entirely devoted they are to each other . Then Wilson using religious metaphors to describe house .Wilson confessing that he's "afraid of house's wings melting" . I'm afraid you're going to kill yourself trying to outdo yourself again and again in the hopes of feeling like your life means something

God . House's entire life isjust him screaming for someone to look at him. Idk . Can't stop thinking about how House will die trying to prove that he's useful for something. die trying to maintain the one thing he thinks makes him worthy of being loved And yet wilson loves him above all without house having to do a single thing . Idc (lying)

[mask131]

Many people have talked about the Japanese influence of the Little Nightmares game - more precisely how the games offered themselves as a nightmarish and twisted Ghibli movie, what Miyazaki would have created for a Silent Hill game.

But I don't see many people talk about the French style and influence of the games...

Yes, I said French. It might surprise you, but one of the main sources for the aesthetic and tone of the games is a set of French works. The creators of Little Nightmares have been pretty clear in interviews that the movies of Jean-Pierre Jeunet were a big design and concept influence for the game. Now, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is most famous for his slightly absurd romance-comedy Amélie Poulain... But it was his two other most famous movies that inspired the Little Nightmares world.

On one side: Delicatessen

In a post-apocalyptic world, a building stands alone in the middle of the ruins of a city... A block of flats, each one hosting weird and excentric people: a tenant lives in water-filled rooms infested with snails and frogs, another keeps trying to kill herself with incredibly complex and extravagant suicide plans, others are dedicated creators of moo boxes... But all of them live under the domination and tyrany of the butcher whose shop is located at the base of the building: he is the one who provides the meat for all those who live above him, and thus has full authority over them, and nobody asks where it comes from...

One day, a new janitor arrives. A naive former circus clown, a gentle but farcical man who soon falls in love with the shy and secluded musician-daughter of the butcher. Unfortunately, it proves to be an actual fairytale as the janitor didn't just fell in love with a princess high up in her tower... but with the daughter of the ogre, for all the janitors before our protagonist mysteriously disappeared right with every new "meat supplies" delivery... The sweet and touching budding romance of these two youths in a no man's land soon turns into horror as the shadow of the butcher's cleaver falls upon them, and as the madness of the buildings' tenants keep increasing to absurd levels.

And what seems to be the couple's only hope? A secret network of sewer-dwelling, vegetarian terrorists that the butcher's daughter contacts in secret...

On the other side: La cité des enfants perdus

While Delicatessen was a dark comedy (or an humoristic horror, depending on which side you take it), The City of Lost Children is much harder to categorize as Jeunet (and Marc Caro, who also co-created Delicatessen) fully delve into the urban nightmare, the obscure poetry, the dark fairytale, the disturbing children story.

La Cité des Enfants perdus is the story of a mad scientist who lives in a derelict oil platform at sea, surrounded by various "failed" experiments (idiotic clones, a dwarf-wife, a brain in a jar). Unable to dream, he decides to capture the children of the nearest portuary town, in order to steal their dreams for himself - and he performs these crimes with the help of a strange cult of one eyed men referred to as the "cyclops".

One day, the scientist kidnaps the little brother of a simple-minded former circus strongman called "One". Determined to find him back, One teams up with miette (Crumb), a clever and cynical street-urchin girl ; however, their quest to find the secret of the Cyclops is made even more complicated by the presence of the Pieuvre (Octopus), cruel and greedy conjoined twins who are the boss of the children-thief network Miette belonged to, and hatch nefarious plans in light of the recent events...

In a way you could say that Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a sort of French Terry Gilliam. He has a very unique and distinctive style when it comes to his movies, something halway between a realistic Guillermo del Toro and a dirty Wes Anderson. His movies are still to this day a weir, but cult, part of French cinema.

And... Little Nightmares borrowed heavily from them. The large One and the little girl Crumb teaming up to save a child from a sea-dwelling villain becomes Six fighting for her life in the sea-faring Maw against the Lady. The butchering cannibalism of Delicatessen can be found back ; the water-infested flat of the elderly frog-raiser can evoke the Granny's quarters, while the strange suicide plans of the depressed tenant evoke the various "puzzles" of the game. The school run by the Octopus (stern school-teachers by day, vicious crime-lords at night) brings back to mind the school of Little Nightmares 2, and so forth and so on. Plus, of course, the strange technology: these two movies thrive on weird contraptions and strange buildings and never-ending pipes and other bizarre soul-sucking machinery, all elements that were very determinant in the visuals of the Little Nightmares universe.

If you ever wondered what a Little Nightmares movie would feel like... These movies could be of some help. Do yourself a marathon of Ghibli movies and Terry Gilliam ones intercut with Jeunet's pieces, and you could recreate yourself a strange Little Nightmares-flavored experience.

[retrosofa]

We got a lot of trivia for Cutie Honey episode 22: “My Beloved Paradise Academy.”

Screenwriter: Masaki Tsuji

Art Director: Iwamitsu Ito

Animation Director: Shinya Takahashi

Director: Kazukiyo Shigeno

The animation director for this episode, Shinya Takahashi, has a history of working on Toei Animation’s early majokko series. He previously did the character designs for Himitsu no Akko-chan, Mahou no Mako-chan, Sarutobi Ecchan, and Mahoutsukai Chappy.

Takahashi would later do animation work for the 1995 PC-FX video game, Cutey Honey FX.

The principal of Paradise Academy is based on the grandfather from Go Nagai’s Kikkai-kun manga, which is also where the characters Alphonne and Pochi originated from. Kikkai-kun’s grandfather also served as the basis for the janitor Kiyohiko Todoroki in the Devilman anime.

The principal was voiced by Isamu Tanonaka, who had filled in for Keiko Yamamoto as Pochi in the previous episode. 

Goemon is based on Goemon Abashiri, the oldest son from the Abashiri Family manga. Goemon’s claim to fame is that he’s a “professional pervert.” Go Nagai’s assistant and good friend Ken Ishikawa was the model for Goemon. While he doesn’t appear in the original Cutie Honey manga, one of Honey’s (female) classmates is based on him. Goemon would make cameo appearances in New Cutey Honey, Re: Cutie Honey, and Cutie Honey Universe. 

Shunji Yamada (later known as Keaton Yamada) voiced Goemon in this episode only, while Sanji Hase played him for the remainder of the series. Hase was previously the King of Manaco in episode 16 and the occasional nameless Panther subordinate.

Naojiro refers to Goemon as "senkou" (先公), which is a rude way of saying "teacher." I suppose the best English equivalent is referring to an educator as "teach."

The “Yoshitune” that Danbei sings about is probably Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a military commander from the late Heian and early Kamakura periods.

Danbei’s “adorable nephew” Naojiro is another character borrowed from Go Nagai’s Abashiri Family. In that series, Naojiro was the second oldest son of the Abashiri family. His unique feature was being a cyborg.

In the original Cutie Honey manga Naojiro does not appear as Danbei’s nephew but instead as a girl named Naoko. Naoko is the gang leader of St. Chapel Academy, much like how Naojiro is the gang leader of Paradise Academy in the anime. According to producer Toshio Katsuta, he wanted to introduce Naojiro as a good contrast to Honey, unlike Seiji who he said was “silly and weak.” 

In this episode only, Naojiro was voiced by Hiroshi Masuoka, who previously voiced Demon General Zannin in Devilman and Hebitsubo in Dororon Enma-kun. For the remainder of the series Naojiro is voiced by an uncredited Shoji Nishizaki, who mostly did voice work in tokusatsu series. 

Naojiro would later make a cameo appearance in the second episode of New Cutey Honey.

While Paradise Academy does not appear in the original Cutie Honey manga, it is very much inspired by Go Nagai’s infamous manga, Harenchi Gakuen. Before he was reinventing the concept of magical girls and giant robots, Go Nagai was stirring up controversy with this 1968 series. Harenchi Gakuen or “Shameless Academy” was one of the first manga to be featured in the popular Weekly Shonen Jump. It featured ridiculous Benny Hill-like antics, excessive nudity, lowbrow toilet humor, crucifixion scenes played for laughs and made a mockery of the Japanese school system. There was such outage towards Harenchi Gakuen, PTA groups actually performed public burnings of the manga. Despite the controversies, Harenchi was immensely popular, which led to live action TV series and films. 

Paradise Academy’s name comes from the Abashiri Family manga. Originally, Paradise Academy was a prison-like middle school for aspiring young assassins and served as the setting for an early arc in the manga. A few of Naojiro’s classmates seen in this episode are taken directly from the Abashiri Family manga as well.

While attempting to evade Naojiro, Honey transforms into members of the baseball club, wrestling club and boxing club. As a boxer, she is only wearing shorts, shoes and boxing gloves. This is exactly how Kikunosuke dresses when she practices boxing in the Abashiri Family manga.

The self-proclaimed “Magician of Hell” was originally designed by Ken Ishikawa, who had her sporting more obvious magician motifs such as a giant top hat and bow tie. The “Great” in her name likely refers to a magician’s title.

Great Claw controlling Naojiro’s comrades with spider-like threads is possibly a reference to the Devilman manga. There are a couple of chapters involving a spider-like demon who controls the students of Nakado Academy and forces them to attack Akira and Miki. There is also an episode of the Devilman TV series which features a demon who controls human-like mannequins with spider threads.

This is also the only episode to not feature Panther Zora or Sister Jill.

That's all for episode 22!

[boymeetsworldconfessions]

ABOUT:

Harvey "Harley" Keiner was the leader of the bullies at John Adams High. His oldest lackey is Frankie and his newest one is Joey. He tried to recruit Shawn, but was thwarted by Cory. In Back 2 School, Cory tried to make friends with him as a way to gain instant popularity but Harley instead chose to target Cory. He refers to Cory as "Johnny Baboon". He is currently a janitor at John Quincy Adams Middle School in New York.

Linda is a girl at John Adams High who dated Eric. In Teacher's Bet, someone at the mall called her a racial slur based on her Japanese ancestory, causing her to break into tears. Watching Eric comfort her, Cory became inspired to read Anne Frank and make a lecture about prejudice. Later, she became a cheerleader, much to Eric's joy. While she is dating Eric, she becomes friends with Morgan, who announces that she likes her when Linda says that she is '15 and three quarters'. Morgan later tries to cheer Linda up when she is upset.

[crowleytwstrp]

Guidelines

Anyone may interact though for anyone wanting to use their oc I do request that anonymous not be used. I want to be certain the actual owner of the character is wanting to interact. I may direct-message any oc-askers if I'm unable to find information about the oc. Linking to a oc's bio or giving a description within the ask about the oc is greatly appreciated.

If the ask doesn't specify who the asker is, I will assume the asker is supposed to be Yuu, the Ramshackle Prefect from another world. If you want thoughts about your oc, please clarify if you mean you want Crowley's thoughts on a being in universe, Crowley's thoughts on a made-up character, or if you're asking the mod for her thoughts. I probably should assume it to be the first option, but sometimes I can get confused.

Hate for Crowley is alright with me as long as it's nothing like a graphic description of gutting the man. I may not respond to any hate sent in as depending on it I might want to hold onto it and make one post for a compilation of general annoyance for the character.

Flirting is alright with me as long as it's sfw and not from a minor nor a student of Night Raven College. This does mean that the asker will need to clarify who the asker is rp-wise. If a pick-up line is sent but no clarification if the asker is supposed to be a student or a teacher or whoever, then it will be deleted.

If any asks sent in have any potentially triggering stuff, such as spiders, which would trigger arachnophobia, I will be reworking the ask. This means I will rewrite the ask into a post. I will tag the asker if it wasn't anonymous so a notification should still reach them. I will put the possible offending material under the cut off / read more section of the post.

Please do look for any warnings on posts with read more before expanding them. I will try to tag and catch any triggering stuff, but I'm not fully aware of all possible upsetting material. If any of my posts have missed any of that, please let me know so I can add trigger warning tags to them. I wish for this to all be a fun and light-hearted role-play blog.

I might switch from styles of using quotation marks when Crowley speaks to no quotation marks at all. No quotation marks usually means it's just Crowley speaking. If I do use quotation marks, that may mean I'm having Ghost Janitor interact as well or it made more sense to do so for me at the time. Sorry if that ends up annoying, I'm a bit new to this so there may be some awkward moments as I figure this out.

I only have access to the English server so please don't request anything that's only out in the Japanese server. This is a sideblog for fun and I wont always react in the way I think Crowley would really behave. I may be silly or ridiculous with how I have Crowley act.

I may not answer asks in a timely manner. I'm prone to bouts of laziness. If you're worried that your ask hasn't been received, you may dm me. Though I'm not sure if this blog can receive dms, so feel free to dm my main/mod blog. If you are dming my main blog about an ask sent here, please let me know you mean an ask sent to this blog.

Mod blog is @axvwriter If anyone wishs to refer to me directly on this blog, they may call me “Axvie” or “Ghost Janitor”.

[calciumcryptid]

Nava Jha

Nava Jha is a Japanese chef, restaurateur, television personality, and writer. He founded his restaurant group Fresh Flavors in XXXX, and opened his signature restaurant the Golden Plate in Tokyo, Japan. He makes a regular appearance on In the Know. He is considered one of the most influential chefs in the world.

APPEARANCE

EARLY LIFE

Nava Jha was born in Tokyo, Japan to two Indian immigrants with his mother working as a janitor at a series of apartment complexes and his father working in a factory. His parents later had another child, Jha's younger sibling Jyoti Jha.

Due to his family's low funds, Nava Jha got experimental with the food they could afford doing all he could to make a dollar store meal a five star experience. His family had nightly family dinners, which contains his fondest memories.

When he was fifteen, his father died in a factory accident and his mother passed away from illness not too long after. Jha didn't continue his education, instead heading straight into the workforce to put food on the table.

CAREER

He started to work at a restaurant and slowly climbed the ranks to Head Chef.

While working there, a producer asked if he would be interested in competing in a reality competitive cooking competition to which he agreed. He participated in the cooking competition, but was eliminated in the third round due to the judges being disgusted at his lack of high quality ingredients despite the meal tasting the same.

Despite being eliminated, he did meet another person in the industry who asked if he would be interested in appearing on the first season of a talk host show as a show personality bartender. He was hesitant, but eventually agreed to try out.

In preparation for his audition, he went against the ordered food and drinks and prepared the talk show hosts favorite foods and drinks instead. On the day of the audition, he was the last one to audition and rolled out his specially prepared meal. While the network wanted to disqualify him, Kofuyo hired him on the spot due to his consideration.

The talk show was later named In the Know, and aired on XXXX. Nava Jha was a regular on the show for the first season, having his own bar set and taking a comedic role on the show as he helped set up jokes and conversations. A notable bit is when a guest said something outrageous, Kofuyo would call Jha to make her a drink as she needed one. Nava's popularity rose during this time, and is often jokingly referred to as the secret co-host by fans due to his chemistry with Kofuyo. In the second and third season, Nava Jha got his own segment that would help mark the beginnings of the morning and night segments of the show with him making a breakfast during the morning and then a drink for the night segments.

During the second season, Jha opened his first restaurant called 'The Golden Plate' to success.

When In the Know was renewed for a fourth season, it was noted by many fans that Nava Jha had been demoted from series regular to recurring guest. In response, Kofuyo shared that Nava Jha had started filming a new show for the network that limited his schedule. It was later revealed that the new show was called Nava Jha and the Flavors of the World, where he traveled from country to country to try and learn how to cook different food. The show recieved postiive reviews, with many noting Nava Jha's eagerness to learn and his respect towards other cultures. At the end of the show, he came back to In the Know where he shared his finds with Kofuyo and the two had a meal with the live audience.

Nava Jha was promoted to regular for the fifth and sixth seasons of In the Know, but was gone for an episode due to serving as a celebrity judge on the same cooking competition he was eliminated from all those years ago. He also was gone from his bar set sometimes due to the network sending him out to different festivals and celebrations around the world to try the food.

When In the Know was renewed for a seventh season, Nava Jha was once again demoted to recurring guest due to going off to film a new show for the network. The show was revealed to be titled 'Finding the Flavor', and it is an American reality television series in which Nava Jha was invited by owns to spend a week with a failing restaurant in an attempt to revive the business. The show was an attempted reboot of the pre-quirk show Kitchen Nightmares. The show was ordered for thirty episodes, but it is notable that only twenty-nine episodes officially aired. The show had a 1:4 ratio, with every failed business Nava Jha exceeded in saving four businesses. At the end of filming, Nava Jha came back to In the Know, and shared food from the restaurants he had saved with Kofuyo.

Nava Jha was promoted to regular again for the eighth season of In the Know, but was joined by a new young apprentice chef and mixologist Maple Hoffman that he had met during his time filming 'Finding the Flavor'. When asked about his new apprentice by Kofuyo, Nava Jha said it was so she didn't feel lonely when he had to go off and film. Later, Maple Hoffman had her first solo food segment while Jha was away judging another cooking competition.

Nava Jha was demoted to recurring guest for the ninth season of In the Know, due to after his engagement special with Koyufo he had become interested in baking. He soon opened his own bakery known as The Golden Whisk, and started a new series for the network called 'Finding the Treat' where he was invited by owners to spend a week with a failing bakery in an attempt to revive the business. The show was ordered for twenty-five episodes, and all episodes aired.

Nava Jha was once again promoted to regular for the tenth season of In the Know, and he revealed in an interview that he'll probably stay at the show for the foreseeable future as he missed the banter and regularity of being a regular.

PERSONAL LIFE

Nava Jha is the older brother of famous streamer and game designer Jyoti Jha; however, Jyoti didn't reveal their family connections until they hit one million subscribers wanting to make their own career on their own merit. The two are now often seen together in Instagram posts, and Jytoi Jha sometimes shares behind the scenes stories of In the Know on their channel.

Nava Jha and Koyufo were noted for their chemistry since the first season of In the Know, and in XXXX the two revealed they had started dating. A few years later the two got engaged, and a year later got married. The two had an engagement special that aired in place of an episode of In the Know where the two went around to different bakeries and tasted different cakes and learned how to bake them. When asked about children, the two said they had a discussion about kids but with their busy schedules it was not viable to start a family at the moment.

In an interview with the two, it was revealed Koyufo was the one to ask Jha out. She said that he always gave her leftovers to take home since she often didn't have time to make herself dinner. One day when he gave her leftovers, she realized she has feelings for him and asked him out.

Nava Jha has shared their quirk on television, saying it was called Recipe and it made it so he could identify all the components it took to make something. At first he thought it applied just to food, but later learned it applied to other things. It does not tell him how to make something though just the component and amount.

PUBLIC IMAGE

Nava Jha is often regarded as the 'Anti-Ramsey', a reference to a pre-quirk chef. This title comes from his more calm approach to teaching, and when helping failing restaurants does his best to keep the restaurant theming in tact even if it conflicts with his personal tastes.

When questioned about the unreleased episode of Finding the Flavor, Nava Jha shared that he felt personally uncomfortable airing the episode due the sheer amount of abuse displayed. Later, Maple Hoffman revealed she was from the restaurant in the unaired episode, and was grateful Jha got her out of a horrible situation.

Nava Jha is a non-playable character in the game Hero Shock in the Japan Campaign Path. He is found at the In the Know set where he gives out a quest asking the player to bring him ingredients for Madame Magic's surprise birthday party. At the end of the quest, he gives the player his bond item called the Golden Knife of Flavor. When the Golden Knife of Flavor is equipped it helps regenerate health. When the Golden Knife of Flavor is equipped on Madame Magic, his bond effects will come into play regenerating both health and energy and giving her random buffs. He was released in the mini update Magic of Cooking alongside Madame Magic and the introduction of a cooking mechanic.

Nava Jha's net worth is about sixty-five million dollars.

TAGLIST

@insomniac-jay

This is really late and for that I apologize.

[dragomer]

Headcanon real names for The Maw crew.

The Janitor: Technically we do know his real name is Roger according to his name tag in the game’s data mine, so this is more of a headcanon last name. So The Janitor’s full name to me is Roger Lang. The word Lang is long in German.

The Twin Chefs: I imagine their names being Yub and Zen. Why I choose these specifically? Because their names are kind of a reference to Spirited Away. Yub being short for Yubaba and Zen being short for Zeniba.

The Lady: I imagine her name being Yvonne Akuma. There’s two reasons why I chosen this name for her. Number one, because it has a nice ring to it. Number two, because of their meanings. Yvonne in Hebrew means gift or grace of god. Which seems fitting imo. Akuma means Devil in Japanese and also sounds kinda fitting for The Lady.

Ooooh, those are some nice headcanon, pretty detailed too!

[moonlight404-translates]

A3! Izumida Azami | R - Fallen Blood | Translation

Quote: “A janitor needs cleaning implements, right?”

Thanks for sharing the backstage with me RL, and thanks A4! friends for your help with a line!! (´｡• ᵕ •｡`)

--------------------------

Disclaimer: Neither English nor Japanese is my native language, but I did my best with the translation. If you find any mistakes, feel free to tell me. By the way, Director’s name will be Izumi.

Inventions Survey /1

Taichi: A-chan, your inventor role in this play is so, so cool~!  Azami: Yeah, but what is kinda good for its role study?  Taichi: Isn’t inventing something perfect for it?  Azami: Inventing… that’s like making a thing, right? Taichi: Exactly! You can get a hint for your role by creating something. Even a small one could work! Yuki: Ah, you’re still awake. Don’t you say lack of sleep is bad for the skin? You should go to sleep soon.  Taichi: Nice timing, Yuki-chan! Is there something you want that A-chan can make?   Yuki: Something I want to make it? Azami: Ah, you see—

Yuki: Oh, I get it now. Role study, huh? Taichi: Something practical could work~! Or, if you have a request, you can also say it! Azami: There’s a limit to what I can make, though.  Yuki: Hmm… I want a new sewing machine? Taichi: A sewing machine!? Azami: Hey, did you hear what I said, Yuki-san? Yuki: I’m joking.  Taichi: You really caught me…!  Yuki: If you’re that lost about what to make, why don’t you make a survey asking everyone what they want?  Azami: A survey?  Yuki: Yeah. I made one for my kunoichi role study during the ninja play.  Taichi: Ah~! I remember that!  Azami: I see…  Azami: Well, I don’t know if there’ll be proper answers, but it can be a reference. I’m gonna try it out.

Azami: Do you have a minute? Tsuzuru: What’s wrong, Azami? Azami: I want you to answer this survey to take as a reference for my role study.  Homare: Oh, and about what is it?  Azami: On this paper, you can write something practical or something you want me to make. Citron: Oh~! It sounds fun~!  Banri: Anything can go there?  Azami: Whatever you think I can make is good.  Azuma: I understand. Fufu, now what should I write?

Inventions Survey /2

Taichi: I brought the spring troupe’s surveys!  Yuki: Here are the summer troupe’s ones.  Azami: Thank you. We gathered all the answers. Now, let’s check them.  Taichi: Then, let’s start~! The first one says… “something to stop the snores from a roommate.”  Azami: Hah? That’s from Banri, no doubt… Taichi: Hmm. Ban-chan has tried many ways to stop them. It seems hard to invent something for it.  Yuki: Let’s leave that one aside for now. Next one. “An item to make me the one for them (but only me).” Azami: …What do they think an inventor is? A wizard or something…?  Taichi: Then, next one! “A triangle thought up by Azami!” Azami: Yeah, that’s so loose. I mean, that doesn’t seem like an invention, does it? Next, please. Yuki: “A robot that goes to the company instead of me.” Azami: I told them to write something that I can make!  Taichi: “A robot that automatically cleans and does the laundry and also writes the documents for me.” Yuki: …Yep, he’s a useless manager. Azami: And no one hears what others say!

Azami: All of them are nonsense. I can’t use any.  Yuki: Well, most of the answers in my survey were like that too.  Azami: Sigh… To be honest, I can’t come up with a helpful invention easier for me, either… Taichi: Ah! What about Sakyo-nii’s one, A-chan? Azami: Haah? Why that guy— Azami: And he wrote “a backscratcher.” What is he? An old man? Yuki: However, it might work as something practical.  Azami: No way. Besides…  Azami: …!  Azami: Yeah… you know what? I’m gonna go with this one.  Taichi: Huh? Azami: Now that I chose that, let’s quickly prepare the tools.

Azami: —Hey you, shitty blonde four eyes. Here, I give you this. Sakyo: Aah? Hey, don’t throw away your things.  Azami: I took the time to make that, don’t complain about it.  Sakyo: This is… a backscratcher?  Azami: You really are an old man.  Sakyo: I just put something easy to make and understand.  Sakyo: However, is this well made? Let’s find it out now…  Sakyo: …? Sakyo: Hey, this... I was wondering why my itch isn't going away but now that I look at it, isn't the tip made of rubber?! Azami: Pft… Sakyo: Bon, you…  Sakyo: Sigh… If you can make this to annoy me, use those abilities for something else!

----------------------

Note: Yuki’s Shinobi Card Backstage has his survey experience. 

[yourehomesickiunderstand]

About/Rules/Verses

Hello, and welcome to my Bofur RP blog. This post is a HUGE wall of text, if you are on desktop and would like to see it a little tidier, please see the separate pages in the sidebar to the right. 

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About the Mun

1. Firstly I am over 30, own a house, have a husband, 1 baby, 2 cats, and a wealth of commitments and responsibilities. I will do my best to reply in a timely manner, but will state up front that sometimes life gets in the way.

2. I am in EST and work M-F from 9-5, plus a half hour commute. Please understand that I can not post from work, and will not be posting during those times.

3. In addition, I am Mom to a very active toddler who is my priority over writing and who’s nap schedule tends to dictate when I can post.

4. My native language is English, though I can understand French, and a little bit of Spanish and Japanese. Don’t bank on me carrying on a decent conversation in any of those languages though.

About the Blog

1. When I first set up this blog I didn’t realize that secondary blogs can’t follow back, ask, or submit. My main blog name is Saffity, so if you see that blog follow you, it’s me. If I send an ask or submit, I will mention this blog name so you don’t get confused.

2. My inbox, ask, etc. is open. Please feel free to write me any starters, questions, or whatever.

3. Please send any critiques or suggestions to me. I’ve been on Tumblr forever, but have never really been a poster. If you see me doing basic noob mistakes with my posts that can be easily fixed, please let me know.

4. I will be tracking #yourehomesickiunderstand so please use that tag with our threads.

Mun’s Playing Style

1. I prefer my Bofur straight. I understand Boffins and other ships and have no qualms with them, I’ve been known to enjoy a good fluff fic once in a while, but this Bofur is straight.

2. Please send me an ask or fan mail if you would like our characters to have an already established relationship, I’m totally cool with it. I respond to all cannon characters as known as it shows in the books or movies, but if you are an OC and want something other than a “Nice to meet you” please let me know first.

3. I’m willing to do some fluffies, but not full on smut, if the thread calls for smut (which will often happen), I’ll fade to black when I’ve gone as far as I feel comfortable with. (Don’t worry, I’ll fade when I’m ready, you’ll never get any angry messages from me about going too far.)

4. Bofur here is multiverse, au, indie, whatever you want to call it. I’m sure he’ll fit into whatever crossover or world you decide to drop him in, he’s very easy going after all.

5. I tend to write in the past tense, third person. If you’d prefer a different style, just let me know and I’ll try to accommodate.

6. I’m bad with my images, so bad! I’m still figuring everything out, so if I’ve royally screwed something up, please let me know and I will delete and repost correctly.

7. I am super okay with editing anything I write if it doesn’t jive with your character or where you want the plot to go, please just let me know.

8. I mainly play on mobile, as such, I’m not able to cut my posts down. Please do so whenever you feel the need/want, I won’t be upset.

Head Cannons that go across all verses

1. Bofur has a Northern Irish accent and his hat, always his hat.

2. Bofur has named his hat Bundushathur, which in Khuzdul means “Cloudyhead” and will sometimes refer to his hat as a sleeping rabbit. If Khuzdul does not exist in the verse (like Modern) then the hat is called Cloudyhead and still referred to as a rabbit.

3. Bofur is the everyman, he isn’t special or high born. He is good natured, friendly, and the world’s best wingman, even if it means connecting someone he pines after with someone else. He would rather see them happy and keep their friendship than try to force his feelings on them or lose their friendship because of his pride.

4. The main characteristic about Bofur is that he is unimportant in the hierarchy of society.

Main Verse - The Hobbit/LOTR

Bofur is 4'6" but fairly thin for a dwarf.

Bofur is a dwarf who’s family line comes from Moria. He is of the mining class. He was born and raised in Ered Luin with his brother. Shortly after Bofur became an adult, his parents died, leaving him to raise his brother. Shortly after that, Bifur was injured in an orc attack. Bofur and Bombur took Bifur in, however there were a number of difficult years as they all got used to Bifur’s new personality.

Once Bifur was stable enough, the brothers decided it would be a good idea to head out and find new customers for their skills. They ended up at Bree, opening up a shop to sell Bifur’s fabulous toys, and offer tinkering services.

During their stay in Bree, Bombur got married to a passing female dwarf and moved his overly large family near the shop. Bifur and Bofur live together in living quarters at the back of the shop, Bombur lived with them until he got married.

Bofur travels around Middle Earth, usually west of the Misty Mountains, and most often between Bree and Ered Luin by way of the Shire. He collects supplies, sells wares, and visits many friends and family that are about the lands.

When Thorin calls for assistance in taking back Erebor, Bofur and his kin lock up their shop and head for the Shire.

After the quest they settle in Erebor, though Bofur heads back to Bree to close up their shop and settle accounts prior to settling in for a long life of enjoying his 14th share of the treasure.

Head Cannons that can totally change if my partner is a Bifur or Bombur

1. Bofur’s father was killed in Moria at the battle of Azanulbizar, his Mother died in an Orc attack when Bofur was in his 40s. He has taken care of his brother ever since.

2. Bofur took Bifur in after Bifur was orphaned as well, the three are like brothers, having shared the experience of loss and growing up together.

3. Bombur stopped speaking after their mother died. Bofur’s tried to get him to speak, and has managed to get him to speak sometimes, but usually just small replies and often with much prodding. Bifur and Bombur use the same sign language to speak to each other and those who don’t speak Khuzdul. Bofur takes care of both of them and is the one who speaks to customers.

Modern Verse

High School

Bofur is not popular, though he’s friendly and basically knows everyone. He enjoys shop class, classical music, and historical literature.

Studious and hard working, Bofur can often be found with his nose in a book, when not sitting on the bleachers playing the tin flute he always has on him.

College Student

Bofur is a TA in college. His major is historical literature, and his goal is to eventually become a professor. His passion is delving into historical fanatasy from cultures other than England and Western Europe.

He enjoys learning languages in order to read what he is researching in its original state.

General Modern Adult

In most modern adult verses Bofur is a general labourer, most often a janitor. If he is a teacher, he teaches music and drama.

Ice Cream Shop

Bofur runs a small home made ice cream shop that is part of a coffee shop run with a companion or family member (his partner can be any member of the company). He makes a variety of flavours, and offers lactose and gluten free varieties.

He prides himself on being able to guess his customers’ favourites on sight (like the movie Chocolat).

Marvel

Bofur is a janitor within shield. He can be found on the helicarrier, within the Avengers training base, or basically anywhere the heroes may be destroying things that need to be cleaned up.

While he is quiet and without powers, he has wisdom and a patient ear to lend to those supers who require a moment to vent.

Star Trek

This is the only verse where Bofur stands out. Bofur is a red shirt, but by some miraculous turn of events, he has gone on a number of away missions and made it back alive. Poor Bofur would love to get off the enterprise with his life, and shirt, in tact, but it appears some of the higher officers like to see him lose his mind and suggest him for more away missions, even if only in jest.

Head cannons that exist in all modern verses

1. Bofur and his family are from Northern Ireland, though Bofur travels around, goes to school abroad, and in general can pop up anywhere in the world.

2. Bofur is short for a male - 5'6", with a stocky build, and fairly strong.

3. Bofur’s younger brother Bombur is still at home (or married with kids depending on their age).

4. Bofur’s parents took Bifur in after he got injured during Armed Forces training, as Bofur’s family lives closer to the rehab resources that Bifur requires.

[maxwell-grant]

Downfall of a Dark Avenger Part 2: Shadows of Manhattan

Having finished reading Al Ewing’s El Sombra trilogy and having had enough time to digest it, I’d like to talk about the trajectory of it’s titular protagonist, the character and series’s relationship with it’s influences. Relating to The Shadow and Zorro and general pulp archetypes, and also the way it incorporates Astro Boy’s Pluto into the mix.

This part is focused on Gods of Manhattan and El Sombra’s first appearences in Pax Omega and the ways in which the urban vigilante manifests itself in the books. 

In Gods of Manhattan, El Sombra takes a backseat to it’s central players, Doc Thunder and The Blood-Spider. I’ve mentioned how Thunder, while ostensibly a Doc Savage/Superman amalgam, also combines aspects that allow the character to condense the entire history of the superman into a single being, but to a character very much centered on the future and in progressive ideals, described in the book as someone considered both the city’s ultimate savior as well as viewed as "a faggot, a liberal and a miscegenationist”. In that regard, the Blood-Spider becomes his opposite. Perhaps the most comprehensive savaging of the dark detective/The Shadow ever put on paper, that has a larger point behind the questions and criticisms it brings up to what this kind of figure can be. 

"You can hardly have a war on crime unless you are the one defining what a crime is. First rule of the war on crime: everyone is guilty or something"

Us am vigilantes! Am us not men? Us use violence to effect social change! Am us not men? Us bring terror to underclass, make streets safer for overclass! Am us not men? Am us not men?

Making them loved rather than feared. Having them fight crime, or the right kind of crime, at least. Created a persona designed to appeal to the worst in people, to bring the citizens of New York around to his cause, his war on crime, which would, of course, then become a war against ‘urban crime’. Or some other little euphemism. ‘Inhuman’, for example. Sounds a lot more relatable than subhuman, doesn’t it? Comes to the same thing, though.

Although The Blood-Spider is an evil take on The Shadow, most of his character traits are taken from characters that followed him. He’s got the moniker, savagery, fright tactics and branded murders of The Spider, he climbs buildings and has a civilian identity akin to Spider-Man’s, with constant name references to characters like Stacey, Jonah and a redhead named Mary Watson, with him sharing a name with Peter Parker as well as Batman villain Jonathan Crane, he’s got Rorschach monologues that are echoed by his associates past his demise in white supremacist organizations dedicated to carrying off Spider’s legacy, predating HBO Watchmen’s take on Rorschach legacy. If Doc Thunder is all about taking the superhero’s past to create a better future with it, Blood-Spider takes the future of the urban vigilante and uses it as a conduit to enact a barbaric and reactionary agenda in service of undoing everything Thunder stands for, even before he’s revealed to be a Nazi agent. 

Blood-Spider is what happens when the absolute worst aspects of said characters are brought to the forefront and twisted by a dose of reality. He’s to The Shadow what Plutonian is to Superman, the most sour way said character and legend can be twisted into something horrendous. He’s the Doutrinador in a fedora, everything I vehemently argue that The Shadow wasn’t, and yet seems sadly ever closer to as more and more comics dehumanize the character. He’s Howard Chaykin’s Shadow, naked and raw and exposed for what it ultimately is. An insult and a wake-up call, if a necessary one.

In fact, said poisoning of a legend is explicitly a plot point in the book, because the book establishes that, before The Blood-Spider, the city’s main vigilante used to be a man by the name of Blue Ghost, friend of Doc Thunder and, although a mysterious public figure, still firmly on the side of good. Unfortunately, moral victories aside, “good” alone doesn’t cut it in the world of El Sombra. 

You took a look at the Blue Ghost - mysterious masked avenger, operatives all over the place, big fan-following with the working classes, and you figured...we need one of those. Just take away the Japanese orphan kid and replace him with a foxy Aryan chick.

Blue Ghost is almost a textbook Spirit analogue, even defined as being beat up a lot as his main asset, except here, he’s placed as Doc’s counterpart that died before the story began and is now replaced by a darker and more horrendous counterpart, and because The Spirit was influenced by The Shadow, it opens a roundabout connection. You can read this as a comparison between the shift from Adam West’s Batman to Frank Miller’s Batman, or a comparison between The Shadow and earlier more straightforward pulp vigilantes like Jimmie Dale, or a comparison between the pulp/radio Shadow and later iterations of him or analogues to his archetype that upped the nastier aspects. Again, nothing in El Sombra is ever quite just one thing. 

And at last we come to El Sombra, who spends much of the book caught in between the duels of Doc, Untergang and players in between. And it’s interesting that here, while El Sombra’s final victories over the story’s major conflict lie in his willingness to team up with Doc, despite knowing of his origins as a Nazi weapon, his victories over Blood-Spider instead come from turning tricks of The Shadow against him. First, when he discovers Spider’s true nature, spying on him by pulling a Fritz the Janitor. And then in the finale, when he schools Spider on what a real shadowy avenger looks like. 

"Amigo...that's my sword"

The voice came from the darkness above them, where the gaslight did not reach. The Spider's blood ran cold for a long moment, and then he grabbed hold of his other gun, tearing it from its holster and raising it to fire a volley of bullets into the darkness. "Where are you? Show yourself!" he hissed, turning in place, the gun raised to fire at the slightest sound or movement.

"You're not the only one who can hide in the shadows, my friend. I've got very good at it, over the years."

"Show yourself!" Another volley of shots, with no result. Was he throwing his voice? Was he everywhere at once? Was he a shadow himself? A ghost?

The voice echoed from another place now, continuing his speech exactly where he had left off. And still that mocking voice echoed from the shadows above.

"See, I didn't know if you were a good guy or a bad guy. I mean, sure, you killed people, and you were kind of a dick about it, you know? But I didn't know if you were one of the bastards. I didn't know if you needed to die or not, amigo."

The gun clicked empty. He was out of bullets. He turned again, and there was the man in the red mask. Just standing there, in the middle of the concourse. His smile didn't look human. And his eyes. Oh, his terrible eyes...

"Stay back." The Spider whispered, and his voice sounded in his ears like a frightened, animal thing, waiting to curl up and die in its hole.

The man in the red mask only laughed. A rich, deep, joyous laugh, a laugh that echoed and filled the whole station, bouncing from pillar to pillar, careening through the great vaulted arches. Such a laugh!

Then the laughter stopped, and he fixed the Blood-Spider with a look that would freeze the fires of Hell.

And suddenly - quite suddenly - there was no Blood-Spider. There was only Parker Crane, the Nazi. Parker Crane, the traitor. Who thought he could destroy America, and only managed to destroy himself. Parker Crane. Just a man wearing a mask. He ran, and left the sword behind him.

"Nice trick," Doc murmured, turning to the masked man. "Throwing your sword from up on the balcony - good aim, by the way - then throwing your voice and a little mental suggestion to make him think you were up in the arches where he'd been. Where did you learn that?"

The masked man shrugged, lifting up his weapon. "In the desert. You can learn a lot in the desert, if you put your mind to it."

By the story’s end, once Lars Lomax, Thunder’s arch-enemy and Lex Luthor, takes center stage as it’s ultimate threat, Parker Crane is left a traumatized, broken shell unable to even move, utterly stripped of any mystique or power that his mask and guns may have brought him. And in the end, El Sombra finds him, neutralized and no longer a threat to anyone. And he makes his choice.

El Sombra knew what it was to hate, to hate so hard and so long that you knew nothing else, to hate so strongly that it crossed that line into something beyond reason.

He lifted his sword, resting the blade in his palm for a moment, considering. Crane only stared, weeping and making his soft, mad noises. El Sombra sighed, shaking his head. "You know, I don't know if I can kill a guy who's already dead. Even if he is one of the bastards."

"Don't let him in here." Murmured Crane, his eyes wide.

"Shhh, I won't let him in," smiled El Sombra in response, trying to be reassuring. "You'll never have to face him again. I promise. It's okay, amigo. It's okay."

It was strange. He knew he should feel hate for Parker Crane. It was Djego's job to bear things like pity and doubt, to feel sorrow and shame. That was Djego's role in their team of one. El Sombra was there to take never-ending revenge and to laugh and to never look back. But to know that his murder of Heinrich Donner - his righteous kill - had resulted in so much harm coming to so many... and now to see the leader of Undergang, the man he'd come to New York to kill, just an empty, broken madman, a shell of a person... El Sombra wondered if he was changing.

"Don't," whispered Crane, a tear rolling down his cheek. "Don't let him back in."

El Sombra smiled, placing a hand on his shoulder. "It's okay, amigo. I'm going to go and make sure nobody ever needs to see him again. And I couldn't have done it without you." He squeezed lightly. "You didn't mean to, but you did some good. Remember that."

Then, gently, he pushed the tip of the sword through the front of Crane's skull and into his brain.

He was not incapable of pity. But he was who he was, and he did what he did.

And broken or not, the bastards had to die.

We’ve seen El Sombra struggle and be faced with choices, choices between Djego and El Sombra, choices between kindness and violence, between peace and conflict. We’ve seen the conflict in his soul between things that he knows are right, because Djego is a good man with a good soul who wants good things for himself and others, and things he knows he must do, because he is El Sombra and El Sombra was created to kill the bastards that brought his world to ruin and therefore it’s what he must always do. And in the end, El Sombra is simply stronger. He has to be. But strength and violence and hatred can only get one so far. 

Gods of Manhattan is the trilogy’s moral compass, the book that most clearly defines the morality the series operates on. And in between the spectrums of justice embodied by Doc and Crane’s approach, between the two urban avengers in The Blue Ghost and Blood-Spider, El Sombra made his choice. And it’s the first choice that dooms him.

Enter Pax Omega, and we learn that, 4 years since the previous book's events, El Sombra joined a squad of agents called Yankee Bravo Seven, who work for an organization named STEAM, who enact missions against Nazis to turn the tides of war. He is joined by several other types of characters, including The Blood Widow, Crane’s former assistant Marlene Lang now having taken up the moniker (just as Nita van Sloan did for The Spider, even with the “Widow” prefix). We see that El Sombra has joined a team of bantering heroes and even formed a friendly rivalry with a man named Savate, modeled after Batroc the Leaper. 

But we see that the hunger for vengeance still burns, still burns beyond reason, restless because it’s been 4 years and the war still isn’t over and Hitler still isn’t dead by his sword. And it’s that restlessness that again dooms him, when he once again makes the wrong choice and betrays leader Jack Scorpio, Scorpio who had personally brought him on board and gave him the best shot he ever had at getting to Hitler. 

El Sombra frowned. "We need to make our move now."

Scorpio shook his head. "Not yet."

"What?" El Sombra looked incredulous.

"Wait for my signal, I said! Damn it, I need you to trust me!" Jack Scorpio reached up to brush the back of his finger across his forehead, and realised he was sweating. 

Through his special glasses, El Sombra's aura was glowing an angry, pulsing red, like a throbbing vein. "Just...trust me. I'm asking you to hold back for just five minutes. There's more going on here than you know."

El Sombra just stared at him, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a cold snarl.

"Trust me. That's all I ask." Jack Scorpio looked into the blazing eyes behind the bloodstained mask, and spoke softly, soothingly, almost desperately. "Can you just hold back for one minute?"

The eyes behind the mask narrowed.

"Can you?"

PERSONNEL FILE: DJEGO "EL SOMBRA". TO EYES ONLY: THIS INDIVIDUAL IS HIGHLY DANGEROUS. IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED HE NOT BE INCLUDED IN ANY OPERATIONS CLASSIFIED ABOVE TOP SECRET OR HIGHER. (I'll take the risk - J.S)

El Sombra spat in Scorpio's face.

"Chinga tu madre."

Then he drew his sword and leaped down into the fray.

After the mission is over, with the base destroyed and a major victory secured, although with Jack Scorpio having been killed, the team disbands. El Sombra continues to wander the forests near the Luftwaffe base for about two weeks, killing as many Nazis as he can, until an explosion blast hits near him, knocking away his mask and portions of his leg and arm, and rendering him unconscious for 8 months. By the time he wakes up, the war has ended, and so has El Sombra for the past 7 years.

Djego was afforded the best of medical care at the hospital in Venice. El Sombra was nowhere to be found.

His mask had been torn off in the explosion, along with some of the meat of his leg and arm. He walked stiffly, now, with a pronounced limp, and his left arm was all but useless, hanging limply at his side. The Wildcat crew had salvaged his sword, but Djego had little interest in using it.

Gradually, he regained his mobility. The back of his head itched constantly, and he suffered from horrendous mood swings, when he would rage against the Fuhrer and the bastards, or weep helplessly, like a child. But gradually, he found his personality stabilising in the gentle, antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. He found that Djego - so long despised as a weakling, a coward and a fool - was capable of a kind of gentle, melancholic wit that made him popular.

Djego healed and grew, and the itch in the back of his skull began to subside, as El Sombra relinquished his grip.

Djego felt his heart seize in his chest. The cloth was missing a scrap at the end, and there was mud ground into the fabric along with the old bloodstains; but it had two evenly-spaced holes in it, and was unmistakably a mask. It seemed to be looking at him.

He takes up gardening and establishes himself in the city of Brandenberg, he becomes a fixture of the city and a friend of it, he enters a relationship, and El Sombra never appears again.

Until a mysterious stranger named Leonard Lorraine, walks through his door one day, saying he’s got a mission to fulfill, and hands him his mask. And, once again, El Sombra is simply stronger, and he makes the wrong choice again. 

Djego shook his head and tried to step back from it, but his legs wouldn't move.

"No," he whispered. "No. Please"

"I was happy," pleaded Djego. "Doesn't that matter to you?" He picked up the cloth in trembling fingers, looking into the empty eyeholds. "Doesn't that mean anything?"

There was no answer. The patrons of the bierkeller did not even notice anything was happening.

"I was happy," Djego choked, and then, in one spasmodic motion, he pulled the mask onto his face, and secured it tightly, so that the knot once again rested in the back of his head, where it belonged: so tightly that it might never come off again.

El Sombra looked at his hands.

He prodded his belly, amused at the rounded shape of it, and took a couple of steps back from the bar. The limp was gone.

He laughed, very softly, so as not to disturb the patrons.

Djego and Lorraine walk through the desolate streets of Berlin, which in the years since has completely sealed itself from the outside world through an impossibly thick dome, and Djego discovers the city completely bereft of life, with only a few lobotomized robotic citizens aimlessly wandering and chewing on the mountains of corpses in the city, as their Nazi ideology reached it’s inevitable outcome of total annihilation of any and all that the party could find an excuse to slaughter in the name of purity, which eventually included it’s few remaining members. In this world, Hitler has been a brain inside a robotic contraption ever since 1945, and it’s amidst this scenario that El Sombra, while thinking about how his final confrontation with Hitler would play out, eventually finds what’s left of Hitler. 

All around them, there were the sounds of machinery, but the Mecha-Fuhrer was completely silent, utterly motionless. In the centre of its chest rested a tank of toxic green fluid, and on the surface of the fluid, a human brain floated, like the corpse of a goldfish.

It was quite dead.

El Sombra stared at the Fuhrer for a long moment. Eventually, he spoke, and his voice was cracked and raw, and choked with rage. "Is...is this a joke?"

De Lareine smiled his terrible smile. "The Fuhrer's body needed a great deal of maintenance and repair, you know. After two years, one of the processes delivering oxygen to his brain failed...and there was nobody left to repair it. He died, slowly." There would have been some pain, at the end".

El Sombra slammed his fist into the great iron throne on which the massive body sat, shattering his knuckles and tearing the skin from them. He didn't seem to notice. "Some pain," he choked, through gritted teeth."

El Sombra was still staring into the empty, dead eyes of the Fuhrer.

El Sombra again chooses poorly. It’s this moment, above all else, that truly damns him to his fate, as we come to see what is it exactly that a persona created for the purpose of vengeance has, when said vengeance is robbed from it. Like Parker Crane, his persona crumbles completely to expose the petty, ugly little feelings that drove it to such grandstanding antics in the first place, and the allmighty El Sombra is exposed for the all-too human failings that damned him once and for all.

"This isn't right," he said, eventually, in a strangled voice. "How...how can it end like this?"

"Why shouldn't it?" De Lareine shrugged. "Here's a thought. Maybe, despite his twenty-year tantrum and all his dressing up, spoilt little Djego is not the centre of the universe -"

El Sombra turned, face red, tears streaming from his eyes, and charged at De Lareine, slashing his sword. El Sombra crashed down onto the floor, into the soot scattered about, as De Lareine walked around him.

"Did you really believe Adolf Hitler would wait around for your sword? Did you not imagine that it might be better for him to seal himself off in a hole to die, instead of murdering and enslaving continents until you finally got around to him? Did you think you were the hero of your own little story, El Sombra, with your mask and your laugh and your-"

"Shut up!" El Sombra cried out, scrambling to his feet, the sword shaking in his hand, tears and snot running down his face. "He was mine! He was mine to kill!" He lifted the sword, the tip trembling. "Bring him back," he screamed, "do you hear me? Bring him back to life!"

De Lareine had to laugh at that.

And in the end, El Sombra is crushed, spiritually and physically as his spine is shattered by Lareine, who begins to experiment on him as he lays dying, ready to fulfill fate’s greater purpose for El Sombra. Ready to become not just the perfect machine Pasito’s conquerors intended, but a superior design. Ready to abandon his former life, ready to abandon everything that defined him, ready to shed any and all traces of Zorro and Shadow and pulp hero in his system, because the age of pulp heroes and superheroes has passed. 

The metal man emerged from his hole, dragging the corpse of the Fuhrer behind him.

The brain in the metal man's chest would, perhaps, live for thousands of years. He wondered how he would spend the time.

He remembered little of his former life; he had been a man named El Sombra, or perhaps Djego. He had been stupid - he realised that now - but that was something he would never be again.

Apart from that, there was only a succession of faces, the memory of laughter and of a final, awful betrayal that had destroyed him. But there was also the sense that a great and terrible mission had ended at last, and it was time for a new life to begin.

The metal man took a last look back at the great dome of Fortress Berlin. Somewhere in there, the Leopard Man was hunting, freed from his own mission. And in the Fuhrer's old office, the empty, lifeless clay of El Sombra - or was it Djego? - lay, discarded, like a butterfly's cocoon.

The metal man thought on this, as the Fuhrer rusted at his feet and the tanks began to approach from over the hills ahead.

He would need a new name.

It’s now the age of Pluto.

[dialovers-translations]

Diabolik Lovers DRAMA CD: English Translation Masterlist [LUNATIC PARADE + VERSUS III + SADISTIC SONG]

Important notes

-> Huge shout-out to anshiva for compiling a list with all of the Japanese titles of the Drama CDs. I used this as a base/reference to make my own Masterlist.

-> I will only be including my OWN translations on these lists.

-> This list is a WIP and new links will be added as I translate more drama CDs.

ll DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE ll

001. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE Gentei Tokuten Drama CD “Diabolik Aquatic Showtime!”

002. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE Yoyaku Tokuten Drama CD “The 12 Vampires and the Mysterious Chocolate Factory!”

003. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE Animate Tokuten Drama CD ”A message to all guests. Leave the hotel at once. Furthermore, listen to the staff’s orders at all costs.  ~ Hotel Mondstein ・The King of Founders & The Lazy Man are in Charge of All Rooms ~”

004. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE Stellaworth Tokuten Drama CD ”A Charming Invitation ~Sudden Fluffiness~”

005. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE Imajin Webshop Tokuten Drama CD ”Being a Popular ★ Guy is Rough ~Greetings from Inside the Kigurumi~”

006. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE Imajin Webshop Tokuten Drama CD ”The Youngest Child’s Agony ~Shuu VS Ruki, the Older Brothers Guide to a Succesful Banquet”

007. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE SKiT Dolce Tokuten Drama CD ”Charm the Hearts of the Visitors!? ~ The Legendary Performer-Janitor~”

008. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE Sofmap Tokuten Drama CD ”This Afternoon at 3 PM, a Certain Parade Commences ~The Gorgeous Waiter~”

009. DIABOLIK LOVERS LUNATIC PARADE WonderGOO Tokuten Drama CD  “Tumult at the Lost Child Center ~Don’t be too Childish~”

ll DIABOLIK LOVERS DO-S KYUUKETSU VERSUS III ll

001. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Vol.1 Ayato VS Carla 

002. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Vol.2 Laito VS Shin

003. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Vol.3 Subaru VS Kou    

004. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Vol.4 Reiji VS Ruki

005. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Vol.5 Shuu VS Yuma

006. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Vol.6 Kanato VS Azusa

007. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Animate Tokuten Drama CD ”Agricultural Management, the Vampire Way! ~When Disaster Strikes, a Storm Whips Up~”

008. DIABOLIK LOVERS Do-S Kyuuketsu VERSUS Ⅲ Tower Records Tokuten Drama CD ”Ryoutei Academy’s ★ Noctural Mystery-Solving Exploration Team”

ll DIABOLIK LOVERS SADISTIC SONG ll

001. DIABOLIK LOVERS Sadistic Song Vol.1 “Kekkyoku NIGHT” Sakamaki Ayato Mini Drama

002. DIABOLIK LOVERS Sadistic Song Vol.2 “Kaikan DEATH-TRUCTION” Sakamaki Kanato Mini Drama

003. DIABOLIK LOVERS Sadistic Song Vol.3 “CHAOS★PARTY” Sakamaki Laito Mini Drama

004. DIABOLIK LOVERS Sadistic Song Vol.4 “Iolite” Sakamaki Shuu Mini Drama

005. DIABOLIK LOVERS Sadistic Song Vol.5 ″Mr.ButterflyMask” Sakamaki Reiji Mini Drama

006. DIABOLIK LOVERS Sadistic Song Vol.6 “SQueeze…” Sakamaki Subaru Mini Drama

[allelitewrestlings]

what’s a cleaner? is that a fancy way of saying heel kenny?

the cleaner is kenny's heel persona, he was the cleaner back when he joined the the bullet club in njpw years ago, and he was pretty known because of it. this explains way better than i can 😅:

"Omega, dubbing himself "The Cleaner", claimed he had lied at the press conference and was only interested in money and the title. As part of his new villainous persona, Omega, who is fluent in Japanese, stopped talking in Japanese and instead did his interviews in English. Behind the scenes, Omega was told that his otaku gimmick was "too bubbly" for Bullet Club, which led to him adopting the Cleaner nickname, which was intended to be a reference to people who clean up crime scenes. Initially, Omega played the role straight, but after repeatedly having to explain the character when people thought he was portraying an actual janitor, he began incorporating comedy into the gimmick and started coming out for matches with a mop and broom." (source)

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Radio Friendly Unit Shifter: The Complete Nirvana Videography

Heart-Shaped Box

Nirvana had originally wanted Kevin Kerslake to direct this video, who had written the initial treatment in July 1992. By the summer of 1993, he had written at least five treatments, which included a shot of Kurt Cobain kissing William Burroughs and another of the entire band hanging by their necks from trees. Yet by the end of August, the band decided to go with Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn. The director seemed initially apprehensive about agreeing to do the video as he had heard Kurt Cobain could act overly detailed in production. He would say, “But then I looked at it and I thought that actually it was pretty good. I was very amazed by somebody writing a song and having those ideas as precise as he did." The video begins with the band standing in a hospital room around an old man receiving an IV drip, then moves to a surreal Wizard of Oz type of outdoor setting. The same old man in a Santa and later Pope hat climbs on a crow infested cross as they sing the song. The video also includes a young girl reaching for fetuses in a tree, while at the same time an overweight woman appears with human organs painted on her chest with a pair of wings. Many of these ideas were actually conceived by Corbijn, not the band as he always came up with the ideas on his own for any of his videos. Upon the promotion’s release, Kevin Kerslake sued the band for copyright infringement, as the case would be settled out of court. Upon its release, the clip became the most played video on MTV eventually garnering two video music awards for Best Alternative Video and Art Direction. Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear accepted the awards as Kurt Cobain had already passed. New Musical Express named it as the 11th best music video of all time, while Time magazine called it the number 10 music video ever saying it was both “beautiful and terrible.” In 2016, Dave Grohl reunited with the young girl from the video, who had this to say about the reunion. “Today reminded me that I peaked at 6 years old but I was the most badass kid on the playground. Today was the absolute coolest. Or in Dave's words seeing each other today was a 'historic moment'! What a legend!”

Sliver

A music video for the song was released in 1993 to promote the compilation album, Incesticide. The video would be directed by longtime collaborator Kevin Kerslake. The clip begins with Kurt Cobain holding his young daughter up behind some cardboard as she dances along to the first few seconds of the track. The video moves to Cobain’s garage, where it shows the band performing the song. Dave Grohl is playing on the drums, even though he never played on the original song. Cobain only sings into a microphone, but he's never seen playing guitar. He is wearing a red mohair sweater that Courtney Love had purchased for him from a fan at a Nirvana show in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His whole garage is filled with toys and decorations the singer had placed in storage just before the release of Nevermind that he had collected over the years. The collection included a Chim Chim toy monkey that was given to him from the Japanese band Shonen Knife.

Come As You Are

This video would actually be the first one directed by Kevin Kerslake, who was hired after such a negative experience with the director on Smells Like Teen Spirit. The concept would be developed by Kerslake as Cobain could not come up with any ideas, so he let the director develop the video. The singer’s only requirement was that some kind of reference be made to the cover of the Nevermind album. The clip shows the band in a dark room as water falls around them obscuring their form. Other images include Cobain swinging from a chandelier, a dog wandering around the room, a baby swimming in a pool, and a pistol falling underwater. The end of the video shows the entire group lying on the ground as Cobain kisses the camera.

Lithium

This video originally had a concept of doing a short animated story about a female girl named Prego. This girl lives in a forest, when she finds some eggs and takes them to a king in a nearby castle. Unfortunately, both Kevin Kerslake and Cobain discovered that it would take four months to produce the video, so they abandoned the idea. Kerslake instead created a collage of concert footage for the video made up of their 1991 Paramount Theater concert and other footage from the 1992 film, The Year Punk Broke. Biographer Michael Azerrad would make this critical comment about the clip. "Although [the video] was enlivened by Kerslake's neat trick of using more violent footage during the quiet parts of the song and vice versa, it was something of a disappointment from a band and a song that promised so much."

You Know You’re Right

Chris Hafner directed this video released in October 2002 to coincide with the single of the same name. The clip shows a montage of The band in either concerts or interviews, but giving the impression that they are actually performing the song. The video would reach number two on Billboard’s music videos chart. New Musical Express would go on to nominate it for Best Music Video in 2002.

In Bloom

Two versions of this video exist. The first one showed clips of the band walking around New York City and performing at Maxwells in New Jersey. In the clip, one can see Krist Novoselic in some shots has hair and others a shaved head. The reason for that comes from the fact that he had to shave it as punishment for a mediocre performance during a show at the Pyramid Club. They made this alternate version for a compilation dvd on the Sub Pop label, Sub Pop Video Network Volume One. The second version, which most people remember is called the Nevermind version. This promotional clip would be directed once again by Kevin Kerslake and released in November 1992. Kurt Cobain’s original concept for it was to tell the story of a young girl born into a Ku Klux Klan family until she realizes the evil nature of her parents, but the concept seemed much too difficult to work out. He then switched it into a parody of 1960’s television shows like the Ed Sullivan Show. The entire video was shot in original cameras of the period in Kinescope, while the band did the entire song without a script. The actor playing the host was Doug Llewellyn, who had worked as the reporter interviewing people after their case on the People’s Court. Cobain wanted to make a funny parody video to show that there was another side to Nirvana. He felt “so tired for the last year of people taking us so seriously . . . I wanted to fuck off and show them that we have a humorous side to us.” The entire band would wear suits during their performance, while the Nirvana frontman had glasses that eventually made him quite dizzy. He would later say in a Melody Maker interview that they wanted to parody groups like the Dave Clark Five, but not the Beatles. He would never mock the Fab Four due to their influence on his songwriting. In the clip, Novoselic is wearing short hair, which he liked so much that he never changed it. They eventually destroy all of their instruments and the stage by the end of the song. In Bloom would go on to win the 1993 MTV Music Video Award for Best Alternative Video.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

This video would be directed by first timer Sam Bayer. The director believed that he actually got hired because the work on his résumé seemed so below average that Nirvana thought that it would represent the opposite of anything remotely corporate. The concept developed by the band was to stage a school concert that ended in a riot. The idea had been based on the films Rock ‘n’ Roll High School starring the Ramones and The 1979 film, Over the Edge. The clip begins with the band playing the song during a pep rally in a high school gym as cheerleaders wearing sweaters with the anarchy symbol on them cheer along. Every so often, the camera cuts to a janitor dancing alongside his broom. The video ends with the apathetic students going from the bleachers to the gym floor in a full-scale riot. The apathy from the students was actually real as they had been sitting on the bleachers all day. Cobain was finally able to convince Bayer that the students should be allowed to mosh at the end of the video. The singer said, “Once the kids came out dancing they just said 'fuck you', because they were so tired of his shit throughout the day.” The Nirvana frontman hated the directors final edit of the video so much that he went in himself creating what became the final version. Upon its release, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke would say that it was “the greatest gig that you could ever imagine.” The video would go on the win MTV Video Music Awards for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Video. In 1999, the video was named the number three music video of all time on a list put out by MTV. VH1 named it number 18 in the greatest television moments in the history of music as alternative music now became a “commercial and cultural force.” At the end of 2019, the video had been viewed 1 billion times on YouTube.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Man Who Helped Turn 4chan Into the Internet’s Racist Engine

In two decades, 4chan has evolved from a message board where people talked about anime to a casually racist but influential creation engine of internet culture, and now into a generator of far-right propaganda, a place where dangerous conspiracy theories originate, and an amplifier of online bigotry. This evolution, according to 4chan moderators who spoke to Motherboard and leaked chat logs, is in large part because of an anonymous administrator who used moderation enforcement, or lack thereof, to allow the influential website to become a crucial arm of the far-right.

4chan attracted hordes of disaffected young men who trolled various other websites, creating popular memes (many of them racist or sexist) and originating a great deal of internet culture. In recent years, however, 4chan has evolved into something actively sinister: a hive of bigotry, threats of violence, and far right ideology. This rapid and severe descent wasn’t driven solely by the mass action of disgruntled young men. 

One current and three former 4chan moderators believe the process was aided along by the de facto administrator of the site, a far right supporter with the handle “RapeApe” who helped turn the site into a meme factory for extreme politics. Motherboard agreed to let the janitors speak anonymously because they said they signed non-disclosure agreements with 4chan.

Because of 4chan’s often wildly offensive content, many assume that the site is completely unmoderated. But 4chan has a corps of volunteers, called “janitors,” “mods,” or “jannies,” whose job it is—theoretically—to make sure that content on the site abides by the rules. (4chan draws a distinction between more senior “moderators,” who are responsible for all boards, and “janitors,” who patrol one or two; we refer to them interchangeably because janitors also moderate discussion.) The janitors we spoke to and a major trove of leaked chat logs from the janitors’ private communications channel tell the story of RapeApe’s rise from junior janny to someone who could decide what kind of content was allowed on the site and where, shaping 4chan into the hateful, radicalizing online community it's known for today.

Started in 2003 by Christopher Poole, 4chan was initially a place for people to discuss anime. Since its founding, the site has expanded to include discussion boards on everything from travel to fitness to video games to origami. It now claims around 22 million visitors a month. Some parts of it are also recruiting grounds for Neo-Nazi groups.

4chan’s more recent extremist element can be traced back to an infamous board: “politically incorrect,” which is listed as "/pol/" on the site. Ostensibly devoted to discussing politics, /pol/ threads often involve users calling each other racist terms, arguing for the genocide of whole nations or ethnicities, or debating about whether different concepts are “degenerate”—a Nazi term of art for material (or people) that ought to be purged. Posters there celebrate and lionize some of the most notorious mass murderers of the last decade, from Anders Breivik to Dylann Roof.

The forum has popularized iconography like Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character reappropriated by some as a racist symbol of the far right that President Trump’s son has tweeted images of. According to academic researchers, 4chan's /pol/ has become one of the most prodigious factories for content on the internet. And the boundaries of its influence spread far beyond the borders of 4chan itself, affecting everything from YouTube to Twitter to mainstream Republican politics.

The politically incorrect board wasn’t always this bad. In fact, former 4chan moderators told Motherboard that /pol/ wasn’t added to the site until 2011, eight years after the site started. For the first few years of its existence, according to two former janitors, Poole intended the /pol/ board to siphon off the racism from other areas of the site so that other users could enjoy their own, board-specific pursuits. 

“It was started as a containment board,” one former moderator told me about /pol/. According to chat logs and former moderators, in its early days, moderators at 4chan removed racist posts and users from other boards while ignoring them within one board, “random” (/b/, which was supposed to be a kind of “no rules, anything goes” space. /b/ is where many early memes were born, and is where the hacktivist group Anonymous came from). Such posts also sometimes slipped by on the /pol/ board as well, even though they technically violated the rules there. “Enforcement was more active in the past,” a former moderator said. In contrast to its current far right political climate, “4chan skewed extremely progressive when it first started,” according to the mod, although the use of bigoted and misogynistic language was widespread even then.

But 4chan has changed in recent years. Several studies of the site have shown that 4chan has become more racist, bigoted, and toxic in recent years—especially the /pol/ board. Ideologies propagated on /pol/ have become linked with violence and domestic terrorism. 4chan janitors' main job is to clean up and remove child pornography, lest 4chan draw the wrath of federal authorities, but they also shape the discourse there by setting the limits of acceptable discussion. If a thread goes off-topic or starts to get too racist, the janitors have the responsibility for asking mods to delete it and potentially issue bans against specific users.

According to leaked logs and the 4chan janitors who spoke with Motherboard, the manager of 4chan’s janitors is RapeApe. Relatively little is known about him, even by the janitors who spoke with us and worked for him, although he has been supervising 4chan’s day-to-day operations for around a decade. 

In 2015, Poole announced that he had decided to sell 4chan to a Japanese businessman named Hiroyuki Nishimura. Nishimura previously owned 2chan, a Japanese website which inspired 4chan. Janitors who spoke with Motherboard described Nishimura as being almost completely hands off, leaving moderation of the site primarily to RapeApe. 

“[RapeApe] basically fulfills the role of an administrator considering Hiroyuki [Nishimura], the actual admin, doesn't touch the site,” a current janitor told me. Poole and Nishimura did not respond to repeated requests for comment. RapeApe responded by sending an email that contained only a single link to a video of naked muscular men dancing.

Even prior to the site’s change in ownership, RapeApe functioned as the primary judge of what constituted acceptable content on the site, as well as the person who educated the staff on what did and didn’t cross the line. As Gamergate became a subject on the site in 2014, 4chan users began harassing women in the video game industry due to what they perceived as progressive bias in reporting on games. Eventually, RapeApe tried to stop 4chan’s campaign of intimidation. “[Gamergate] is no longer allowed on the video game boards. So said [RapeApe],” one janitor informed another in the leaked chats. When other jannies protested, RapeApe rapidly shut them down: “This isn’t a democracy,” RapeApe wrote. “Gamergate has overstayed its welcome. It is starting to cause a massive burden for moderation.” 

WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 12: Counterprotestors to the Unite the Right 2 rally burn a Kekistan flag, a white nationalist symbol, in the middle of 15th St. NW near the White House on August 12, 2018 in Washington, DC. Image: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In 2015, an anonymous former moderator leaked an extensive chat history of the janitors from 2012-2015 to a file-sharing service. One of the former janitors included in the chats confirmed their authenticity. According to a brief message posted with the logs, the leaker was unhappy with “the direction of the site.” From those leaked logs and the current and former janitors who spoke with Motherboard, RapeApe claims to be a military veteran who served in Afghanistan as well as a voracious reader, interested in video games, guns, and Warhammer: 40,000. He often complained about his family impeding his work and was afraid they would walk in on him looking at questionable or pornographic posts as he was moderating.

According to the janitor and chat logs (as well as a deleted Twitter account two staff members confirmed was his), RapeApe is also politically conservative and racist. One former janitor described him as “a typical right winger and /pol/ dude.” His Twitter account featured him responding approvingly to Tucker Carlson clips, urging another user to buy an AR-15 rifle for self-defense, wondering whether the state would force people to be homosexual and suggesting that Twitter was “staffed by leftists” who were deleting conservative users’ accounts. In conversations with other janitors in the leaked chats, he found humor in horrifying news about riots, shootings, and the Ebola epidemic—especially when that news involved Black people dying.

But RapeApe isn’t just a typical /pol/ user who happens to run the site. According to three current and former staff members, RapeApe shaped 4chan into a reflection of his own political beliefs. “RapeApe has an agenda: he wants /pol/ to have influence on the rest of the site and [its] politics,” a current janitor said.

Alone, RapeApe couldn’t steer 4chan to the far right. But he supervises a staff of dozens of volunteers who control discourse on the boards. According to the leaked chats and janitors who spoke with Motherboard, he instructed janitors on how to handle the more bigoted content on 4chan—and dismissed them if they deleted content he likes. He took a special interest in the /pol/ board, telling a novice janitor in the chat logs to “treat /pol/ with kid gloves. So long as they obey the rules, they are allowed to support whatever abominable political positions they want.”

4chan has an extensive list of rules posted on the site and each board has its own smaller set of edicts. A little-known and rarely enforced 4chan regulation, Global Rule #3, prohibits racist content on the site. But the leaked chat logs show many incidents of moderators and janitors discussing when racism got severe enough that it ought to be banned. Indeed, RapeApe himself deleted at least one thread for violating Rule #3 early on in his 4chan career, before he became a manager.

Once he became head moderator, RapeApe began to post reminders that moderators ought to be as hands-off as possible. In the leaked logs and according to current and former janitors, RapeApe pushed his staff into a position where almost no content could run afoul of the rule against racism. Instructing the janitors, RapeApe wrote, “And remember that with racism we're targeting the intent of the poster and not the words themselves.” One current janitor told me that in practice, within 4chan’s warped, irony-poisoned culture, this meant there was no way to ban a user for even the most flagrant, bigoted language or images. They could always claim that the intent wasn’t racist, even if the content unquestionably was. 

"The plausible deniability excuse for racism—I was just joking, I was just trolling—is bullshit," Whitney Phillips, an Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and author of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, told Motherboard. "Intent can matter when thinking about the things people say, but it matters very little when considering consequences. Whether or not someone says a racist thing with hate in their heart, they're still saying a racist thing and that still contributes to dehumanization and the normalization of harm. Anyway, the very criterion is absurd, as you can't assess what's in someone's heart just by looking at the things they post, especially to a place like 4chan. The only reasonable conclusion is that, whatever might have been written in the site rules, this moderator ensured that there was no policy against racism. Instead it became a pro-racism policy."

The leaked chat logs show that RapeApe didn't want /pol/ to be totally unmoderated, despite allowing racist content. He was concerned with making sure 4chan wasn’t hosting illegal material. “Mostly I just want to keep the site legal,” he wrote to the staff in one message in the leaked chats. He posted frequent reminders to the channel to “take it easy” and ignore, rather than ban, racist content. In the leaked chats, RapeApe quotes judicial decisions on whether photos depicting animal abuse are illegal, concluding that they only rise to that level if the abuse is sexual in nature. In another case, he reluctantly told a janitor to delete some revenge porn, though not without belittling laws against it.

Nishimura’s purchase of the site in 2016 and RapeApe’s ascension to de facto administrator of 4chan coincides with an incredible 40 percent spike in the volume of racist and violent language on /pol/. Other, comparable sites and communication channels also pushed towards extreme conservatism independently of 4chan, so RapeApe and /pol/ certainly aren’t the only reasons why 4chan slid towards the far right. Some experts credited 4chan’s evolution to Donald Trump’s overtly-racist political campaign, others to an influx of new users, and still others to active interference and recruiting of 4channers by Neo-Nazi elements.

While other websites also host increasing amounts of violent and bigoted language, 4chan is an outlier even compared to other internet gathering places filled with similar ideologies. A VICE News analysis found that there was more hate speech on /pol/ than in the comments on one overtly Neo-Nazi site, the Daily Stormer. Mass murderers have posted manifestos on 4chan. White nationalists have used the site to coordinate protests. 

When one Neo-Nazi group polled their supporters to discover how they came to the movement, /pol/ was tied for the most common gateway. Gab, another far right hotbed, contains about half the rate of hate speech as /pol/, and 4chan has 20 times more users. The only popular websites more toxic than 4chan are its much smaller offspring sites, like 8chan, now 8kun.

According to one current and three former janitors, RapeApe’s push for a hands-off approach combined with his preference for janitors who shared his political beliefs has shifted the website further into the extremes of bigotry and threats of violence in which it now operates. “He wants 4chan to be more like /pol/,” said one former janitor.

Over time, /pol/ has come to dominate the public perception of 4chan, overshadowing the quieter, less vile topic areas which make up much of the activity on the site. /pol/ is regularly the most active board on the site, but even so, it makes up a small portion of the total posts. Under RapeApe’s management, however, /pol/’s bigotry has metastasized. 

“[W]hen RapeApe took over fully after [Poole] left, he put in a ‘laissez-faire’ policy of moderation, knowing exactly what would happen, that right wing ideas would dominate the site thanks to /pol/ spilling over onto other boards,” said a current janitor.

The /pol/ forum often hosts threads in which users talk about flooding other, unrelated boards with racial slurs and bigoted imagery. These “raids” expose users who were on 4chan to discuss other subjects to its unconventional, far-right politics. Posters who logged on to the site to chat about sports or browse pornography could find themselves learning about Neo-Nazi ideology instead. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University and expert on far-right extremism, describes this phenomenon as “gateway content.” Simply by exposing people to hate speech, psychologists have found that it’s possible to desensitize them to further hate speech and dehumanize outgroups. By raiding other boards and giving users a taste of their ideology, /pol/ diehards hoped to bring them into their fold.

In one incident from the chat logs, when a moderator tried to clean up such an “invasion” of the science board, RapeApe wasn’t having it. Rather than delete the thread a janitor described as planning a raid, RapeApe argued that they weren’t doing anything against the rules. “Are they actually vandalising or defacing anything, or harassing people?” RapeApe added: “Because if they're just posting things, that's not really a raid.” 

Current and former janitors say that one moderator named Modcat was fired for disagreeing withRapeApe's laissez-faire moderation policy. 

“Some jannies got in trouble for overusing [global rule 3, against racism],” said one former janitor. 

An analysis of the archives of the anime board (/a/) Modcat used to patrol, derived by scraping its past threads, shows that Modcat’s departure and replacement with another janitor had consequences on the language used there. Motherboard used a 4chan archive and wrote a program to scrape data from the board over the last five years, counting the number of instances of common hate speech terms against Black, Latino, Jewish, and LGBTQ people each day, as well as Neo-Nazi slogans. This program scraped text only and so did not include instances of speech within images, a common medium of communication on 4chan. Immediately after his departure, according to former moderators, /pol/ users raided the board, spamming Neo-Nazi slogans like “sieg heil” and “heil Hitler” in about one in every 50 posts. (Use of these terms had been negligible before Modcat left.) Even after the initial raid on /a/ subsided, there were long-term effects on the forum. During Modcat's brief tenure, the anime board had hate speech in only about one in every 50 posts overall. Since his departure, that has risen to about one in every 30 posts.

Leaked chat logs demonstrate other instances of seemingly politically-motivated firings. Not long after a janitor named yetsturdy argued that the use of terms like the n-word and stereotyped depictions of Jews violated 4chan’s rules, they were fired. (Leaked chat logs show janitors suggesting that his firing was due to arguing with another janitor). A janitor who described himself as a “lefty” in leaked logs was let go ostensibly for losing his anonymity, although another 4chan staff member with far right politics is open about his identity on Twitter and publishes newspaper editorials under his real name.

Others in the leaked janitor chats noticed the firings of their colleagues. One even alluded to RapeApe’s apparent agenda, asking him directly: “with all these janitors quitting/getting fired, is… is /pol/ winning?” (In the chat, RapeApe quickly denied that it had anything to do with /pol/’s political agenda, saying that the fired janitors had violated clear rules.)

Five years later, the politically incorrect board’s conflict with the rest of 4chan has been settled: /pol/ won. After years of declining volume both there and on the site in general, /pol/’s activity (in terms of the number of users and posts) is on the rise once again, according to a site that tracks 4chan. Jumping upwards in May 2020, /pol/ boasted the highest number of posts per day since election day in 2016, when ecstatic users celebrated Trump’s victory by calling for a second Holocaust and harassing journalists.

/pol/’s surging popularity coincides with a boost for the rest of the site as well. According to SimilarWeb, a company that tracks web traffic, 4chan has risen to become one of the top 400 sites in the United States in terms of engagement and visits. The domain now rivals or exceeds major news sites in terms of the number of visitors: it gets more traffic than abcnews.com, for example.

And the /pol/ channel continues to create massive amounts of right-wing content. RapeApe’s “meme factory,” as he described /pol/ in one leaked chat log, is chugging along smoothly. “[RapeApe has] basically fulfilled his intentions,” a current janitor told me. “[4chan] exists as a fully developed political tool used for propagating memes and propaganda.” 4chan’s content sometimes spreads beyond its esoteric corner of the internet into the mainstream discourse, using a well-established pipeline running through Reddit and Twitter into more popular channels.

Journalists have chronicled the outsized influence 4chan has had on our culture and created many theories to explain its slide into racist extremism, connections to the rise of Donald Trump, and a surge in white nationalist movements around the world. Disaffected young men across the globe have participated in creating a hateful melting pot of conspiracy theories, bigotry, and hate speech with a massive, global audience.

We can’t know exactly how much impact the rhetoric on the site had on the world or the full extent of its influence on the broader political landscape. But we can dispel some of the mystery about how 4chan became filled with hate. Like every other platform, 4chan’s evolution stems in part from the choices made by its administrators about what speech is acceptable and what is not. Facebook allowed Holocaust denial content until Mark Zuckerberg decided not to; Reddit allowed its Donald Trump-focused subreddit to popularize 4chan’s content until it shut it down. 4chan became the dangerous cesspool we know today because of the choices of a site administrator who wanted to amplify far right content and an owner who doesn’t care.

The internet is one of the most powerful technologies the world has ever known, but why that power so often results in dehumanizing and hurting people is not as mysterious as we sometimes assume. It is the direct result of the choices people with control over internet platforms make.

The Man Who Helped Turn 4chan Into the Internet’s Racist Engine syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[alexeiadrae]

Nostalgia Trip: My Story of Watching the Slayers, Day 6

Day 6:  What inside jokes do you have about The Slayers with friends/family you watched it with?

That Rezo’s hair terrifies me. I...I mean....just look at it!

Hair should not be like that. Hair does not stick up like that at the end. Something about it’s physics defying ability disturbs me. Several characters have similar hairstyles, but none as groomed and polished or they have big bangs up front that make the look better. Rezo has creepy gravity defying hair. And strangely, no, I don’t have a clown phobia (I thought It was boring), but I really don’t like Rezo’s hair, something about it freaks me out. And that caused a lot of bemusement among my friends and family.

Those who have read my fanfics know about Gunther because when I write about Gourry’s family I always name one of his brothers Gunther. It started as an inside joke among my friends. The rather boring story behind it is that we were watching Slayers TRY at a New Years Eve party with a friend from out of town who had never seen it before. His reaction to the show was about as funny as the show itself because he was so lost, and at one point he was all, “that blonde guy, Gunther…” And for whatever reason we all started laughing. Strangely Gunther as a name fits Gourry though so it stuck and when we referred to Gourry we would call him Gunther. Um, yeah, you would have had to have been there.

1.       How did you start watching The Slayers?

2.       How easy was it for you to collect the series to watch it?

3.       What stage of your life were you in when you watched The Slayers?

4.      Have you met anyone involved in any way with the creation of the show? Hajime Kanzaka, a voice actor be they Japanese, American, Spanish, Elvin, etc? A janitor who worked in the animation studio? What were they like?

5.      Do you have a precious collectible from the show? What is it, and how did you get it?

6.      What inside jokes do you have about The Slayers with friends/family you watched it with?

7.       What lengths did you go to to get access to Slayers VHS/DVSs/fansubs, etc?

8.        This one favors our English speaking fans, but it’s too great a story in the history of watching Slayers to leave out. Do you remember the Great Slayers Disc Exchange (I think that’s what it was called)? Do you have a story involving your participation in it? And are you still mad at Software Sculptors? If English isn’t your first language, what stories do you have about the studios bungling the release of Slayers DVDs in your primary language?

9.        What is your memory of experiencing your favorite funny moment in The Slayers?

10.       What is your memory of experiencing your favorite moment of your favorite Slayers character?

11.       What moment in The Slayers surprised you the most?

12.      When did The Slayers exceed your expectations?

13.      When did The Slayers disappoint you?

14.      What do you remember about experiencing the moment when Phibrizzo kidnapped Gourry?

15.       What was your memory of experiencing your favorite moment of your favorite Slayers ship?

16.       What is your memory of watching your favorite dramatic Slayers moment?

17.       What is your favorite memory of watching The Slayers?

18.       What was your strangest memory of something that happened when you were watching The Slayers?

19.       Which character dying at the hands of Phibrizzo affected you the most?

20.       What was your reaction to the end of Slayers NEXT?

21.       What was your experience with tracking down the novels?

22.       When did you fall in love with Lina? Or if you didn’t fall in love with her, how did your feelings about her evolve through the series?

23.      How did your feelings about Gourry evolve through the series?

24.      How did your feelings about Zelgadis evolve through the series?

25.     How did your feelings about Amelia evolve through the series?

26.     How did your feelings about Sylphiel evolve through the series?

27.     How did your feelings about Xellos evolve through the series?

28.     What moments from the show do you use to motivate you?

29.     What impact has the show had on your life?

30.      Why do you believe this show has had such a lasting impact in people’s hearts?

[shimzus-a]

思庵, THE SHIMIZU FAMILY TEA HOUSE.

* note : additional cultural info + images for this headcanon are on the version in my google drive. for the sake of accessibiltity, i'm posting my headcanons on both tumblr + google docs, with google docs versions representing the extended read.

kiyoko’s family operates & maintains a traditional japanese tea house on their property. her maternal grandparents built the house on their ancestral property in the early 1900s after her grandmother spent many of her formative years studying tea ceremonies. however, tea ceremonies in japan are not as popular as they once were, so the tea house has limited use; instead, the second room of the building has been transformed into a tea shop offering unique & specialty blends. now, the tea house provides official tea ceremonies by reservation only & otherwise serves primarily as a specialty store operated by kiyoko’s grandmother. 

the house is named 思庵 ( omou-an ). like many great tea houses, omou-an is named with the character “an” meaning “hut” and “omou” which may refer to “thinking/thoughts.” “omou” is also formed from the heart radical & the rice field character & is associated with other vocabulary such as “believing,” “desiring/wanting,” “imagining,” & “remembering.” it is also used in the phrases for “mutual love” & “to one’s heart’s content.” the “omou” character evokes strong emotional connotations, which is why kiyoko’s grandparents named the tea house from it. “omou-an” is meant to represent a thoughtful, loving space that nurtures positive emotions & soothes longing. 

the singular tea room is 4.5 tatami mats in size & fits approximately 5 guests at maximum. kiyoko’s grandmother is the only member of the family properly trained in tea ceremonies, but she often calls on kiyoko to serve as an attendant & guide ( especially for foreign guests unfamiliar with the ways of tea ). the tea shop is a similar size, but feels much more cluttered due to it being used as storage space for the teas.

kiyoko spends her free time assisting in the shop -- as a clerk, inventory manager, janitor, & shipment coordinator. her grandmother is the main proprietor of the tea house & accordingly takes care of the shop on most days, but kiyoko always urges that it’s important she help to give her grandmother rest. on days after practice & on free weekends, kiyoko takes in new shipments, cleans the space, & services any patrons that come by. she’s not responsible for re-ordering or connecting with suppliers, but on occasion she may have to contact them to schedule drop-off/pick-up times, since her grandmother can’t carry heavy packages of tea by herself. 

accordingly, kiyoko is & has always been a “tea before coffee” type of person. her favorite type of tea is simple black tea ( caffeine free ) with no additives, served hot. she regularly drinks 2-3 cups per day, & brews enough to serve her whole family in the mornings for breakfast. she is nothing if not diligent about tea, having learned a lot from her grandmother’s ceremonies & spending time in the family store.