#1994 lawsuit

[arcadebroke]

1994 lawsuit Capcom U.S.A. Inc. v. Data East Corp.

[thankskenpenders]

The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings review

The day has finally come. Many, understandably, thought we'd never get here. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten here. We've been through so much. Lawsuits, reboots, redesigns, unreleased NFTs, empty legal threats over the fact that movie Knuckles has a dad, an attempt to license out Scourge the Hedgehog to fans that immediately got canceled (in both meanings of the term), and many, MANY idiotic Twitter controversies. But now, here we are.

Thirteen years after first announcing it in the middle of his legal battles with Archie and Sega that changed the American Sonic comics forever, former writer Ken Penders has released the first part of his new series: The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Yes. I had to buy the book. I had to take one for the team. Look at the fucking URL of this blog, a blog I've been using to talk about the American Sonic comics for nearly a decade while the specter of this book loomed in the distance. The one time I've actually been paid to write an article about anything in any professional capacity, it was an article about the Penders lawsuits. I'm cited on his Wikipedia page. There was no way I was going to skip reviewing this, and there was no guarantee that scans would ever turn up online given the incredibly small audience for this trash. (Only 166 people preordered this, and even that number feels way higher than it should be.) No, I had to preorder it to ensure I could get a copy and cover it for the blog... even if that meant my name would be forever immortalized in the list of "supporters" in the back of the book. These are the sacrifices I must make as a woman who stumbled ass backwards into being an amateur Archie Sonic historian.

So, what exactly is in this book? How much of it is new? How bad is it? How did we even get here in the first place? How can this exist without Sega pursuing legal action? What happens next? And, most importantly... why are there multiple depictions of an Archie Sonic character breastfeeding in this book?

I'm here to answer those questions as best I can, and in agonizing detail.

First, for those just tuning in to this decades-long saga or those who maybe don't know the full story, here's a refresher on the background info.

"What the hell is this?"

The Lara-Su Chronicles is Ken Penders' long-dreaded long-awaited continuation of his 1994-2006 run on Archie Sonic, ignoring everything written after he left by other writers like Ian Flynn. In particular, it picks up from the cliffhanger ending of the 2003-2004 arc "Mobius: 25 Years Later," which was set in what Ken considers the definitive canonical future of the series. It stars Knuckles' daughter from that future era, Lara-Su, among other new and returning characters. The project was first announced near the start of Ken's legal battle with Archie in 2011, and he's been posting WIP previews online for about a decade. Now, after all this time, a Lara-Su Chronicles book finally exists.

We'll get to the actual contents of that book in a bit.

"He can do that without getting in trouble with Sega?"

Believe it or not, yes, he can.

Thanks to the outcome of Archie Comics' woefully mismanaged lawsuits against Ken (yes, they sued him after he started filing for copyrights, not the other way around), he now has full legal ownership of every story he wrote for Archie Sonic and every character he created for the series. This was explicitly granted to him in the terms of the settlement between him and Archie (acting on behalf of Sega). He can even reprint his old Sonic material as-is to his heart's content. The main catch is just that he can't write new stories featuring Sega characters or trademarks, and his new stories also have to be distinct from Sonic at a glance to avoid confusing readers. As such, reprints can't use Sonic iconography on the cover, a few Sega characters (mainly Knuckles) have been renamed and slightly redesigned in the new stories, and the art style has been changed to less closely resemble Sonic. But otherwise, he can do whatever he wants with his own characters.

All of this is because Archie lost the original copy of Ken's work-for-hire contract that signed over the rights to his work. Without that (or any alternative that was considered permissible in court), his comics and characters are the property of their creator by default. Yes, those old comics are full of Sega stuff, but Sega doesn't automatically own the copyright for every drawing of Sonic in existence. And Sega put their stamp of approval all over those comics and let them get sold at retail for decades, even though (in the eyes of the court) there was no legal paperwork granting them ownership of any of it. It's almost like they were unwittingly distributing a fan comic for years and declaring it a fair use of their property, and now there's no takesies backsies. It's a strange and unique copyright situation. Again, they worked all this out in the settlement. And, yes, fans have long speculated that Ken stole and destroyed his own contract to regain the rights to his work, but frankly Archie was so incompetent throughout the lawsuit (it went so bad that they had to fire and replace their lawyers midway through) that I completely buy the idea of them just losing important legal documents.

Also, in case it needs to be spelled out: while Ken's a weirdo, it's ultimately a good thing for creatives everywhere that Archie lost their lawsuit against Ken. We do not want to live in a world where corporations can claim ownership of peoples' work without the contracts to back it up. That would be an incredibly dangerous legal precedent to set. And more comic creators, and artists in general, should own their own work! Corporations are not your friend! They'll delete your work for a tax write-off in a heartbeat! It's just bewildering that this guy, of all people, was the creator who ended up successfully getting his shit back, and that this is what he's doing with it.

"What about his old collaborators? Are they involved? Is he paying them?"

Ken is mostly doing The Lara-Su Chronicles solo, though he has, in fact, talked about compensating the artists involved in any material he's reprinting. The ones who give enough of a shit to get paid for a small scale reprint of something they did 20 years ago, anyway.

On the subject of his collaborators, it's also worth pointing out that Ken's wasn't the only contract that was lost. Most of the early Archie Sonic writers from before Ian Flynn's time seem to be in the same boat as Ken, with the ownership of their stories and characters defaulting back to them. Again, Archie fucked up big time. But like I said, most of them don't really seem to give a shit. For most of them, Sonic was just a random temporary gig they took to pay the bills while Marvel was busy going bankrupt in the '90s, not the thing that defined their entire careers.

The only other Archie Sonic contributor who's tried to do anything on the level of what Ken is doing was writer and editor Scott Fulop. In 2016 he attempted to sue Archie for the unauthorized use of what are now retroactively considered his copyrighted characters and stories, and he even announced a standalone comic about his most famous Sonic character, the recurring villain Mammoth Mogul (sort of a pastiche of DC's Vandal Savage and Marvel's Kingpin, with wizard powers added for spice). However, Fulop lost his lawsuit because he didn't put together a particularly compelling case. Since then he seems to have wiped all traces of his ill-advised Mammoth Mogul comic and his company, Narrative Ark Entertainment, from the internet. For now, this leaves The Lara-Su Chronicles the only project of its kind.

"What about those other Archie Sonic reprints he just announced?"

At the time of writing, Ken is once again claiming that he's trying to get the band back together to reprint all of Archie Sonic, now under the bad new banner "Floating Island Productions: MOBIAN LINE" that I can't imagine he consulted literally anyone else on.

So, like, look. As we've established, Ken can reprint his own stories. And if he can work something out with the other contributors whose contracts were lost, he can print their work, too. But there is no fucking way he's getting his hands on Ian Flynn's run, which Sega undoubtedly holds the copyright for. Even if they don't, Ian needs to maintain a good working relationship with both Sega and IDW if he's to keep his job, so he'd never go for this. Not to mention that Ian and Ken just... don't get along! Ken's whole plan here seems to be predicated on IDW going out of business (a thing he REALLY wants to happen) and freeing up the Sonic comic license, after which he knocks on Sega's door and goes "hey I've still got dirt on you guys," blackmailing them into giving him the Sonic license back so that he can reprint the later comics. Every step of this plan is ludicrous. It's never gonna happen.

He's been saying he wants to reprint the whole series for a few years now, though. This isn't really anything new. And despite his lofty plans that set Sonic Twitter ablaze, he quickly backpedaled. The only specific things in the works right now are a "two-volume omnibus" of all of his Knuckles stories and a collection of artist Scott Shaw's work on the very early Archie Sonic issues, since they're on good terms with each other. I have no idea how Ken plans on packaging these when he can't put any Sega characters or the Freedom Fighters on the covers, but these projects are small enough in scale that there's a decent chance they'll see the light of day. Scott Shaw only did like five issues. But anything beyond that? I'll believe it when I see it.

Or, y'know, this could've all just been a publicity stunt for his new book. I wouldn't put it past him. Let's just focus on the book that actually exists.

"So he finally did it? He made a whole Lara-Su book? It's out? He finished it??"

Yes and no.

The book that's out now is The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, a prologue for the series of seven graphic novels Ken somehow plans on making, even though it's taken him 13 years to put out literally anything new. I don't know whether or not this counts as book one of seven, because it only features 30 pages of new comics. 30.5 if I'm being generous.

Most of the book is actually just a reprint of his infamous Archie Sonic storyline "Mobius: 25 Years Later", which ran from issue #131 to #144 in 2003-2004. (Again, yes, he can reprint this, he just can't put Sonic on the cover.) Why's it infamous? Well, Ken had been building anticipation for this future era of the series for basically his entire run. We kept seeing King Sonic and Queen Sally from the future. Knuckles' entire backstory hinges on his dad having a vision of this future. Several years before Silver the Hedgehog was created, it was Lara-Su who was Sonic's equivalent to Future Trunks, the cool-looking child of one of the main characters who traveled back in time to try and prevent a dark future. Believe it or not, yes, there was hype for Lara-Su. And then we finally got M25YL, and none of that cool stuff happened. Instead it really ended up being about how unbearably boring the middle aged Sonic, Knuckles, Sally, and co. are in this peaceful future where Robotnik is dead and they're all married with kids, forced into traditional nuclear family gender roles. Lara-Su is present, but she mostly just does generic teen girl stuff and complains about how Knuckles won't let her do anything even though she REALLY wants to be the new Guardian of Angel Island, like, super bad! Come on, dad!!!

In its original printing, this meandering arc ended on an abrupt time travel cliffhanger that Ken was never able to follow up on before he left Archie in 2006. This new printing slightly changes that ending, using the unresolved timey-wimey shenanigans as a convenient excuse to alter the entire timeline. This creates the slightly different world of The Lara-Su Chronicles, where the few relevant Sega-owned characters have been replaced and everyone is ten times uglier.

After this, we finally get two short new stories picking up where M25YL left off: "The Storm," starring Acorn Kingdom super-spy and known creep Geoffrey St. John, and an early release of the first chapter of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, the first full TLSC graphic novel.

And now that we're all on the same page about what we're looking at, let's actually talk about the book!

The cover

Let's start by beating a dead horse. The cover art: it's still bad! But why is it bad?

The cover is, of course, based on Patrick Spaziante's cover from Archie Sonic #131, the start of the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc. (Ken did the layout for that cover, though, so in the eyes of the law he's the original creator who owns that cover.) That cover was, itself, a tribute to the iconic cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, the issue that introduced the version of the team with Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, etc.

Ken seems to have forgotten that the point of both these covers was to hype up the arrival of a new cast of characters. The new guys are supposed to make a dramatic entrance front and center. That's the focal point. Meanwhile, the cover for Beginnings has the old timeline versions of the cast from Archie Sonic dramatically bursting out of a shattered crystal ball, while their new counterparts look on in mild bemusement - if they're even bothering to look at all, since most of the characters here are just copied and pasted from their profile pages. That's just not how you do this particular homage! The point is supposed to be "out with the old, in with the new." And why are they using a crystal ball to view the past? Hell, why are they even using a crystal ball at all? The original arc was presented as a magical vision of the future courtesy of Tails' uncle Merlin (don't ask), but the new story leans all the way into being futuristic sci-fi.

Of course, there is no real artistic intent at play here. The old versions of the characters are placed front and center in the crystal ball simply because Ken traced over Spaziante's original art of Lara-Su and Julie-Su (the only two characters on the Sonic cover he owns) and threw out the rest, ruining the composition in the process. Look at the awkward empty space where Sonic, Sally, and Rotor once were, and the new drawing of The Character Formerly Known As Knuckles who's no longer properly centered between his wife and daughter. Even if Ken can claim ownership of the cover because he did the original layout, this all just feels scummy and lame.

And, yeah, if it needs to be said, the new characters and Ken's new rendering style look like absolute fucking dogshit. Putting new Lara-Su directly next to old Lara-Su does her no favors. The shattered glass effect looks absolutely atrocious. I could go on, but we'll have plenty of time to talk about the art style when we see how bad the stories inside look.

Changes to "Mobius: 25 Years Later"

Overall, 99% of M25YL is presented identically to its original printing. Sonic, Sally, Knuckles, et al. are still present with no changes to their names and no tweaks to the art. Even the original cover for issue #131 is included only a few pages into this book with its Archie, Sonic, and Sega logos still intact and everything. Again, because of the weird copyright situation described above, these preexisting comics can be released without any changes.

There is exactly one bizarre change to the art, though, where a hand drawn shot of Angel Island is replaced with an unfitting photo background and the ugly Floating Island photobash that Ken has been using as his personal logo for decades. I think he only did this as part of a test for his motion comic app that nobody asked for. I don't know why this had to make it into the print version. It's like the book is firing a warning shot for what's to come if you keep reading.

The new content begins on the final page of M25YL. In the original wet fart of a cliffhanger ending, Sonic and co. accidentally alter the timeline with an old time machine of Robotnik's and Lara-Su begins to fade away. Then, after everything goes white, we just cut to the present day heroes going "gee, you ever think about the future?" In this new printing, that last bit has been cut, and the rest of the page has been awkwardly shrunk down so that Ken can fit in a new panel. We now see the hands of an off-screen villain, seemingly named "Override," proclaiming that "the Praetorian" (Knuckles) has messed up the timeline again and that they'll finally get their revenge.

Who is this Override? I have no fucking clue. The new stories in this book make no mention of them. You have to buy the next book to find out.

My confusion over the identity of this villain overlaps with another big problem: name changes. So many names and nouns have been arbitrarily changed in The Lara-Su Chronicles, even ones Ken didn't have to change for copyright reasons, and I only know what half of them are replacing because Ken's been tweeting about this shit for years.

The echidnas are now a totally original alien race called "the Echyd'nya." Even in flashbacks to events from M25YL attempting to mimic the old art style, if it's on a new comic page, they're gonna call themselves "Echyd'nya." Evil echidna faction the Dark Legion is now the "Cyberdark Dominion," hailing from the "Cyberdark Colony." The Brotherhood of Guardians is still the Brotherhood of Guardians, but now the main guardian is called "The Praetorian." Angel Island is still called "The Floating Island," like it was in the older Archie comics, but it's ALSO sometimes called "Avion"? When I read this I wasn't sure if he had randomly renamed Albion, the other echidna city from the Archie comics. But no. Now we have an Albion AND an Avion. Sally is mentioned simply as "Princess Acorn," while Sonic is referenced once as an unnamed "blue-spined Erinaceinae," using the scientific name for hedgehog to make it sound more sci-fi. In an incredibly ballsy move, Ken even mentions Robotnik as "the Insurrectionist Kintobor," retaining his original surname from the Archie comics that's just "Robotnik" backwards. Guess Sega never trademarked that one.

Aside from every name change being a downgrade, this leads to confusion when you're not sure if something is supposed to be new, or if it's just an Archie thing you're supposed to recognize despite having a new name and design. Is "Override" someone I'm supposed to know already? Am I just supposed to have read a fucking tweet from Ken where he said he changed the name of some existing villain to "Override"? The answer is no, but I had to term search his Twitter just to verify this.

Moving on!

New story #1: "The Storm"

If you've been following the WIPs, this is that story about Geoffrey St. John that Ken's been posting previews of for almost a decade. The title page copyright dates it to 2015, and that absurdly long gestation is probably why the art is so inconsistent here. Even the style of speech bubbles and the font change between pages two and three.

This is a problem when there's supposed to be a deliberate and noticeable change in art style here signaling the moment where the time travel stuff alters the timeline, replacing the Archie Sonic world with the Lara-Su Chronicles world. If you don't already know that's what's going on, the idea isn't conveyed clearly at all. It just goes from one hideous art style to a slightly different one with no explanation.

The main problem here is that Ken has hitched his wagon to a franchise about anthropomorphic animals when he can't draw furries to save his life. (Though a bit later in the book we'll also begin to wonder if he can even still draw humans.) He's shifted away from the cartooniness of the original designs and given them more human proportions and facial features, but this just ends up making them look incredibly uncanny and lumpy and gross. With some designs he's trying to lean into more of a Star Trek alien vibe, but then he still insists upon retaining the giant Sonic eyes on most characters even though he has no idea how to make them emote.

The rendering of these godawful designs doesn't do them any favors, either. Ken's going for more of a painterly look now, but it almost seems as though he's shading everything with Photoshop's burn and dodge tools that are designed to darken and lighten select areas of a photo. The result is a muddy, smudgy look that makes it feel like the color layer has been smeared in vaseline. And it only looks worse after coming off of 14 chapters of M25YL that have way more palatable art.

The backgrounds, too, are a complete mess, a jumble of low res jpeg photo elements (sometimes with extremely noticeable pixelation), stock textures, and smooth digital gradients. There's no real sense of place here, and it gives everything a surreal, dreamlike quality when you can't really tell where anything is supposed to take place. This first story is seemingly set in a high-tech stronghold below Castle Acorn called "the Bunker," but it could just as easily be confused for the bridge of a spaceship. This whole story features characters speaking to each other over floating video displays and hologram projectors from three different locations, but without a hologram effect and without a clear sense of where the characters are it often feels like they're just in the same room as each other. Characters will be in one location on one photo background, and then the camera angle changes and they're in a completely different place, because Ken just uses mismatched photos off of the internet. It's been like 25 years since he first tried using photo backgrounds in the Archie comics and he hasn't gotten any better at it.

When I had my boyfriend read the book to see if it made literally any sense to him (it didn't), Anthony said this: "This is the kind of shit I'd see linked on a Second Life world that hasn't been touched since 2004." I think he really hit the nail on the head. Now, there's actually a contrarian part of me that thinks that might theoretically almost be kind of cool, in sort of a messy counterculture way. I love weird indie shit. I was a Homestuck reader! But this isn't a scrappy mixed media zine, or experimental outsider art from someone just messing around with Photoshop, or a loving throwback to weird old internet art, or even something intentionally bizarre and offputting like Xavier: Renegade Angel or a PilotRedSun video or whatever where the fact that it's weird and ugly is part of the humor. This is supposed to be a sincere sci-fi epic drawing on Star Trek and Jack Kirby comics, made by a guy who's been drawing comics professionally since the '80s. This is supposed to look good. This is supposed to compete with mainstream comics that are on sale right now. He thinks any day now IDW's gonna go out of business and Sega will come crawling back to him so that he can stamp the Sonic logo on shit like this. It just doesn't work.

But, okay. It's ugly. We knew it would be ugly. But that ugliness would be much easier to accept if it was in service of an otherwise genuinely good story. So what about the writing? After all this time, how does Ken choose to kick off this new saga? Well, credit where credit's due. "The Storm" feels like a proper continuation of Ken's writing style from M25YL.

Because it's eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing fucking happens.

Here's the synopsis: A dog woman named Brownie, an ensign in the Royal Secret Service fresh out of training and the only character who's almost cute, walks up to Geoffrey to deliver a report. He's immediately suspicious of her, asking who let her in and if she's a spy for Elias (Sally's brother, if you're new here) or Alicia (Sally's mom). The art style suddenly shifts when the timeline is altered, but the scene continues uninterrupted. Geoffrey points a gun at Brownie when she won't say whose spy she is. Geoffrey is distracted by a call and proceeds to have a conversation via a mix of holograms and video screens with Remington (head of Echidnaopolis security), Spectre (Knuckles' great great great great great grandpa, the one with the helmet who always looks evil), and a new scientist character named Dr. Zephyr/Zephur. (The spelling of this character's name changes multiple times throughout the 11-page story, because I guess nine years wasn't enough time to spellcheck this shit.) They say a bunch of made up technobabble nonsense about how it looks like the timeline was just altered and Knuckles and co. seem to be involved. It's complete drivel that I'm not even going to try to make sense of. Everyone decides to investigate further, and the conversation ends. Brownie tells Geoffrey she's his spy, then walks out and implies she's actually Alicia's spy in her inner monologue.

To be continued!!!

Yes, that's it. It's really just a bunch of technobabble where some characters talk about how it seems like the timeline has been fucked with. That's it. The whole time Geoffrey doesn't even get up out of his damn chair, which he's of course sitting in backwards to show how cool he is. It's just 11 pages of Geoffrey sitting in a chair and talking to people and looking uglier than he's ever looked. Nothing happens. Nine years for this.

I'm also struck by how meaningless all of this is to anyone who hasn't read Archie Sonic. The added context from M25YL may help a little, but "The Storm" focuses on characters who weren't in that arc, and the story does very little to introduce who any of them are. Brownie could've been super useful as an inexperienced point of view character who's only meeting the others for the first time here, but instead she's really just a passive observer who's here as part of some kind of 4D chess game between Geoffrey and Alicia, an off-screen character whose motivations in this era of the story are completely unknown to even returning readers. Who are the good guys and bad guys here? What are the conflicts and the stakes of the story moving forward? What do these characters want? Basic questions like this aren't really answered. I can't imagine a new reader being able to make heads or tails of this. Hell, I can't really imagine a returning reader who hasn't been following the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets about this story making heads or tails of it, either.

...Maybe more will happen in the next story?

New story #2: Shattered Tomorrows preview chapter

After another message from Ken, the story of The Lara-Su Chronicles proper begins with the redesigned Lara-Su walking along a jpeg photograph beach at sunset and crying while thinking about how Knuckles - sorry, his name is K'Nox now - is dead.

Yep! Straight into the dad stuff!

Look, I'm the last person to complain about writers getting super personal and drawing from their own baggage in their writing, but Ken's just no fucking good at it. There's no nuance, nothing interesting to say. He just keeps writing mediocre-to-horrible dads whose misdeeds are always justified by their "good intentions," and then sometimes they die and their kids are like "we may have fought but actually you were the bestest dad ever and I'll miss you forever, I'll never be able to fill your shoes!"

This is the only part of the new material here that feels like it has any heart behind it, because I know how much his complex relationship with his late deadbeat father means to Ken (there's an author's note in this outright saying as much). But the guy died 42 years ago, and it doesn't feel like Ken has had any new thoughts about this part of his life in those four decades. He's just not an introspective or self-aware enough artist to actually mine his personal baggage for anything beyond "father knows best."

Anyway, so then it jumps forward in time(?) and now we're following this human guy who looks like this.

Previously, Ken got a lot of shit for literally just using the likeness of Anthony Mackie for this guy, based on his IMDB profile photo. Ken has thus redesigned the character... and by that I mean I think he looks more like Ernie Hudson now? Ken's clearly just working off of photo references (if not straight up tracing), given his face is the most detailed and realistic-looking thing on any page where he's present.

But you may be wondering: who is this, and why is he here? Well, for one, he's here to run around in front of some low res space photos while making trite references to things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. Haha, he makes a joke about red shirts! Original!! But beyond that, Commander Mykhal Taelor (yes, that's really how he chose to spell it) is a human... from Earth! Archie Sonic readers are probably confused, because in those comics Mobius is Earth in the distant post-apocalyptic future. Well, despite being a Planet of the Apes fan, Ken always hated that particular worldbuilding decision from Karl Bollers, always preferring to think of Mobius as a separate alien planet. And now he gets to make that canon in his own stories and throw out Karl's ideas. So Mobius is basically just, like, a Star Trek planet now, with its own alien creatures that sometimes just so happen to look like anthropomorphic Earth animals.

Also, at one point Taelor wonders if the inhabitants of the dead Mobius might have been human, and the alien ally he's talking to over the radio says it's unlikely. "I don't understand why your kind has a problem understanding you're a minority within a minority." Perhaps poor wording for a line said to the only Black character in the story.

Anyway, Commander Taelor here seems to have discovered the uninhabited husk of Mobius after the vague time-space cataclysm everyone was worried about in M25YL has come to pass, and he finds an audio log from Lara-Su that I presume will explain what happened. I guess those are the titular Lara-Su Chronicles. In theory this flash forward establishes some sense of pressing danger, but when the threat to the planet is so unclear and technobabble-y it just kind of lands with a thud.

It doesn't take long before we get back to Lara-Su being sad about her dad. A good little chunk of the chapter is spent with this new timeline's Lara-Su recalling moments in her life, including echoes of the original Lara-Su's memories from M25YL, which feels redundant coming hot off the heels of a straight reprint of that entire arc. And boy, for anyone who read the later Archie Sonic comics, the protagonist having vague memories of the old version of the series from before a lawsuit-related timeline reboot sure does sound familiar, huh?

The art inconsistency somehow becomes even worse in this story, with Ken flip-flopping on whether or not he wants to use outlines, with the no-outline art managing to look even worse by relying entirely on Ken's awful rendering. By this point in the book, readers are also likely to start noticing how often Ken reuses art from previous panels. This is a shortcut that tons of comic artists use, of course. Invincible famously did a joke about this. It's often understandable. But, again... it sure does stand out in a book that took 13 years to make with only 30 pages of new art. Amusingly, Ken even manages to combine his inconsistency and recycling problems by reusing the same art with and without outlines. And, of course, any time Ken tries to draw the Archie era designs it's just... the worst.

And, yes, it's in this dreamlike montage sequence of Lara-Su's life that we get...

The uncomfortable family nudity scene, followed by the dual timeline Julie-Su breastfeeding scene.

Yeah, you might have heard about this one already. If this incredibly eerie presentation of Lara-Su's hazy memories of the two different timelines make it hard to tell what's going on, don't worry. There's another, clearer version later in the book as part of Julie-Su's character profile, because I guess Ken was just so proud of it.

(I censored these myself because I'm not playing Russian roulette with Tumblr's inconsistent nudity rules and risking getting banned lmao)

Like, okay. Is a mother breastfeeding her child really that shocking of a thing to see in a story? No, not at all. But, like... when it's two characters who you previously created for an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comic for 7-year-olds... and some of those officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comics for 7-year-olds are reprinted in the same book... and when it's drawn like this... yeah, it's kind of a shocker.

It just looks so unnatural. Julie-Su is posed very deliberately so that you'll see both of her breasts, and in the new timeline version she's barely even holding Lara-Su so you can really get a good look at her supermodel body, showing zero physical signs that she just gave birth. Most people will immediately jump to this being Ken putting his fetishes in his work (a type of criticism that I'm incredibly tired of - it's 2024, all the cool artists are blatantly putting their fetishes in their work now). And my immediate response is that, no, this is probably just Ken trying to come off as really mature on a surface level, a thing he's been obsessed with since the Archie days. Free from the shackles of writing a licensed children's comic, of course he's going to jump immediately into depicting some nonsexual, artistic nudity to try and prove he's A Real Mature Artist For Grown-Ups who just thinks the human body is beautiful and breastfeeding shouldn't be a taboo etc. etc.

But then, like. You look at some of the other character designs. Like Espio's daughter Salma, who's now this horrifying alien lizard person who's always nude, and her scale pattern puts scales exactly where her nipples should be. Or you look at his comments about the Echyd'nya age of consent. Or you look at how he keeps drawing Lara-Su in this. Like, does the shuttle really need this, like... reverse chaise lounge thing in the cockpit? So that we can keep getting these shots of the 16-year-old Lara-Su lying on her stomach and posing with one of her legs kicked up, her naked ass in plain view?

The vibe isn't great, is what I'm saying!

I'm not going to try to ascribe authorial intent here. I don't know. I'm not a psychic. Given his very blatant reliance on photo references elsewhere in the book, it's entirely possible he just referenced some figure drawing photos that were maybe just a little too sexy. And also, he's an American comic book artist, and a boomer one at that. Those guys tend to draw women a certain way, even when it's not supposed to be sexual. I don't fucking know. It just sucks. I'm not gonna make some hyperbolic statement about how this makes him a literal pedophile who should be in jail, but it is deeply offputting and objectifying.

But if you already knew about the nursing scenes and were hoping there was some other really shocking stuff in there for me to talk about in this review, sorry to disappoint, but nope. That's the only shockingly weird new thing in here. Once again, not a lot happens in this story, and what does happen is pretty boring.

Once we get past the recap stuff and the human guy, the plot developments boil down to this: The timeline was altered at the end of M25YL... but not as much as you might think. In the new timeline, Knuckles ("K'Nox"), Cobar (now looking significantly younger), and Rotor (now a rhino just called "The Emissary") still traveled via shuttle to go find a time machine in the Badlands and fix the time-space continuum, like in the climax of the original arc. This time, though, Sonic wasn't there, and Lara-Su came along without having to stow away. Lara-Su watches the ship while the grown ups go deal with the time machine, and then after a couple panels Not Rotor comes back with Cobar and is like "Hey, Cobar got hurt, we gotta leave. Dunno what happened to your dad." And then they just, like. Presume that Knuckles must have died. Even though we have no idea what happened to him. And then they just fly away. And then Lara-Su is sad that her dad died.

And that's pretty much it!

This is supposed to be a really emotional sequence - it's literally the scene where Lara-Su learns that Knuckles is dead - but instead it comes off as unintentionally funny because of how poorly it's portrayed. Not showing Knuckles' actual disappearance is a huge misstep, for one, making his uncertain fate more confusing and anticlimactic than dramatic. But also, Ken keeps just using the same two drawings of Rotor for two pages, so he doesn't really seem to be emoting at all, and he's in this spacey hazmat suit that honestly just makes him look like fucking Moltar from Space Ghost. So the whole time I'm just reading his dialogue in Moltar's deadpan voice as he's like "I dunno. We did what we could. Anyway, let's leave."

After this, we get a two-page spread previewing the rest of the story from Shattered Tomorrows. It's basically like a trailer in comic form. It has one of the most mystifying layouts I've ever seen in a comic book. I have no idea what order I'm supposed to read this in.

Yeah, I kinda have a feeling this is the full extent of what Ken has drawn for the rest of that book. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear that I'm right.

Bonus material: Data files

These are mostly very dull, recapping a lot of events shared between Ken's Archie run and the new Lara-Su Chronicles timeline. It seems like almost his entire run is still considered canon to the backstory of the new timeline, just with some names changed, and things only really diverge at the climax of M25YL. But I'll share the interesting stuff here.

Lara-Su

The main thing you'll notice in Lara-Su's profile is the massive, unreadable wall of text where Ken felt the need to list the entire Knuckles family tree, split across both pages.

This is literally so long that Lara-Su's personal history has to awkwardly cut off mid-sentence and be continued on the final page of the book, after the rest of the data files.

Also, please note that this list gives Julie-Su's mom's full name as Mari-Su of the House of Atrades. Incredible on all levels.

There's also a reference to the dark timeline Lara-Su was originally supposed to come from. You know, the one where Julie-Su is the leader of a rebel movement fighting against a Knuckles who had gone mad with power? The timeline that would have been way more interesting than the one in M25YL? Here it seems to have been written off as the result of another "timeline disruption." Lara-Su allegedly has vague memories of this timeline, in the same way that she has vague memories of the M25YL timeline.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey's bio mostly recaps events from the Archie comics, which means the Sonic/Sally/Geoffrey love triangle has to be alluded to. His rivalry with Sonic is described like this:

"He would later resurface when Kintobor was transporting his latest hi-tech weapon, the Dynamac-3000. It was during that mission he discovered a rival for the Princess' affections. Whereas the Princess would be one of a line of conquests where St. John was concerned, the blue-spined Erinaceinae who protested doth a bit too much regarding his affections for the Princess for St. John's taste would prove to be a source of great sport and amusement."

Yes. It's gross. Saying that Geoffrey saw Sally as "one of a line of conquests" is gross. Ken writing this and then still treating Geoffrey as the coolest badass ever is gross. The "Princess Acorn" is also first on the list of Geoffrey's "female relationships" elsewhere in his bio, though I suppose how much of a "relationship" they had is left vague. Honestly, at this point the fact that Ken didn't explicitly confirm that Geoffrey took the underage Sally's virginity in the book comes off as a display of restraint. The bar couldn't be any lower, I know.

Remington

His bio is, frankly, shockingly long for such a minor character, though I guess he does get a large portion of the word salad dialogue in "The Storm." There's a lot of stuff here about how the identities of his biological parents are shrouded in mystery, a plot point that fans have long speculated Ken just straight up forgot about in his time at Archie. (Ian confirmed that Kragok from the Dark Legion was Remington's dad, though, so this isn't really much of a mystery.)

Lien-Da

She gets a bio even though she's not present in the two new stories, just so we get to look at her awful new design and compare it to how Steven Butler drew her earlier in the book:

Commander Taelor

We get to see two drawings of him with the same exact Ernie Hudson face side by side! That's fun.

Julie-Su

She gets a list of "known friends," but the only character listed is Knuckles' mom. Poor Julie-Su.

Also, Ken feels the need to reiterate that Knuckles and Julie-Su are still distant cousins. He made a whole new timeline where he can change whatever details he wants, but THAT had to remain canon. Thanks, Ken.

And then after the data files we get the special thanks page, listing everyone who preordered the book and/or bought TLSC merch from Ken.

With my name on the list. Because I had to buy a copy to cover it for the blog.

My name is on the very next page right after the breastfeeding panel in Julie-Su's data file.

Yep. He got me.

Is it at least a well put together book? Like, in terms of manufacturing quality?

Its physical quality is... fine. It's a nice, sturdy hardcover. The print quality seems fine, though mine does have a bit of smudging from some sort of printing error on one page. The pages don't seem like they'll fall out on me. The image quality is crisp. The colors are vibrant. This is a low bar, but this is one of the few places where I'm able to give this book anything resembling praise.

The formatting and graphic design work, on the other hand...

(I didn't crumple those page corners, it came like that.)

For one, the placement and sizes of the M25YL pages is inconsistent, largely due to the fact that the book doesn't actually match the proportions of a comic. A lot of pages aren't properly centered vertically. Some pages go all the way up to the top edge of the paper, while others leave a visible gap of about half a centimeter. Every page has a 1cm gap to its left and right, which is sometimes filled in with a solid color or gradient that doesn't quite match the page it's surrounding. I have to assume Ken didn't have any sort of source files or original artwork to work off of, as those ideally would've had more generous bleed to account for slight shifts in printing. It kind of seems like he just got the highest resolution versions he could find of the digital releases online and printed those. The colors are a dead ringer for the digital versions, which have always looked slightly more saturated and pastel than they did in print.

I can't say this bodes well for his further plans for Archie Sonic reprints - sorry, Mobian Line reprints. If they ever come out, please, for the love of god, do not buy those. I don't care how much you love Archie Sonic, they aren't going to be good reprints. For comparison, IDW's similarly priced hardcover Sonic collections have none of these formatting problems, because they're made by people who know what they're doing with access to the actual source files.

The book also has its fair share of text-focused pages, split between the data files and messages directly from Ken about the history of his career and this project, and these are formatted in the most amateurish way possible. Just massive walls of Arial text over either plain white backgrounds, simple gradients, or faded photos. I've seen school yearbooks with better graphic design. Even ignoring my subjective feelings about the art and stories within, this book does not feel like it's worth $36 USD.

It's frankly shocking how shabby he let this thing look considering it's supposed to be his baby. And doesn't that really sum it all up?

Closing thoughts

Obviously, I did not expect this to be any good. But I'm still left kind of dumbfounded by it.

I think what really strikes me about it is that Ken had a blank check to do whatever he wanted here. He got an opportunity many writers would kill for when he gained complete ownership of his most famous work. He's free from the limitations of a monthly licensed comic book for children, free to make whatever creative decisions he wants without editors or other writers or Sega to worry about, free to completely reinvent the series to his heart's content and finally tell the story of his dreams. And with that opportunity and 13 years of his time, he made... this. A direct continuation of "Mobius: 25 Years Later" that barely changes anything about the characters or world beyond their awful new designs, even though much of the word count is spent rambling about how the timeline has changed. A story that makes zero concessions for new readers, or even returning readers who don't already have the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets explaining his creative decisions burned into their memory. 30 pages where nothing really happens and the story barely moves forward an inch despite the decades-long wait - but maybe something will happen if you buy the next book!

Who is this for? Maybe this really is a project for no one but Ken. Maybe he just really, really wants to finish the story he started, a story that's personal to him due to the family history it evokes, and the number of people who enjoy it or buy it beyond that is irrelevant. I think that many of the best artists are incredibly self-indulgent ones working with that exact mindset, artists whose enthusiasm for their own work jumps off the page or screen. So, if that's the case, then why the fuck isn't he telling the damn story? What's stopping him? Why is he still spinning his wheels? Where is that passion for his own work? Because it sure as hell isn't there on the page. There's a huge part of me that really wishes I could say "Man, what a weirdo, but you do you, Ken. You tell your weird little story." But there's barely any story here. It's like he loves styling himself as a storyteller, but he's terrified of finally having to actually tell a story after all this time. He's still stuck in the exact same mode of writing he was in almost 30 years ago when he was doing 6-page backup stories about Knuckles, just killing time and stringing readers along until he's eventually able to truly realize his vision. If not now, then when, Ken?

Even the back cover blurb is mostly just a dry recap of the history of this thing. It was a Sonic comic, the original arc was published in these issues, it went unfinished, Ken left Archie, the lawsuits happened, now he's continuing the story. There's nothing about why anyone should give a shit about this as its own story, even though Ken has spent years trying in vain to convince people TLSC is its own beast that shouldn't be judged as a Sonic story. I think deep down he knows that there's no pitch for this beyond the novelty of it originating from Sonic. And that's why, despite declaring that he'd leave the site, he's still on Twitter riling up Sonic fans. It's the only attention he gets at this point.

Maybe this is too harsh when those 30 pages of new comics are just intended as a preview for the "real" book. But the elephant in the room is that we have no idea if that "real" book will ever actually come out, let alone the entire series of seven graphic novels that will supposedly complete this saga.

Ken is undeniably a complete jackass and all around unpleasant, vindictive person who's rightly become an industry pariah. He's a self-proclaimed paragon of progressive values who'll send Comicsgaters after his successors for the crime of not worshiping the ground he walks on, and then turn around and announce he's going to reprint their work without even consulting them. He's a sore winner who already won his copyright battle on a level most comic writers would never dare to dream of, and yet still won't truly be satisfied until he sees an entire major comic publisher go out of business, putting god knows how many people out of work, because he thinks this would get him back the license to a video game franchise he doesn't even like.

But I still have to pity him.

As an artist, the trajectory of his life is my nightmare. I think all of us fear dying before we can tell all the stories we want to tell. There's simply never enough time to do everything. And here's Ken in his 60s, talking about how he's still planning on making his magnum opus all by himself out of stubbornness and pride, despite demonstrably proving he can't handle the workload, and also talking about how if he dies before the project can be finished he'll have to pass the torch on to his kids and get them to finish it for him. It's so grim. Even just typing that sends a shiver down my spine. It took nine years of his limited time on Earth to finish and release an 11-page comic about Geoffrey St. John sitting backwards in a chair.

This is a purgatory of his own creation. And yet... I'm not sure he's ever been prouder. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I guess if I want people to take anything away from this review, it's this:

Lesson one: If you're an artist or writer of some kind, or an aspiring creator, don't wait around. No one else is going to tell your story for you. Start writing that novel. Start drawing that webcomic. Start making that game. If Penders can put out this damn book that no one asked for after 13 years of work, then proudly proclaim that he's still going to make six or seven more books and also reprint hundreds of comics he doesn't have all of the rights to, then show up to cons with that foul Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows banner and sit in front of it beaming with pride, fully aware of his critics but saying "fuck 'em, I know I'm hot shit," then you can do fucking anything. Tell the weird, sincere, cringe story of your dreams. If Ken Penders doesn't have imposter syndrome, then nobody should.

And lesson two: Don't buy Ken's books.

[spacelazarwolf]

"it's 2024 antisemitism isn't a problem anymore you just want to be oppressed."

here's a non-exhaustive list of antisemitic incidents, attacks, and pogroms during my lifetime. if you're not jewish, i am guilting you into reading this entire list. i really do not care if it takes forever or makes you feel bad. read it.

1993

state farm settles a $30mil lawsuit after it was revealed that state farm kept a list of prominent jewish lawyers referred to within state farm as "the jewish lawyers list" where any claims made by those attorneys were automatically forwarded to state farm's fraud unit, purely on the basis of the attorney's jewish identity. state farm employees testified confirming the list had been used to discriminate against ethnic minorities.

1994

four days after the cave of patriarchs massacre, a man shot at a van full of jewish students, killing one and injuring three others. he is reported to have shouted "kill the jews" as revenge for the cave of patriarchs massacre.

a white supremacist fired ten rounds at a synagogue in eugene, oregon.

a jewish community center in buenos aires, argentina was bombed, killing 85 people and injuring 300.

1995

a japanese magazine ran an article that stated "the 'holocaust' is a fabrication. there were no execution gas chambers in auschwitz or in any other concentration camp. today, what are displaced as 'gas chambers' at the remaints of the auschwitz camp in poland are a post-war fabrication by the polish communist regime or by the soviet union, which controlled the country. not once, neither at auschwitz nor in any territory controlled by the germans during the second world war, was there 'mass murder of jews' in 'gas chambers'."

1996

in turkey, an islamic preacher distributed thousands of copies of a book called "the holocaust lie."

1997

jean-marie le pen was convicted and fined for remarks minimizing the holocaust, and then accused the president of france of being "on the payroll of jewish organizations, and particularly of b'nai b'rith."

1998

osama bin laden stated that israel's ultimate goal was to annex the arabian peninsula and the middle east and enslave its peoples. he claimed that the us state department and department of defense were controlled by jews for the sole purpose of serving israel's goals. he also claimed that israeli jews controlled the governments of the us and uk, directing them to kill as many muslims as they could.

1999

iran arrested 13 iranian jews, accusing them of being spies for israel, including a 16 year old boy. ten of them were sentenced to 4-13 years in prison, and eventually when they were freed they left iran for israel.

a man was arrested in paris for attacking a bartender because he "believed she was jewish."

several synagogues in sacramento were set on fire by a group of eight or nine men.

a man shot and killed one person and injured five at a jewish community center in los angeles.

2000

a man broke into a jewish woman's house, shot and killed her, then set her house on fire. he then drove to the synagogue where she was a member and fired into the windows of the synagogue, then exited his car and spray-painted two red swastikas on the building. he drove to another synagogue where he shot and shattered the synagogue's glass windows.

on yom kippur, two molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue.

a synagogue in syracuse, new york was set on fire by a man who reportedly yelled "i did this for you, god!"

a sukkah was destroyed at a synagogue in st. paul, minnesota.

a synagogue in harrisburg, pennsylvania was set on fire before yom kippur.

during the 2000 presidential election, lee alcorn, president of the dallas naacp branch, criticized al gore's selection of senator joe lieberman for his vice-presidential candidate because lieberman was jewish. alcorn said "if we get a jew person, then what i'm wondering is, i mean, what is this movement for, you know? does it have anything to do with the failed peace talks?" ... "so i think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kinds of things."

2001

in belgium, the vice president of one of the country's largest parties gave an interview on dutch tv where he cast doubt over the number of jews murdered by the nazis during the holocaust. in the same interview he questioned the scale of the nazis' use of gas chambers and the authenticity of anne frank's diary.

2002

osama bin laden stated in a letter that jews controlled the civilian media outlets, politics, and economic institutions of the united states.

a synagogue was set on fire in toronto, ontario, canada.

men rammed two cars through the courtyard gates of a synagogue in lyon, france, then rammed one of the cars into the prayer hall before setting the vehicles on fire. eyewitnesses reported seeing between 12 and 15 attackers. this was the first of a series of attacks on jewish targets in france in a single week - which coincided with passover - including at least five other synagogues.

a synagogue in marseille, france was burned to the ground.

a synagogue in strasbourg was set on fire.

a synagogue in paris was firebombed.

"richard nixon tapes" were declassified, which confirmed that billy graham, a famous evangelist and civil rights advocate, had agreed with nixon that jews controll the american media, calling it a "stranglehold."

a synagogue in tunisia was bombed, killing 20 and injuring 30.

a gunman opened fire at the airline ticket counter of el al, israel's national airline, at the la international airport. two people were killed and four were injured. federal investigators concluded that the gunman had hoped to influence us government policy in favor of palestinians and that the incident was a terror attack.

in an interview for a french magazine, a french actor, comedian, and activist dieudonne m'bala m'bala described "the jews" as "a sect, a fraud, which is the worst of all because it was the first."

white supremacists planned to bomb a series of institutions and people associated with the black and jewish communities. targets included the united states holocaust museum, the new england holocaust memorial, and steven spielberg.

2003

terrorists attempted to bomb a jewish cemetery, and succeeded in bombing a jewish community center and jewish-owned italian restaurant in morocco. 45 people in total were killed.

a molotov cocktail was thrown through the windows of a synagogue in los angeles, california.

the prime minister of malaysia drew a standing ovation for his speech. an excerpt: "[muslims] are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. the nazis killed 6 million jews out of 12 million. but today the jews rule this world by proxy. they get others to fight and die for them. they invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so they may enjoy equal rights with others. with these they have now gained control over the most powerful countries. and they, this tiny community, have become a world power."

two synagogues in turkey were bombed, killing 55 and injuring over 750.

2004

romania officially denied the holocaust occurred on its territory up until 2004.

the film 'the passion of the christ' was released, causing backlash against the jewish community for protesting the antisemitic tones of the movie.

a jewish school library was firebombed in montreal, quebec, canada.

jewish cemeteries were defaced with swastikas and a funeral home set on fire in wellington new zealand.

2005

m'bala claimed during a press conference that the central council of french jews was a "mafia" that had "total control over french policy exercise", called the commemoration of the holocaust "memorial pornography" and claimed that the "zionists of the centre national de la cinematographie" which "control french cinema" prevented him from making a film about the slave trade.

the muslim brotherhood leader denounced what he called "the myth of the holocaust" in defending iranian president's denial of the holocaust.

a polish radio station during the polish election promoted antisemitic views, including denial of the jedwabne pogrom. their support of right-wing conservative law and justice party is considered a major factor in their electoral victory.

a group of 15 members of the state duma of russia demanded that judaism and jewish orgqanizations be banned from the country. 500 prominent russians demanded that the state prosecutor investigate ancient jewish texts as "anti-russian" and ban judaism.

islamic extremists planned to bomb a number of synagogues and an israeli consulate in california.

iranian president denied the holocaust during a speech in zahedan. "they have invented a myth that jews were massacred and palce this above god, religions and the prophets." he suggested that if the holocaust had occurred, that it was the responsibility of europeans to offer up territory to the jews.

2006

a man stabbed nine people at a synagogue in russia.

the iranian state-sponsored "international conference to review the global vision of the holocaust" opened, with its focus being to question the facts of the holocaust. the iranian foreign ministry spokesperson stated "the holocaust is not a sacred issue that one can't touch. i have visited the nazi camps in eastern europe. i think it is exaggerated."

mel gibson was arrested for a dui, and reportedly yelled at the police officer, "fucking jews... the jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. are you a jew?"

m'bala was fined for defamation after calling a prominent jewish tv presenter a "secret donor of the child-murdering israeli army."

ilan halimi, a french moroccan jew, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. he was dumped on the side of the road, 80% of his body covered in burns, and died from his injuries on his way to the hospital. the kisnappers thought halimi was wealthy because he came from a jewish family, and the gang confessed that they believed all jews to be rich which motivated them to target several jews. the halimi family reports being told that if they could not raise the money for the ransom then they should get it from the jewish community.

a man targeted the jewish federation of seattle when the organization showed up in search results after he typed the phrase "something jewish" into a search engine. he forced his way through the building's security door with several guns, a knife, and ammunition, taking a 14 year old girl as a hostage. he is reported to have said "i'm only doing this for a statement" and "i'm a muslim american; i'm angry at israel" before the shooting spree began. he then took a pregnant woman hostage, saying "now since you don't know how to... listen, now you're the hostage, and i don't give a fuck if i kill you or your baby." the woman reported him stating "that he was a muslim, and this was his personal statement against jews and the bush administration for giving money to jews, and for us jews for giving money to israel, about hozbollah, the war in iraq, and he wanted to talk to cnn."

2007

holocaust survivor elie wiesel was attacked by a holocaust denier in san francisco.

jewish professor elizabeth midlarsky had a swastika spray painted on her office door.

2008 - gaza war

a leading member of hamas made a statement that israelis "have legitimized the murder of their own children by killing the children of palestine... they have legitimized the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people."

a belgian jewish magazine received a dozen death threats on its website, including a threat to carry out a suicide attack to "avenge the suffering of the palestinians."

protestors in indonesia shut down the country's only synagogue, threatening to drive out the country's jews. they stated that "if israel refuses to stop its attacks and oppression of the palestinian people, we don't need to defend [the synagogue's' presence here." the synagogue has been shuttered since.

a man sent a letter threatening to bo b the ida crown jewish academy in chicago. the letter said that explosives would be set off around the school unless violence in gaza stopped by january 15 2009.

south african deputy foreign minister was quoted saying "[jews] in fact control [america], no matter which government comes into power, whether republican or democratic, whether barack obama or george bush... the control of america, just like the control of most western countries, is in the hands of jewish money and if jewish money controls their country then you cannot expect anything else." she later claimed she "conflated zionist pressure with jewish influence."

antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, appeared all over turkey. a sign was put up at the door of a civic group's office saying "jews cannot enter, dogs can." anti-jewish articles began appearing in turkish newspapers, and there were several hundred documented examples of antisemitic messages. as a result, turkish jewish immigration to israel increased.

in yemen, jews experienced verbal and physical harassment. jewish children were injured, one seriously, when muslim students threw stones at them. anti-israel protestors also attacked several jewish homes, smashing windows and pelting them with rocks, and injuring at least one jewish residence. a yemeni jewish family was extricated from yemen to israel after suffering continuous antisemitic attacks and death threats. a grenade was also thrown into the courtyard of the family's home in raydah.

a molotov cocktail was thrown. at a synagogue in brussels. rocks and other objects were thrown at a jewish school. a jewish home was the subject of arson. afterwards, hundreds of protestors tried to march toward the jewish neighborhood but were held off by police.

a man opened fire on three israeli cosmetics salesmen and two customers in a shopping mall. the shooting, which followed a period of harassment against the cosmetic stand, resulted in two israelis being hit by the shots. the perpatrator explained that he was motivated by the middle east situation.

sixty-six antisemitic incidents were reported in france, home to europe's largest muslim and jewish populations. numerous synagogues were attacked with petrol bombs and damaged in various towns. a car was rammed into the gates of a synagogue in toulouse and set on fire. a petrol bomb was thrown at a synagogue which set fire to an adjacent jewish restaurant. offensive graffiti was also sprayed on synagogues throughout the country. in paris, a rabbi's car was torched, a. jewish student was attacked and stabbed four times, and a 15-year old girl was assaulted by a gang.

a jewish community in germany was daubed and later stoned, and the central council of jews in german reported a significant increase in the number of hate mails and death threats during the conflict.

synagogues in multiple cities in greece were vandalized and suffered arson attacks. in athens, the walls of a jewish cemetery were sprayed with antisemitic graffiti "jews israelites murderers." neo-nazi slogans like "ax and fire to the jewish dogs" were used at anti-israel protests. a monument commemorating the murder of greek jews was vandalized with slogans like "greece - palestine no jew will remain." a seminar at the jewish museum of thessaloniki was cancelled after receiving threats, and the leftist parliamentary party of coalition of the radical left declined to attend the greek national day of remembrance of holocaust heroes and martyrs because of the attendance of the israeli ambassador. in ioannina the local jewish cemetery was vandalized with several tombs broken. the corfu synagogue was vandalized with graffiti such as "shit on israel" "jews nazis" and "murderers." the shoah memorial was also vandalized with graffiti regarding gaza. in larisa both grouns from the extreme right and extreme left targeted the local community. leftist and palestinian demonstrators attempted to vandalize the synagogue during a march, while later the same day groups linked to neo-nazi groups vandalized the shoah monyment and organized protests in front of the synagogue asking for the expulsion of jews from larisa. jews were attacked as "christ killers" and "smelling of blood" "they are the worst thing of the 20th century" and an eminent member of the greek orthodox church spoke of "zionist monsters with sharp claws" and "jews puhished for killing christ" and being "god killers."

italian trade union flaica-cub issued a call to boycott jewish-owned shops in rome in protest at the israeli offensive. it was condemned as antisemitic and reminiscent of the italian race laws under fascism in the 1930s.

a molotov cocktail was thrown at a jewish owned building in amsterdam following an attempted arson of a jewish institution in arnhem. a synagogue and jewish owned building were targeted by stoning. at an anti-israel demonstration in utrecht, some demonstrators shouted "hamass, hamas, jews to the gas."

during the 2009 oslo riots, the largest anti-jewish riots in norwegian history, muslim youth attacked the israeli embassy and yelled anti-jewish slogans in arabic, including "death to the jews" "kill the jews" and "slaughter the jews." in one incident, young men beat a 73 year old man who was carrying an israeli flag while shouting "bloody jew - get him!" they only stopped attacking him when they realized he was not jewish.

a jewish burial chapel in sweden was the target of an arson attack and a jewish centor was set on fire twice in three days.

there were approximately 225 recorded antisemitic incidents in the uk during the war. synagogues were firebombed, jews received verbal and digital abuse, and a gang tried to force their way into jewish restaurants and shops, specifically focusing on the london jewish family centre. a jewish motorist was also dragged from his car and assaulted. antisemitic graffiti with slogans including "kill jews" "jews are scumbags" and "jihad 4 israel" were sprayed in jewish areas across london and manchester.

a molotov cocktail was thrown at a tample in chicago, and in lincolnwood a synagogue's glass doors were shattered by a brick and "free palestine" and "death to israel" were spraypainted on the building. a jewish preschool in california was graffitied with swastikas and antisemitic messages.

argentinian jews wearing kippot were physically attacked on public buses and jewish cemetaries were defaced. a gang attacked argentinian jews near the israeli embassy in buenos aires.

in bolivia, vandals removed a star of david from a monument from the plaza israel and started spraypainting "plaza palestina" on jewish murals.

during shabbat, the caracas synagogue, venezuela's oldest synagogue, was defaced with "property of islam", and an armed gang of 15 unidentified people broke in and the security guards were bound and gagged while the gang destroyed the offices and the repository where the holy books were stored. they daubed the walls with antisemitic and anti-israel graffiti that called for jews to be expelled from the country, and also stole a database that listed jews who lived in venezuela.

2008 - cont

the harvard crimson school paper ran a paid holocaust denial ad.

a chabad house in mumbai was taken over by two attackers and several residents were held hostage. a rabbi and his wife, who was six months pregnant, were murdered with four other hostages in the house by the attackers. according to radio transmissions, the attackers "would be told by their handlers in pakistan that the lives of jews were worth 50 times those of non jews." injuries on some of the bodies indicated that they may have been tortured.

2009

hamas refused to allow palestinian children to learn about the holocaust, which it called "a lie invented by the zionists" and referred to holocaust education as a "war crime."

an irish journalist claimed "there was no holocaust... and six million jews were not murdered by the third reich. these two statements of mine are irrefutable truths."

tapes were released in which billy graham is heard in conversation with richard nixon referring to jews as "the synagogue of satan."

four men were arrested in new york in connection with a plot to blow up two synagogues in the bronx.

a neo nazi entered the united states holocaust memorial museum in washington dc and shot and fatally wounded a security officer.

2010

the last surviving romaniote synagogue in greece was targeted for an arson attack.

a synagogue in cairo, egypt was bombed.

a synagogue in sweden was attacked with explosives.

2011

six jewish institutions were attacked by vandals in montreal, including four synagogues and a school.

j.z. knight stated "fuck god's chosen people! i think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now."

the manhattan terrorism plot to bomb various targets in manhattan, including a synagogue.

2012

a man killed four jews, including three children, outside a school in toulouse, france.

a synagogue in sweden was attacked with an explosive decide, shattering a window.

2013

alice walker expressed appreciation for the works of antisemitic conspiracy theorist david icke. she said that icke's book "human race get off your knees" would be her choice if she could have only one book. the book promotes the theory that the earth is ruled by shapeshifting reptilian humanoids and "rothschild zionists."

louis farrakhan delivered an antisemitic speech, referring to jews as "satanic jews" and "the synagogue of satan", controlling america's government and other sectors, reportedly saying that president obama "surrounded himself with satan... members of the jewish community." farrakhan also said that the jewish people "have mastered the civilization now, but they've mastered it in evil... who's the owner of hollywood that creates images and makes the people think that what is created on screen is the way we should live? that's satan... satan has devoured so much of humanity. ... the people that own hollywood are the same people that control your press, the same people that control your media, the same people who are the publishers, the same people who are the distributors, the same synagogue of satan, and they put you before the world in this disgraceful manner. ... jesus was the last hope for the jewish people but they rejected him. they are now in control of the media and the airwaves, gaining access to the 'sacred territory' which is in the minds of the people."

the supreme leader of iran grand ayatollah ali khamenei questioned the validity of the holocaust, saying "the holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's uncertain how it has happened."

2014

kkk leader killed three non jewish people at a jewish community center and jewish retirement home in kansas, the day before passover.

residents of a village in spain called "castrillo matajudios" ("jew-killer camp") since 1627 voted to change the name of the village.

2015

four jews were killed when a gunman attacked a kosher supermarket in paris where the gunman held 15 other hostages and demanded that the kouachi brothers not be harmed.

iran organized the international holocaust cartoon competition, a competition in which artists were encouraged to submit cartoons on the theme of holocaust denial.

louis farrakhan accused jews of involvement in sept 11 attacks.

swastikas were spraypainted on a jewish fraternity at uc davis on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz.

a french settlement named "la mort aux juifs" or "death to jews" finally changed its name after a denied attempt in 1992.

a synagogue in copenhagen was taken by a gunman during a bat mitzvah celebration where one jewish man on security duty was killed.

stanford university student senate candidate molly horwitz was asked by a student group how being jewish would affect her decision-making.

two synagogues and a jewish neighborhood in san antonio, texas were vandalized with antisemitic graffiti.

2016

natasha waldorf of alameda was subjected to two boys sending her text messages that included antisemitic slurs, two other students joked about the holocaust and when she confronted them they told her that "hitler should have finished the job."

the campus chapter of students for justice in palestine at the university of california irvine was sanctioned because they disrupted a program hosted by a jewish campus group and intimidated jewish students.

2017

alice walker published a poem on her blog titled "it is our (frightful) duty to study the talmud", recommending that the reader should start with youtube to learn about the evils of the talmud.

a huge wave of threats, including bomb threats, were made against jewish community centers and other institutions in the united states around the high holy days.

sarah halimi was murdered in paris.

the chicago dyke march organizers singled out and approached a group of women carrying jewish pride flags and began to question them on their political stance in regards to zionism and israel, and then expelled them from the event. the organizers attributed the reasoning to the star of david on the flag as a "zionist expression." the organization's twitter account also used the phrase "zio tears" in a now deleted tweet. "zio" is a slur originated by david duke.

the new england holocaust memorial was smashed with a rock.

in ukraine, the space of synagogues holocaust memorial display was vandalized by neo nazis.

the chairpersons of the chicago slutwalk wrote, "we still stand behind dyke march chicago's decision to remove the zionist contingent from their event, and we won't allow zionist displays at ours." the organizers made the following declaration about the star of david: "its connections to the oppression enacted by israel is too strong for it to be neutral."

a jewish cemetery in missouri was vandalized.

the unite the right rally took place in charlottesville, virginia, where white nationalists chanted slogans like "blood and soil" "jews will not replace us" "the goyim know" "the jewish media is going down."

a synagogue in sweden was firebombed.

2018

trayon white, an american politician, posted a video to his official facebook page showing snow flurries following, and alluding to the rothschild family conspiring to manipulate the weather.

an israeli man wearing a yarmulke was attacked in berlin; the attacker reportedly beat him with a belt and shouted "yehudi" ("jew")

tamika mallory, an american activist and one of the organizers of the womens march, attended an antisemitic speech by louis farrakhan, a figure she had previously refused to denounce. during the three hour speech, farrakhan claimed that "the powerful jews are my enemy" "the jews have control over agencies of those angencies of government" like the fbi, thta jews are "the mother and father of apartheid" and that jews are responsible for "degenerate behavior in hollywood turning men into women and women into men."

a republican candidate for senate in california openly called for a united states "free from jews."

11 people were murdered at the tree of life synagogue. on social media, several people made the claim that they "should not be mourned if they were zionists."

2019

belgium outlawed kosher slaughter.

rep ilhan omar tweeted an allegation that american support for israel was rooted in money spent by pro israel lobbying organizations.

several mps quit the labor party under jeremy corbyn citing "culture of extreme antisemitism and intolerance."

a subway poster in brooklyn with a picture of ruth bader ginsburg was valdalized with the writing "die jew bitch" and a swastika.

multiple violent attacks occured in brooklyn.

a synagogue in turkey is attacked with a molotov cocktail.

one person was killed and three were injured during a shooting at a passover seder in california.

a synagogue was attacked by a lone shooter in germany.

a kosher grocery store in jersey city, new jersey was attacked and five people were killed.

jersey city mayor steve fullop said a trustee of the jersey city board of education should resign in the wake of her comment after the above shooting about "jew brutes" that according to her have "threatened, intimidated, and harassed" black residents. the trustee asked whether the public is "brave enough" to listen to the shooters' message, and said the local rabbis were selling body parts. she remained on the board until 2022.

a jewish elder was killed and four others were injured at the home of a hasidic rabbi during hanukkah in new york.

2020

the tomb of esther and mordechai in iran was subjected to an arson attack.

the jewish center at the unitersity of delaware was subjected to an arson attack.

six igbo synagogues in nigeria were razed by soldiers, and at least 50 people were killed.

a synagogue in portland was subjected to an arson attack.

2021

george washington university's chapter of tau kappa epsilon fraternity reported that their house was broken into and vandalized, and their sefer torah destroyed.

2022

four hostages were taken at a synagogue in colleyville, texas. the attacker believed that the rabbi could call another rabbi in new york and secure the release of aafia siddiqui, a pakistani operative imprisoned for attempted murder and other crimes. siddiqui tried to dismiss her lawyers on the grounds that they were jewish. she said the case against her was a jewish conspiracy theory, demanded that no jews be allowed on the jury, and that all prospective jurors be dna tested and excluded from the jury at her trial if they had "zionist or israeli" dna. she wrote a letter to president obama, asserting, "study the history of the jews. they have always back-stabbed everyone who has taken pity on them and make the fatal error of giving them shelter... and it is this cruel, ungrateful back-stabbing of the jews that has caused them to be mercilessly expelled from wherever they gain strength. this is why 'holocausts' keep happening to them repeatedly! if they would only learn to be grateful and change their behavior!"

kanye west states that he "likes hitler" and is a "nazi." he still occasionally goes on an antisemitic twitter bender.

2023-2024 - current war

in october, an egyptian police officer shot and killed two israeli tourists and an egyptial tour guide in alexandria.

a jewish man walking to synagogue in johannesburg was accosted by a male jogger screaming antisemitic insults at him. the jogger then assaulted the man, knocked him over, and kicked and punched him while he lay on the ground.

a jewish cricket player was stripped of the captaincy by cricket south africa, claimed to have been a measure to reduce protests at the world cup.

a synagogue in tunisia was severely damaged during anti-israel riots with hundreds of people filmed setting fire to the building.

in armenia, unknown assailants set fire to a synagogue in yerevan and disseminated the arson attack on social media.

the associated press noted a rise in antisemitism on chinese social media. an israeli employee of the israeli embasee in beijing was stabbed and injured on october 13.

a 16 year old in australia was arrested after planning to attack a synagogue in vienna.

gravestones in belgium were damaged and many stars of david were stolen from a cemetery. only the jewish section was vandalized.

danish police arrested at least four operatives who were planning attacks on jewish or israeli targets in denmark.

in paris, stars of david were painted on multipe spots on several building fronts in a southern district. similar tags appeared over the weekend in other suburbs. antisemitic chants were filmed on the paris metro, "fuck the jews and fuck your mother, long live palestine. we are nazis and proud of it." a woman in lyon was stabbed and a swastika was graffitied on her home.

overall, french jews have noted a huge increase in antisemitism, with a surge of 1200% since october 7.

in berlin, the houses of several jews were marked with a star of david. two molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue.

israeli students in riga, latvia reported receiving hate texts and threats from other students.

lectures on the holocaust at utrecht university of applied sciences in the netherlands were postponed indefinitely.

a norwegian medical student at a rally in warsaw was pictured holding a poster of the flag of israel in a trash can alongside the text "keep the world clean." far right polish lawmaker grzegorz braun used a fire extinguisher on a lit menorah and removed it from the wall during a hanukkah celebration, saying "there can be no pace for the acts of this racist, tribal, wild talmudic cult."

residents of dagestan gathered near the flamingo hotel after reports that refugees from israel were being accomodated there. the protesters demanded that all hotel residents come to the windows to look at them. when the guests did not do this, stones were thrown into the building. the residents demanded to check the basements and let them into the hotel. police arrived and allowed protestors to check the hotel to make sure it was "jew free", and after this a message was posted outside the hotel that jews were prohibited from entering.

an antisemitic ralley was held in cherkessk, demanding the "eviction of ethnic jews."

a local jewish religious national-cultural community center under construction was set on fire in nalchik with the attackers writing "death to the yahuds" on the wall.

a mob stormed the uytash airport in dagestan after the arrival of a red wings flight from tel aviv. messages spread on telegram that a direct flight from israel was arriving, with calls to come to the airport and prevent the plane from landing. dozens of protestors stormed the airport and reached the runway, some of whom managed to climb up onto the plane's wings. 20 people were injured, two of whom were seriously injured. there are reports from passengers of rioters checking cars going to and from the airport for jews.

a synagogue in melillah, a spanish enclave in north africa, was attacked by a mob chanting "murderous israel" while waving palestinian flags.

pro palestinian demonstrators burned an israeli flag and chanted "bomb israel" outside a synagogue in. sweden.

i have to break up the sections because tumblr apparently has a character limit.

multiple cases of antisemitism were reported by students at concordia university with jewish students facing verbal and physical threats from both other students and faculty members. footage of a professor yanise arab shouting at jewish concordia students to "go back to poland, sharmuta (whore)" went viral alongside another video of a student using the slur "kike."

two jewish schools in montreal were targeted with gunfire overnight, and one was struck with gunfire a second time a few days later.

a jewish community center in montreal was attacked with a molotov cocktail.

jewish students and teachers of the peel district school board reported antisemitism and violent threats, including a teacher posting "jews are the problem" in a private facebook group.

a sukkah at caltech was vandalized with anti-israel graffiti. a man threw rocks through the glass doors of a synagogue and cafe in fresno, the second with a note reading "all jewish businesses will be targeted."

at columbia university, a woman assaulted an israeli man with a stick after he confronted her for ripping down posters with pictures and information abuot kidnapped israelis.

a man was arrested for sending threatening emails to a. synagogue in charlotte, north carolina.

a man in new york's grand central terminal punched a woman in the face and told her it was because she was jewish.

seven members of "white lives matter" california held a demonstration, holding up signs reading "no more wars for i$rael."

professor russell rickford spoke at a rally, saying he had found hamas's attack "exhilarating."

the illinois comptroller's office fired one of its lawyers, sarah chowdhurt, over antisemitic remarks she made on the instagram of another lawyer who is jewish.

a building next to a jewish fraternity at upenn was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti reading "the jews r nazis."

a man broke into a jewish family's home in los angeles, yelling "free palestine" and "kill jews."

threats against the jewish community at cornell university were posted online, threatening to shoot rape, and murder jewish students and encouraging violence against them.

paul kessler, an elderly jewish man, was killed at a rally after being struck in the head by a megaphone by a pro palestine protester, causing him to fall.

a woman was arrested after ramming her car into a black hebrew israelite school in indiana, mistakenly believing it to be an "israel school."

a man fired two rounds from a shotgun into the air outside a synagogue in albany and made threatening statements. he is alleged to have said "free palestine" at some point during the attack.

a game between the girls' varsity teams from the leffell school and roosevelt high school early college studies in yonkers was stopped when roosevelt students began to hurl antisemitic slurs at leffell students, with one yelling "i support hamas, you fucking jew", and during the third quarter became aggressive and violent during the play resulting in injuries of leffell's players.

participants in a pro-palestine rally in sydney changed "gas the jews", and several individuals in melbourne made death threats against jews, one group harassing a rabbi and his son, and another asking where to find jews, saying they were "hunting for jews."

a man in new south wales threatened to kill four jewish teenagers in a car with an israeli flag draped on it.

neo nazis marched in melbourne, displaying a banner reading "expose jewish power" and distributing neo nazi literature.

a sydney jewish man was verbally abused for wearing a kippah.

pro palestine graffiti was spray painted on the fence of a synagogue in auckland, and an unsuccessful attempt was made to set the property on fire. google maps had mistakenly listed the property as the local israeli consulate.

new zealand jews report a surge in antisemitic threats.

in new zealand, one child was physically assaulted and another had a swastika and a star of david drawn side by side on their school shirt. children were greeted by their peers with nazi salutes, being called "dirty jews", being told "jews control the world", and jokes about jews being gassed, and the blood libel claim that jews "chop off babies heads."

the us and israeli embassies in buenos aires received bomb threats via email, including one which said "jews we are going. tokill you all."

three people were arrested under suspicion of planning an attack on the maccabiah games.

brazilian authorities arrested two suspects in a. hezbollah backed terror plot to attack synagogues and other jewish targets in the country.

a column on the israeli embassy on colombia was vandalized with a swastika, start of david, and the word "terror" in hebrew.

if you made it to the bottom of this list and actually read everything, reblog with the tag "heard." that's really it. i just want to know that people hear us begging for people to speak up.

[todays-just-a-daydream]

i’d like to buy you all a coke and keep you company…

now we all drink…pepsi

Shakermaker - Oasis (Noel Gallagher live)

Note how he starts singing the Coke song “I’d like to teach the world to sing” at 2:54…he’s referencing how Oasis got sued because  Shakermaker blatantly rips off the Coca Cola song.

[victusinveritas]

Summer 1962. Rio de Janeiro. At the Veloso Bar, a block from the beach at Ipanema, two friends—the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and the poet Vinícius de Moraes��are drinking Brahma beer and musing about their latest song collaboration.

The duo favor the place for the good brew and the even better girl-watching opportunities. Though both are married men, they’re not above a little ogling. Especially when it comes to a neighborhood girl nicknamed Helô. Eighteen-year-old Heloisa Eneida Menezes Pais Pinto is a Carioca—a native of Rio. She’s tall and tan, with emerald green eyes and long, dark wavy hair. They’ve seen her passing by, as she’s heading to the beach or coming home from school. She has a way of walking that de Moraes calls “sheer poetry.”

Legend has it that Jobim and de Moraes were so inspired by this shapely coed, they wrote a song for her right on the bar napkins. It’s a good story, but it’s not quite true.

While Helô inspired the song, it was another Carioca who carried it beyond Rio. Astrud Gilberto was just the wife of singing star João Gilberto when she entered a NYC studio in March 1963. João and Jobim were making a record with tenor saxman Stan Getz. The idea of cutting a verse on “Ipanema” in English came up, and Astrud was the only one of the Brazilians who spoke more than phrasebook English.

Astrud’s child-like vocal, devoid of vibrato and singerly mannerisms, was the perfect foil for her husband’s soft bumblebee voice. Jobim tinkled piano. Getz blew a creamy smooth tenor. Four minutes of magic went to tape.

A year later, the song was casting its quiet spell of sea and sand on the charts, washing past the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” It peaked in mid-June at No. 5, selling over two million copies.

“The Girl From Ipanema” went on to become the second-most recorded popular song in history, behind “Yesterday.” Covered by an A-Z gamut of performers, it’s become the ultimate cliché of elevator music—shorthand for the entire lounge revival of the ’90s.

Over the years, Helô Pinheiro (her married name) enjoyed country-wide fame, ranking with Pelé as one of the goodwill ambassadors of Brazil. She never settled on an occupation, dabbling in acting, then running a modeling agency. In 1987, she posed nude for Playboy (and again in 2003, with her daughter Ticiane). In 2001, Helô opened the Girl From Ipanema clothing boutique in a Rio shopping center.

Shortly after, the heirs of Jobim (who died in 1994) and de Moraes (who died in 1980) filed a lawsuit, claiming Helô was only inadvertently involved in the song’s creation and didn’t have the right to use it for commercial purposes.

Helô says, “I never made a cent from ‘The Girl From Ipanema,’ nor do I claim that I should. Yet now that I’m using a legally registered trademark, they want to prohibit me from being the girl from Ipanema. I’m sure that Antonio and Vinícius would never question the use of the name.”

After much ugliness in and out of court, Helô was able to keep the name for her boutique. Today, she reflects on the early ’60s in Ipanema with nostalgia. “I like the time when everything was prettier because of love, as it says in the Portuguese version of the song. I am still touched when somebody plays the song in my honor.”

—By Bill DeMain

Image: As a teenager, Helo Pinheiro was a regular on Rio's Ipanema Beach

[thornsent]

On RAMCOA, Satanic Panic, and the dangers of conspiracy theory

Lately I've seen a term gaining usage in online DID/OSDD communities, and I would like to talk about its origins and implications.

I want to establish right away that while I do not believe in RAMCOA or SRA, I do believe that these people are genuinely traumatized.

This is not written with the intent to invalidate anyone, rather I am legitimately concerned about the negative impact this is having on survivors of severe trauma as well as marginalized people targeted by conspiracy theories.

Let's begin with what RAMCOA is, and where the term comes from.

RAMCOA stands for ritual abuse, mind control, organized abuse. The term has its origins in the ISSTD, with the creation of their special interest group (SIG) dedicated to the topic. The ISSTD, which began in 1982, has a long history of controversy and is in no small part responsible for the beginnings of the Satanic Panic.

Multiple significant parties of the ISSTD have made claims of transgenerational Satanic cults dating back to two thousand years.

Michael Salter, who would eventually become the chair of the RAMCOA SIG in 2018, claimed in 2008 that there were secret tunnels and chambers beneath the school to facilitate the abuse. This claim was not only disproven, but it is reminiscent of both the Satanic Panic and Pizzagate-era allegations, both of which have also repeatedly been disproven.

Michael has continued to assert his claim as recently as 2019. In 2023, Michael Salter would become president of the ISSTD.

But Michael isn't the only sketchy person involved in the ISSTD. Founding member and former president George Greaves would lose his license for engaging in sexual activity with his patient in 1994.

Bennet Braun, the founder and another former president, has faced multiple malpractice lawsuits due to misleading his patients, resulting in distorted memories and more harm done to an already vulnerable person. Braun’s license would be revoked in 2023.

Also accused of malpractice by multiple patients is Colin Ross, president of the ISSTD From 1993-94. Ross is also known for his claim that he can shoot energy beams from his eyes. This, unsurprisingly, was disproven.

In 2020, the RAMCOA SIG was renamed to the Organized and Extreme Abuse SIG due to the optics of the term no longer suiting the organization.

We have established that the ISSTD was founded and consistently led by conspiracy theorists and abusive psychologists who have since had their licenses revoked. Let's dig a bit into the Satanic Panic and SRA.

The Satanic Panic is a moral panic that began in the 80s and still goes on today. In recent years there has been a resurgence of the same rhetoric taking new forms, but it all has roots in allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse. The Panic of the 80s properly began with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers, written by Lawrence Pazder and his patient-turned-wife, Michelle Smith.

The text contains an account of SRA recovered through the pseudoscientific modality of recovered-memory therapy. The claims in this book have no substantial evidence and are generally regarded as a work of fiction influenced by social morality and pop culture at the time.

Over 12,000 claims of SRA were given during the height of the Satanic Panic, but even after the FBI launched an investigation no evidence of the legitimacy of SRA could be found.

The stories offered by SRA survivors are shocking: Multigenerational cults, sometimes stretching worldwide, going on for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, in which children were bred as sacrifices and/or as slaves to “the elites of our society.”

That phrase should give you pause, because it's an antisemitic dogwhistle, and a loud one at that. The Satanic Panic’s roots go deep into history, back to the burning of so-called witches and back to the antisemitic conspiracy of blood libel.

Blood Libel is an accusation that Jews use the blood of Christians (typically children or infants) in the making of Passover bread and other religious practices. Such claims have resulted in the murder of countless Jews.

These accusations against the Jewish people have continued into modern times, seeing a resurgence within conspiracies such as Qanon’s claim that “Hollywood elites” are harvesting adrenochromes by enacting SRA upon children.

You cannot separate the concept of blood libel from the concept of Satanic Ritual Abuse and the Satanic Panic, and subsequently, you cannot separate conspiratorial thought from SRA and associated terminology.

Abuse that is orchestrated by multiple individuals is real. Conditioning is real. Religious and spiritual trauma is real. Cults, too, are real-- But Ritual Abuse, Mind Control, and Organized Abuse is not. Using these terms promotes conspiracy theories that put Jewish people and systems both at risk of harm.

Let's talk about programming now. The idea that a system can be programmed purposefully into a child is unrealistic pseudoscience.

The sheer amount of knowledge and effort an individual would need in order to maintain a constructed system like that is impossible, and this also assumes a much more widespread knowledge of DID and OSDD than is actually present.

While it is technically possible that an abuser (or abusers) may pick up on their victim's ‘quirks’, while it is technically possible that an abuser may realize doing X action leads to Z desired result for them, this is not programming. This is conditioning.

It is still a horrible abuse to inflict upon another person, but the concept of programming and mind control has its roots in yet another disproven conspiracy theory: Project Monarch.

Project Monarch was alleged to be a subset of Project MKUltra. It was said to be a project which trafficked children, using torture-based mind control to force them into becoming sex slaves for international trafficking rings, drug barons, Satanic cults, and “elites”.

These claims originate from Cathy O’Brien, who claims she uncovered repressed memories of this abuse under hypnosis, similar to Michelle Smith. She claims that this abuse led her to develop Dissociative Identity Disorder. This is echoed in the concept of programming as we see it today.

While we are on the subject of DID directly, I'd like to talk about HC-DID.

HC-DID is a community term meaning Highly Complex Dissociative Identity Disorder, which was coined to specifically describe DID caused by RAMCOA/SRA.

Other than the specific claim of origin, HC-DID is virtually indistinguishable from C-DID, otherwise known as polyfragmentation. This is a term with professional research and backing behind it, unlike HC-DID which is a term coined by someone within the RAMCOA community.

In my opinion there is no need for this term when there is already a well-known, scientifically-backed term to describe the same cluster of symptoms, and it is also well known that DID is already a highly complicated disorder with presentation varying widely from system to system. Usage of this term seems at best an alternative description for something which already exists, and at worst a way to further isolate an already vulnerable population.

To be clear, I don't for a second believe that the RAMCOA community has a secret agenda to isolate survivors or anything of the sort. I think the community as it currently stands is full of deeply traumatized, lonely, isolated, and younger plurals who are grappling for language to describe the horrific things they suffered.

I also believe that it has become a dangerous echo chamber that not only distorts people's memory, but may further traumatize and isolate them.

The RAMCOA community does not use plain language to discuss their experiences. Frequently they speak in a code, using esoteric community terms when they do not outright refuse to discuss what RAMCOA may be like whatsoever.

That is not to say that we are entitled to the stories of trauma survivors, rather that this language and how guarded the community is regarding information on RAMCOA results in a very insular community where discussing the subject with outsiders becomes difficult due to this inaccessibility of information. And this leads to these survivors feeling all the more cut off from the outside world, left with only the language coined by conspiracy theorists to describe the indescribable.

This inadvertently pushes the narrative of these dangerous conspiracies I've spoken about throughout this post. To once again make myself clear, I believe these victims in as far as I believe they went through something unspeakably traumatic at a very young age.

But with the volume of RAMCOA claims ever-increasing, yet substantiation of those claims ever-lacking, I cannot logically believe that the intense claims purported are completely and factually true given the evidence in front of me.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/136592NCJRS.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiigJ75pNuIAxX8LtAFHfjvIdUQFnoECBAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1rF29SeYdt2ZljtHvnOLqI

https://greyfaction.org/isstd-exposed-a-culture-of-conspiracy/

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/10/us/hypnosis-may-cause-false-memories.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9531675/

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/blood-libel

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/satanic-panic-film-movie-michelle-smith-memoir-b2300716.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20131014102812/http://www.process.org/discept/2010/02/08/dr-colin-a-ross-psychiatry-the-supernatural-and-malpractice-most-foul/

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/abuse-innocence-mcmartin-preschool-trial

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-07-mn-14693-story.html

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/colin-ross-has-an-eyebeam-of-energy-hed-like-you-to-hear-7121325

https://web.archive.org/web/20240119125127/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2004-02-13-0402130313-story.html

https://rentry.co/ssct_satanic-ritual-abuse https://scholar.google.com/scholar? hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C24&q=programmed+dissociative+identity+disorder&oq=programmed+diss#d=gs_qabs&t=1715683073093&u=%23p%3Dc6utAUJfID0J

https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.1997.16.2.112

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/r476y63t603wc9p7kpzoh/ALUZm1JXJ--kDpn34rXCSwg?rlkey=vkkkqm8w28fi11741hak63y55&e=1&st=drvkpis9

https://archive.org/details/ozian-u-w-chainless-slaves-trauma-programming/page/n210/mode/1up?q=illuminati

https://rentry.co/xy7zpu83

https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/2022/12/dutch-commission-finds-no-evidence-for-satanic-ritual-abuse/

[loveerran]

In 2020, NBC did a survey of 45 states + Washington DC. Of 4,890 transgender women prisoners, only 15 were housed according to their gender identity. This despite the 1994 Farmer vs Brennan Supreme Court decision (Dee Farmer, a trans woman, had to file a lawsuit alleging her beating and rape violated 8th Amendment protections on her own - the ACLU didn't step in until it reached the Supreme Court), and studies consistent with this one that show trans women in prison are 13x more likely to be the object of violence, particularly sexual assault and rape. In the following comparison, all the white dots are transgender women who are not housed according to their lived gender identity, and the red dots are those who are:

We should also note that trans women, particularly black trans women, are far more likely to be incarcerated (10x more frequently than the general population) - possibly due to old and new laws that make it nearly illegal to be trans.

[killed-by-choice]

Rhonda Rollinson (USA 1992)

Rhonda Rollinson went to Philadelphia Women’s Center on September 3, 1992. She had an attempted abortion by Jay Levin, but was told that it was “unsuccessful” and to come back for another try on September 12. It is not stated whether or not her baby survived the original attempt, but based on Rhonda’s condition just a few days later, most likely her baby had been dead or dying and left to decompose inside of her when she was sent home.

Rhonda was in excruciating pain soon. She had a fever and was overwhelmed with dizziness. There was discharge that indicated a severe health problem. On September 10, she went to the hospital.

Despite the best efforts of the hospital and multiple emergency surgeries, Rhonda died on September 14.

The autopsy found a perforation that ran from her vagina into the uterine cavity, lung infarction (when an artery to the lung becomes blocked and part of the lung dies), DIC (disseminated intravascular coagulopathy), non-bacterial thrombotic endocarditis, pulmonary infarctions, dysplastic kidney and sepsis. She didn’t have a chance at survival.

A lawsuit by Rhonda’s family charged the facility and its owner with hiring Levin despite his lack of competence, failure to properly supervise his work, violation of applicable laws and regulations, lack of informed consent, failure to give proper post-operative instructions, and failure “to respond to the requests of [Rhonda] and her family for post-operative medical advice.”

Rhonda and her baby both died a terrible and completely needless death.

Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas Case No. 291, 1994

[sepdet]

Why Authors Can't Read Our Fanfic

It's something we learn sooner or later... sometimes not soon enough. 😔

Most authors, including @neil-gaiman and @dduane , ask us not to link them to fanfic.

They don't consent. They said no. That should be enough.

But why? I thought it might be useful to share some examples of Never Do This.

The one I remember is a stunningly good Babylon 5 episode, "Passing Through Gethsemane," about all the different rational, irrational, selfless and xenophobic ways communities on a large space station can respond to a deadly epidemic (lolsob).

Before the WWW, B5's creator JMStraczynski was pretty unique in interacting with fans on the old fan usenet discussion forums. He'd asked fans not to share story ideas with him, but someone said, "what if a plague hit the space station?" after that episode was already in development.

That 1994 episode had to be shelved for a year until they could track down the fan IRL and get a legal disclaimer signed that satisfied not just the production team, the fan, and JMS, but also Warner Bros' lawyers that there was no chance that producing the episode would come back and bite them with a lawsuit. Authors would have the same problem with their publisher's lawyers, even if they themselves trust their fans. It's not personal; it's a legal CYA thing.

In days of Yore when I was still a kid, there was some legendary incident with Marion Zimmer Bradley, who used to curate and publish fanfiction anthologies set in her Darkover universe.

Bradley read something in a fan story that meshed well with a Darkover book she was currently writing, so she wrote the fan author, Jean Lamb, offering her "a sum and a dedication for all rights to the text." In a 1991 Usenet post, Jean continued, "I attempted at that point to _very politely_ negotiate a better deal. I was told that I had better take what I was offered, that much better authors than I had not been paid as much (we're talking a few hundred dollars here) and had gotten the same sort of 'credit' (this was in the summer of 1992)...a few months later I received a letter from Ms. Bradley's lawyer threatening me with a suit."[52] After Bradley's death, more information has come out supporting the fan's story.[53] The rumor, however, was that Bradley had a skirmish with a fan who claimed authorship of a book identical to one Bradley had published and accused Bradley of "stealing" the idea, and the resultant lawsuit cost Bradley a book. Either way, her attorney advised her against reading fan fiction of her work.

I heard the rumor summarized in the Wikipedia entry above, and that it was the reason many authors avoided looking at fan works or suggestions.

TL;DR: Authors don't want to be accused of, or sued for, stealing ideas. They also don't want to do the thing where you subconsciously pick up an idea from something you've read, and don't realize it!

Does anyone remember any other incidents? I know there were others, but my brain is cheese. (I don't want to get into judgements or taking sides — you'll notice I've tiptoed around one rather large elephant— I'm trying to stick to topic, for once,)

[polutrope]

Beleria AU: Cast

A list that no one asked for of my Beleria Modern AU characters, for your perusal. To be expanded, edited, and retconned as the mood strikes.

The Noldoran Finvesens

Finwë Noldoran (b. 1922, d. 2015, aged 92, natural causes). 6'. WW2 veteran and founder of Tirion Technical University in Valin, Aman. A Noldorin revolutionary sympathiser.

Míriel Noldoran, née Weber. (b. 1925, d. 1960, aged 35, pancreatic cancer). 5’2”. Finwë's first wife. They were very much in love and wished to have children but were never successful.

Fëanor Finvesen (b. 1958), 65. 5’11”. Adopted by Finwë and Míriel in 1960. Míriel died the first month of his adoption. His biological mother committed suicide and his father was incarcerated for sedition in the Noldorin Revolution and never released. Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (joint), Masters Civil Engineering, PhD Economics. Left Valin for Beleria, Endor, in 2016 after losing a major land ownership lawsuit against the government of Aman. Founder and President of Ambar Metta Development Group.

Nerdanel Finvesen (b. 1957), 66. 5’7”. Retired landscape architect. Sculptor, occasionally does public art projects. Studied at Tirion Technical University, where she met Fëanor.

Their children:

Maedhros (b. 1987), 36. 6’5”. Physical therapist and VP of Community Partnerships, and a shareholder, of Ambar Metta. Moved to Beleria with his parents. In a common-law relationship with Fingon.

Maglor (b. 1989), 34. 6’1”. Associate Artistic Director of Lindon Studios children’s musical theatre school. Shareholder in Ambar Metta. Divorced. Was in a successful rock band with his ex-husband in Valin. Moved to Beleria in 2021 after his divorce. In a relationship and lives with Daeron.

Celegorm (b. 1991), 32. 6’2”. Veterinary college student, part-time bartender at Angrist microbrewery. Shareholder in Ambar Metta. BA in Philosophy. Moved to Beleria with his parents. In a relationship with Aredhel.

Huan (b. 2017). His dog, a German shepherd and a good boy.

Caranthir (b. 1992), 31. 6’2”. Long-haul trucker, investor. Co-founder of Angrist microbrewery. Shareholder in Ambar Metta. MA Economics. Moved to Beleria in 2019. Single.

Curufin (b. 1994), 29. 5’10.” Co-founder, owner, and head brewer of Angrist microbrewery. Shareholder in Ambar Metta. BSc Chemistry. Moved to Beleria with his parents, on whom he was financially dependent. Single.

Celebrimbor (b. 2013), 10. His son, a fourth-grader at Himlad Elementary. Likes machines and cool facts. Alwen (b. 1993), 30. Celebrimbor’s mother and Curufin’s high school girlfriend. Lives in Valin.

Amrod (b. 2001), 22. 6’3”. Undergraduate student in Forestry. Shareholder in Ambar Metta. Moved to Beleria with his parents.

Amras (b. 2001), 22. 6’3”. Undergraduate student in Applied Biology. Shareholder in Ambar Metta. Moved to Beleria with his parents.

Indis Noldoran, née Vasiliev. (b. 1933), 90. 5’11”. Finwë’s second wife. From Valma, Aman. Lives in an eldercare home in south end of Beleria. Nerdanel and Fingolfin are her most frequent visitors.

Findis Noldoran (b. 1962), 61. 5’9”. Finwë and Indis’ first child. Lives in Valin.

Elemmírë. Her wife.

Fingolfin Noldoran (b. 1963), 60. 6’. Finwë and Indis’ second child. Founder and owner of Hithlum Properties. Moved to Beleria, Endor with his family in 2017 during the recession in Aman.

Anairë Noldoran (b. 1959). 64. 5’6”. Fingolfin’s wife. A clinical counsellor.

Their children:

Fingon (b. 1989), 34. 5’11”. Firefighter. In a common-law relationship with Maedhros.

Turgon (b. 1992), 31. 6’6”. Postdoc in urban planning at Ondolindë University. Best friends with his cousin Finrod.

Elenwë (b. 1992), 31. 5’4”. His wife. School teacher at Tumladen Elementary. Was nearly killed in 2019 when her car, also carrying Idril (who was unharmed), was hit by a maintenance truck owned by Ambar Metta, for which she received no financial compensation after the company won a lawsuit blaming the City for black ice on the roads. Idril (b. 2018), 5. Their daughter, a first-grader at Tumladen Elementary.

Aredhel (b. 1993), 30. 5’10”. Divorced in 2022 after five-year relationship with Eöl. Temporarily living with Turgon and Elenwë. Yoga teacher searching for a more stable career. In a relationship with Celegorm, who was her boyfriend prior to Eöl.

Maeglin Lómion (b. 2019), 4. Aredhel’s son with Eöl over whom she has full custody. A kindergartner at Tumladen Elementary.

Argon (b. 1997), 26. 6’5”. Moved back to Valin. Close with Fingon.

Lalwen Noldoran (b. 1965), 58. 5’7”. Third child of Finwe and Indis. Owner of a Nordic spa near Beleria. Moved there at the same time as Fingolfin. Single, no children.

Finarfin Noldoran (b. 1968), 55. 5’10”. Fourth child of Finwe and Indis. Cinematographer and occasional film director. Moved to Beleria in 2021, after most of his children had already done so.

Eärwen (b. 1966), 57. Finarfin's wife. Former Olympic swimmer. Now a motivational speaker and author.

Their children:

Finrod (b. 1996), 27. 5’11”. MA Human Geography. Works at a coffee shop. Can’t stop travelling, does not know what he’s doing with his life. Lives with Curufin. Best friends with his cousin, Turgon. Single.

Orodreth (b. 1998), 25. 5’10”. Joined the military, to the befuddlement of his family. Of his siblings, only Finrod gets him. In a relationship.

Angrod (b. 2000), 23. 6’. Recent graduate and volleyball player. Didn’t make pro leagues. Coaches high school volleyball. Single.

Aegnor (b. 2002), 20. 6’1”. Student, varsity volleyball player. Single.

Galadriel (b. 2003), 19. 5’10”. Second-year undergraduate student in psychology at Ondolindë University. Varsity swimmer. Single.

The Singh-Goels

Elu Singh-Goel (b. 1960, Cuivien), 63. 6’7”. Mayor of Beleria. Immigrated to Endor in 1970.

Dr. Melian Goel (b. 1957), 66. Professor of Pyschology at Ondolindë University, planning retirement to become a tarot card reader and astrologist.

Their children:

Lúthien (b. 1989), 34. Director of Neldoreth Dance Company. Engaged to Beren.

Daeron (b. 1994), 29. 5’7”. Collections Assistant for Beleria City Archives. Singer-songwriter and local history vlogger. BA Linguistics. Environmental activist. Vegetarian. Bisexual. In a relationship and lives with Maglor.

Beren Escarra (b. 1998), 25. Former Dorthon oilsands worker. Son of refugees, father deceased and mother in long term care. Currently Volunteer Coordinator for an environmental conservation group. Vegan. Foraging enthusiast. Engaged to Lúthien.

Their friends and acquaintances

Húrin, 32. buddy of Beren's who works up north.

Morwen Ethel-Wang, 33. His wife. A pharmacist. Pregnant with their second child.

Túrin, 9. Their son.

Miscellaneous Residents

Eöl (b. 1983), 40. Former Alquin ferry engineer, laid off when Fëanor Finvesen privatised the ferry service. Aredhel’s ex-husband and Maeglin’s father. Single.

Círdan (b. 1955), 68. Park ranger at Eglarest Beach. “Communist” (when it suits him). Old friend of Elu. Single, no children.

Rúmil, 70. Friend of Fëanor, developing an app with him.

Celeborn, 19. Student.

Galathil, 21. Student, Celeborn’s brother.

Beleg, 20. Student and intern for the City of Beleria.

Mablung, 20. Student and intern for the City of Beleria.

Edhellos, 18. Student. Friend of Galadriel. Has a crush on Angrod.

Nellas, 19. Friend of Galadriel. Dancer with Neldoreth Dance Company and friend of Lúthien.

Saeros Green, a flamboyant and corrupt music producer. Offered Daeron a record deal which he declined.

[andiatas]

VG: Royal duty to testify investigated in 1994 – this was the conclusion

The police will now decide whether Crown Princess Mette-Marit can be summoned for questioning or not. A similar issue was thoroughly considered 30 years ago.

Just over a week ago, the attorney for Juliane Snekkestad – one of the women in the Høiby case – submitted a request to the Oslo Police District to summon the Crown Princess for questioning.

The attorney, Petter J. Grødem, informs VG that he has not yet received a response to the request from the police.

Ever since Marius Borg Høiby (27) was arrested in August, questions have been raised about whether members of the Royal House can be, for example, questioned.

The constitution grants certain special rights to royalty, and opinions have been divided on whether [members who married into the family] also have immunity.

Two experts VG spoke to believe that the police can summon everyone in the Royal House – besides the King – for questioning like all other citizens. However, as a mother, Mette-Marit does not have the duty to testify.

She can therefore refuse because she is close family to the accused.

It is section 37 of the Constitution that is relevant here: "The Royal Princes and Princesses shall not be responsible for their persons to anyone other than the King or whomever he appoints as judge over them."

In 1994, Princess Märtha Louise was summoned as a witness in a divorce case in England and was listed as a co-defendant in the lawsuit.

The case was widely reported in the media, and the legal department of the Norwegian Ministry of Justice prepared a study of the issue.

Their conclusion was that Princess Märtha Louise did not have an obligation to [testify].

[...]

A key point for this conclusion was that the Princess had been made a party to the case:

"Section 37 of the Constitution prevents a Prince or Princess from being made a general party in a divorce case without the King's consent."

The following section of the study may be relevant to the current issue:

"On the other hand, the provision can hardly be interpreted in principle as exempting the Princes and Princesses from giving ordinary witness statements in a civil or criminal case."

Excerpts from an article by Marianne Vikås, Nora Viskjer, Morten S. Hopperstad, Bjørnar Tommelstad, Hilde Kristine Misje, Siri B. Christensen and Gordon Andersen for Verdens Gang (VG), published Nov. 4, 2024, at 18:28 and updated the same day at 18:38. The excerpt has been translated and edited for clarity by me.

[lacy-o-meter]

⁽ LOST IN MY MEMORIES ⁾ ⁎ MBE ¸ the shorthand of memory bank entertainment, is a south korean company that specializes in music production. the company was founded in 2006 by jang minho, a successful producer who wanted more control in his music.

minho started off by debuting his first boy group in 2007, PASTPACE who was known for their vocals but were severely mismanaged by the company. they only released three albums before being shelved for the next big thing: BLOOSOOM. their first girl group debuted in 2009 with moderate success, especially with older male fans. the group faced multiple lineup changes throughout their four years of activity, and by their disbandment none of the original members were in the group.

in 2013 both groups terminated their contracts with memory bank and officially disbanded. a couple months later, the company faced several lawsuits from investors and businesses as they hadn't seen any profit or been paid by the company. multiple employees also came forward about not being paid, and so the investigation into the company began. memory bank temporarily shut down from 2013-2015, calling it a 'period of restructuring' although they had gone bankrupt.

by 2016, memory bank had been bought out by clockwork creative, a controversial decision since clockwork is one of the biggest entertainment companies in the country. the entire company was actually rehauled, and jang minho had been removed from the company since the lawsuits happened. eun jangmi, a young but rising employee at clockwork, was chosen as CEO for memory bank due to her creativity and strict work ethnic, along with her knowledge of the industry. within a year, the company was completely unrecognizable and suddenly the future seemed bright.

⁎ … … JANGMI EUN, also known by her former stage name EUNMI was born south korea, and the history of her family is unknown. jangmi was a member of the legendary girl group SUMONE'S GIRL and debuted when she was 14 under clockwork creative. jangmi was one of the most popular members in the group, but decided to go solo after their contract expired in 2015- however she never released any music.

she was approached by clockwork's ceo kim hyunwoo and offered a 'creative leadership position' which jangmi gladly accepted. she was made CEO of memory bank entertainment in late 2015, and despite being underestimated due to her age and inexperience, the company completely shifted into something new.

being a bit close in age to the new group LACY, jangmi is extremely close to the group and is often called their older sister. she is the first reason the member's list when recalling why they joined the disgraced company. ⋯ BIRTHDAY ⁙ july 5, 1994 ⋯ ZODIAC ⁙ cancer ⋯ BIRTHPLACE ⁙ seoul, south korea ⋯ HOMETOWN ⁙ unknown, seoul ⋯ NATIONALITY ⁙ korean ⋯ YEARS TRAINED ⁙ 3~ months ⋯ POSITIONS ⁙ main vocal, maknae ⋯ FACECLAIM ⁙ han sohee

⁎ … … DOWON KWAK, was born in south korea to an artistic family, both of his parents are accomplished musicians which gave him an instant foot into any musical pursuits. however, dowon's interest was more in illustration and directing. although he learned music to please his parents, he went to school for film and began working at various production companies before getting lured in by eun jangmi.

dowon is the creative director of everything memory bank's new group LACY does. some of his decisions have been controversial, but his vision is part of what has brought the group success. it is noted in interviews that the girls are close to dowon, but they do not get any creative freedom or say when it comes to their concepts, music, and other decisions. ⋯ BIRTHDAY ⁙ october 6, 1995 ⋯ ZODIAC ⁙ libra ⋯ BIRTHPLACE ⁙ seoul, south korea ⋯ HOMETOWN ⁙ gangnam , seoul ⋯ NATIONALITY ⁙ korean ⋯ FACECLAIM ⁙ lee dohyun

[lesfruitsdores]

In 1992, a bomb attack on the Israeli embassy left 29 dead. Two years later, a truck loaded with explosives drove into the AMIA Jewish center and detonated, leaving 85 dead and 300 injured. Argentina has the largest Jewish community in Latin America, with some 300,000 members. (France 24) The ruling also declared that both episodes should be considered crimes against humanity, thus placing them beyond the statute of limitations despite the passage of time and the lack of judicial results. (Buenos Aires Times)

[lboogie1906]

DeAunta T. Farrow (September 7, 1994 - June 22, 2007) killed by West Memphis, Arkansas Police Officer Erik Sammis, was one of the youngest victims of a police shooting that year. His death sparked protests in West Memphis and brought national attention to another death of an unarmed Black citizen at the hands of police officers. His shooting death was an early inspiration for the Black Lives Matter Movement that would begin six years later.

He was born to Robin Perkins and Debra Farrow in West Memphis, Arkansas. Much of his early life is unknown. Just before his death, he graduated from the sixth grade at Maddux Elementary School.

He was walking with his 14-year-old cousin, Unseld Nash, Jr, from his home to the nearby Steeplechase Apartments. The two stopped at a gas station where they purchased soda pop and chips from the station’s convenience store and continued down the street.

Two undercover West Memphis police officers, Jimmy Evans and Sammis, who were on a stakeout in a narcotics investigation, appeared from a nearby dumpster. The two police officers confronted the young men, and Sammis noticed something bulging in the 12-year-old’s coat pocket. As he removed the item, Sammis shot and killed him. Sammis and the West Memphis police claim that Farrow pulled out a toy gun and made a gesture at the officers, at which point Sammis, fearing for his life and the life of his partner, shot the boy. Eyewitnesses claimed that he pulled out the soda pop and chips he had just purchased.

Four days after the shooting, hundreds of angry residents packed a police commission meeting at the West Memphis City Hall, where they demanded answers. They received none as city officials called for calm and asked that everyone wait for the results of a police investigation.

Debra Farrow filed a $125 million lawsuit against the West Memphis Arkansas Police Department, which remains undecided. The US Justice Department ruled that the two West Memphis Police Officers, Sammis and Evans, acted properly under the circumstances and thus could not be held liable for his death. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #blm

[rumic-world]

We've been working on this one for a long time, the background of Rumiko Takahashi's libel lawsuit from 1994 when a Japanese tabloid made the false accusation that she wasn't the actual creator behind Ranma 1/2.

[aaliyahunleashed]

#ONTHISDAY  “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” single is recorded in 1993 and released December 6, 1994.

The controversial song is about a young underage girl being interested in an older man. She notices him checking her out and gives him the green light to pursue their inner burning desires for each other; assuring him that their age difference shouldn't matter (being down for whatever). The song was written and produced by an older male (RKelly).

The music video was directed by Millicent Shelton ( @shelton9mil ) and filmed in Detroit, Michigan in late 1994 and has cameo appearance from her brother Rashad Haughton as well as appearances by rappers Proof and Bizarre from D12.

DID YOU KNOW: In May 1997, music publisher Windswept Pacific filed a lawsuit against Aaliyah with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles citing that she illegally copied Bobby Caldwell's 1978 song "What You Won't Do for Love" and that "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" bears a striking resemblance to Caldwell's song. There are little to no details about the settlement of that case.

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only was Aaliyah dealing with the backlash of the song lyrics, the marriage certificate scandal, and overcoming being blackballed in the industry, but she was also dealing with being sued a month before her high school graduation. That's a lot she had to deal with, but she pushed through!