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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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mewberii · 4 years ago

Text

Streamer!Scaramouche [2]

thanks for all the support in the first part! i wrote a second part where scaramouche plays genshin + the reader comes in (i tried to make it as gender neutral as possible, so let me know if there’s something off!). you’re a close friend of scaramouche and also a voice actor!

i had been planning this since i wrote the first part, but because i was busy and uninspired i couldn’t finish it. but here it is and it’s actually pretty long (over 5k words...)! i hope you guys will like this!! obviously he’s a little nicer than he is in game but,,, for the sake of the plot + it being a modern au, it had to be done sjnfdskjf

He was selected to play the beta for genshin because of his popularity and tbh he really wanted to play it

The game hadn’t really caught his eye all that much when he first heard about it but he saw how everyone online went crazy over it (plus other streamers who also were selected to play it in early access kept talking about it) and he became more curious to know what it would be like and if it’d live to everyone’s expectations

However he couldn’t really play it until it was officially released because he had a very busy schedule, and when he saw other streams of people playing it he was,,, lowkey jealous because it did look fun

When it was finally released and the game finished downloading and installing, he went live right away

And since so many people were looking forward to seeing him play plus the game was getting so popular so fast, that stream of when he first played hit his biggest milestone of live viewers ever

ANYWAYS skip forward to further into the game

when it comes to the gacha,,,

we’ve established that this boy is loaded. he won’t hesitate to throw some big amounts of money at the game to get every single character and weapon he wants and get their constellations to the max

i feel like he’d make little bets (and it works as a way to thank the chat for the support) like “if i get (insert newest character) in the first 50 pulls, i will gift 50 subs”

he’d be SOOOOOOO LUCKY it’d make everyone who doesn’t play think that it must be very easy to get the 5 stars or that the drop rate must be very high,,,

so in the end he’d have to gift the subs and it’d be funny to see the chat go absolutely crazy because everyone is commenting at the same time trying to see if they got lucky too and got the sub

but the chat goes so fast that they can’t even see their own comment after they send it sNDJGDJSK

he’d end up turning subs mode on for a while because it goes crazy

and that’s when he’d see people going “I GOT THE SUB-” all excited and he can’t help but chuckle and congratulate them for being one of the lucky ones

probably another game he can use to play with some subs once in a while! they could play co-op and when he’s a very high level he’d go to the worlds of some of his subs with lower level to help them with whatever they need

SO, LITTLE SKIP HERE

this is where i want the reader to slide into the picture

you’d be a voice actor, and also you have been a friend of his for a very long time

he met you even before he started streaming and you were always so supportive of him, as he was of every and each of your dreams

in fact, he would have invited you over more than once to stream with him

people don’t say anything bc they’re afraid of scaramouche banning them (it’s happened before) + they understand it can be disrespectful... but…

some people lowkey ship you two a little bit,,,,,, you didn’t hear it from me. scaramouche don’t ban me----

so one day he’s making another livestream playing genshin (sponsored by mihoyo to promote the newest update and event) and they’re going to release a new character

AND he has told everyone that you are the voice actor of the new character, who will be introduced in the event and is also getting their own banner

so everyone is very curious of what they’ll be like, if scaramouche will try to get them (obviously he will, he has every single character…. the amount of money he has put into the game…. just thinking of it gives me the heebie-jeebies)

could he even,,, main them,,,,

spoiler: he won’t because he’ll stay honest till the end (and no hard feelings) but there are other characters that he has built up to the max just like them and still work better with the way he plays but he’ll still find a chance to use them often

he didn’t know anything of what the character you voiced would be like because you wanted to keep it a surprise and he knew his audience would enjoy seeing his first reactions

I think the character you voice in the game would have the role that Scaramouche has in the actual game, and their design would be fairly similar (maybe similar color palette) to the design fans made for him as a genshin character (the one i mentioned that he uses for popup notifs of subscriptions and all!)

needless to say he’d absolutely love their personality and the charisma you showed in their lines

of course when he finally gets them he shows everything about them including all their voice lines and he compliments y/n’s voice acting… that was the first time people suspected that....

mayhaps… scaramouche….

has feelings for you....

it’s in the soft gaze in his eyes,,, the gentle smile on his lips,,, his soft voice when saying “I think this one is my favorite line of theirs”

and just how BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL his laugh sounds when someone comments he should invite you and ask you to do that voiceline live for him and everyone else

he’d jokingly reach for his phone and be like “should i call them? i could”

(but he wouldn’t because he doesn’t want to disturb you, you may be busy, considering you still hadn’t replied to the messages he sent to you before he started the stream a few hours ago)

if anyone dares be mean to you saying you got the chance to voice act for genshin just bc of scaramouche

or implies that he did something to get you there he’ll get quite mad even tho he won’t speak up about it (he might if enough people say it)

people can see something shift in his gaze,,,, and he bans them permanently right away

it’d be kinda funny when he does those “reading unban requests” streams and he goes past immediately rejecting people who said those kind of stuff, not even reading the apologies JSNKJFNDSJKGNSDK

some people say he’s too strict about it but literally his stream his rules. people who don’t like him should just not watch him

and people who like him should NOT speak badly about you or doubt your talent and effort, which is what brought you that opportunity in the first place

one day he’d be streaming playing the game, he had been using your character and gathering materials to get their last ascension

and at one point he’d grab his phone and look at the screen for a second before putting it back down and saying he had planned something else for tonight besides playing genshin for a while

then, the doorbell would ring (before he could even close the game-) and it’d be heard from his setup room so people in the chat heard it and they’re all like???

it’s definitely not takeout because scaramouche never orders takeout when he’s on his own, he usually cooks for himself and just orders it when he’s with friends and they all feel like eating something different

actually, offtopic, but i have a feeling he’d be very responsible when it comes to food and like he’d cook himself proper meals all perfectly balanced and all- he could afford having someone cook for him but his house = his privacy and personal space so he’d rather do it himself

it’s like, past 10pm, so no way it would be a package or mail at that time

and then he says “we have a visitor tonight”

and then the chat goes crazy saying “CHILDE” “HARBINGERS” but mostly “Y/N!??!?/PLEASE LET IT BE Y/N”

AND IT WAS YOU!!!!

and omg you brought takeout--------

it had been a while since they had seen you in scaramouche’s stream and you didn’t have your own channel (even though there were many people who encouraged you to open one)

SO everyone was very excited

i feel like scaramouche wouldn’t be the biggest fan of eating on camera so you guys would put the food away so that you can eat it later on your own without an audience

and you two would just spend a while talking to the chat, watching videos

AND reviewing fanart and fanmade content together!! it’d be so cute especially fanarts of the two of you together, little animatics or comics of funny clips or memes from his streams of you two,,,

someone made a little felt plushie of the genshin character you voiced and the way you COOED because it was SO cute

only those who were truly paying attention were able to notice the soft smile on scaramouche’s lips and the way he looked at you as you gushed over how cute the little plushie is and how talented the person who made it is!!

also you’d tell him you saw signora make a stream where she talked to some of her fans on discord individually to give them advice on their life/problems (nothing too serious) and it was very funny and you wanted to do that with him someday

and he’s like “that… could be a huge mess. people could say some crazy stuff” and you’re like “NO but i talked to her about it and she said she got her mods to talk to them first and approve them before they moved them up to the channel where she was to talk to her”

and he’s like “still…….. what if people lie and then when they get to talk to us they say something-”

and you’re like “BOY!!!! DO YOU NOT TRUST YOUR FANS *GASP*” and everyone in the chat is also going “GASP” “HE DOESN’T TRUST US…” “IS THIS YOUR IDOL…..?” “SAY SORRY” (all good fun, obviously he’d love to talk to everyone if he could make sure there won’t be anything disrespectful said)

SO!!!!! you two say you’ll plan to do something like that soon and everyone is very excited, they can already tell it’ll be both super cute and hilarious

before he ends the stream, you two watch some videos together

some are about some upcoming videogames and he talks about them and what he knows and explaining things to you... he is.. so knowledgeable…

the way you look at him as he goes into a little rant about it… cinematic parallels with the way he looked at you before

ONCE AGAIN, people aren’t blind. they notice. but they keep it to themselves bc scary scara (the way i had to resist overusing this one joke with his name-)

so the stream ends and you two walk out of the setup room to go to his living room and eat the takeout you brought while watching something on tv

he apologises because the food is cold now, but you brush it off saying it’s ok, you had missed being on his streams and you two can just heat up the food again

he doesn’t look at you in the eyes as he mutters that you know you can join his streams whenever, and instead just says it as he makes his way to the kitchen to heat the food

you join him in the kitchen soon after and tell him you also bought something for dessert and put it in the fridge already before

and honestly he didn’t know how much he wanted to eat that dessert until it was in his fridge, so he can’t stop himself from sighing and saying “god, i love you”

there’s silence for a second, right as the microwave beeps as it finished heating the food

it feels eternal to him, but you immediately started laughing and said jokingly “of course you do! you’re welcome!”

he’s happy you took it as a joke because that’s not how he planned to confess (he didn’t plan to confess anytime soon in the first place) but at the same time ?? he’s lowkey offended inside because? you took it as a joke?? is it so unrealistic that you wouldn’t even think that he meant it romantically?

it’s at that moment that he realises that if he didn’t want to confess before, now he does.

he wouldn’t want anyone to know about how he let that slip because he’s sure no one in you two’s friend group even knows he likes you

but you,,, actually,,,,, were actually caught off guard too because scaramouche wasn’t precisely one for words of affection and he showed his care for everyone with his actions

in fact, you had never heard him say those words before but well- it was kinda nice- if only he meant it as you feel it- but he couldn’t, right? who’d confess their feelings so casually while looking at a dessert in the fridge with desire-------

that night, it gets pretty late and to be honest he’s a little too tired to drive you home as he usually would, so he asks if you’d like to sleep over

it wouldn’t be your first time doing so, not even the first time you stayed unplanned, and he had a couple guest rooms that you could use so you accepted

also, staying for longer meant you could keep watching some more of that series with him without worrying about it getting late

or,,,

“actually” you said in a low voice, almost a whisper, since it was getting late and you two had been in complete silence while watching the series “i lowkey still wanted to stream some more”

he scoffs but then lets out a short chuckle, replying in the same volume

“it’s past 2am, who’s going to watch me stream now?”

“i would” have mercy for his poor heart- “but i’d be the streamer too this time so it doesn’t count”

“what even would we do”

“can we play that co-op game you played with childe? it was so much fun”

had you not brought it up, he wouldn’t have offered that ever because? if he had recently played it with childe he didn’t want to stream it again and make it feel repetitive for his audience

(jokes on him because when genshin came out they put up with it being the only thing he streamed for over a week. they’d rewatch any game if it’s you two playing it)

but to be honest, he didn’t really want to stream anymore that day and just wanted to be with you, just you and no one else

he got up from the couch and walked towards the hallway, making you look up to him in confusion for a second, but then started getting excited knowing this meant he was going to let you play it with him

“i don’t really feel like streaming anymore today, but we can still play it. let’s go”

the next day, you two wake up around the same time and make breakfast together

scaramouche i feel is not very talkative in the mornings

in fact, i feel like he’s just not the most talkative in general. he’s more the type to listen, but it’s different during his streams because he’s doing what he loves and talking about what he loves

and when it comes to you and he talks more it’s because he’s talking to who he loves----

before you’re going to leave and you’re standing at the door about to say goodbye to him, he suddenly speaks up before you can

“do you want to go somewhere tomorrow?”

you raise your eyebrows in curiosity from the sudden request, but then smile at him and nod

“yeah sure! what do you have in min-”

“it’s a date” he said, interrupting you, which was weird enough of him (since he would never interrupt you), but his words were even weirder-

“h-huh?” you felt the heat rising to your cheeks, and scaramouche just repeated his words

on the outside, he looked so casual and just, confident- bUT INSIDE he was actually panicking a little bit

but just a little bit.

After a moment, you smiled at him again, this time somewhat more shily but also excited for your date!

“I look forward to it”

Just with that, you two knew you had made the first step

You weren’t just friends anymore

You two had hung out on your own many times before, in fact and as it was mentioned before, you two had even slept over at his house or yours many times before

but it had all always been purely platonic, and you guys had never even questioned that aspect of it even after realising you had romantic feelings for each other

he’d spend the rest of the day thinking of what you could do the next day, as if he hadn’t been brainstorming for ideas all night either

i feel like he hasn’t gone in many (if not any--) dates before

solely because he has never been interested in romance plus he had never liked someone or at least, not as much as he liked you

and even when he found out he felt something for you, he just always told himself he was okay with how things were, because he’d never experienced anything beyond friendship and didn’t feel the need to try and maybe ruin the friendship

SO he didn’t have many ideas of what a good date could be

he definitely didn’t want a cliché corny date, but he really didn’t have any idea of what was good enough for a date

(and if for future dates you want something he’d consider a “”cliché corny date”” he’d do it for you and actually enjoy it)

the last thing he wanted was to have to ask you what you could do for your date

1- because he didn’t want to show you any side of him that didn’t look like he always has everything under control and he’s always composed (as if you wouldn’t want to see every side of him, even his most vulnerable sides- you’d have to work on that with him when you two become official)

2- he… kind of wanted to surprise you…..

but it really got to the point where he really didn’t know what you’d like the most (or what he’d like the most too) and what he wanted most over anything else is to not disappoint you in you two’s first date

SO he finally texted you asking if there was anything special you wanted to do (and therefore indirectly admitting he……….. just really wanted to ask you out. so much he did it without thinking of what he’d do if you said yes--)

you didn’t seem to mind, and in fact you were happy he asked for your opinion

overall, scaramouche was very independent so he wasn’t one to ask others for advice, opinions or anything, much less for help regarding anything

“how long has it been since we last went to the arcade? we could go there! i heard from childe that they added new games!”

and he’s like !?!?!?? THAT…. is…….. the perfect idea

“that actually sounds perfect” he admitted, and the message brought a big smile to your face

“just don’t get mad at me when you lose at all of them” he sent right after, teasing you, and you couldn’t help but let out a laugh out loud

“the last time i won in your favorite game” you reminded him, and even after he read your message, he took a little bit to reply

(he needed a second to put the pieces of his pride together SJNFKJDS)

“don’t get used to it, it won’t happen again”

“we will see about that” the more you two joked like this, the more excited you got thinking about tomorrow

scaramouche was sure now that it’d be a great first date that you’d both remember forever

the next day, it was almost the time for the date and scaramouche was going to pick you up at your house

i feel like scaramouche would be very fashionable and even in his style he doesn’t try to hide that he’s loaded…

not that he cares about buying cheap clothes, literally he’d say if he likes it and it’s good (aka it’s not cheap because it’s made of something that won’t make it last longer than 3 weeks) he’ll get it

but it just so happens that many times… the clothes he likes most are from famous brands…

AND THIS DAY!!!!!! he’s putting together one of his favorite outfits because it’s a special day

it almost hurts me just how nonchalant he’d look on the outside, making it a little hard to know exactly just how much this date meant to him (because as i said he’s not one to be very vocal about his feelings or even his thoughts)

BUT i trust that you… since you know him well…. can see past all that and you know that this is not just anything casual to him. this is special.

STILL!!!! he’d try his best to not let the blush rise to his cheeks and show, as well as to not let his voice shake when he complimented that you looked very good

ANYWAYS i think i think Scaramouche wouldn’t be one for big pda

the most he’d do where anyone can see is hold your hand or put his arm around your waist

WHICH IS WHY he’d try to be all smooth (and he would manage) reaching for your hand and lacing his fingers with yours

he wouldn’t make eye contact because then he’s sure it’ll show on his face that he’s getting somewhat flustered, but he’d still ask if you’re okay with it, to which you said yes

the area where the arcade was is always somewhat crowded so when you two were getting there, scaramouche would tighten the grip on your hand a little bit to make sure you wouldn’t let go and you’d be pulled apart by people trying to walk past however they can

you know that if you two got serious about your relationship, he would want to be the first person to share the news with his fans

BUT since he was so popular now, you two lived in a pretty big city and now were at a popular area (+ scaramouche wouldn’t be the type to try and hide his identity because he’s never had people make a fuss when they recognise him)

you were a little worried someone would see you two and maybe take a picture and post it online and it’d go viral before he can admit it himself

because of that, you end up throwing back to him the question he had asked when he held your hand

“are you sure this is okay?”

your question confused him because he didn’t know what you mean, so he finally looked you in the eyes and waited for you to explain further

“it’s just- what if somebody sees us and recognises you?”

he looked away from you and back at where he was going, taking a few seconds to answer before he just shrugged

“i don’t care”

you softly let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding as you waited for him to say something, and almost missed the way he whispered

“as long as it doesn’t affect you”

for someone who seemed and actually tried to seem to self-sufficient, who appreciated his friends but was also okay on his own because he was absolutely comfortable with himself, he was actually…

more selfless than people would ever know, especially when it came to you

you two would have SO much fun in the arcade, trying every single game many times

this time though, scaramouche won in his favorite game so he lived up to his words

you two won so many tickets you literally didn’t even know what to do with them once you got the couple prizes you were interested in

you bumped into a couple fans of his, so you talked for a while

once again, you were met with suggestions of opening your own streaming channel, and even scaramouche said “i’ve told them that many times too, but they always say they think their streams won’t be fun enough”

and the fans are like “NO!! literally everyone thinks you’re super nice and fun!! of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but we’d love it!!”

one of the fans (exaggerating a little as a joke) said “i’ll be your number 1 fan i swear” and the three of you laughed, except scaramouche who just scoffed and smirked

“i am ALREADY their number one fan. but good try” <- scaramouche in his head. say it outloud u coward.

but at the same time it was a joke scaramouche chill pretty much everyone knows you’re their number one fan……. even though you think you’re so smooth………. they just don’t say anything

they were very nice and fun to talk to and you knew scaramouche and you didn’t really want anything else from the prizes, so you offered you two’s tickets to them

“we don’t really need these anymore so maybe you’ll have more use for them!!”

they got SO excited, the way their eyes lit up :( scaramouche is convinced you’re an angel but he’s also very happy to see how joyful his fans got because those were more than enough for the prize they really wanted-

so after that cute little interaction and having used up your energy for competition, you two leave and think of buying some ice cream or a milkshake or something to end the date nicely and to enjoy while you walk back home

the arcade was not exactly very close to where you two lived (it was far from your house, but even farther from his-) so he asked if you were okay with walking back or if you two should get an uber or something, to which you said you were okay

walking back with him meant!! a little more time you could spend with him

and he was happy you said that because he was feeling the same way and still didn’t want the day to end

we’ll see more about the kind of things he likes and dislikes if he’s released as a playing character BUT FOR NOW i really get this vibe that he’d LOVE boba tea

i even think he’d?? enjoy tea in general??? classy boy…

SO you two would end up going to get some boba

it was very touching how, when reading the flavors they had that day, he suddenly and casually went “oh, they have your favorite” and you looked at the one he was pointing at and !!! indeed it was your favorite!!!!!!!

he remembers this kind of details very well

you take the chance to talk some more as you’re walking home

scaramouche asks about your job with voice acting and you tell him that you actually have been recording some new lines for your genshin character lately because in the next update there’ll be an event involving them

he’s looking forward to it but he teases you a little asking if it’s okay for you to spoil him with such information

but it’s okay because it’s not like he’d tell anyone, especially knowing it could get you in trouble

when he drops you off at your house, he has a hard time saying goodbye

literally you’re standing at your door and he’s in front of you, a couple steps away, looking away from you

you don’t say goodbye either, mainly because you know scaramouche is working the courage to say something, and you can also sort of guess what he wants to say

you think of saying it first, but then think that it would make scaramouche proud to be honest about his feelings and confess first

“i’ve liked you for a long time”

you can’t help the smile that makes its way onto your face, unconsciously reaching a hand up to slightly cover it

“i feel the same way” you replied to him in a soft voice

he took a deep breath and exhaled it softly, finally lifting up his gaze and making eye contact with you

it was already dark outside, so you couldn’t appreciate the faint rosy blush on his cheeks well

“can i kiss you?”

your eyes widened for a second, not expecting him to ask and if anything, thinking he’d just step forward and do it

so you were a little embarrassed and caught off-guard to reply properly, so you just nodded and put your hand down as he took the last couple steps and his face was right in front of yours

he’d cup your cheek in one of his hands, feeling the warmth of your skin

you closed your eyes, and he looked at you for a second longer before he finally leaned in and closed the short distance that separated your lips

at that moment you both knew that you had been missing on so much more when you two just settled and were content with your friendship

but!! that was about to change now, so it was all worth it

after that, scaramouche would make clear that this would be the first day of your relationship!! and even if he didn’t say it with words, you could just feel his happiness!!

so!! after that, because of work you two got a little busy the next couple months so dates weren’t very frequent

or at least, they weren’t dates like the one you first had

but still whenever you two were free he’d go over to your house, or you’d come over to his to play, stream together, or literally just spend time together doing anything

he wouldn’t let people know you two had started dating straight away (if anything, only his other streamer friends -aka you two’s friends in common- knew)

but the day he said it, he wanted you to be there

SO one day you two were streaming and you were currently reacting to one fanart of you two together

so he looked at you and you made eye contact and it was like you two spoke with your eyes like

“do we tell them now”

“let’s tell them.”

so scaramouche would clear his throat and without closing the fanart, he’d say he has something he wanted to announce

everyone was excited thinking it’d be some new project, maybe involving you

maybe some merch??? and the fanarts had reminded him of it???????

BUT THEN he straightforwardly said

“y/n and i are dating”

and everyone goes aBSOLUTELY CRAZY

amidst the chaos, you two catch a comment saying “will you unban the people who shipped you two” and you laugh

and you look at each other like “did you read that one?” “yeah”

and scaramouche is like “yeah, i guess i will have to unban some people”

and when some get unbanned they’re like “fREEDOM!!!!”

and jokingly they’re all like “APOLOGISE!!!!!!!! SAY SORRY!!!” so he just laughs and you join them being like “!!! apologise!!! you banned them for it and!! look at you now!!”

so he ends up trying to hold in another laugh as he mutters a halfassed ‘sorry’ and everyone starts commenting claps and hearts and celebrating that he apologised. now justice has been made.

the rest of that stream suddenly feels livelier and brighter!! you two are laughing a lot and so is everyone in the chat!!

and also the new genshin event would’ve already just been released that same day so you can talk about some of your experiences with recording or what you thought of it

and scaramouche would let you play it yourself!! (he still hadn’t played it) and it was also the first time you played genshin live!! you’d show people the characters you have and everything and tell them some anecdotes

people would be SHOCKED because you!? don’t have the character you voiced!? D:

and you’re like “yeah… i pulled for them and used up all my primogems and… didn’t get them”

and your banner is back because of the event, so scaramouche won’t let this slide!!!!!!!!!! YOU WILL GET YOUR CHARACTER.

your luck is terrible compared to his so at one point you’ll literally feel bad for how much he’s spending for you to get it

but he doesn’t mind at all and everyone is having fun so!!

and once you finally get them you’re sO HAPPY and everyone in the chat is celebrating

and you think it’s over but scaramouche is like ???? what are you doing?? open the wish page again. you’re going to get them c6.

and you’re like oh my gOD PLEASE NO DON’T SPEND MORE MONEY ON ME FOR THIS

but he won’t listen and he’ll do it

so!!! he’ll always do his best to be the best boyfriend he can be for you!! so you better give him your heart!!!!

#genshin #genshin impact #genshin impact x reader #scaramouche #scaramouche x reader #genshin impact scenarios #genshin impact imagines #genshim impact headcanons #genshin impact fluff #genshin impact scaramouche #scaramouche scenarios #scaramouche headcanons

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unpopularly-opinionated · 4 years ago

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Finally been playing through the Witcher 3 since I’ve put it off for so long. More or less completed most of the Velen/Novigrad area, save a few areas that were just too high level for me.

Now I’m in Skellege and...ehhhhh I really wish there was like a mod or something I could download (I checked and couldn’t find one) to just like...skip all the underwater parts. If it’s diving in a lake then it’s no big deal, but diving in the ocean gives me HUGE anxiety issues, IDK why, I’ve just always had issues with underwater areas like that in games.

I still want to 100% the game, best I can anyways (not fucking doing Gwent) so I’ll likely just have to nut up and brave it. I just pray to the Eternal Fire that there’s no like kraken or some other bullshit. Sirens and drowners are w/e, they’re a fucking nuisance to deal with, especially Sirens out of water but they’re alright in water. But fuck me, just swimming down a few feet to get a chest makes me uncomfortable.

Minor/major spoilers about other bits to just express my thoughts.

I love the game so far, it’s definitely great having the context from the books, and save a few character introductions I don’t really feel like I need to have played the previous two games to understand what’s going on much.

Couple of nitpicks, of course.

1. Overall, this is a pretty minor nitpick. They all are, really. But it’s something that kinda bothered me. When you’re in Novigrad, there’s a point where you burn down Menge’s guard house and, at least in my game, I killed him too.

Now I assume this issue stems from the fact that you probably can let him live and he probably runs away from Novigrad or something, but at least two times after this incident you use the fact that Menge’s life and whereabouts are “unknown” to your advantage to progress the story...but I don’t know, to me it just felt wildly unrealistic?

Like the first time you do it (I can’t remember the specific details) it’s fine because the fire just happened so it makes sense that there’d be some confusion, sure. But the second time plenty of time has passed for either Menge’s charred remains to have been found, or at the very least for him to have just been presumed dead or MIA. I mean they literally say that the guard doesn’t know he’s dead and “might just think he’s run off” but like...if they think he’s run off then surely they’d replace him pretty damn quickly considering being w/o a leader is probably not great.

Anyways, it’s a minor nitpick but the second time it happened I was like “Really? They’ll just fall for this again?”

2. These next two might just very well be me who is being confused rather than the game, so if y’all know better feel free to learn me about them.

Part of the quest to find Dandelion has you meet Djikstra who sends you on a quest to find out who robbed his vault. By this point, we know that coincidentally Dandelion and Ciri also went to go rob some vault, and then at some point it’s confirmed that yeah it was Dandelion and Ciri who robbed the vault.

Then we find out that they gave the money to Whoreson Junior as payment so he’d fix the phylactery thingy for Ciri, okay, not confusing yet. Then we go and confront Whoreson Junior and...nothing? We confront him about Ciri, and when we ask him about the contents of the vault, he says he doesn’t have them, and there’s even a note that said he was pissed off that Ciri couldn’t get him the contents...so who the fuck has the money???

The weirdest part about this is that the quest just ends after you confront Junior. You never learn who has the money, where the money is, anything. And I’m not even sure at which point I could get confused by. If Whoreson had the money, then surely we’d have gotten it back once we’d dealt with him? Dandelion certainly didn’t have the money otherwise he’d have said so. It’s just weird.

3. This is an aspect of a sidequest, the one where you’re helping fellow Witcher, Lambert track down the people who killed his other Witcher friend. The confusing part of this quest for me was the second to last step in the quest when you’re sent to Skellege to find one of the killer’s friends and you go there, you kill him, and then you find a letter between him and the killer which explicitly states that he is out of the business and he asks his friend to never contact him again.

So the confusing part is...I go back to see Lambert and the very first thing Geralt says is “He’s still in the business.” and I’m just like “HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS??” I mean sure, he could’ve been lying in the letter but we’ve no reason to believe that. This gets compounded by the fact that we go to confront the killer and he’s all chill, has a family and donates to charity n shit. So I decide, well we’ve all done some shit, you’re reformed now, so I tell Lambert to back off and he gets livid and says the guy is lying.

Now of course this could just be because Lambert is pissed for his friend, sure, but that still doesn’t explain why Geralt out of the blue said he was still “in the business” when the evidence clearly pointed otherwise.

4. Non-quest related nitpick. The game is scaled rather awkwardly, I think. I’m not sure if or how it scales enemies around your level, but what’s particularly odd is I’ll be in an area you start off in very early on and around me will be level 4 Drowners while I’m level 20, but then like 100 feet away I’ll run into a level 38 Earth Elemental? It’s just kind of odd why they place monsters with dramatically varying levels like that so near to each other.

5. I don’t much care for the level system. It’s incredibly awkward and for the most part useless I think. Of course it depends largely on your play style, sure, but I want to say that after maybe level 15 or so I really stopped caring about leveling up other than the fact that it means higher level enemies are less of a threat.

I stopped caring because after I upgraded the few signs that I use, the fast melee attack skills, and a couple of the orange misc. skills, there’s really nothing left for me to want, and the other issue is that even if I wanted something more the game only lets me have access to the skills I equip and it only gives you 12 slots for skills when there’s like 125 skills (I think anyways, if memory serves w/o googling it, it’s like 5x5 grid of skills and there’s 5 pages).

Now, I am playing on easy which is why I’m not complaining about the fact that the alchemy skills and alchemy in general is largely useless to me. I understand they’re probably more useful at higher difficulty levels. Honestly, with how loooong the game is, I’m playing on easy purely to speed things along and not make me want to pull my teeth out. It’s a shame I miss out on alchemy, since that’s like half of being a Witcher, but w/e.

6. Last, but most important nitpick: I’m mad the game cheated me out of my win in the race against the stupid Runesmith guy.

It’s so dumb but I definitely won the race but then we hop off our horses and Geralt’s all: “yOu wOn, gOoD jOb!” like shut the fuck up, no he did not. I won. I don’t know how or why the game cheated me out of the win, but what I do know is that I didn’t even notice it was a quest to beat him, let alone one I couldn’t repeat, and by the time I noticed the “Failed” quest I had long since moved on from it.

#random rant #personal #witcher 3 #long post

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sometownie · 5 years ago

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get to know my playstyle tag!

I got tagged by @eulaliasims, thank you so much!! I really wanted to get tagged in this one! I’ve seen people doing this and loved reading everyone’s answers, soooo prepare for long answers from yours truly.

[edit] I was so tired I forgot to tag anyone! Let's fix that: @mynameisquoi and @grilledcheese-aspiration and @tegamisim consider yourselves tagged! I'm very curious about your playstyles, but feel free to ignore this! [/edit]

We’ve seen the Get to Know Me post going around and it’s really cute so here’s one for us Simmers that’s more our style.

Family size at the start:

I actually rarely create children or teenagers when I start a new family! Never, really. It’s always one or two adults. If it’s two, they’re either siblings or married. I kinda feel like I’m cheating if I create the children myself. I prefer waiting how the children will look! I’m always gushing over whether the child has gotten the dad’s nose or the mom’s eyes or whatever the case!

The Lifespan of my sims:

Right now it’s completely messed up! I fairly recently got Phaneoh’s Lifespan mod to adjust the lifespan length, but as per usual it won’t affect the life stage the sim was in at the time of acquiring the mod. SO now I have kids who are going to be kids forever and adults who are aging up really fast. Lately a lot of my sims have been drinking a lot of Elixir of Life to compensate.

I’m not sure I’m actually satisfied with the mod, however. I like the longer life stage on toddlers and slightly shorter life stage for teens, but for me 12 days for children is really long! I probably should get the summer vacation mod as well? Quite honestly, playing children is sometimes pretty boring...... But then again, my sims’ lives seem to start only when they enter college: That’s when I properly start planning their careers and life partners, although some sims do get their plans decided way earlier! We’ll see if I end up getting rid of the mod, but I’m going to try sticking to it at least for a generation so I can see how the lifespan works out.

Favorite family I have played:

I’m going to name two! Both of these families are from earlier hoods that I haven’t posted about on this blog.

The first one is the Bigg family. I created the Biggs after feeling frustrated at blogging. Focusing on blogging instead of playing sucked out all the fun from playing. So I created the Biggs and never intended to blog about them. I actually started the family on my dad’s computer and only got default replacement skins and eyes I’d always used, otherwise playing completely vanilla. Eventually I moved the family to my own computer as I got really into playing the family, threw in the downloads and rest is history. The family lived up to it’s name, the second generation already had 4 children, and many of the children’s families continued living in the family house (I got the more sims in a family hack just for this family). The family also had an evil witch, the big foot and a servo! The Bigg family is very similar to my current Limestone family: both families have a family house, they both owned a hospital and both were started by my fav sim Nikolas (Nicholas Bigg/Nikolai Limestone)!

(That’s the parents Amy and Nicholas at the back, with their children (left to right) River, Hope, Pace and Rhea.)

Next I’m just going to have to mention the Lovett family, which is a name I snatched for my current hood as well! They started off as Jenny and Adam Lovett, siblings, but Adam got married to Kevin Mills very quick. Adam was a doctor and Kevin was a cook, and he eventually owned his own bakery. They adopted a son, Angel. Meanwhile Jenny was a romance sim, aiming for her life goals of first reaching the top of slacker career and then having 20 lovers. Jenny married once, to a musician called Elizabeth, but they divorced veery fast when Elizabeth caught her cheating and found someone better. After that Jenny focused on being a grandmother to her grandchildren Ruby and Sapphire. I had the most fun playing the Mills and Lovett families! Mia Lovett in my current hood is a tribute to Jenny!

(Jenny is the one in the center of the picture, beside him is Kevin and at the end of the table is Adam. On the other side of the table are Jewel and Angel.)

Am I a Malevolent or Benevolent God:

I like to think a little both. I definitely want all my sims to do well, but at the same time I rarely follow their lifetime wants or attraction bolts. And if I have an idea for a plot twist for a family, then they’re at the mercy of it! But in general I’m kind to my sims, I swear :DD I’m definitely a perfectionist even with my game, which means I hate when things happen that I did not plan - which means unexpected deaths are the worst! But I’ve decided if the death isn’t because of my own stupidity, I will let it happen. It’s good practice for my perfectionism!

What I like best about the current version of Sims I play:

Everything? But really, the genetics are my favorite. Both how the actual sims look like and how it is possible to make them look unique, but also the way genetics work. I still love seeing how the children will look like compared to their parents and even grandparents! Now if there only was a proper way to forever eliminate first-born syndrome, because sometimes I forget to do the fix and will end up having 3 identical children.....

What I am most anticipating for the current version of the Sims:

I’m a ts2 player through and through but I have to admit I’m kinda excited for the Island Living expansion. It’s the mermaids! I was really disappointed in the buggy Island Paradise hood in ts3, and now I’m kinda hopeful the ts4 one will turn out good! THAT BEING SAID, I discovered the mermaid mods by @midgethetree only yesterday and I’m so excited to try them out!!!

As for ts2, on top of constantly getting excited for new mods and new stuff people make for thise game, I’m actually looking forward to branching out myself! On top of playing Whitewave, I’m working on a story hood and intend to turn it into an actual story! I like to think myself as a writer and I’ve always wanted to try out simstories, so let’s hope I get it done some day.

#challenge tag #i could literally write a full-length book about my sims #maybe i will! just for myself #for fun #that actually sounds like something i would do lol #ts2 gameplay

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threeswept · 5 years ago

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I was obsessed with Adorable when I was in college. I first discovered them when my older sister (who is the one responsible...

#adorable #sunshine smile #creation records #Pete Fijalkowski #pete fij

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uta-no-fan-sama · 6 years ago

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A Year of Idol Hell

Today, February 13th, as it just so happens, marks exactly one year since I first discovered Uta no Prince-sama, so I’d really like to share some of my experience with the series itself with you all.

I actually first found out about UtaPri through Shining Live, which I’d found on the App Store (while looking for otome games, I’ll admit). I’d never actually played rhythm games before (apart from Piano Tiles), and I’d assumed it was an otome when I downloaded it. Of course, though I was wrong, I wasn’t disappointed.

I remember getting really excited over the fact that the sprites were animated and the game was fully voiced, and I distinctly remember messaging Indi about it frantically because “OH MY GOD YOU CAN SEE THEM BREATHE THIS IS SO COOL” and no other VN game I’d played so far had any of that.

I’d set Tokiya as my favourite in the beginning, partially because I was into the cool, I-don’t-need-anyone-but-I’m-kinda-falling-for-you type (sue me) at the time, and partially because he was voiced by Mamoru Miyano, who also voiced Light Yagami (sue me again, I love Death Note).

This is gonna sound cliché as hell, but, honestly, I never expected to fall headfirst for these characters so fast.

I started watching the anime when I found out it had one, but I only managed to watch up until Ren’s episode in season one when other things (namely school) overtook my life, but I picked it up again in April/May, when I finished watching it and convinced Indi to do so too. In fact, she’d called me to talk about it on May 26th, which led to us making this blog together. The rest it history.

It’s been a year since my lazy butt decided to download a random game off the App Store, but at the risk of sounding incredibly sappy and overly dramatic, these idols have changed my life in a way I really couldn’t have fathomed beforehand.

I’ve learned a lot from them, and they (and you all!) have been a huge source of motivation for me, even bringing me back into writing fanfics, something I’d stopped doing in early March last year. They’ve given me bucketloads of inspiration and things to look forward to (Maji Love Kingdom is this June!) and I have so, so much appreciation for UtaPri and the rest of its fanbase for so many things, I can’t begin to express it.

I’m looking forward to another year with you guys and these idols!

Mod Emma, signing off to disappear into the void because our finals have started :/

#mods talk #emma post #sorta utapri?#anniversary #uta no prince sama #utapri #utapri appreciation #I KNOW WHAT TO CALL IT:#utapriciation

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divinity-original-sin-2-c1f · 2 years ago

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divinity-original-sin-2-cqv · 2 years ago

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dayz-mod-codes-lock-wv · 2 years ago

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DayZ Best Mods () -

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥 Tired of giving in codes? Which code belongs to which door anyways? Geezus, some guy put a bot on my door to break the code. Here comes Door Management. Throw away your codes and enjoy a simple eye scan. Add your friends to your list on the door an enjoy a stress free "door opening" experience. Door opening too fast? If you press the unlock action you will not see a code dialog anymore. My dialog overwrites this dialog with my personal one. This will open the door after 2 seconds of scanning. Fails when you are not on the manage list ofcourse. Only people on the manage list can manage the door ofcourse. Owner will be alwyas highest authority and can never be erased. Thanks P4L - Rimblock. If you press manual code you get the old dialog back. You can disable this in the config section. The door code is still being used, but only codewise back-end. You dont see anything in the front-end. If you get any duplicates of classes, just delete them from the defines. Infistar Antihack If you're running Infistar Antihack, add this to the dialogs array;. Does this door management use the plot pole friends list? Or is there a manage option on each door. So every Locked door in the plot pole range will open without codes for whoever is in the plot pole freinds list? That way you can allow certain people in your front garage but not in the main living room for example. What happens with all the Locks that are already placed? How does it know that its my ComboLock that i placed before the script was added? The NON-plot4life versop, will have a text window where a person can claim ownership of the door by giving in the Old Code. He will be set as Owner First in list - Cannot be removed. If they put in the time and effort it's possible. But can easily take a couple hours to crack a door. A chance to break in would be good as I have been playing around with the idea of bobby trapping a door with a frag mod :D Just as an aside, I am just writing the instructions for my add-on for A Plot for Life which gives a plot owner the option to take ownership of all buildables on the plot excluding safes, lockboxes, tents and locked doors - all configurable. I'd just like to see enter code so people with the existing codes can enter the door until the owner adds them. I opened an issue on your git. I've fixed one of the errors by defining the two actions in variables. You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account. Paste as plain text instead. Only 75 emoji are allowed. Display as a link instead. Clear editor. Upload or insert images from URL. A2: Epoch Mods 1. Search In. Sign in to follow this Followers Reply to this topic Start new topic. Recommended Posts. Zupa Report post. Posted September 11, Inspired by plotManagement but now for Doors! And kicks player to lobby if failed more then random number between 4 and 14 times. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites. Did some last minut changes, so i hope i didnt break anything. SN1P3R Every door has it's own list. People only can acces that specifific door where there are added on. Eta on a non plot life version? ARcoolJ 8. When the door is claimed, it cannot be claimed anymore. I highly recommend just going for plot4flife, makes everything much easier. Old dialog would be ideal combo lock. Kicks to lobby :. RimBlock Thanks for the mention Zupa. Creep Well, That would be logical, and it would solve base destruction. Just kill them and take their eye. Looking foward to NON plot 4 life version. PeterBeer Join the conversation You can post now and register later. Reply to this topic Go To Topic Listing. Similar Content. Garage Door Opener is part of Epoch 1. Hi guys, Here's an in vehicle garage door opener I wrote a while ago, Original idea was from Sanbird. Outdated, already built into Epoch 1. Hello all, My name is Joseph. I am looking for active members on Arma 2-Overpoch to join a Team. You must have some knowledge in playing the game and you must have a working mic No Echo. We will be playing on a server that has recently started up but has big hopes for its self. We will be working together as a team to attend and capture missions also Helping with base building ECT. How you play is entirely up to you if you this meaning if you want to be a bandit or a hero You must be over the ages of 16 and have a strong sense of humor. Sign In Sign Up.

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divinity-original-sin-2-d0a · 2 years ago

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Game Trainers: Divinity: Original Sin 2 v (+22 Trainer) [FLiNG] | MegaGames

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥 Home Discussions Workshop Market Broadcasts. Change language. Install Steam. Divinity: Original Sin 2 Store Page. It is only visible to you. If you believe your item has been removed by mistake, please contact Steam Support. This item is incompatible with Divinity: Original Sin 2. Please see the instructions page for reasons why this item might not work within Divinity: Original Sin 2. Current visibility: Hidden. This item will only be visible to you, admins, and anyone marked as a creator. Current visibility: Friends-only. This item will only be visible in searches to you, your friends, and admins. Description Discussions 2 Comments Change Notes. Description Discussions Comments Change Notes. Add to Collection. This item has been added to your Favorites. Type: Add-on. Game Mode: Story. Version: Definitive Edition. Tags: Quality Of Life , Utility. File Size. Created by. Muffiny Offline. See all collections some may be hidden. This item has been added to your Subscriptions. Some games will require you to relaunch them before the item will be downloaded. Looking to speed through the game quickly to gather info for wiki documentation? Simply like to cheat and have everything at your disposal? The Cheat Commander allows simple and fast character levelling, equipment generation, skillbook acquisition, gold and more, at any stage in the main campaign! This mod is made to be easily enabled and disabled at any point during the campaign. Want to level up to 30 and deck yourself out in epic gear while still on the boat to Fort Joy? No problem. Anything you add to or modify on your characters will remain even after disabling the mod! What can the Cheat Commander do exactly? Popular Discussions View All 2. Traxx 12 Jul am. Quandale Dingle 10 Jul am. Ryu 9 Jul am. Can this mod give you anathama? PasDeBras 27 Jun pm. Smug Schadenfreude 21 Jun pm. Can it spawn the "withered heart" from Zaleshkar? My group is past fort joy and our sebile killed him. Aaaand we forgot what we did to the heart, but apparently sebile did not eat it, soooo. Bear Sheriff 18 Apr pm. So this didn't work for me on workshop. Even tho i was subscribed steam never downloaded the required files. I then went to Mod Nexus and got the files, put them in myself and it worked. It seems like many people are having this issue. TheeWolfuu 24 Mar pm. Share to your Steam activity feed. You need to sign in or create an account to do that. Sign In Create an Account Cancel. Edit links. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. Some geospatial data on this website is provided by geonames. View mobile website.

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webbaxelsen0-blog · 6 years ago

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The Key to Successful Fallout 76

The Argument About Fallout 76 The entire point of a movie's trailer is to make you wish to observe the movie. So it is not easy to discover the ideal spot to call home in Fallout 76. Naturally, you will want to download the Bethesda launcher to access it, but apart from that, all you should do is install the games. Make certain before venturing out your character is equipped with some sort of helmet, and you'll get some gear during the nearby Firebreathers quests. Beta testers found a slew of bugs. Games like rust also conduct scavenging a good deal better. Carry weight in Fallout games has ever been a small maligned mechanic, although there are a lot of community created mods created to tie weight limits to backpacks and other containers. There are not any interactive human NPCs on the planet, but there are methods for players to have quests from robots and through various different ways. There's a terminal to select what type of ammo you would love. Fallout 76: the Ultimate Convenience! There are still more options which you'll be able to take though so that you don't need to be stuck on spending a good deal on solutions you wouldn't be needing everyday. The skill to recognize any ripe market is the main skill worth developing. First you must identify your intended industry. The Downside Risk of Fallout 76 Again, you may also go right by bringing in new alterations. You have to restrict all access he's got to you in order for him to begin missing you as part of his life. Extreme hair loss may be a sign that the body is now imbalanced in different ways. Full instructions about how to grab the game are available here. If you're likely to pre-order Fallout 76, you will want to think about this wonderful collector's edition. It is now on my Radar, although I think I will give the special edition a miss. Fallout 76 Explained Howard noted that you're going to be in a position to swap out any part of your character during the course of the game. If you've got the original bodily media, then you own a license for the game. The Forza games are a few of the very best racing games on the marketplace. A number of the geometrical glitches linked to the workshops are fixed, so you do not have to wall-glitch to reach them when they spawn underground. Seriously it is a large ol' wearable helmet. Such a microtransaction has gotten ever more popular through the years, and several defend them because you don't will need to use them to take pleasure in the game. This mod continues in the exact same spirit, allowing a mind-blowing amount of selections to create this story the direction you wish to. You are also going to be in a position to move your creations wherever you would like. Even if NPC companions aren't available, players should start looking for player companions to join their party as a way to acquire certain advantages. The Fallout 76 Pitfall Eagle-eyed Fallout fans ought to be nominally mindful of Vault 76. If you're on the lookout for anything else on Fallout 76, be certain to take a look at our Fallout 76 Guides Hub. Fallout has a fairly sturdy formula. There are not any non-playable characters within this game. Video games are made to make you really feel as a protagonist. It might have been a very good game. Fallout 76 Explained You will also have to do a little micromanaging when your workshop becomes attacked periodically. however, it is a remarkable means to find some fast quick event XP and find some plans at exactly the same time. You may also move your camp to another portion of the map by packing everything up and utilizing the blueprint in another location. The majority of the very first game happened in metropolitan locations, so maybe this one is going to learn more about the wilderness even more. The world might never know. So it's difficult to say that the 2 experiences will play the exact same. It's apparent that Bethesda has taken a good deal of respect in making a sympathetic portrayal of the Mountain State, and thank goodness for it. Naturally, as you may anticipate, not everybody is entirely content. The heart of the human being is the soul, which may not be destroyed. As hard as it's in the world today to maintain a marriage from divorce court, being more mindful of the things which come from our mouths is of extreme importance. Life After Fallout 76 Should you are unable to hack the terminal in the allotted number of guesses, you will be locked from the terminal for a moment. Unfortunately, the entire thing was not as cool as it sounded. There are, in addition, some random characters to muddle things up a little. The Advantages of Fallout 76 Streaming your favourite shows on Netflix will cost you more, just like it is going to cost Netflix more to continue to keep their bandwidth. When joining a server you'll be able to select from an assortment of regions to spawn into. The organization states it'll notify any customers whose messages and photos might have been inadvertently shared. fallout 76

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dramallamadingdang · 6 years ago

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Annnnd some replies.

For @penig, @scribblingsim, @taylors-simblr. @freezerbunny-sims, @tamtam-go92, @dunne-ias, @holleyberry, and @scibirg...

penig replied to your post “Every time I think I’m going to get back on track with keeping up with...”

Bonk the guilt on the head. Following someone is not the same as promising to view all the content. Anybody you're particularly interested in, you can go to the individual blog sometime when you're in the mood. You never get to do all the things you want to do and that's life. Don't turn your leisure into work.

Intellectually I know that. Thing is, there are some things I really do want to catch up on, but then when I sit down at the computer, I end up doing something else. Like, going off and looking at Photoshop tutorials or something because an idea strikes me and I want to check out some ways to make it happen. In short, I need more hours in the day and being able to stay awake for them. But don’t we all, I guess? :)

scribblingsim replied to your link “ModTheSims - Orchard Fruits Gussy Up”

Oh, of *course* I'd find out about this after I finally get my game loaded. LOL ah well. A good download for later.

Ain’t that always the way! *laugh* My game was already loaded, too, when I looked at the downloads on MTS, so adding in the mod will have to wait until the next time I exit and reload it. But it’s in the Downloads folder, waiting for that to happen, at least. :)

taylors-simblr replied to your post “Every time I think I’m going to get back on track with keeping up with...”

Same here, I think ooh I’ll catch up and comment on recent story posts, but then I also want to read a book or play a game or maybe I have ironing to catch up on and then I forget and feel guilty and then the dash moves so fast anyway. It is one of the ways that livejournal/dream width is slightly better. The posts don’t get lost forever in the sheer amount of posts even on one persons tumblr

I actually like the journal system better, overall, for lots of different reasons. (Properly threaded conversations is the main one.) But its downside -- at least the last time I used my LJ -- was that it’s a pain to post pics. Gotta do the upload the pics somewhere and then link to the post thing, which is tedious if it’s a lot of pics, rather than just dragging/dropping like you do with Tumblr. Since Sims-posting tends to be pic-heavy, that’s a real bummer. Buuuuuut yeah, it’s nice that it doesn’t move at breakneck speed like Tumblr does. Tumblr’s definitely meant more for the short-attention-span crowd, I think.

And then people post saying their “dash is dead,” and I’m like, “What? HOW??!!” :)

freezerbunny-sims replied to your post “Question!”

Never tried that but it's a great idea. Wasn't there an option for sims with high enthusiasm in a hobby to instruct other sims? Or does that just increase hobby enthusiasm, not skills? On a side note, maybe some skilling objects could be modded to have an option to instruct other sims, like some of the career rewards already have. I don't know how hard it would be though.

Yeah, the instruct thing does only affect enthusiasm. Which is good, too, for my purposes. Because ultimately skills don’t really matter in this neighborhood. No one has a job and most of the skills, except maybe cooking, are most useful for job promotions and whatnot. They don’t actually have too much of an effect on a Sim’s daily life. What would be good is if instructing would increase badge levels. But I think maybe SimWardrobe’s vocational training podium can do that, now that I think about it. I’ll have to track that down...

tamtam-go92 replied to your post “Oh, I didn't know that "send grave to the community lot" thing didn't...”

I didn't know the sent to graveyard doesn't work probably too! And I always sent ma ghosts there ��

Using “Move This Grave” works in the sense that it does move the grave and doesn’t break anything in ways that would cause neighborhood corruption, but if keeping the ghosts’ colors/behaviors is important to you, that’s not the way you want to do it. So far as I know, the interaction hasn’t been fixed so that it preserves the colors/behaviors.

holleyberry replied to your post “Hi iCad. I have a morbid question. How do you deal with graves in your...”

I didn't know that about letting the ghost spawn.

Yeah, the issue is that when a Sim dies, a certain amount of time has to pass before the ghost will spawn. I think the time is randomly determined when the Sim dies, but it seems like it can be anywhere between the night of their death (if they died during the day) up to three or four nights after the Sim’s death. If you move the grave to a community lot before the ghost spawns for the first time...Well, time doesn’t actually pass on unowned community lots because they don’t save, so an “unspawned” grave on a community lot will never reach its designated “spawn time.”

So, if you want ghosts on community lots, you have to let the ghost spawn for the first time on a residential lot, where time DOES pass. If you don’t want it to be their home lot (so you don’t have to deal with haunting, for instance), then you could use a gravekeeper, go to THEIR residential lot, and have them plunk the grave down there. Then make motives static and put the game on ultraspeed until the ghost spawns. THEN put the “pre-spawned” grave on the community lot. Then the ghost will appear there.

tamtam-go92 replied to your post “Question!”

It's not quite in topic but in my normal gameplay I pretend that teens that don't attend University do an apprenticeship. They have to get a Job and when they go to school I tell it trade school. But since neither exist in your neighborhood I think your Suggestion seems a good Option! As someone who did an apprenticeship I wish there Was something like that in game.

I tend to not like the schooling in the game at all. Probably because I’m not a fan of the “standard” public school system in the US, which is what the game’s school is based on. :) For instance, I violently disagree with the entire concept of “homework” IRL, so I homeschooled my real kids, and in my game, I come up with alternative ways to educate kids/teens that are actual practical (As in, they gain actual skills or badges or whatever) as opposed to just something that sends them off the lot for X hours and all they get is meaningless “grades.” I’ve not done apprenticeship before, but that sort of system makes logical sense for this neighborhood, since it is mostly trades-based, so I’m going to work out some kind of system.

dunne-ias replied to your post “Question!”

I played it once similar to your plan. The teen would move in with the mentor (unless the mentor was their parent) but I would have them stay there, not move them back to their parents's house as I think that made more sense. They were often invited home though for big events and sometimes just dinner. I also made the parents pay the mentor. I think a certain amount of days of apprenticeship would be reasonable, or a certain amount of work done so that skilled workers-

2/2 - would be able to finish their apprenticeship faster. Once they were done they were moved back in with the parents until they had enough money to move out, so the cost of moving out wasn't subtracted from the mentor, but the parent (I had the no20Khandouts.)

With the Sim Transporter, I can move individual Sims into and out of different households at will, without the moving-around affecting anyone's money. (Although there is no money in this neighborhood, so it doesn't really matter. :) ) I use it to run daycares and schools in my game. For this neighborhood...Teens will all leave their birth household on the morning after their teen bday, mostly because space will be at a premium and they’ll need to get out to make room for their younger siblings. :) They'll move to the communal lot, going into the queue to earn their own house. So I was thinking that when playing the communal lot, any apprentices would just get transported out somewhere for a block of days -- to simulate being "at training" -- and then transported back. Then when I play the mentoring household, I can use the transporter to move their “assigned” apprentice(s) in for their days of actual training and then transport them back when they're done. I think it'll work....

The detail I'm not really clear on is how to run the training. I suppose they can just do all the mentor's work, give them a break. *laugh* But I'd like there to be some interaction between mentor and apprentice as wel. It'd be nice if there was some sort of social interaction to “pass on” skills or badges, sort of like how you can pass along earned business benefits... Maybe I can rig something up with Sophie-David's "opportunity" items (There's a thought...) or maybe SimWardrobe’s vocational trainer or both. Maybe have them do hands-on work one day and then “classroom”-learn from the mentor the next and switch off that way. That might work...

I've got time to think about it, though; it'll be a while before there are any born-in-game teens in this neighborhood! *laugh*

tamtam-go92 replied to your post “This looks crazy. I wonder, how do you take the second baby out of the...”

It's still possible that the fences of the cribs can be put down to put the babies in ��

Now that I think about it, I don’t actually recall if the crib “doors” are animated on those cribs. Of course, that’s how such a thing would work in real life, but I’ve not paid attention to whether or not those cribs are animated in-game....

scibirg replied to your post “This looks crazy. I wonder, how do you take the second baby out of the...”

I once played a medieval game and the Picaso's were living in a tiny hovel and just kept having kids (ACR of course). With the shelf beds from simlogical I was able to cram an amazing number of sims into their one bedroom house!

Oh, yeah. Shelf beds will definitely be used! (That’s why the second bedroom in the houses is three tiles deep. :) ) I’m figuring I can stack three of them per side of the room and then maybe put a floor mattress underneath the “stack,” thus cramming in eight kids. If there’s more than that at a time, tents will be broken out! :)

tamtam-go92 replied to your photo “Attempting to befriend another wolf. This one’s a female because I...”

Won't they bite the sim and turn her into a werewolf?

(This is an old reply. Sorry about that, dear; I missed it when I did the last batch of replies.)

Anyway, no, only the “Leader of the Pack” -- the wolf with the glowing yellow eyes -- can turn a Sim into a werewolf. The others are just really aggressive big dogs that are rather hard to build relationships with because many interactions are rejected at first and the wolf tends to leave before you can get very far, so you have to wait for the same one to show up again to continue to work on the relationship. I do want someone to befriend/adopt the Leader, though. Mostly because I’ve never had anyone become a werewolf by the “real” in-game method. *laugh*

#penig #scribblingsim #taylors-simblr #freezerbunny-sims #tamtam-go92 #dunne-ias #holleyberry #scibirg

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