#all of your information is on the internet and its not that difficult getting your hands on it

[zaine-the-cat-meme-generator]

He know what you did

[gibbearish]

it is fun when u comment on a post on reddit and someones like "ummmm look what sub youre in" like no i know. i just think what you said is dumb enough that i'm willing to get downvoted to tell you that

[mcybree]

is this your man

3l!BigB is like a cicada to me. He showed up, dug underground, stayed there for seventeen years, came back up to the surface and died horrifically

[acid-ixx]

I hope you don’t mind but I need to ramble this to someone, neglected Wayne reader right? The fam would forget to bring them to social events and whatnot right? So there would be very few pictures, articles and interviews or even facts about them, meaning that reader Wayne is a rarity. Still following me? Reader Wayne with a small but devout fanbase.

I’m talking they are trading the latest pictures and sharing links to the rare interview with reader in it, following any social media they have that isn’t private, they are just fascinated by this micro celebrity that seems to always be forgotten. Okay but also imagine one of the heroes developing a para-social attachment to reader. My money is on Conner Kent, mainly bc he can project his own issues with his dads onto reader and he can Dolores ~Encanto~ reader with his super hearing and develop a even bigger parasocial obsession with them

I hope you enjoyed this ramble, I will leave you be now, see ya later alligator! 🐊

omg another one of my asks that actually predicted a major plot point... this ask ties well with the last part written here. i'm thinking about having the reader get a love interest/s but i have already written an outline but one thing is for sure—

you have more than just your family interested in taking you.

major spoilers below the cut. — an excerpt from chapter xx

(name) wayne may have been a name forcefully deleted off of the face of the internet, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its conspiracies of its own. nobody knows who you are beyond the blurry, unsolicited pictures of you. it may have been a photograph of your back, or articles published in unknown websites and buried at the far end about a kid entering through the fancy gates of the wayne manor.

you are a product of a one-night-stand.

but they don't know who the mother is, don't know your age, or where you come from, and what business bruce has with the woman to guarantee your adoption at the instance she had disappeared without warning.

your existence was a mystery most would like to solve. after all, it was your picture that was plastered all over the newspapers and articles, it was your name that journalists whisper and it was a silhouette of your face that the underground knows by heart. every known information about you was shared discretely yet efficiently like some sort of virus.

you were a target for interest, a large sum of money if they will. and alfred had taken it in his hands to make sure there would never be a repeat of what had happened before.

it was a clumsy mistake, one that cost you your memories, and one he swears on his life he'll never make again.

the first course of action he needs to arrange, which may seem difficult for most; he needs to confront bruce.

after all, your freedom is your doom.

maybe this is out of the picture, but id' like to imagine you and connor having a therapy session where one comes out absolutely obsessed with the other, and it's not you.

connor's character for me is so, so good for an angst potential. it's like his personal struggles is a way for him to show you how absolutely you two are meant to be. and he may have met you through bumping into you (false) or maybe... he has seen you stalking through the shadows back when he visits the manor. using his superhearing, he can hear your voice from the kitchen begging alfred to relay a message to bruce, sounding so absolutely desperate. it's the way you tell alfred how you wished your father actually spends time with you, or how nobody seems to notice you— that he kind of just makes a silent promise that he will talk to you soon, he needs to know why this family seems so keen on ignoring and how hypocritical tim is for literally doing the same thing to you when he's aware of kon's past.

if he (or anyone else) should be a love interest (though he is a minor character in the series unless you guys want him to be a major one), i can already imagine the absolute hell you have to suffer not only from your family but from your own lover. just imagine the stockholm syndrome or the delusions you convince yourself with because you're finally loved by someone but that love restricts you from the very freedom you tried to build.

the batfamily would be so conflicted because why are you choosing some stranger over them...? then you slap them in the face with, "well, this "stranger" wants to kidnap me and lock me up, sure! but at least they actually looked at me for more than five seconds!" and you can watch how the color drains off their face, their conflict giving you the perfect opportunity to run away from both your ex-family and your soon-to-be-kidnapper-lover who thinks your comeback is a funny way for you to propose.

[occasionalsnippets]

Hello! I have an ask for your family dissonance au. It’s a scenario I’m curious about that you mentioned in one of your writings. What would happen if reader needed up in an alternate au that doesn’t have her in it dressed as Robin because she was filling in? (In like a Yandere way btw). Would she be able to hide, would she reveal herself? What would the Batfam she was originally with do when they notice she is gone??? And for drama sake what if Tim in the other au she falls into was in the time period he was banned from being Robin for his safety due to Redhood just appearing? What would Redhood do about another Robin?

I hope you have a wonderful day!

Taglist: @dragondevinity, @lonely-star2044, @sheep-from-rad, @ilxandra, @thethingwiththefeathers, @star-wars-lycanwing-bat, @sackofsadstuff, @zonked-times, @paastaboi, @venfia, @fantasy-angelo, @linaisadream, @shirp-collector-of-fixations

---

When you aren't acting as Robin, everything is fair game.

If you don't land near a bat, you're not likely to reveal yourself or go to the manor until you do some information gathering. You play it careful, avoid getting caught on any cameras and head to a safe house. Disabling all the hidden mics and trackers is child's play and the safe house is stocked enough for you to get your bearings.

First things first, the internet. Doing a quick search reveals the current state of Gotham, its vigilantes and rogues. Pretty standard stuff. Your plan is mainly to just bunker down until you're found. There's nothing stopping you from doing so and sooner or later, your family will find you.

Those plans are ruined deep into the night by someone else breaking into the safe house.

Red Hood stumbles in, trailing blood all over the place. You're already categorizing his injuries by the time he drags himself over to the couch. Several bullets. Dislocated shoulder. Some kind of fear toxin. All things you can fix if you choose to get involved.

You might as well. Jason will live whether you do or don't but you would feel bad about leaving him. He's not all that there while you're treating him but he's definitely more lucid after getting the antidote.

"So," you hum as you dig bullets out of his flesh, "do you specifically want Batman to kill the Joker or do you want to kill him yourself or are you okay if anyone kills him."

He mutters something you can't hear. The blood loss is probably getting to him. By the time you're finished wrapping him up, his breathing has slowed and become steady. You pat his smooth helmet. Even if it's part of his brand, it kinda makes him look bald.

"Sleep tight, Hood."

By the time he wakes, you are gone and the Joker is dead.

I'm not really sure how to spin the rest of it in a yandere type of way since you don't stay long enough in the universe to really trigger anything.

Jason's helmet probably has some kind of recording thing though so there's evidence of you in the universe before you disappear. Plus in your quest to commit murder, you run into a couple other bats too. The bats in that universe might end up spiralling trying to find you though since a. you killed the Joker, b. you patched Jason up, c. you look like Tim, and d. you broke into a safe house too easily.

Maybe they'll find where you came from, maybe they won't, but regardless, they're sure to have questions.

---

On the other side of the coin, what is going on with your batfam?

They notice within probably 10 ish minutes or less that your trackers are down. In less than half an hour, their facts are confirmed. You’ve gone missing. Like any good detectives, information gathering comes first and conclusions drawn from evidence last. Despite that, they’re actually pretty frantic in their search for you.

Most resources are diverted solely to finding you, everything else is dealt with quickly and efficiently so they aren’t wasting time. Once they narrow things down to magic, fixing everything is actually quite easy. Thank goodness you’re not difficult to find. If it took any longer, you probably wouldn’t want to know the lengths they’d go to for you to be back home and safe.

—

There are three Robins in Titan’s Tower. One current Robin, one former Robin and one not-Robin. It is, in summary, a Spider-Man pointing meme situation.

There’s a lot of yelling and fighting and “you’re ruining my plan” and “well I wasn’t trying to” but it doesn’t end with any major injuries.

Tim and Jason definitely think it’s a time travel thing where future Tim came back to the past to fix something. You don’t have enough energy to correct them. Either way, you stall long enough for the big Bat and Nightwing to come crashing into Titan’s Tower for an early reveal.

You’re gone by the time they get back to the topic of your presence. Hidden away, waiting to return home.

[eamour]

the void craze

as many of you already might now, the "void" state, also called the "i am" state, is a method coined by neville goddard which became popular and famous for its rather unique way of manifesting your desires. just like with every method being put on a pedestal, there are a hand full of problems that come along with it. with this post, i want to help you gain clarity but also consciousness (no pun intended) about your outlook on this method.

problems of obsessing over a state

disregarding your outer reality. you have responsibilities and things to look after in the physical world that — even if you can change and get rid of them — need your attention. you exist in both, 4D and 3D. as long as you are aware of yourself physically, you need to care for yourself.

disregarding your inner reality. by constantly being in a state of waiting and wanting, you keep desiring. you keep occupying a state of mind and refuse to change it — in other words, change your "i am" — and will remain in that state assuming you don't "enter" the void state.

dismissing your feelings and emotions. this point is less about you desiring something but more about your emotional well being. by not fulfilling yourself from within, you are enslaved to your senses and will continue to upset yourself with the 3D, starting to bottle up your emotions.

becoming indifferent to your surroundings. you might start to disregard everything around you and force yourself not to negatively react or acknowledge the outer world.

developing unhealthy habits. some people are likely to isolate themselves, some begin to spend an unhealthy amount of time on the internet (specifically apps like tumblr or youtube), some ruin their sleep schedules to attempt once they are truly sleepy, and so on.

overconsuming information. with people spending a significant amount of time online, it enables the possibility of people taking in more information than they actually need (also causing people to doubt or double-check their knowledge).

overcomplicating the method. now, entering the void is easy. all you do is "enter" a specific state of mind, something you do all the time with many many different states all day long. but people love to think that it's different with the void as it's such an "important" state to occupy (which it is not).

refusing to change from within. as you rely on one method to change your life entirely, you are not willing to take the lead and to "manifest the usual way". you don't want to try any other method, nor make an effort to try something else.

focusing solely on the void. you are convinced that the void will be your saviour and fix all of your problems immediately which is why you see no point in manifesting another way. you are certain that the void is the only way to shift your reality easily, quickly and effortlessly.

trusting only the void. it's easy to give up all efforts to manifest your desires with other methods when you feel that manifesting without the void seems too difficult, hard or too exhausting.

mistrusting other methods. you might also feel like other methods don't work as "good" or "efficiently" as the void method.

putting your life on hold. while many people try to attempt to "enter the void" aka "become pure consciousness" at night or once they get into a sleepy, drowsy state, they tend to fail to care about their lives for several hours throughout the day. they dismiss improving their lives, start losing hope and stop to invest in themselves, as they see no point in "trying" to change anything. they believe that achieving change will only be worth it or purposeful once they do it via the void state.

conditioning your desires. waiting for the best moment to attempt, meaning once you are tired, doesn't mean to condition your desires. it's thinking that you can only attempt around that time that makes you condition your desires.

discrediting your power. since the void is known to change lives drastically, some lean towards ascribing more power to this method compared to themselves.

believing in an external power. some even believe the void is a place that exists outside of them rather than viewing the void as a state of reaching pure consciousness.

doubting your abilities. you can draw this conclusion once you begin to think that a state of mind has more power over you than the person that has the ability to choose and to occupy any state of mind they wish to.

burning out. if you have "failed" to identify with that state of mind, you are very likely to develop beliefs implying things such as being unable to manifest, being out of control and overall giving up on yourself.

advice

i didn't make this post for the solely purpose to scare you off and to persuade you not to try the void method at all. i made this post for you to understand the many many unnecessary thoughts all around this method. these are things that people do or think once they start to make their happiness depend on a method, a state that they are infinitely greater than.

i want to encourage you to try out any method that you are interested in and determined to master. do as you please, regardless of the opinions of other people. but always keep in mind: it's nothing you can't achieve. and remember, just like neville said, the conceiver is ever greater than his conception — meaning, you will always and forever be more powerful than any state of mind you could possibly think of.

with love, ella.

[singbluesxlver]

Im so sick of north americans claiming all the time to be so inclusive and respectful to other cultures when in reality they're the most ignorant and self-centered people in the world.

Especially now that apparently being a "latino" seems to be just a trend.

And guess what! Disney took the opportunity to start releasing content from its new series, based on Latin America's (actually just Mexico, because for people in the US it is very difficult to understand that there are many countries besides Mexico in Latin America) culture, "Primos".

Created, directed, written by: people who know nothing about Latin America.

I am not going to dwell on the number of errors that JUST the opening song already has because the internet is already full of information about it.

But I do want to dwell on how part of the team behind this series is defending itself against the accusations of how racist their show is.

Myrna Velasco, who voices the main character in the series, recently posted a video on her ig stories making the following statement with an air of superiority in her voice:

"The Spanish language its not a Latin American language. Its a language that Spanish conquistadors forced upon latin american people (etc etc)"

(all of this happened because someone corrected a grammatically wrong sentence that she said in Spanish)

1- By that criteria, English is not a North American language.

2- Spanish has been spoken in Latin America for centuries. Whether you like it or not, that language (in all its shapes and colors, because the same Spanish is not spoken in Mexico as in Argentina as in Peru, etc.) is already part of our culture.

3- You dont like Spanish because its not native? ok then do it in Guarani, Quechua, Aimara, Nahuatl, etc

4- Why you can go speaking a very broken Spanish and get away with it but every time a Spanish speaker, after actually taking the time to learn your language (because it is impossible to communicate with you in any other way), is mocked and mistreated BY YOU for their accent even though they are forming grammatically perfect sentences??? (this goes to the majority of US population)

5- This woman claims to love Latin American culture but posts things like this one:

in conclusion, stop being so hypocritical and learn to look at what happens outside the United States, the rest of the world does not work the same way your country does or how your country thinks it works.

thanks for coming to my ted talk, I needed to get it off my chest.

chau

[sreegs]

Tumblr users like to build up a lot of myths about this site that still get thrown around like they're fact, but I think the biggest myth they've convinced themselves is true is that the site is unprofitable because of the users.

Tumblr's unprofitable because its model doesn't fly under the current state of internet advertising. It's also had a string of owners, leadership, and people in charge of coming up with ideas for Tumblr that don't know what they have and would be damned if they knew what to do with it. You can't make money on social media unless you collect worthwhile info from users to sell to advertisers. You also don't make money on social media by copying existing features.

Tumblr's core prop, which they has somehow survived Yahoo, Verizon, and now Automattic, is anonymity. You can't sell that information that you don't collect. Outside of that, Tumblr's a long-form blogging platform which flies in the face of short-form attention-grabbing content like Tiktok and Twitter.

The people who have been in charge of making decisions at Tumblr have never known what to do with it. A lot of them just copied other platforms' features. It got really frustrating working there, being forced to make something you knew would just languish for months before being left to rot or, hopefully, mercifully, be removed.

Meanwhile site improvements were neglected because they don't make a quick buck. This was the main reason I quit, because I just gave up on trying to make the place better only to be forced into adding a new feature that no one wants to use.

Case in point, Tumblr live. I can assure you that none of the engineers or the people who run the Staff blog, or anyone else who does actual work work at Tumblr, wanted to support it. It's not even the first time Tumblr had live video.

The thing is, though, I'm not sure that just improving the site without adding anything new would lead to long term success anyways. You need a steady stream of new users to replace the old. It's also incredibly expensive to run a social media site that hosts images and video. AND you have to moderate it, which is expensive and difficult. Even if Tumblr just made all these things better, I'm not convinced it would keep the site alive much longer. Tumblr's too expensive to maintain on this model that doesn't make enough money from advertising, and it's too expensive to be maintained on user donations.

Anyways, the point is, the Tumblr users that like to proudly declare they have the power to make this site lose money are actually helping the site make money by posting and using the site. Even if you have an ad-blocker never pay for merch or whatever, your presence and activity here adds to Tumblr's usership statistics, which they use to court more advertisers. The people who have actually been keeping this site unprofitable are the people who own it and the decision makers who dictate what the next feature will be.

[theoutcastrogue]

the internet is rotting, as Jonathan Zittrain noted in an important (but paywalled) 2021 Atlantic article. A huge percentage of the links on the internet are broken, and there is no single authoritative, accessible universal repository that keeps track of everything. It is frighteningly easy for crucial information to slip away. ...

The practice of making changes to an article without noting that you’ve made them is called “stealth editing,” and even the New York Times does it. ... The existence of stealth editing means that it’s difficult to trust that the version of an article you click on at any given moment is the article as it was originally published. ...

I also, to my alarm, realized just how dependent we are on private publications themselves to give us access to records of their own work. Often, they keep it payawalled behind locked gates and charge you admission if you want to have a look. There are lots of sources in the Chomsky book to which you have to subscribe if you want to verify, such as this 1999 story in the Los Angeles Times about NATO’s bombing of a bus in Yugoslavia. This is a story of national importance, far too overlooked at the time, but if you don’t subscribe to the LA Times, you need research library access or a workaround if you want to read it.

Thank God for the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine preserves as much of the internet as they can and is invaluable for researchers trying to figure out what was once housed at now-dead links. But the Internet Archive has its limits. Social media posts, YouTube videos, paywalled Substack posts, PDFs—all can be very difficult to track down after they disappear. If a politician tweets something embarrassing, for instance, and then deletes it, it might be preserved in a screenshot. But we know screenshots are easy to fake. So where do you turn to prove satisfactorily that something was in fact said? ...

it’s very easy to lose pieces of information that seem permanent. E-books, for instance, can be changed by their publisher without the changes even being noted. You might read a book on your Amazon Kindle one day and open it up the next day to look for a quote only to find that the quote has disappeared without a trace. The Guardian, for twenty years, hosted a copy of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people,” an important historical document. After the letter went viral on TikTok, the Guardian removed it from the site entirely. The New Republic did the same after an article of theirs about Pete Buttigieg caused controversy. The documents in question can still be found, but only by digging through the Internet Archive. If that ever goes down, researchers will find that trying to piece together the online past is like trying to learn about a lost civilization from excavated fragments. ...

I think that in an age where people (rightly) don’t trust the information they’re getting to be true, it needs to be as easy as possible to do research. Instead, while we have better technology than ever for sifting through information, it’s still the case that the truth is paywalled and the lies are free. If you want to “do your own research” to check on the veracity of claims, you will run headlong into a maze of broken links, paywalls, and pop-ups. How can anyone hope to find the truth when it’s so elusive, trapped behind so many toll gates? 

[disregardcanon]

a few thoughts about the us tiktok and the rednote thing

and a link to an article from npr detailing it

bytedance's first app was a comedy meme platform that was forced to shut down by the chinese government. bytedance is not some arm of the chinese government that's happily giving away foreign data. they're a company whose first attempt at a social media platform was banned in their home country for being subversive. they are not purposefully giving away foreign data.

on top of that evidence, the company has tons of foreign investors and the interfaces for tiktok and its chinese counterpart are both housed in their respective companies, making it much harder for them to even procure the data if the chinese government somehow tried to force them to give it up.

the chinese internet IS highly censored and the government IS authoritarian. however, the us government won't give any information about why they think this is happening, why it would be dangerous, or what else they would DO about it, which leads most of us to believe that it's a red-scare propaganda attempt as well as an act of corporate greed. if the company sells an american company then one of OUR oligarchs gets to take hold of a great interface, steal the interface for their own financial gain, and make changes that make it harder to be "unamerican" on the platform.

us tiktok users are understandably upset about this. as a matter of spite, lots of them are moving to a different chinese social media app: rednote.

rednote

i made an account there and have been having fun with it. i don't plan on making it like, my main social media presence, but i LOVE exploring. i'm gonna hang out for some memes, cat pics, work on my mandarin and help some nice people with their english homework.

before i get too starry eyed about it... the people ARE very nice. it IS cool to get to talk to people that live somewhere else and this CAN facilitate that. there are definitely some real conversations happening here and it's letting people make good, difficult connections. however... rednote is the Squeaky Clean Perfect Version of the people on it. they have to do their best salesperson for china act to maintain access to this platform.

any legitimate complaints that they would like to make about their OWN government CAN'T be made in a forum like this because of the censorship from the chinese government. OVERT censorship vs the more covert version americans are used to. https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/07/how-xiaohongshu-censors-sudden-incidents/

i one hundred percent understand the urge to "enemy of my enemy is my friend" something, but... more than one government is capable of Doing Propaganda at the same time. if you go on rednote and go "everything is actually so nice and wonderful and perfect in china all the time!!!! they have everything right!!!" then... you probably shouldn't be on rednote. or have a chat with the nice mormon missionaries that rang your doorbell.

a quick reminder about the treatment of uyghur muslims under the chinese government

okay now i'm done

[liaredrose]

Hello everyone.

I think some of you have noticed I haven’t updated my stories in a while. They are not abandoned, I will finish them. I’ve been a silent reader of Dramione for something like 15 years. Before writing in English I wrote and shared fic in my mother tongue. I have always loved Harry Potter and I have always adored Dramione. It’s just that - and I have to confess I it with a heavy heart - it has become difficult to find joy in writing - and sharing - Dramione. To me writing has always been a way to escape reality and enter the fantasy world that reins in my mind. Well, that world has zero limits. Now whenever I write a Dramione I have to fathom how some people might twist what I write and be personally offended.

It has becoming annoying. I know that some might say: it’s on the internet; brace yourself for criticism. Yeah, you are right but that does not allow people I don’t even know to insult me. I have been told to cure my fat-phobia - I didn’t even know that was a thing - because I wrote Hermione didn’t like Dudley. The fact I wrote she also didn’t like him because he was a moron was apparently irrelevant. Some people were concerned by the fact Hermione believed herself to be a slut for her behaviour so they launched themselves into a campaign to accuse me. Again, the fact she had had a previous sexual relationship that had affected her way of thinking was not relevant. I have been accused of being a racist because in one of my stories Draco decided to go by MUDBLOOD as a muggle rockstar. There is a reason that I haven’t yet explained in the story so I won’t write it here. Besides, comparing muggle au to racism it’s such a ludicrous thought that I am honestly speechless. In a comment someone wrote and I’m quoting here “Careful not to make this into a smut without plot”. I also had to defend a story and waste time I could have been using to write to stop a stupid quarrel.

We don’t know each other, but I’m only patient with my son and with my students. This is a hobby, so I have zero patience here. My heart is broken because I love this fandom. I met wonderful people thanks to Dramione and I will be forever grateful. But enough is enough. I want to reassure my readers that I will finish Crimson Seeds and MUDBLOOD because I love those stories and I want them to have a closure. Then I’m done. I’m writing the next chapters, but - for all the reasons listed before and more - I’m doing it slower than before. I truly hope this fandom will get back to its former glory because it was a fantastic place to be.

I love you all.

Yours,

Lia

P.S. This was just meant to inform my readers so please don’t turn my words in something they are not. Thank you

[womanlifefreedom]

All eyes on alert

This is a note to thank everyone for sharing voices from Iran and the diaspora.

In the past, it was easier to downplay or forget injustices going on around the world when the news cycle had moved onto the next big story. Now, all one has to do is get past an algorithm and do a little searching to inform oneself. It is more difficult to move on when the names of the people being wrongly imprisoned have hashtags and we can still see the faces and hear the voices of those who are being oppressed and killed. It also is more difficult for the regime to operate with total impunity when there is more public and political attention on their human rights abuses.

I know the sheer amount of raw footage has dropped on Twitter, partly due to increased surveillance and internet restrictions as well as ebbs and flows in both activity on the ground and online attention spans. We must remember that social change, resistance movements, revolution, these things are a long game. They demand stamina and commitment. It is never going to be at full throttle all the time.

The anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s unjust death is approaching. If you can, keep posting and sharing what is happening in Iran. Keep an eye out for local actions. Keep attending protests. Keep contacting and pressuring your political representatives. Keep learning about this country and its rich history and culture. Thank you.

[egrets-highish-hunt-loth]

Name: Charlie R. Hopper

Nicknames/Aliases: various randomly generated Internet aliases, often having numbers or codes within them.

Creed/Virtue: Hermit / Vision

Drive: Curiosity

You don’t like to think about the past; you were in law enforcement, briefly, before a car accident smeared as a drunk driving incident rendered you functionally brain dead for six months and your higher-ranked sisters face on every MISSING poster across the UK. You fell into a hole of drinking and passing out on streets when the fallout hit too hard — and you thought you found solace with a drinking buddy until one night you wake up with his teeth around your neck and promises of an eternity of peace babbling from his throat.

It’s not that that does it, though. You wriggled hard enough to escape, and you hid in your house with blood pouring down your neck — and nothing happens. You never see your drinking buddy again, even if you’re sure sometimes you feel his eyes on the back of your neck. You don’t report it to the people that had already shunned you. You don’t have friends to tell; they were all your sisters’, and she’s not turned up either. You’re just the leftovers, the chewed up gristle that would do better to be ground against the pavement and discarded.

So, instead of taking action, you move — far, far away — in the hopes that nothing but the scar tissue would follow you. Like you could swallow down that rage and escape with just a few physical reminders that, in time, would fade.

You didn’t know just how loud the whispers would get.

Merits:

Tolerance (1pt) ; Most hermits can’t be in populated spaces without completely losing it. Charlie has a *slight* tolerance that has allowed him to squat in an abandoned apartment complex, though it still means the endless barrage of garbled messages makes it difficult for him to focus; he finds himself unable to leave despite the urge to get away from it all, his Curiosity driving him to put up with the Babble. || This merit only extends to the presence of 1 Imbued or Supernatural being, if more than that are within a 30 metre radius (patron bg 3) Charlie is rendered unable to focus on anything other than the Messages.||

Patron Background (3pt); Charlie is fed a constant barrage of messages and warnings that come; when in the presence of another Imbued or supernatural being (within a 30 metre radius with current points), Charlie is overwhelmed by the noise and suffers a -2 penalty to any rolls involving focus or concentration; unless it’s to release the messages unto others. I’ll be writing the messages as quite incoherent, as I don’t want to step on or reveal anyones’ meta character information without permission; feel free to dm if you want some details revealed!

Flaws:

— Demophobe (derangement); Charlie is deathly afraid of crowds, and doesn’t even like the idea of fellow squatters in the apartment complex he squats in lest they become too numerous; he regularly installs self made security and ‘’traps’’ to deter any from being too close for fear of a crowd gathering.

— Weak-Willed ; Even when Charlie is aware some-one is trying to sway him, he cannot roll resistance against manipulation attempts.

— Stalker ; Charlie briefly was the target of a planned embrace, but narrowly escaped. His wanna-be sire still lurks, somewhere, keeping an eye on its’ lost quarry; it contributes to his demophobia, as he’s afraid he might not be able to recognise the lurking face in a large crowd.

[[ Hunter PC in the Blood On The Bay campaign set in San Francisco. <3]]

[mbti-notes]

Funny story, the other day I received a question about the quotation "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate". (Sorry to the person who asked because I lost track of your handle and must now post the full response here. You're about to see the journey you've sent me on.) The question was vaguely worded, so I can only assume it was requesting a source for the quotation. This struck me as odd for a couple reasons. First, the quotation is widely attributed to Jung, so it shouldn't be very difficult to find the source. When I say "widely", I mean it is not only used all over the internet, it also appears in numerous books. Second, the quotation does a great job of encapsulating a central tenet of Jung's theory, so there is nothing particularly strange or suspicious about it.

Since I'm used to academic writing and wading through research materials, I'm usually diligent about finding the original source of quotations in order to avoid misattributions. But I was lax in this case because I allowed myself to assume that such a well-known quotation must have already been checked by someone. A mistake. A preliminary search revealed that a small handful of people have doubted the attribution, but a definitive answer seemed elusive. So, I decided to take a deep dive into the literature. I searched through Jung's as well as whatever Jung-adjacent and Jung-inspired works I could get my hands on.

I was unable to find a verbatim source in Jung's own writing. However, this isn't enough for me to claim that he never said it. It's possible that it was lifted from a discussion, lecture, or interview, of which the transcripts are not readily available. Jung did write sentences that were remarkably similar to the quotation in meaning, so it's also possible that the quotation was somehow mangled or lost in translation from the original language, which makes it difficult to match up with the official English editions of his work.

I then decided to locate its earliest usage in order to piece together an origin story. The earliest date I could find was ~2006, which is a huge red flag. Books by Jung and about Jung span the entire last century, so one would expect at least a few references from earlier periods, especially throughout the 90s when psychoanalytic theory was widely referenced in a variety of academic disciplines. Of course, books before the 90s haven't all been indexed and made available to search online, so a citation might still exist out there somewhere in a very obscure book.

I then decided to examine books published since 2006 that contained the quotation to see if any included a citation. This was even more of a red flag because, in every case, the authors either did not provide a citation, cited another post-2006 book, or cited a (dubious) internet resource. It turns out that 2006 might be an important piece of the puzzle because it was around then that goodreads.com went online and became a widely used resource for quotations.

Although goodreads makes it clear that they don't verify information, people often trust the website because it is assumed that readers are quoting accurately as they read the actual books. The Jung quotation in question is listed on their website and could even be the first instance, but there was no citation and I couldn't find who originally posted it in order to ask where they got it from. Whoever originally posted it was obviously familiar enough with Jungian theory to capture some of its essence.

In conclusion, I hazard to guess that there are three main possibilities for how this quotation came into being. Around the mid 2000s, someone reading something in the original language posted their own personal translation of it, or they got it from an obscure source, or they fabricated it for reasons unknown. From there, the quotation got picked up by various parties and spread far and wide.

I decided to tell this story because I think it's a good example of how misinformation creeps around online and gradually becomes "reality". The numerous steps I had to go through to investigate this one tiny piece of information illustrates how tedious it can be to verify the things you read. Should we expect the masses to verify every word they come across? It's not realistic, is it? Teachers and parents tell kids to be careful about the internet content they consume, to not take things at face value, to not believe everything they see and hear, etc. But it isn't easy (or fun) to always be on alert even for the motivated, even for this weary and grizzled researcher.

Fortunately, nobody's gonna die from a misattributed quote. But, what about subjects of consequence such as medicine or geopolitics where truth really matters? I love that we have so much information at our fingertips. I just wish we didn't always have to battle against greed and chaos to find the good stuff.

[thorraborinn]

hey man, hope you're well.

bit of an arb question for ya - and i totally understand if you'd prefer to skip it because time & effort etc etc - but if you're game i'd really be interested in your thoughts on the ᛇ rune.

thanks dude, appreciate it. even if you nope the hell outta this ;)

cheers

I'm sorry that I left you on read for months. The honest truth is that at first I had trouble reigning in the scope of my response and knowing when to cut myself off from researching (there are still things I've yet to read that could influence my take on this), and then I got busy and just straight up forgot. I'm gonna give you a response that will be completely unsatisfying but hopefully better than no response.

For more on the details of the different linguistic theories about the rune that I only briefly mention below see "The Yew Rune, Yogh and Yew" by Bernard Mees.

The problem I have talking about this rune is that any examination of it produces a lot of questions, all of them very interesting, and some which call into question what we can know about runes in general. Talking about this rune is like untying a knot where every time you loosen a section another one tightens. There are a lot of people on the internet who claim to have figured it out but who have not realized that the conclusions that must logically follow are not things they're likely to accept. It's hard to talk about it at all without saying a lot. This is entirely unlike ᛈ *perþō(?) *perþrō(?) where it simply becomes a dead end quickly due to lack of evidence. With ᛇ there is an extreme overabundance of mutually-conflicting possibility, plus a history of the rune being innovated in ways that obscures how it was used prior to that innovation.

I recognize that most people who want to talk about runes on this website are mostly interested in magical/divinatory uses. For better or worse I don't have anything to say about that, but if that's what someone's into then I urge you to at least consider that the mundane aspects of a rune form the ground of speculation about everything else, and any magical/mystical speculation should at least be inclusive of things we can see and touch. And I think that if someone chooses not to grapple with the evidence, they're actually missing out on what's actually interesting about this rune.

Even giving it a single name is loaded. In text I call it "the yew rune" but thanks to the particularities of English that doesn't work out loud. There's no possibility of writing or speaking its name without making some bold assertions about linguistics, whether one knows it or not. I think the most accurate way to give it a "name" results in this entire paragraph-length sentence:

There were a few synonyms for 'yew (tree/wood)', which may have included any or all of *īwaz, *īhaz, *īgaz, *īhwaz, and *īgwaz; that may or may not have arisen by the splitting of an earlier proto-form that is difficult to reconstruct; and which had some degree of exchangeability in some places and times; and the earliest name of the rune could have been any of these but it was also identified with one or another at different times.

*īwaz informs the normal OE word for 'yew' and the Old Norse rune ýr; *īhaz informs the OE rune īh/ēoh. Sometimes they get shoved together into *īhwaz, which on the surface is just a way of abbreviating "the above explanation"*īwaz and *īhaz", but has potential to be read at face value if you're willing to grapple with some questions regarding Proto-Indo-European, Verner's Law, maybe Germanic reflexes of laryngeals. *eihwaz is a name I see a lot but which is either definitely wrong; requires either significant reanalysis of the languages it was used to write; or undermines the use of the comparative method for reconstructing rune names at all (which, hey, maybe it should be undermined, but the consequences for the rest of the runes would be significant). Sometimes when people propose *eihwaz or anything starting *ei- they are actually intentionally saying "runes are older than Proto-Germanic" which is an argument one can make but you have to actually make it, and they are usually neglecting that at that time, the word for 'ice' was *eisa- and so this doesn't actually restore balance to the runes anyway.

The next set of problems involves its use in writing. In the earliest inscriptions we have, it's used very rarely but when it is it's indistinguishable from *īsa(z), i.e., it writes /i/. Later on, it also comes to write a consonant that was probably something like [ç], the sound in German ich, which was present in some of these languages but cannot be the first sound in a word. It would actually be pretty satisfying to argue that the [ç] sound was original, and that /i/ is a later thing coming from the principle that a rune's name should start with the sound it writes. But this is the reverse of the evidence -- are we supposed to just be okay with the idea that the rune's original usage just happened by coincidence not to produce any surviving evidence for hundreds of years, and then suddenly did?

The īh rune in Codex Vindobonensis 795, c. 798 with sound value given "i & h"

It would eventually gain other sound values too, including /k/ in some Old English sources and of course it becomes (or rather, merges with ᛉᛦ into) the /ʀ/ rune in Old Norse, then a weird multifunctional vowel rune for a bit before settling on /y/ which was its main use into modern times.

Ideally, if you lined up the questions about the reconstruction of the name in one column, and the problems in what sounds it was used to write in another, you could find overlaps and find items in each column that reinforce each other; but in reality the questions tend to multiply instead.

I have some thoughts about why most of this rarely gets discussed, even by people for whom runes are an important part of their religion. I think we have a cultural predisposition to recognized systematic order and balance as a sign of legitimacy, to the point that it even overwhelms material evidence. What this rune is evidence of isn't an original cohesive and complete system (whether or not that existed), but rather of persistent intervention over the course of a thousand years -- it cannot be understood in isolation of stone, parchment, and human hands. This is anecdotal but it seems that most people who are into runes at all are really only interested in that "original" pure unadulturated state that they suppose must have been the first iteration of runes, and view everything that comes after -- that is, all actual evidence -- as valuable only insofar as it points back toward that idealized system. But not only doesn't ᛇ do that (though admittedly, one day it might, if the right theory comes along), it shows that the way people interacted with runes over generations calls into question our assumption that the other runes do provide reliable evidence for that. I think that for most people who post about runes online or even write books about runes for a popular audience, this is in such violation of common sense that they don't find it worth consideration, and generally side with whatever one of the simple theories about it they most recently read. Even among professional linguists, most attempts to explain the rune simply aren't just neutral answers, they are expressions of panic and attempts to restore order. Admittedly, a theory could still be proposed that puts all this to rest. But the way people respond now, while it hasn't, while people habitually latch onto explanations that they clearly don't understand, is still revealing of our epistemologies.

If you want to find meaning in this, I might suggest something like this. One of the distinguishing characteristics of yew wood is its flexibility and springiness (making it so suitable for bows that ýr can simply mean 'bow' in Old Norse). Whatever the rune's earliest name was (or set of names were), it was somehow seemingly set up to stay relevant a thousand years in the future. Despite being redundant already in the earliest examples we have (maybe even when it was first used??), it found new usage for writing a [ç]-like sound (presumably *īha- was pronounced somewhere in the vicinity of [iːça]). Old Norse was eventually going to need a rune for /y/, and *īwaz was set up to produce a word by regular phonological development: *īw > ý (see also *tīwaz > Týr), and it's almost creepy how they thought to preserve that name despite needing to move it to a different graphic form, given that *elhaz/algiz worked perfectly well as the name of a rune for writing /ʀ/, but lacked a y.

[Edit: I should clarify that I don't actually think there's anything unexplainable or mystical about this -- I think it's a combination of the same opportunistic innovation that is characteristic of rune use in general and a little bit of coincidence].

So basically ᛇ is distinguished by how often it's been bent and twisted and made to fill gaps that arose as a result of language change while always maintaining continuity with its earlier forms. Its name may or may not have alternated between some closely-associated variants, but it was never changed outright, unlike a bunch of others. It exhibits a plasticity that's fitting for a rune meaning 'yew,' and it was given that name long, long before demonstrating its suitability. All this can only be seen by taking the long view, looking at how it unfolds over time, by specifically turning away from an idealized, atemporal proto-Elder Futhark.

[hurtmemoreplease]

any advice for people who want to dm you and say hi, but are really shy?

Hi! This is a great question, and I'm gonna be indulgent and take my time answering it. I do this sometimes - you'll simply have to put up with me rambling. My answer is gonna be in two parts; general guidelines for how to message an internet stranger or interact with people in this context, and then I'll do my best to narrow the focus down to me.

You've probably heard this part before, and that's because it is the most critical of everything. I'm just another person. Don't put an internet blogger up on a pedestal. We're all here on the clown website.

Okay, now for the actual advice. When messaging an internet stranger, the general assumption is that you know them better than they know you. You've seen them post about their hobbies, their favorite media, maybe even their partners or their general life situation. You might not KNOW these things anymore, but it generates a sense of familiarity that is NOT reciprocated. If you do know that stuff, then there's this information gap, right? You might think "oh we both love Ryunosuke Fujinami from Urusei Yatsura," or "we both struggle with feeling alienated from our families," but that's one sided! They don't know that about you. Try to imagine if a complete stranger messaged you - it would be REALLY hard to hold a conversation, especially if they just say "hi!" or hit you with some generic pleasantries. The fix to this is have some prepared conversation topics - with actual insightful things to say! You might not end up using them, but it's better than realizing you have nothing to say and stalling out.

Another part of the general advice is to try to know why you're messaging someone, and to make sure your... attitude? Demeanor? Is right for that. I'll try to clarify what I mean! If you think they're cool, and want to be friends, then come in with an understanding that you're both just people, who might have common interests, and express that! If you want advice on something, then you should probably ask if its okay first, but don't beat around the bush about it. If you want them to have sex with you, probably don't message them! Or I mean. At least have some tact about it - make sure its not your ONLY reason. All I'm really trying to get across here is that its worth making sure you know your goals going into ANY situation.

I think.... there's more I could say, honestly. But it comes down to a lot of individual circumstances and who you are as a person. I think those points cover the bulk of it; know who you are and what you want, and be ready and able to communicate it.

Now onto the hard part (for me.) Advice on... how to talk... to me. Jeez. Um... I don't think there's a lot to say about me that is unique. I like engaging on my hobbies and media. I get very insecure a lot, and worry that I'm being difficult to talk to, or being a burden. It's hard for me to believe compliments or admiration are deserved or sincere. I love my girlfriend more than anything. I'm probably gonna struggle to engage with you if you come out of the gate swinging and being flirtatious, but I'm pretty weak to getting flirted with once I'm a little more comfortable with someone. I can promise you I will give you a fair shake and do my best to engage with you! Sorry if that's not helpful!!