#and also hes too jarringly relatable for me (and probably for many) to be named fucking eustace winner

[ummmuhhidk]

you get it perfectly. like this is my exact take on each and every name. HEAVY on the eustace thing btw like hey dont call him useless ,, :(

everyone called Nicole being named Tabitha/Tabby Lloyd. like that one was very very obvious but that's typical Ace Attorney witness shit. that's perfectly fine. Fifi Leguarde works. i can see why you can look at Patricia and go "that's a Fifi right there". Bodhidharma Kanis is pretty cool i won't lie. Eddie Fender is another typical Ace Attorney pun name but i think me and other people were mostly upset by giving such a major character that we're mostly meant to take seriously that sort of name. it's like if Maya was named Spira Chanelur. Verity Gavélle is also pretty cool. Simeon Saint is also fine, not what i would've gone with but it's fine. i get the thought process. and Eustace Winner and Bronco Knight is truly just such a fucking disservice to both of them. have they not already suffered enough

[angelofthequeers]

How is Zoe's comic racist? (sorry don't mean to question you, genuinely curious) Also, I admit I was also sucked into the salt fic whirlpool, but quickly left after I realized how toxic it was being. Could you also elaborate on GalahadWilder, if it isn't too uncomfortable for you? I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, or ask uncomfortable questions.

I can’t point out everything off the top of my head but the racism (along with everything else but that’s not the focus) is a large part of what made me throw my hands up and write this. And I won’t be answering any more asks about any of this because I just want to get it out there so people know (because of how many people genuinely don’t see it) and then go back to trying to forget that this shit ever existed, rather than dragging out some new fandom drama. Also keep in mind that while I’m West Asian/Arab, I’m also white-passing so if I get anything wrong, I appreciate call-outs. (Also I finally got my laptop charger today so I can snip my posts again 😭)

Her treatment of Max in ‘Gamer’.

It’s not unique to her; it’s a very common salter thing to utterly tear into Max for being a “sexist jerk” and daring to underestimate princess Marinette because she’s a girl. Never mind that they canonically aren’t close friends because of Chloé’s bullying, so Max probably had no idea that Marinette’s liked video games all this time, where Adrien is the new boy so it’s just one more thing to learn about him.

It’s especially heinous compared to how the other classmates are treated far more leniently for their own mistakes - they still get salted on but Max, aka the Black boy, always seems to get singled out and held to higher standards. Just look at ‘Chameleon’ and how the other classmates are mildly to moderately attacked by salters but Max gets utterly ripped to shreds because he “should know better”. (Never mind that just because he’s smart doesn’t mean he’s good at human interaction. They just want to attack him).

It also angers me because people like Nathaniel and Ivan are absolved of what they do as akumas (like kidnapping others and literally forcing someone to go on a date with them) because they couldn’t help it, yet Max is literally held responsible for what he did when akumatised (because he dared to go after Princess Marinette) and even for daring to get akumatised in the first place. Both these things just make him a sore loser, apparently.

So SL ‘Gamer’ was the final straw for me, especially with how she characterised Max as a smug arsehole, and it made me so angry that I just exploded to my friends, but I didn’t know how to directly call it out without looking like a petty bitch.

Here’s a post I made about salters and ‘Gamer’ if you’re interested in a more coherent and in-depth thing about it.

Alya’s treatment throughout the whole thing.

In canon, she’s an enthusiastic and passionate girl who sometimes gets carried away and goes too far and who idolises Ladybug because Ladybug stands against evil. Here? She’s treated as the butt of the joke for being so starry-eyed over superheroes that she idolises Scarlet Lady while Marinette mocks her behind her back. Never mind her iconic line of “all that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing” and this is why she loves Majestia in the first place. Never mind that she loves Ladybug because Ladybug is kind and passionate and strong and creative. Canon Alya wouldn’t want a bar of Scarlet Lady, who just sits around complaining, and yet SL!Alya worships her because...why? Running joke? The only Black girl in the series is treated as a gag to be made fun of by someone who’s supposed to be her best friend, just for the audience’s amusement. Marinette’s probably meant to look funny and relatable here, but she just looks like a major bitch to her new friend. Alya’s flaws are basically blown up and exaggerated for comedic effect, while Marinette in contrast is airbrushed to perfection, with no flaws and no anxiety that was only alleviated in canon by - guess what - being Ladybug.

It’s like Zoe wants to stick to canon while adding her own little “fun” twists for humour, like making Marinette snarky and perfect (which just makes her look like an utter bitch) and in the case of Alya, it does her so dirty that even Lila is more sympathetic. LILA. After SL humiliates Lila, Alya looks doubtful but buys some bullshit excuse so that she can continue to be the Scar-worshipping idiot. And then in the aftermath, her concern isn’t for Lila, the girl who was humiliated and bullied by a literal superhero and then ended up sick. No, she’s angry because...Lila lied on her blog. The blog that doesn’t have nearly as much recognition as in canon because SL would never validate her, unlike Ladybug. So her passion for her blog is exaggerated to imply that she’d say that a girl deserves to be bullied and sick because she told a few lies (since at this point, Alya doesn’t know about any possible malice on Lila’s part, just as in canon. All that’s known is the lying for attention).

It’s horrible hypocrisy, where Alya is held to higher standards than the other (white) characters and when she fails to meet those standards, she’s torn into. She’s not afforded any sympathy for being hurt that Lila lied to her; in fact, she’s demonised for feeling hurt, especially because of the running joke that her blog is focused on someone so horrible and she doesn’t see that. Lila is presented as the sympathetic one here. LILA. Just because Alya dared to believe her in canon.

Also, how she’s constantly trying to either tease Marinette for having a crush or insist that Marinette’s only doing what she does because of a crush...even though according to this ‘verse’s canon, Marinette is too good to make mistakes and do obsessive stuff over a crush, which is why canon Alya thinks this about her in the first place. That didn’t just come out of nowhere in the show purely for “woe is Marinette, her best friend doubts her”.

Like in the first part of ‘Gamer’, where she’s accusing Marinette of only entering the tournament to flirt with Adrien while Marinette so “coolly and calmly” rebuts her...why? By the ‘verse’s own logic, Marinette isn’t a flustered mess around Adrien. The only purpose of this scene is to glorify Marinette and her amazing calmness while making Alya look like a nosy idiot who dares to doubt her best friend. The logic of the ‘verse and of canon clash really jarringly in moments like this, and it becomes clear that the only purpose of these moments is to make Marinette look better at the expense of others. Most often her best friend, who’s an utter idiot for not seeing Scarlet Lady’s true nature and just can’t keep her nose out of Marinette’s business and so comes to wrong conclusions. Why are Marinette and Alya even friends in this ‘verse? SL!Marinette’s been nothing but condescending towards Alya most of the time.

Uh, and also the way she occasionally whitewashes Alya. Just look at the SL headers. She literally made Alya, aka a Black girl who’s one of the good guys, lighter than Lila, aka a white girl who’s one of the bad guys and not even that tanned in canon. Why do people make one of the villains darker and often whitewash one of the heroes? It’s not that hard to figure out.

(Also the way she really played into the aggressive Black girl stereotype in ‘Horrificator’ over a minor argument, even physically threatening Nino. Why? Literally why did she have to go full-on aggressive instead of just looking angry and scolding him or something?)

This all might not be conscious on Zoe’s part but the way Alya is treated is still disgusting, especially if you’re operating on internalised salt from other aspects of the salty fandom. I’ve seen her claims that she’s trying to help Alya improve and she’s not being salty but...even if she’s not being consciously salty, her salt is definitely still leaking over it and part of that salt includes racism. I also don’t see how making Alya a joke and exaggerating her flaws is helping her to improve when there was plenty to go off in canon but, well, that might just be me.

Even Marinette, who’s pretty much treated as white for 99% of it.

Marinette, aka the girl who’s only made visibly “Asian/Other” in SL ‘Reflekta’ with her Chinese-inspired Black Cat suit and name which is a one-off, while her permanent Bee outfit is just the bland tight suit that salters criticise Ladybug for having and her name is just Marigold. It comes across as using “Asianness” as a costume and it really didn’t sit right with me at first, but it took me a while to tease out why exactly this made me feel ick.

There’s nothing wrong with touching more on Marinette’s heritage and expanding on it in ways that the show doesn’t, especially because this is a big sticking point for salters, but again...it’s only a one-off. A costume. There aren’t casual hints sprinkled throughout the comic that just normally establish Marinette as half-Chinese, aside from like a page or two in ‘Timebreaker’ showing Sabine’s outfit. It’s another ‘Kung Food’ where it’s slammed into one episode and shoved into our faces that Marinette Is Chinese and it’s really jarring and unpleasant.

It just comes across as fetishising, is all. I don’t think it’s something most people would pick up on unless they’re used to being able to see this kind of thing.

Master Fu. Oh, Master Fu.

From an old man who made mistakes but tried as best as he could with the limited knowledge he had, he’s now a bumbling idiot who...put the earrings in Marinette’s bag instead of her room for some reason? To kickstart the plot? Especially because the ring was still in Adrien’s room. It’s very, very contrived.

And then in one of the most recent updates, Zoe has Adrien - a white boy - physically threaten Fu, aka an elderly Asian man. It’s disgusting. I was gobsmacked when I first saw it. And that’s the thing with salters: they tear into Adrien for being a white boy so they can look Enlightened when he hasn’t actually done anything racist, yet they then turn around and perpetuate actual racism in trying to “fix” him

There’s probably more but those are the examples that jump out at me of the racism in SL. There are plenty more problems but...whatever. I’ll be here all day if I try and cover those.

As for the Galahad thing...it’s personal. That original post was as much as I was comfortable revealing.

[just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi]

Little Seer

[Whumpee is called “boy” but is not underage, simply lacks a name... for now. Maybe if he didn’t choose such a hard to explain name he could get it in his introduction but I have no control over my disaster children.]

CW: Knives, captivity, manhandling, duct tape restraints, multiple whumpers, brief eye whump/drugging (unwanted eye drops), mind invasion, cutting on arms (not self-harm related but I’m tagging it regardless). 

Word count: 3,192

[Masterlist] [Next?]

The space was cramped and musty. The boy tried to stretch his legs, to stave off the constant cramps and spasms from staying curled. Hard to do when you wake up in the closet of a second-rate hotel by the highway. The cuff on his ankle rattled against the side of the cheap cabinet. His wrists were taped behind his back, keeping him from taking the tap off his mouth. Not that he would again, not after last time.

He leaned back his head and tried to make himself comfortable. His mouth was dry and ashen, but he would just have to wait until they came back to give him water. He craved the water, but mostly the precious moments that they took the tape off his mouth. Just a few blessed times a day, in the morning to get ready, mealtime, and if they gave him water. Other than that, the duct tape over his lips was part of him.

He drifted, not really sleeping but not fully aware. He used to daydream, creating stories and other lives that he could live, but Victoria had only laughed at him when she found them. After that, they weren’t as comforting anymore, and he didn’t want to share them.

Voices. Voices muffled by the particle board. Talking loudly, but not enough for him to catch the words. Footsteps shake the ground as he wished he could squirm so far into the darkness that no one would ever see him again. No one would ever find him. No one would ever grab him and wrench him back into those rooms. Those chairs.

“Hi little Seer,” she coos as she opens the door and reaches in to grab the front of his shirt. He wishes she wouldn’t call him that. It’s not his name, but his name was stolen from him long ago, so the nickname was the closest thing he had. She uncuffs his ankle and pulls him to his feet. Blood rushes back to his legs, sending stabs of pins and needles through them. He’s unsteady, but she holds his arms and guides him to where she wants him. The room is too bright with the cheap florescent lamps. With a pull then a shove, he thuds into the wooden armchair. Adrenalin starts to rush his head, making his nose flare as he tried to control his breathing. Victoria grins and pinches his nose.

“Good, get all worked up for us. It goes quicker that way.” He twists and struggles uselessly to get away from her grip. His lungs burn and he can feel heat pushing behind the skin of his face. After a brief moment, she lets go and he wishes he could gasp for breath instead of having to scramble to get air through his nose. Tyler comes out of the bathroom and leans against the door frame.

“How many orders today?” he asked absent mindedly as he dries his hands. Victoria cuts the tape around his writs and pulls them down to tape them to the armrests, palms up. He groans internally, more and more layers of tape that will get ripped away later. Heaven forbid they get actual cuffs for his wrists. How many hotel chairs had they left sticky residue on?

“Five,” she responds as she finishes his other hand. A shudder ripples down his spine and digs into his bones. Three was his hard limit for one session, which meant this would happen multiple time today.

“Any specials?” asks Tyler as he pulls his bag from the floor and starts to gather his tools. The boy squeezes his eyes shut and hopes none are a special order. Maybe if he focuses, he can manifest it…

“Two.”

Shit. Uninvited tears well in his eyes and threaten to spill over. A hand strokes through his curly hair as he tries to shake his head. He can’t do five today, he doesn’t have the strength, they never let him truly rest.

“You’re getting popular, honey! Isn’t that great? And you’re getting fans, both our specials are from the Southwest Syndicate.” Victoria plays with his hair, scratching lightly with her acrylic nails. It would feel nice, but she already plays with his head too much; it’s all too much. “Do good with these, and they said they’ll set us up in one of their places. Wouldn’t that be nice? Not moving around from hotel to hotel?” Her voice is sweet and condescending, like she’s comforting a child that dropped their ice cream cone, not a shuddering boy that she tied to a chair.

“Where’s Vince?” Tyler asks as he sets out his tools on the side of the bed. A knife, a taser, a short length of strong rope, an eyedropper bottle, two small canisters. The tears overflow and fall from the boy’s eyes as he desperately wishes they weren’t there.

“Hell if I know. Probably buying lotto tickets somewhere.” Victoria is somewhere behind him, although she’d taken her hand off his head at this point.

“We’ll do two regular ones and the last one a special. We can finish the other ones in a second round later.” Tyler’s voice is as smooth and bored as if he was simply planning the meals for the week, not the torture of the shaking form in front of him. He moves to sit on the bed across from the boy, arranging his tools within reach. Victoria pulls out the headphones and slips them over the boy’s ears. Before they turn on, Tyler snaps his fingers in front of the boy’s face, forcing his attention to the photo he holds.

“Now, little Seer, you’re not going to look away again, are you? Gonna keep those little eyes open?” The boy nods desperately, begging with his eyes. He doesn’t know what he’s begging for, but he begs, nevertheless. The headphones are turned on, startling him. A low, masculine voice starts to speak, so loud in his ears it’s all he can hear. The rumble fills his head and digs into his mind.

It’s the man in the picture that’s only inches from his face. Details for him to focus on, find this man out of all the strangers. Pick this man out of space and time instead of himself, as he accidentally does sometimes. It’s not his fault; they’re twisting his ability to something that it’s not supposed to be. It’s not for other’s gain, but instead to protect himself when he’s in danger. Just a quick vision of his future to show him what to do when he’s threatened. The boy knows this, but it seems like it’s about the only thing that he knows for sure. He knows this is wrong. He also knows it will be so much worse if he doesn’t comply.

He locks his eyes on the picture and tries to focus on the sound of the voice as it rattles useless information. Most of the time they say insignificant things; their name, their address, work title, parent’s names, any identifying information. Sometimes they just list numbers that mean nothing to him. He studies the glossy photo of an older man in a boring black suit. He begs and pleads with his brain, Please, please just do it. Don’t make this hard on me this time. Please.

Movement in his periphery, but he doesn’t dare move his eyes from the photo. He doesn’t look at the knife, but he can feel it when it cuts into the skin of his arm. A whimper fights its way out from behind the tape, but he still doesn’t look away. Panic creeps around his mind as he stares intensely at the thinning hair, the suitcase, anything to trigger the vision. He can feel the blood circling its way around the curve of his arm, bumping along the other scars. Another slice, centimetres away from the first. His heart pounds in his chest, beating as if its going to try and escape through his throat.

Another and another, crossing over each other adding to the latticework etched into both his arms. Each slice gets deeper as Tyler starts to lose his patience. Tears stream down the boy’s face as he can feel sweat build on his forehead and his back. Desperation digs its’ claws deep, and he frantically searches the details. It was getting to be too long; Tyler was getting impatient. Danger! Danger! This is danger, goddamn it. Do it! A bead of sweat drips into the cuts, pushing his over the edge.

Like a hit to the gut, the air gets knocked out of his lungs. The world fizzles out and he’s floating. Listing, tumbling through a void with no sense of up or down. He’s lost, grappling onto something, anything to ground him. Threads slip through his fingers, fleeting and ethereal. He doesn’t have a body. He doesn’t have borders. He can feel his consciousness ooze away and stretch thin.

Sight crashes back into focus jarringly. The man eating at the large table of a fancy estate alone. The man driving a golf cart around, chatting with another man of equal age holding onto the handle attached to the roof. The man in a nursing home alone.

The real-world crashes back into vision just as sharply, as if he was slammed full force back into his body. He slumps against the back of the chair, too disoriented to even sit up straight. The room spins as the vibrant, saturated, inhuman colors shift back into normal hues, swirling and bubbling around in a way only he can see. Uneven breath catching as he tries to breath through his nose.

He can see the room around him, but it doesn’t register. All that registers is the pain in his arm and the hand that slides through his hair. The tears in his eyes feel foreign. Like he shouldn’t have a physical form but was forced into one anyway.

Without giving him time to recover, he can feel Victoria invade his mind. He can’t see her, but he can feel that she’s there. He feels her move through his memories. He can feel the tracks that she leaves like footprints. She isn’t just browsing this time; she’s searching for that vision. He tries to focus on it, to keep it in the forefront of his mind. He learned not to fight her long ago, she’ll leave when she finds what she came for. He latches onto the details, knowing they’ll be upset with him if he forgets them.

A snap like a recoil in his mind and it’s gone. It’s all gone. An empty vacuum is left in place of the memory. His panic riddled brain scrambles to fill it, short circuiting and fumbling at the space that was a memory only mere seconds ago. It needs to restart and re-evaluate, fix the files, it’s too much, too quick. It shuts down and he blacks out.

Seconds later, his nose is assaulted with a painful sensation. A heatless burn that creeps down his throat. He jerks awake again, head and arm throbbing in unison. Tyler takes the smelling salts from underneath his nose and puts them back next to the knife on the bed.

The bed. The hotel room. Tyler. It comes back to him in pieces, where he is and what’s happening.

The boy closes his eyes and focuses on his breathing. He knows that this is his time to try and recover, that they won’t give him much more. He only really has the time it takes Victoria to project the memory on the TV and record it with the cheap camcorder they use. Especially today if they have five orders to fill. God, he wishes it could go back to when it was only a few visions a week, not multiple a day.

“Meh, it’s not much but it doesn’t look like his life has much more in it. Poor dude. Imagine paying all this money just to learn you’ll die a lonely old man?” Victoria laughs. The boy doesn’t even try and put the pieces of the vision back together again. That vision is gone just like the hundreds of others, and trying to get it back will only hurt and confuse him more in the long run. It’s like his brain is screaming at him, I’m not made for this! You keep messing up my files! Just stop before I can’t function anymore!

His breathing evens out and he feels those hands on his shoulders, centering him in the chair.

The second time is worse. Tyler pours salt into the fresh cuts and grinds them into his flesh until it triggers the vision. Flashes of a woman’s life and a car crash that feels like it hits the boy himself. His chest heaves miserably when he comes back to his battered body. Even the hint of Victoria in his mind crashes the delicate web of synapses. Blackness.

Soft hands this time, rubbing circles with thumbs on his temples. He wakes in stages, slowly pulled from the inky darkness. His eyes close and he tries unsuccessfully to retreat into nothingness.

It’s a delicate balance for them. Do they push him every day and grab the most money they can? Or do they take care of their asset and ensure that he can function for another day? It doesn’t help that they never ask for his opinion, or how he’s doing. If they did, maybe they would slow down.

Or they wouldn’t.

He almost wishes his breathing doesn’t return to regular. Regular breathing seems to be their cue that he’s ready for the next round. Hands come from behind him again to set his shoulders back center. He’s not, he wants to scream that he’s not ready. He can’t do it. His eyes flutter open to see Tyler’s attention fully on him, so he meets Tyler’s cold brown eyes and begs. He knows he looks pitiful, sweat dripping from his brows, shaking and crying, dark circles permanently dug into his face. His eyes are all that he has, and he learned to use them years ago. They rarely do any good, but he tries every time.

“Oh, come on. One more then you get a break, m’kay?” Tyler chides as he thumbs some tears away. The boy nods, at least there was some sort of response this time. A loose promise of relief at some later time.  

The hand in his hair guides his head back until his looking up at the ceiling. The special requests are the worst, rivaling even when they try to push his limits to fill more orders in one session. Tears run down his temples, and he can start to feel his nose grow stuffy from crying. Victoria hears the sniff and her head bobs into his vision.

“Hey, hey, hey, none of that. You want to breathe, don’t you?” She smiles a sickly white smile to him, her red hair pooling around her face as she looks down on him. The florescent lights highlight her hair and allude to a false halo. He doesn’t respond. “Actually, on second thought, go ahead. It’ll go faster.”

A hand with an eyedropper appears in his vision, and he shut his eyes tight. It stings, it burns, please don’t. Please. Please don’t. A tsk. Fingers dig into the soft skin around his eye and force it open. He whines, but the drops fall anyways. Quickly, the hands shift and put that acid in the other eye. He knows its not actually acid, but it feels like it. They all know it’s not good for his eyes, hence the higher fee for special requests. More money, more danger, but also more detailed information. Whatever the liquid is, it focuses the vision and makes it stronger. Clearer.

He can feel it working as the light in the room starts to hurt his head. He blinks quickly, desperate for some sort of relief, but that only works to spread the burn more evenly around his eye. Headphones slip on again, another photo inches from his face. His vision is blurry, shapes and colors roll with the greasy film on his eyes. Even the tears that slide down his face seem to burn tracks into his skin.

Another male voice, listing locations, times, and names. This photo is not a person, but a place. An empty warehouse. He tries to focus, but his body is begging to cave into exhaustion. The lids of his eyes drift down slowly, so slowly. They close for just a moment, just of moment of reprieve from the overwhelming senses that drill into his mind.

Fingers dig into his brows and pull his eyes open once again. The world is bleary and dizzy, shifting and slanting like a ship rocked by waves. The voice echoes in his head, destroying whatever shred of himself he had left. Any shred of the person that he was before he was their Little Seer.

He can feel the hard plastic and cold metal dig into and almost under his ribs. His mind is too far gone, to panicked and desperate to even respond to the threat. All he can do is shake and accept whatever will come. Whatever will be done to him. Pray that it will be quick.

The taser needs only flick alive for a moment, seizing all control of his lungs and surging pure electricity through his veins. His eyes bulge out before they relax and a haze like silver storms clouds overtake his blown-wide pupils.

Falling, grasping, tumbling, lost.

This time, he might as well be standing in the warehouse with the men. Their stoic expressions, their rumpled and wrinkled suit jackets, their stiff posture. It’s a meeting, an exchange of some sort. The man closest to his perspective, the shortest one with standard black wire glasses has a black brief case by his side.

It’s 3:56 pm, three days in the future, far too warm for the season. The short man shifts, restless and uncomfortable. As he moves, the white button down he’s wearing shifts and a small black wire blinks into view. It’s a sting. It’s a trap.

Black cars, a mat black Jeep Wrangler with custom trim and G-140 rims and two black Lincoln Navigators with tinted window pull into view of the open cargo doors. The farthest Navigator has a dark scratch covering half of the wheel well of the back, left tire. A man in a tailored black suit steps out from the passenger side. He has long blond hair tied up in a low knot at the nape of his neck. The short, wired man’s breathing hitches slightly, only visible when seen from a specter’s perspective.

They meet in neutral ground and exchange words. Too late, the other notices the pucker of his shirt collar and the shadow of a wire. Guns are drawn, shots are fired. Neither man makes it out alive, others are wounded, only the driver of the jeep escapes. Sirens blare in the distance, but the scene is starting to slip away.

When he slams back into his body, his eyes don’t even open before blackness envelops him.

[sitabethel]

I just wrote a fanfic and it is the worst fanfic ever

I am sending to you the Bakura/Weevil fanfic that I wrote because of boredom and a very bad sense of humor. It is postcanon and Teen rated for references to sexual situations but no sexual situations happening.

This is the easiest way I could think of to send this much text. Feel free to share it with the world I guess. If I could put a read more I would do that here to make it less jarringly long but I can’t.

(Sita Note: I am putting this under the cut to protect the innocents out there that would cry if they had to read a story with Bakura and Weevil together.

But honestly? I thought this was going to be like the time you troll-posted a “finfic” into my message box, but no, this is a proper story. I was impressed! And grossed out, but still impressed. I hope Malik barfed on his bike at the end)

Bakura paced the small distance of Ryou’s washroom again. When he caught his reflection out of the corner of his eye, he turned on it and growled.

He twirled a fat eyeliner pencil in his hand. Normally he didn’t bother with any sort of upkeep on Ryou’s features, and when he did it was a simple matter of adding ‘evil twin’ kohl lines, but this was a special occasion.

Not only was it a date, it was a blind date. His host had set it up for him after he had spent a week and a half drinking wine and eating ice cream because Malik had gotten mad and wouldn’t call him back. Ryou had set up an account for him on the new Kaibacorp Duel Monsters Dating App, complete with selfies with astonishingly convincing scowls. Bakura assumed Yugi had helped Ryou get his hair to stand up properly.

 The hair was a problem. He was never good at convincing it to cooperate. It was bad enough that Ryou’s hair was so unruly on its own, but something about his dark aura made it impossible to wrestle into anything but a spiky vertical mess. Malik had thought his ‘bunny ears’ were cute- No. No thoughts of Malik, this was a new start.

His host interrupted before he could go back to pulling at their hair and pacing. “I don’t see what the problem is. You look like you belong in a Visual Kei band.”

“That’s the problem. I wanted to look like we’re a normal person, and not a goth weirdo with a brain parasite trying desperately to look normal while renting headspace.”

“But we look like a hot weirdo. You’re still trying to live up to Malik’s standards. Just borrow the stuff I go to concerts with Yugi in. If he doesn’t like it, I’ll let you go shopping for something better next time.”

He only had fifteen minutes until his date showed up anyways. Bakura gave in and dug out the least garish stuff he could find in Ryou’s concertwear. It was better than jeans and a tshirt. Or jeans and a neon flannel. Or jeans and an ugly sweater…

 The doorbell rang, and Bakura hurried to answer it. When he opened the door, he saw nothing-

Until he looked down.

His first instinct was to kick anything that short, because he didn’t know any children, but he knew one heck of a short pharaoh.

But this wasn’t the pharaoh.

“Are you even old enough to drink?”

His date looked like an idiot schoolboy. Green blazer, giant bowtie, thick glasses bowl cut. Bakura was honestly a little concerned.

The gremlin snorted out a laugh. “I thought you would recognize me, since we dueled at the same level when you placed in Battle City. What was that, a decade ago?”

It had in fact been eight years. Bakura knew this because he’d been planning a special date with Malik to celebrate. He didn’t correct the gremlin.

Bakura decided to go for huffy and aloof. He didn’t like bringing up the past, and he didn’t particularly like Duel Monsters either. Better to cut that conversation off before it got started. “I didn’t pay much attention to the other competitors, I was busy.”

“I’m Weevil Underwood.” Ryou was laughing now, and Bakura assumed it had something to do with the fact that his date was a gremlin manchild. “Hey spirit, I hardly met this guy, but he hates Yugi too. He’s the guy who threw Yugi’s cards into the ocean. You’re gonna get along great.”

Weevil looked uncomfortable under Bakura’s scrutiny, and attempted more small talk. “So on your profile you said you like to use an Occult Deck? It would be fun to d-“

“No dueling.” Bakura pushed past Weevil and locked his apartment door behind him. He was still getting dinner out of this.

–

Weevil insisted on burgers. Bakura didn’t mind burgers, because at least he wouldn’t have to stand around while his gremlin date got carded for a bar.

Bakura found that he hated this man. So much.

Weevil didn’t seem to like silence. Bakura refused to talk. So Weevil filled the silence. First with Duel Monsters strategies. Then with insect facts. Then back to Duel Monsters to talk about insect themed monsters and how they related to real insects.

Bakura chewed very slowly, and glared.

Weevil seemed to be picking up on the fact that things were not going well. “Are you okay? Sick or something?”

“Fantastic.”

“You don’t seem fantastic.”

What was the quickest way out of this mess? Deadpan, “I’m going through a breakup and I’m too distraught to be out in the real world right now.”

“A breakup? Me too.”

Bakura snorted into his burger. “I can’t imagine why anyone would break up with you.”

He regretted it, because Weevil looked like he was about to start crying. “H-his name was. Was Rex. W-we were semifinalists together. I thought it was all going to be perfect, b-but he said I d-DIDN’T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT DINOSAURS.”

Weevil proceeded to weep openly at their table.

It was a pathetic display, and Bakura wished he were not currently sitting in the same booth. He wanted to be as unassociated with this display as possible.

With a sigh, Bakura grabbed several napkins from the dispenser and shoved them at Weevil. Then he threw the guy over his shoulder and carried him out of the burger joint.

 –

Twenty minutes later, he had him on Ryou’s couch with a nature documentary playing.

Bakura sat stiffly next to him, feeling very intrusive, and also missing his annoying ex very much. He was halfway through a bottle of moscato.  

“B-bakura?” Weevil addressed him for the first time since the burger meltdown had started.

“Yes?”

“D-do you know what would be really good revenge?”

This piqued his interest. Bakura loved revenge.

“Let’s just fuck right now on this sofa to get back at our exes.”

His vengeance boner receded immediately. “That won’t affect them at all.”

“What if we record it and email it to them?”

Bakura took a moment to finish the bottle. “Sure.”

 –

Malik, who had been busy repairing his bike Entirely Too Many Times, heard his phone blip with an email alert.

He walked over and scowled when he saw that it was from Bakura. He had been trying very hard not to text Bakura. Life without Bakura was surprisingly boring, but Malik had initiated the breakup and it would be lame to give up on that this soon.

Despite his reservations, he opened the video attachment. Bakura had probably gotten himself too drunk to write an email and sobbed a speech into a webcam instead.

What greeted him when the video had loaded was decidedly not Bakura sobbing into a webcam.

[nofomoartworld]

Failed banks, quantified self and addiction to the infinite scroll. An interview with Michael Mandiberg

Michael Mandiberg, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance), 2017. Installation view at LACMA’s Ray’s & Stark Bar

In 2008, as the U.S. was going through the Great Recession, Michael Mandiberg noticed that when a bank failed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would erase its visual identity from the internet. The whole disappearing act was taking place over the course of one weekend; on Friday the bank was there and by Monday morning all traces of its visual identity were gone. Mandiberg started monitoring the weekly updates to the FDIC Failed Bank List and downloading the logos of the banks in advance of their public wipe out. With his collection of over 500 logos, Mandiberg is now probably the greatest archivist of failed U.S. banks.

The second part of his work consisted in using a laser-cutter to burn the name of each bank and its logo onto the covers of investment guidebooks. Total Money Makeover, The Holy Use of Money, Success Is a Choice (my favourite!), etc. The titles of the books are as grand as their fate is humble: Mandiberg bought them from the dollar racks of the Strand bookstore in New York city.

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured (First Georgia Community Bank, Jackson GA, December 5, 2008), 2009-2016

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured Documentation

I would normally say that i have absolutely zero sympathy for the fate of banks. Yet, i found FDIC Insured incredibly moving. At first, all you see are mundane logos and bank names. A moment later, you start visualizing the employees who lost their job, the hundreds of thousands of individuals dispossessed of their savings… Maybe you even knew some of these people. Do check out the book and the web archive of the project. The sheer banality and repetition that FDIC Insured exposes make the Great Recession all the more crushing and incredibly tangible.

There are many reasons why i wanted to interview Mandiberg. He is an artist whose work i’ve admired for years, the founder of New York Arts Practicum and the co-founder of the brilliant Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon which invites women artists around the world to fight gender gaps online by updating Wikipedia entries on subjects related to art and feminism.

Michael Mandiberg, Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms)

And right now, Mandiberg has a year-long show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Titled Workflow, the exhibition and project explore the changing definition of labor in the digital age by pushing self-tracking technologies to their most invasive limits.

Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms) sonifies a year of the artist’s heart rate data alongside the sound of email alerts. The other work, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance), is a stop motion animation composed of webcam photos and screenshots captured from Mandiberg’s computer and smartphone every 15 minutes for an entire year. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this project is that it actually echoes current practices for monitoring staff productivity.

I’m so happy the artist found a moment to answer my many questions about Workflow and FDIC Insured:

Michael Mandiberg, Detail of “Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance)”, 2016

Hi Michael! Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms) is played in LACMA’s Pritzker Parking Garage elevators. Is the location meaningful? Why parking garage elevators?

I wanted an enclosed space to hold people in the sound. These elevators are blood red, like a beating heart or a womb. Elevators are small, and the Pritzker elevators are glass and metal, so they become a resonant box: the sound feels like it is coming from all around you. Some people say the feeling is comforting; others report feeling claustrophobic.

Elevators have become spaces where people routinely check their mobile phones; the 45 seconds provide just enough time to take a quick glance and satisfy our addictions, but not long enough to do anything meaningful. Elevators are places where we are willfully trapped, though only temporarily, for the most part. (Have you ever been stuck in an elevator? I have. Kind of frightening!)

In Los Angeles, where the vast majority of people commute by car, parking garage elevators are liminal spaces between the outside and inside. They are a kind of lobby that precedes the lobby. In this case, they mark the threshold between the bustle of the outside world and the contemplative space of the museum. At LACMA, the “lobby” is actually an outside pavilion (because it almost never rains in LA, and when it does rain, practically no one goes out). Also, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) is installed directly across the pavilion from these elevators.

Michael Mandiberg, Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms), 2017. Installation in LACMA’s Pritzker Parking Garage elevators

The work sonifies a year of your heart rate data alongside the sound of email alerts. How did these two connect? Did your heart jump with each email alert?

I spent time in the installation when I was documenting it, and noticed times when my heart started beating fast in the lead up to the sound of a sent email. I imagine this was because of the concentration and stress that accompany a difficult email. At the same time, the email alerts are staccato, erratic: jarringly disconnected from the rhythmic pulsations of my heart. I’m working on a series of slightly more conventional visualizations for the project, however in this case, I used sound as a form through which the data would speak on an emotional and psychological level.

Michael Mandiberg, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) – Documentation

In an interview with Unframed, you say that the works you’re showing at LACMA, Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms) and Quantified Self Portrait (1 Year Performance), directly pay homage to Tehching Hsieh’s work. His yearlong performances were famously challenging physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Quantified Self Portrait sounds like a very stressful performance, too (at least to me). One year is a very long time and not only can things go into unexpected and unpleasant directions, but they can also wear you out or maybe unnerve you over time.

What were the challenges and difficulties you encountered over the course of this performance?



I experienced challenges tracking my life (which was time-consuming and stressful), but the performance also made me acutely aware of the challenges that were already present in my life. By giving my life a visible framework, the performance brought frustrations and difficulties that I previously regarded as mundane, or didn’t notice, into focus. This is a significant difference between Hsieh’s performances and my work: Hsieh imposed onto himself simple but exaggerated or absurd gestures that reflected daily actions. By repeating these gestures, he reframed their meaning. They weren’t necessary gestures—they referenced necessary gestures. I imposed on myself a system of tracking externally imposed, necessary gestures and actions: the things that I tracked are gestures required of me.

So, the challenges I experienced didn’t arise from imposing an abstract disciplinary system on myself, but resulted from noticing and recording the ways in which my life is already a tightrope act of internalized self-discipline. The year made it visible that, in a sense, I bring my prison everywhere I go.

I also used a more complicated mechanism of marking time, which introduced more possibilities for failure when the system breaks down. Once a month, I would have some kind of technical crisis. This is, of course, normal in projects that use technology. So these moments of failure end up embedded in the record itself, like my journal entry from March 22, 12:41 a.m., which reads: “I can’t sleep. I realized that my Fitbit battery was dying. I went to transfer the data before the battery died, out of fear the data would disappear. I killed the battery AND it didn’t transfer.” At 1:11 a.m. on the same day, I write: “I am going to bed now. I couldn’t find the charger. My Fitbit is dead. I assume I will get to sleep around 1:30–1:45” After five and a half hours of what I imagine was pretty bad sleep, I wrote at 9:06 a.m., “I woke at 7:17. After an hour of searching, I found my computer bag. [Which held the charging cable] Fitbit is charging.”



Was your relationship with your computer and with internet altered by this year-long performance? Did you self-censor when you knew the system was about to take the screenshot of your computer screen, for example? Or try to adopt a more relaxed expression or rearrange the space right behind you when the camera was about to take your portrait?

For the first few days, I was self-conscious. I remember looking at the clock and thinking “I should wait one more minute, until it takes a photo, before I go to the bathroom.” I remember noticing where the light source was in the room, and positioning myself so that I wasn’t backlit. I remember my partner, Jackie, would ask if the system was about to take a photo before sitting next to me to look at something on my computer. Within a week or two, though, I became accustomed to it and then forgot about it. I grew so accustomed to it that I didn’t notice when the software on my laptop crashed and stopped working for a while.

The software on my iPhone actually required me to press a button, because iOS doesn’t allow software to automatically take photographs in the background. So I always knew when those photos were happening, but I just took them wherever I was, in whatever pose I was in, bad posture and all. Toward the end, Jackie started trying to photobomb the iPhone photos. 


Self-monitoring technologies promise users that they will gain some “self-knowledge” through this voluntary accumulation of data.  Did you get some of that? Learn something about yourself? Useful or not?


I went into the project intending to make a critical Quantified Self Portrait, which would articulate the possibilities and limitations of the aspiration for self-knowledge through data.

I learned some things, but if I’m honest with myself, they’re all things I already knew but didn’t allow myself to articulate: I don’t sleep enough. I work too much. I spend a startling amount of time on my iPhone. Most of my time in the studio is spent in what might be considered a producer role: planning, writing emails, applying for grants, documenting the work, traveling to install the work, etc. I spend little of my time making, whereas my assistants spend almost all their time making: writing code, editing video, laser cutting to make the work. But seeing these realities rendered in a fairly conclusive way was a bit unnerving.

I also learned things that I hadn’t been seeking, that I didn’t know I wanted to know. In an effort to get some “qualitative” data, I wrote in a journal almost every evening, and then distilled these entries into a few sentences that I typed into a piece of software on my phone. These short texts form the third channel of the video as it is installed at LACMA. These texts reveal to me just how much physical pain I was experiencing, the level of stress my day job causes me, how happy a bike ride or a trip to the beach makes me feel. They also chronicle my uncertainty that I’ll unlock any kind of self-knowledge through this data. 



The work makes remote computer labor very tangible. It also made me realize how present and invisible it is in our life—how intrusive and grim it is for workers, too. Could you tell us about the weight this online labour has on our work culture? How much place it takes in our everyday gestures and how much more importance it might take in the future?

This is a big question. There is no one answer, because we don’t have a single work culture across countries or across industries and classes. But the weight is there. Here are a few points in the constellation: In the US, big-box retailers and restaurant chains have installed self-checkout kiosks which remove human contact, put people out of work, and extract involuntary surplus labor from customers. For over a decade, we’ve all been solving reCaptchas for Google, performing micro-labor by training AIs (yes, that’s what we are doing when we “prove we are human” and identify all the cars in the photo—directly or indirectly, we’re talking to AIs). An entire industry of content moderators, often based in the Philippines, have major psychological trauma from repeated exposure to ISIS beheading videos, dick pics, animal torture videos, etc. as they review posts that have been flagged by AIs or by humans. France has implemented new laws protecting workers from having to check email after work hours; yes, it’s for a limited segment of the workforce, is still a step forward.

Part of the problem is that this techno-speedup produces a kind of addiction. An addiction to working. An addiction to the infinite scroll. An addiction to the quantitative rewards of social media metrics. I don’t use this word lightly: research indicates that it is an actual addiction, triggering the same neurological rewards as cocaine or gambling.

As I was writing that last paragraph I impulsively checked social media. Four keystrokes: Command-Tab, Command-L, one “f” which autocompletes, Enter, and I scroll through more of the same about American neo-Nazis and our abusive, gaslighting President. I compulsively return again and again, hoping to get my high, except everything I read makes me miserable. As with any drug, the more you do it, the more it takes to feel high, and without it you feel incomplete. My partner and I have a practice of asking each other, “Is that making you happy?” when we see each other caught in the hypnosis of the infinite scroll. I think you know what the answer is.

Hunched over my laptop, my wrists are sore as I write this. I go in and out of cycles of repetitive strain injuries. I’m in the trough of one now. That instinctual four-keystroke sequence hurts, twisting my wrists into contorted positions, over and over again.

Michael Mandiberg, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance)


In the video interview with LACMA Unframed, you mentioned that you were recreating one of Charlie Chaplin’s movies shot by shot with the help of online workers. Are you still working on that project?

Yes, I am still working on the Chaplin film. I made some headway this summer. I had to pause working on it when Quantified Self Portrait, which had very distinct and unavoidable deadlines, kind of took over my life. I also experienced unexpected hurdles working with online labor platforms: Fiverr.com kept rejecting my posts, and I was unable to get anyone on Mechanical Turk to complete even a three-second clip, even when I offered $40 per clip. It seemed that the Turkers were unwilling to leave their houses or set up a camera on a tripod. In response, I made a piece where I asked two hundred Turkers to take photographs out of the window in the room they were working.

As I said in the LACMA Unframed interview, I view all these works as part of a larger project exploring contemporary digital labor. The Chaplin film and the windows look outward, representing the lives of others, while Quantified Self Portrait looks inward, using myself to show that conventional representations of how an artist works bear little resemblance to reality.

Michael Mandiberg. Installation view of “FDIC Insured”, Denny Gallery, 2016

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured (Corn Belt Bank and Trust, Pittsfield IL, February 13, 2009), 2009-2016

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured (Bear Sterns, New York NY, March 16, 2008), 2009-2016


How did the whole FDIC Insured project start? When did you realize that the failed banks’ identities were being erased? And when did you get the intuition you would collect such an impressive collection of logos? 

When I started collecting the logos in 2008, I had just completed Digital Foundations with xtine burrough. I was thinking a lot about design, engaging in free culture activism that often centered around archives, and making work with found books as a material. FDIC Insured pulled from each of these threads.

My work with books began on the street. Walking around Brooklyn in 2007, I began noticing the books people had started to leave on their stoops. I collected these books, although I didn’t know what to do with them. I was trying to think through what it meant for these objects, which had been so important for so long, to be discarded at that precise moment.

We all felt the breakdown of the financial system. I was thinking a lot about these banks, the failures of the system, and the contraction between this failure and the purpose of the modern logo. I started collecting logos, unsure of what I would do with them. At some point in the winter of 2008–09, I connected the dots.

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured (Merrill Lynch, New York NY, September 14, 2008), 2009-2016

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured (Washington Mutual Bank, Henderson NV, September 25, 2008), 2009-2016


You’ve now seen, recorded, and laser-cut hundreds of bank logos. What can you tell us about their design and aesthetic?  What do they communicate about the banking system and its values, for example?

Many of the logos are inspired by classic American Modernist logos from the 1950s, like Paul Rand’s IBM logo or Chermayeff & Geismar’s NBC logo. Characterized as “corporate design,” this particular flavor of Modernism aims to be timeless (both immediate and eternal), as well as being legible in different languages and cultural contexts.

These logos manifest timelessness by seeming to erase history: they remove whatever might have come before, and have rarely been changed since. These banks chose a style that was meant to exude stability, permanence, trust, and confidence, and yet they failed.

The logos also seek to evoke a sense of permanence through their iconography. The US economy and banking system were built on slavery and settler colonialism, obscured by myths of manifest destiny and white supremacy. It’s no mistake that these logos include iconography of land (oceans, lakes, mountains) and the fruits of the land (wheat, grapes). For a country with a relatively short history—both in relationship to the nations of the many continents its citizens immigrated from, and the indigenous nations they conquered—these logos claim power from the past by using historical iconography: Greek columns, statehouses, and references to the antebellum South. The word “first” is repeated again and again: there are multiple First State Banks, First National Banks, First Community Banks. Everyone wants to be first, and thus oldest. Of course, there is no Royal Bank(!)

Color plays a significant role. Many of the logos include blue: the color of honesty, the color of the Virgin Mary, the color of suit lawyers advise that their clients wear in the courtroom. Some logos are green, the color of the dollar bill. Very few include any red, which is associated with stop signs and Communism, unless the color is explicitly themed around the red, white, and blue of the US flag.

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured (Sherman County Bank, Loup City NE, February 27, 2009), 2009-2016

Michael Mandiberg. Installation view of “FDIC Insured”, Denny Gallery, 2016



I was actually very surprised by the fact that the visual identities of the failed banks are erased from the web. I recently had a long discussion with people from various parts of Europe about the fact that failure is actually valued in the US far more than here in Europe. We try to hide our failures, whereas in the US it seems that failure is part of the experience gained, and it’s not something to be ashamed of. Do you know anything about the rationale behind this complete erasure of the visual identity of the banks?

I don’t know if I can speak to the comparative cultural value of failure. When you say that the US values failure more, I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “There are no second acts in American lives” on the one hand, and also Samuel Beckett’s “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” on the other. Maybe the closest contemporary example might be the way Silicon Valley embraces failure as the moment of “pivot.” The Venture Capitalist pivot, in a sense, is the latest turn in the American ideology of entrepreneurship, where risk and failure serve as mileposts on the road to self-appreciation of one’s “human capital.” This narrative tries to convince the 99% that we haven’t succeeded because we haven’t risked enough, not because of clear structural inequalities.

I do think that the symbolic value of this erasure is telling: we have to erase the history of these repeated failures in order for society to accept and trust this economic system, despite its repeated cyclical pattern of near-catastrophic failure.

But I don’t think that the banks have an explicit or rational policy mandating erasure of these visual identities. Rather, it’s more a byproduct of the effort to maintain structural continuity and visual branding, combined with something akin to linkrot on a corporate scale. 

From a pragmatic User Experience (UX) design point of view, the organizations that take over these failed banks are faced with thousands of customers visiting www.oldbank.com that need to be absorbed into www.newbank.com with as little disruption as possible. I regularly observed the new bank redirecting everything on www.oldbank.com (including the legally required FDIC transfer notice) to a specific landing page to welcome the new customers (e.g. http://ift.tt/2eOGw2U.) This redirect also means you can’t access any of the logos that might have been there. 


In a less pragmatic and more symbolic way, the new bank needs to manifest its own visual presence throughout the virtual and physical sites of the old bank. While the interior design of the spaces cannot be completely changed in one weekend, they change what they can in such a short time (the signage on the outside of the building, the employees’ uniforms) and complete the remainder of the work soon thereafter.

You might think that these logos are all archived somewhere, but they aren’t. The most prominent ones, like Washington Mutual or Lehman Brothers, are archived on websites that collect the logos of Fortune 500 companies. Some but not all of these banks had a presence in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but most of these records don’t contain images. 


Any upcoming work, field of research or event you could share with us?

FDIC Insured will be included in POST FAIL at Fotomuseum Winterthur this winter. The Dutch language version of Print Wikipedia will be included in The House of the Book at the Koninkelijke Bibliotheek this fall. Michael Mandiberg: Workflow is up at LACMA through New Year’s Eve, and work from these projects will be included in a solo show at Denny Gallery this fall. 


Thanks Michael!

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