#aranock

[aranock]

Jessie Gender and my nearly 6 hour magnum opus on the politics of star wars is now up.

We have been working on this for over a year, I did 17 minutes of animation for it, please share it around and give it a watch.

[dudeijusthadthecraziestdream]

Btw a bunch of really talented YouTubers are raising 1 million doll hairs for PCRF, link here♥️ reblog, don't like!!!

[camijhk]

🇵🇸 CREATORS FOR PALESTINE 🇵🇸

Got this from Chad Chad’s community post! Donate if you can and share to boost!!

(Apologies for not fitting everyone in the tags there’s a 30 tag limit!!)

[pimscrypt]

I'm 30 minutes into this video and it's already fantastic! Few people have analyzed the work of James Gunn as eloquently as Jessie, and Aranock is absolutely on the same level. They're a great fit for sure!

I'm also very proud to have contributed my voice to this video!

[letamreviews]

Top of 2022

With 19 films watched and 2 favorited from 2022, I composed a list of my top. To coincide with 2019′s pure happenstance, the list is ‘almost’ an exact third (7) of the total films watched. Anything seen after the end of February, 2023, isn’t included (with 1 exception).

Honorable Mentions: Infernal Affairs remastered trilogy (2002 - 2003), Skinamarink, Vesper, TÁR Exception: Aranock’s Queer Relativity Why’s this so late? Yes, it is late.

Blind Rating is how worthwhile the film is watching “blind” (or knowing nothing). The scale is 1 (worth it) to 5 (you must). ‘Eh is essentially a 0.5.

1. Queer Relativity | Aranock (Canada)

Saw on YouTube in early March twice and listened to atleast once. i don’t even know (i guess: i fucking love it). Y’all, this movie fucked me up. Had to pause it so many times during first viewing this shit took me back so much. fuck Also, i fucking hate it. Blind Rating: 0.5/5 | film | Teaser | Description:

Hope you all enjoy my film on queer temporalities, language, and journey of discovering self

2. RRR (India)

Saw on Netflix in Hindi with English subtitles and again in theatre in Telugu with English subs. i fucking love it. Best (official) movie of the year. Don’t waste my time. Blind Rating: 1/5 Thoughts

3. Please Baby Please (USA)

Saw at Sie FilmCenter. i really like it (? tier). Holy fucking shit, this movie. lul Definitely put some people in the mood. Thoughts Quickie

4. Avatar: The Way of Water (USA)

Saw at Hawkins Theatres in 3D HFR and again at AMC Theatres in Real 3D. i really like it (mid tier?). Thoughts 1 & 2 Quickie

5. Everything Everywhere All at Once (USA)

Saw in theatre. i really like it (mid tier?). Y’all, I saw this in a theatre with 2-3 other dudes and we all bawled during the same scene. Shit was great. Thoughts Blind Rating: 0.5/5

6. Three Thousand Years of Longing (Australia & USA)

Saw at Hawkins Theatres. i really like it (high tier). Did not expect to enjoy it so much. Glad I went (and disregarded certain reviews). Thoughts

7. Nope (USA)

Saw at Harkins Theatres and again in VR (don’t ask). i really like it (mid tier?). Really enjoyed the entirety of it, especially as a story of two siblings. While I do see this as the director changing the horror genre (again? 🤔), I’m now wondering how much of it already exists in widely unknown indie films. 😐 (shout-out to LambHoot’s “The Resident Evil they keep Remaking...” video) Thoughts 1 & 2 Blind Rating: 1/5

[enemro]

Posting a bunch of doodles I made while at work, at various states of completeness.

Aranock is so cool and lovely, and she makes amazing videos, go check out her channel.

Ballpoint pen.

[mysticdragon3md3]

The best genre you've never heard of by Aranock

Counterpoint: "anime-coded nostalgic movies"

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tawny Platis (@tawnyplatis)

[questioningespecialy]

Aranock's streamin' (and multi-voiced readin') the Bachelor's Pathologic route for some "life sucks" donos

Due to a long series of disasters and my disability Im doing terrible financially so I’m doing this to try and help with that. Think of it as a street performance on the internet, its digital busking, shakespeare in the park but theres more murder and weirder voices.

[traulisms]

cleaned up an old sketch of a clown friend!

[vibratoryblurriness]

Good news, everyone! The automatic captions on other videos are still producing delightful nonsense.

(from Jessie Gender and Aranock's latest video, The Decaying Monomyth of Star Wars, which I haven't finished yet but is good so far and only further reinforcing my frustration that literally anyone anywhere still takes Campbell or his daddy Jung seriously)

Auto-generated captions out there continuing to do great work

[aranock]

Hey if you've enjoyed my art, its helped you or brought value to your life this year maybe considering supporting:

Either way I hope you have a lovely end of the year and that you are spending time with loved ones, if you are celebraring the relevant holidays chag sameach and merry christmas.

Thank you to everyone who has watched shared and supported this year, it means the world, looking forward to making so much more for you all in 2025 💜

[agentravensong]

watching a deltarune stream rn by a creator whose next video essay will be on undertale (they're about to finish chapter 1, i'm watching from the start), and they dropped this hot take:

"gaster* represents what happens if you allow your curiosity to consume you and you dig so far that you literally go outside of the work of art that you're examining"

*based on context i assume they mean gaster in ut specifically

friends. how do we feel about this interpretation? discuss.

[cassierain]

I'm gonna need trans video essays to stop being so relatable, or I'm gonna open boxes that i don't need to.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

re: Somerton

Not for nothing, but I think we should remember that James Somerton's fans and subscribers are normal people, just like you. They are people who received his output in good faith, and extended to him a normal amount of grace and benefit of the doubt, which he took advantage of.

I don't think it's helpful to respond to the exposé on Somerton with sentiments along the lines of "wow, how could anyone ever think THIS GUY'S videos were any good, ha ha ha, how did he ever get subscribers?" because 1) you have the substantial benefit of hindsight and a disengaged outsider perspective, and 2) it's a rhetoric that creates a divide between you (refined, savvy, smart, sophisticated) and Somerton's audience (gullible, unrefined, easily taken advantage of, terrible taste), which is a false divide, with a false sense of security.

Somerton's success happened because he stole good writing. He found interesting, insightful, in-depth work done by other people, applied the one skill he actually has which is marketing, and re-packaged it as his own. He targeted a market which is starving for the exact kind of writing he was stealing, and pushed his audience to disengage from sources that conflicted with him.

Hbomberguy makes this point in his exposé video: good queer writing is hard to find and incredibly easy to lose. The writers Somerton stole from were often poor or precarious, writing freelance work for small circles under shitty conditions, without the means or the reach or the privileges necessary to find bigger markets. And, as Hbomb demonstrated, when people did discover Somerton's plagiarism, he used his substantial audience to hound them away and dissuade anyone else from trying to hold him accountable.

He stole queer writing by marginalized people, about experiences and perspectives that people are desperate to hear more about, and even if his delivery and aesthetics were naff, his words resonated with people because the original writers who actually wrote them poured their goddamn hearts and souls into it.

Somerton also maintained a consistent narrative of persecution and marginalization about himself. He took the plain truth, which is that queer people and perspectives are discriminated against, and worked that into a story about himself as a lone, brave truth-teller, daring to voice an authentic queer perspective, constantly beset by bigots and adversaries who sought to tear him down. As @aranock, who works with some of the people he targeted, writes in this post, Somerton weaponized whatever casual bias and bigotry he could find in his audience to reinforce his me vs them narrative (usually misogyny and various forms of transphobia), which is what grifters do. They find a vulnerable thread in a community and pull on it. And while you may not have the particular vulnerability that he exploited, you do have vulnerabilities, and they can be exploited too.

People felt compelled to support him, even if his work was sometimes shoddy, because he presented himself as a vulnerable, marginalized person in need of help, he pulled on that vulnerable thread.

Again, he has a degree in marketing, and just like propaganda, nobody is immune to marketing.

YouTube as a system is set up to push for more, constantly more. More content, more videos, more output, more more more more, and part of Somerton and Illuminaughty's success was their ability to push out large amounts of content to the hungry algorithm, even if it was of inferior quality. The algorithm rewarded their volume of output with more eyeballs and attention, and therefore more opportunities to find people who were vulnerable to their grift.

It is a system which quite literally rewards the exact kind of plagiarism that they do, because watch-time and engagement are easily measurable metrics for a corporation, and academic rigor is not. There is pressure to deliver, and a lot of rewards to gain from cutting corners to do it.

Somerton and Illuminaughty and Internet Historian are extreme and very obvious cases, so blatant that you can make a four hour video essay exposing what they've done, but the vast majority of this kind of plagiarism isn't going to be obvious - sometimes it might not even be obvious to the people who are doing it. Casual plagiarism is endemic to the modern internet, and most people don't get educated on what the exact boundaries are between proper sourcing and quoting vs plagiarizing. We had an entire course module at my university aimed at teaching students the exact differences and definitions, and people still made good faith mistakes in their essays and papers that they had to learn to correct during their education.

All of this to say: it is extremely easy in hindsight to call Somerton's work shitty and shoddy, his aesthetics flat and uninspired, and to imagine that as a sophisticated person with good taste and critical faculties, you would never be taken in by this kind of grifter. It is extremely easy to distance yourself from the people he preyed on, and imagine that you will never have to worry about your fave doing your dirty like that.

But part of the point of Hbomberguy's video is that plagiarism is extremely easy to get away with, and often difficult for the average person to spot and call out, and with the rise of AI tools blurring the lines even further, it is not going to get any easier.

So I think we should resist the temptation to think of Somerton's audience as people with bad taste and poor faculties. We should resist the temptation to distance ourselves from the perfectly normal people he preyed on. Many times in your life, a modestly clever man with a marketing degree has fooled you too.

On a personal note, by the same token, I am resisting the temptation to assume that I am too good to be vulnerable to the systemic pressures that produced Somerton and Illuminaughty. No, I've never made a video by word-for-word reciting someone else's work, but I know for a fact that I could do a better job of double-checking my work and citing my sources. I feel the exact same pressure to get a video out as fast as possible, I have the exact same rewards dangled in front of me by YouTube as a platform, and I can't pretend it doesn't affect my work. To me, Hbomb's video felt like a wake-up call to do better.

[lonniemachin]

LET'S GET MARAM AND AHMED TO €33K BY SUNDAY

My friend Ahmed and his wife Maram's fundraiser to escape Gaza with their three little children has started to stagnate, with only 4 donations in the past 2 DAYS. This is unacceptable for them, as they need to reach their goal as soon as possible to secure their funds before something prevents them from it -- in a situation such as this, anything could happen, from bank closure to GoFundMe shutting down their campaign without warning. Please, help get them to at least €33,000 by SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 15TH. That's only €201 LEFT TO GO! They need at least €35k-36k to have enough to register for all 5 to evacuate at Hala's current prices, but as their campaign has been moving so slowly, I thought to set a shorter goal of €33,000 to encourage more people to give.

EVERY euro counts.

As always, I've been in contact with them for months and have personally seen and have been provided with multiple methods of verification to share with those who require it before donating. DM me if this describes you. They've also been vetted by @/el-shab-hussein and featured in a video by YouTuber Ro Ramdin.

Tagging for reach under the cut

@illlllillllli @whencartoonsruletheworld @humaneflies @avirtualdrive

@isa-ah @unearthprisonpanopticon @genderyomi @transwolvie @entertainmentpdf

@saint-sebastian-coded @petzah394 @zoethebitch @genderkoolaid @azdoine

@aranock @lesbutcher @stonefemblues @incorrect-transformers-animated @embermclainapologist

@evatriceakiyama @glados @monomons @lipid @charon-cries

@1eos @song-of-the-stars @toriel-2 @the-arachnocommunist @dyggot

@stripedpaws @aristotels @radioactive-corpsegirl @nosekiss @decadent-trans-girl

@comfortstars @b0nkcreat @anfroginous @ellalily @melissa-titanium

@mothpile @scorchedup @juliuscaesarofficial @lunar-eclipse-bunnies @bom-bombon

@gyroshrike @olowan-waphiya @mothernatureslonelyson @fmab @postpunks