#been a while since i put minor effort into a meme

[mrcorkus]

Knee deep in the passenger seat, sickos

[vidreview]

VIDREV: "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" by Hbomberguy.

[originally posted december 7th 2023]

i didn't initially plan to do a full VIDREV for this one. it's a long video that speaks plenty for itself, revealing a veritable cottage industry of video essayists who've found great success in brazenly stealing the works of marginalized creators. it's an infuriating watch, especially as someone who has put a lot of work over a lot of years into getting better as an essayist. at a moment when the gormless profit-chasing business degree havers of the world are pretty unambiguously winning in every avenue imaginable, it's gratifying to see someone like Hbomberguy use his significant platform to at least make a dent in that trend. i had a few gripes, sure, but i didn't figure they were worth the trouble. of course now it's been out for a few days, the video already has over 6.8 million views, and people are still talking about it on every single social media website of note. watching that discourse evolve from afar has sharpened some of the round edges on my aforementioned gripes, and given me reason to think that maybe weighing in isn't a totally fruitless endeavor. and besides, what's the point of having a video essay review blog if you're not gonna review what is arguably the video essay of the moment? ahhh, there's a Faustian bargain if ever i heard one.

in this post, i'm going to be critical of Hbomberguy's "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" on a few fronts of debatable importance. but first, i want to make it clear that i am genuinely grateful to Hbomb for putting so much time and effort into this investigation. plagiarism is a serious accusation that requires commensurate evidence, and Harris's got that covered in spades. the case is made so much harder to deny by the frequent juxtaposition of a plagiarist's voice-over with the original plagiarized text on screen reacting to minor trail-covering alterations. these sections occupy the bulk of this video's near 4 hour runtime, and while i have some issues with that length, i understand that the deluge of evidence is precisely to make sure that none of the plagiarists in question can continue dodging accusations the way they have done previously. in this process, Hbomb lays out a consistent playbook utilized by all manner of plagiarists, and (hypothetically) gives viewers the tools and awareness they need to better spot plagiarism in the future. this matters because, as he rightly points out, youtube isn't a fun little hobby site for posting silly cat videos anymore, there's real money to be made on the platform and virtually no oversight to protect creators with ethics and integrity (i wanted to pull a direct quote here but alas, you can't ctrl+f a video). it's an open question as to how or whether we can fix this problem, but we don't get to that conversation until we acknowledge that plagiarism is a legitimate, widespread, materially harmful phenomenon online. none of what i have to say in this review is meant to minimize its broad success in calling attention to a very real problem!

that said…

in the days since its release, i've seen a lot of back and forth over what this video is about. on one side you have folks calling for the blood of James Somerton and others mentioned in the essay, saying "fuck these people specifically." yet on another side, many insist that you're missing the point if all you see is more drama for the drama mill. "this is a systemic problem" they say, "that's what the video is about." i'm inclined to agree more with the latter than the former, as Hbomb does consistently circle back to talking about the unpaid victims of plagiarism, ending the video by explicitly highlighting underrated queer creators and even saying outright that he doesn't want the end result to be limited in scope to just retribution against these specific plagiarists.

and yet, when i see a meme like this one:

i can't help but think… is that what the video is about? is someone who just sees the drama missing the point? yes, certainly, Hbomb says as much, but how much does he actually say it compared to everything else? what's the proportion of (to be overly reductive) "drama content" to "systemic criticism"? because it seems to me that anyone who only/mostly gets "wow fuck these people in particular" out of this video has done nothing less than take the video in aggregate. the bulk of its runtime is spent detailing very specific acts of plagiarism, and while yes, as i said above, this abundance serves a very real purpose, it shouldn't go unacknowledged that the tone of these sections is often one of ridicule and mockery. i don't mean that as a criticism in and of itself, to be clear. you can draw a line from here directly backwards through all his "Measured Response" videos, dude cut his teeth on knocking overconfident hacks down a peg, a bit of ridicule and mockery is to be expected. but that does ultimately mean that Hbomb spends most of the video saying "fuck these people in particular," in a tone of voice he honed through many other videos devoted to saying "fuck this guy in particular", only occasionally stopping to add that "plagiarism is popular and insidious and even creators you trust might be doing it" before moving onto the next scornworthy particular guy. so it kind of doesn't matter that one is "the point" and the other is "missing the point" because he's genuinely saying both things, and he's saying one of them significantly more often than the other. you can't tell me the dunks aren't at least part of the point, and if they're part of it then they can and will be misconstrued by some as the whole point. the entertainment and spectacle of knocking these plagiarists down a peg is an indulgence that, while certainly earned, does exist in concrete tension with the systemic arguments that are meant to take priority. now, some of this does come down to how internet culture has shifted in the last decade to facilitate a much more aggressive style of engagement overall, which Harris cannot control no matter how often he says "don't harass the plagiarists." there isn't really a perfectly right way to go about this, and under the circumstances i do think he did far better than others might have done in his stead.

but even still, i think this misapprehension is made worse by the essay's conclusion, which in my opinion largely fails to tie the whole thing together into the systemic argument that supposedly is "the point" some viewers are missing. Harris commendably points out how the so-called AI revolution is at its core an act of automated civilization-scale plagiarism, and that future instances of plagiarism may be harder to catch precisely because of this technology. frankly i wish that perspective had taken up a solid 10% of the runtime rather than a couple paragraphs at the very end, seeing as on balance it's the far bigger and more likely threat to the livelihoods of people watching than old-school direct plagiarism, but that's me. what really bugged me was the brevity with which he discussed possible solutions to the problem. he rightly points out that youtube implementing a plagiarism reporting system would just be another tool for bad faith actors to silence marginalized creators on the platform, and then… he kinda gives up? he shrugs his shoulders and says, well, for now, just talking about plagiarism and spreading awareness of it is enough. for as well-intentioned and, generally speaking, true as that is, it bugs me as an essayist because i believe that a big part of the job is or ought to be expanding the audience's ability to imagine what's possible even if you aren't 100% sure about the answers yourself.

these are all very much "how i would have written it differently" criticisms, so they aren't particularly worth much, but i do feel it's odd that he doesn't even broach the subject of federal regulation, platform control, unionization efforts, or even just good old-fashioned consumer activism. virtually every website that the creative economy hangs on is a venture-capital backed corporate venture, and their ad-driven models for profiteering at a moment when wages are stagnant and layoffs are happening everywhere is, like, the reason this is such a problem. to address plagiarism as a systemic issue, we need to understand the systemic enablers of it as a behavior. if creators weren't getting such a small slice of the revenue pie, if we had more control over the platform and what rises to the top, if the companies that owned these platforms were beholden to federal regulations, if the government increased arts funding and gave out grants to independent creators that involved third-party quality checks, if online video creators had any manner of collective labor power, if the cost of living was lower by way of public healthcare, free education, mass public transit, and affordable housing, then this would be a drastically different conversation. these are not non-sequitors! this is as much an economic problem as it is a cultural one, so any proposed solution that stops at changing the culture is necessarily incomplete and doomed to fail.

look, i don't expect Hbomb to have the answers. nobody has the answers. but i think it's a bit short-sighted to leave so many possibilities unsaid when the one concrete possibility discussed is immediately (correctly) written off as a bad idea. it leads to a conclusion that feels iffy, a bit defeated, lost at sea, and that's an infectious mood. if the first step to solving plagiarism as a systemic problem is to encourage talking about it openly, i think it's equally important to at the very least gesture in the direction of the many possible avenues for a systemic solution, no matter how impossible or ridiculous they might seem in the current political climate. in point of fact, i think it's of utmost importance to include these possibilities precisely because they seem impossible, otherwise we will forever be trapped in a world of insufficient half measures, meekly reifying the conservative austerity of the liberal order because it's easier and safer than taking a wild shot in the dark.

again, i want to stress that this is a deeply subjective criticism. i'm an ornery Marxist, of course i have these kinds of gripes. and it's easy to get lost in criticizing what isn't there, which as an exercise generally tells you more about the critic than the object being criticized. so, to close out, i'm gonna shake my fist a little at something that is there.

there's a moment at about one hour thirty-five minutes in where Harris turns on some colored lights to get that patented blue-purple Bisexual Lighting, and then he says this:

This is a whole style of video now, and by "style" I mean one person did it first and then a bunch of boring people ripped her off. Stealing from lots of places is inspiration, but stealing from one place is plagiarism… unless you call it The BreadTube Style, and then it's fine. I don't even know what a BreadTube is, I just woke up one day and was told that I was in it, and that people hated me for being in it. I don't even know what it is!

i understand where this jab is coming from-- the whole BreadTube scene was a melodramatic nightmare, on account of being an audience-invented genre which that audience (and later creators who emerged from that audience) often inaccurately treated as a coherent movement. i understand the frustration expressed by a lot of creators in that first generation of left-ish essayists (Hbomb, Lindsay Ellis, Dan Olson, Contrapoints etc) with the atmosphere of that moment, and certainly don't begrudge them a desire to distance themselves from it and ridicule its shortcomings.

but this brief little jokey aside left a bad taste in my mouth. the creator he's talking about being "ripped off" here is obviously Contrapoints, who brought a colorful theatricality to her early work that elevated it above being something she shot for cheap in her apartment. this went hand in hand with her Socratic style of essaying, giving her characters a strange and vibrant world to occupy. i don't want to say she "did it first" because, let's be real, Natalie Wynn did not invent the idea of using dramatic lighting on the internet. but she was certainly the first person i saw on youtube doing it in video essays, and yeah, a lot of people followed her example including me!

but that's not the same thing as plagiarism, is it? this whole video is an extensive exploration of what genuinely counts as plagiarism: taking someone else's words and pretending that they're yours. style is almost never part of that conversation across the whole 4 hours, except where it involves use of prepackaged assets like transitions and stock footage, which Hbomb deliberately notes is fine and normal except when people act like they're the ones who invented it (this particularly comes up in the Legal Eagle section). by the terms of this joke, Abby Thorne of PhilosophyTube falls under the category of "boring people" who were "ripping off" Contrapoints even moreso than those who just lit videos like her, because she even does the Socratic-style dialogues! but somehow i don't think Harris would call that plagiarism. if the concern re: bisexual lighting in BreadTube is attribution, all i can say is that Natalie Wynn is one of the single most discussed and cited creators in the whole field. virtually everyone i can think of who "ripped her off" back in the day openly acknowledged being inspired by her at every possible opportunity. of course that's just my own biased recollection of the history, so who knows, maybe there are people out there acting like they did it first. but unlike most of the other victims of plagiarism provided in this video, Natalie Wynn is not wallowing in obscurity. her work is IMMENSELY successful, to the point where she's arguably the closest thing to a household name you can get from this space.

now, i'm sensitive to a joke like this because i always felt like if anything Natalie got too much credit for "inventing" the so-called "BreadTube style". her use of colored lights was striking and unique, yes, but it was also rudimentary and not particularly complicated. i worked in film lighting for enough years to see this "style" as equivalent to late 1910's era silent films blindly grasping at the bare fundamentals of montage that have become the backbone of all cinema. it's good, but it ain't Citizen Kane. i really hoped people would take Natalie's baseline not as a concrete template, but as a challenge to get even more ambitious and filmic with their lighting setups! instead things have stagnated, and we've kinda circled back around to a very slightly more colorful version of the standard pre-Contrapoints look. this is by no means to play down the work that Natalie did, because i know from my own years making video essays that it is NOT easy or simple to set up even rudimentary lighting that looks good. but come on man, have some perspective. she's a philosopher, not an electrician!

what's worse is that later on in the video, Hbomb talks about how many creators were inspired by AVGN to do twists on his formula, and why this was a good thing. near the end, when he's very rightly shouting out many underrated queer essayists, he spends a good chunk of time celebrating the spirit of remix that is so unique to the internet, insisting that there's a real tangible difference between plagiarism and inspiration. this is good! i agree with him! which is why it's so bizarre that there's this one aside that equates using bisexual lighting to plagiarism! it's a disarmingly hypocritical moment in an otherwise relatively on-point video, and its presence kind of weakens the rest of the essay for me (especially if you're sensitive to how near this comes to being all-out drama youtube, as clearly even Hbomb is by his own admission in the video).

the last i'll say is that i find it frustrating when a creator in Hbomb's position tries to act like BreadTube wasn't A Thing. no, it wasn't A Thing the way quite a lot of people thought it was (including many who called themselves BreadTubers). but these creators were often collaborating with each other to make guest appearances, read quotes, etc. certainly they mentioned each other often enough, which couldn't help solidifying in the audience's mind that there was indeed A Thing happening that involved multiple people with similar creative & political goals, regardless of whether or not that was the creators' intent. it wasn't formal, and it certainly wasn't A Movement (the lack of an articulated ideological spine is a BIG part of why things went sour the way they did), but they were happy enough to play along before Drama blew the whole endeavor to smithereens. and notably, successive generations of creators (like Sophie From Mars, Jack Saint, Lily Alexandre, CJ the X, and yes, also me again) saw the BreadTube genre as a place where interesting things were happening, where the kinds of things they/we wanted to create were encouraged and supported vociferously. it's no coincidence that a LOT of up-and-coming trans creators doing very BreadTube-y things got a huge boost from guesting on Hbomb's DK64 Nightmare Stream in 2019 (including me again, haha, oops), because there was A Thing happening even if most people were wrong about what, exactly, it was. none of this is to say that Hbomb should call himself a BreadTuber-- god no, i hope no one does that ever again, i'm embarrassed that i did back in the day! but this history does exist. mostly i just think this joke would've been better left on the cutting room floor.

okay, i think that's enough criticism for one day. one thought i had coming out of this is that i wish more video essays would publish concurrently with a written version on a dedicated website. not just a transcript but an article-format version. i wonder sometimes about the difficulty of indexing video essays, of getting their contents into a historical record that can be printed out and put into a library. but anyway, all my gripes aside, it's a good video and you should go watch it! preferably in chunks over a day or two!

[cios-correct-opinions]

i dont wanna rb the post and add this commentary on it bc this is something personal to me and i feel making my own post is more beneficial but here we go.

the reason i dont like these memes is because i dont think a lot of people understand like. that of all the veterans in this country, the vietnam vets really are Not the ones you wanna be making these memes about.

putting aside the fact that the vast majority of people who get convinced to join the military are being exploited by it from the moment they're targeted by a recruitment officer (you are not immune to propaganda, and also there's a reason the military offers things like free college, etc etc), most people who fought in vietnam were drafted. they were mostly poor, and a LOT of them were black and brown.

there are definitely shitty boomers out there who speak highly of the vietnam war, like it was some kind of valiant effort or "for freedom" or smth. but i can promise you they are the minority.

my grandfather is a vietnam veteran and it's because of what he saw there, among other reasons, that he hates war and actively discouraged my younger brother from joining the US military when my brother was considering it as a career path. i've never talked in-depth with him about what happened because even when i ask surface level questions i can see that he's haunted by it. he knows that war was useless and only benefitted the american imperial war machine. he didn't want to be there and he had no choice, and he's far from the only one.

they were lied to. the american people were lied to. and when the soldiers came home, they were the ones who took the blame. not the government. not the people who sent them there, no. the mostly poor, mostly minority and mostly men who were drafted and forced to fight in a war they wanted nothing to do with.

inb4 "but they could've just not gone" you do understand what happens to draft dodgers right? they go to prison. and i'm sure you understand why that happening to MOSTLY BLACK AND BROWN MEN would be a problem. or anybody tbh the american prison system is FUCKED.

i really wish we could shit on entitled boomers without shitting on people who have already repeatedly been shit on while the people in charge of sending them to effectively commit genocide and lying to them while they did continue to not be noticed or called out or criticized.

let's also not forget that all boomers are elderly now and ageism + ableism is now affecting them and a lot of the vietnam vets are disabled as well and have been since they came home. let's also not forget that one of the highest homeless demographics in the US are veterans and they have some of the highest rates of suicide and mental health issues in the US as well.

i'm not saying to not criticize what the US has done war crimes wise. quite the opposite. but you should probably try focusing on the people in charge of committing those crimes and not, yknow, the people who suffered in their place already for it

[m34gs]

Fic ask meme: 4, 6, 8, and 11!

Thank you for the ask, friend! First ask I'll answer to kick off the New Year, haha. I'm super excited for these questions, so let's get into it! (from this post)

4. Do you think you’ll stop writing for a fandom this year? Which one?

Honestly, I don't think so. There may be fandoms I slow down on or maybe put on hold for however long I need, but it's pretty safe to say that if I've written and posted one fic in a fandom there is always a chance I will come back around and write for it again. Even BNHA. I mean, Aizawa is pretty central to Bar AU, so even if I don't write anything else for the fandom, I will be continuing to contribute to it through our Bar AU.

6. Which yet-to-be-started fic is first on your list?

Definitely the Vampire Idia x Human Kalim fic. Specifically, the one where Ortho is also a vampire (not by choice). I am so excited for it; I miss writing my boys and I love vampires. I have so many ideas, and I'm already looking at a bittersweet ending and kicking my feet over the kissing scenes I will add...and potentially biting scenes 👀👀I have been itching to write that since like, October. Life just kept getting in the way and I do want to be a little closer to being finished my haunted convenience store fic for Blue Exorcist: Inconvenience Store before I really get into it, because I feel like that one is kind of looming over me (I haven't updated it since November and while that's really not that long ago, it feels like forever probably because of the chaos of Christmas).

8. Is there a story idea in your mental vault that you’ve never been brave enough to try writing? Is this the year? Can you tell us about it?

Hmmm, I'm not sure if this is the year...it depends on how the year goes lol, but do you remember the Danganronpa AU we discussed where everyone is a supernatural creature attending Hope's Peak, except for Hajime and Naegi? And all their supernatural classmates get super protective of their human friends and very easily misunderstand common human practices...I really really want to write something along those lines at some point. I miss writing Danganronpa; I haven't done it in forever and the characters are so fun. Honestly, I'd be happy if I can even get one fic for the fandom out, even if it's not the supernatural au. 🥰💜

11. Would you like to try any new fanfic genres or tropes this year?

Well, half my brain is shouting "timeloop fic timeloop fic timeloop fic" and the other half is going "no. absolutely no timeloop fic, do you know the effort that would take? How many timelines we'd have to figure out and unravel? How much additional planning we would need? DO YOU REMEMBER HOW WE STRUGGLE WITH EVEN JUST A SIMPLE MINOR CANON DEVIATION???? THIS IS WHY WE STICK TO AUS. TIMELINES ARE HARD." So. I'll probably end up trying out a timeloop fic this year, even if I don't end up posting it.

Thanks again for asking! Hope you enjoyed my responses💜

[gasha40k]

In an effort to post to this blog regularly again, here’s a much briefer post about a bit of painting or something like that .

This is Intercessor Sergeant Arctos of the Calthradia Crusade. The first image was his old paint job, and the second is his new, current one. I think it’s better, for the most part.

The seals on his breastplate are better, no doubt, and the white bits are cleaner. I also really appreciate the softer shading on the tabard, but the helmet is definitely a downgrade. While painting him, I fell for a classic blunder and completely forgot that his helmet was supposed to be gold (I think I did this the first time I painted him, too). Because of this, I did, like, a full 3 coats of Skavenblight Dinge, colored in the metal bits, a few layers on the eyes the eyes, and did a full wash before realizing, “oh shit he’s supposed to be a completely different color.” Because of how much paint I’d already put on him, the gold came out pretty thick and didn’t take to the washes super well, which is only mildly infuriating. The model looks… fine, but man, the helmet bugs the shit out of me.

Arctos has been one of my main units since the beginning of the Calthradia Crusade, so he’s naturally got a good bit of lore behind him.

He was a battleline Intercessor of particular talent during the Gale Sicane, which is what the Thunderbearers call their (particularly rough) portion of the Indomitus Crusade. He was reliable, quick to act, and masterful with a bolter. In his squad was an Intercessor with whom he grew particularly close with, a hotshot Astartes who wielded a minor relic blade. This man was Arctos’ mentor and friend, a man who he looked up to and aspired to be like. Unfortunately, during a particularly brutal skirmish during their battle across the stars, Arctos and his squad were cornered and overrun. His brother was laid low before him and Arctos was forced to wield the relic blade in a desperate attempt to fend off their attackers. This attempt would prove successful, and so Arctos would keep the relic blade by his side from then on, vowing to use it to defend himself as a remembrance to his fallen brother.

Sergeant Arctos has been on Calthradia in more recent years. He isn’t the most natural leader and struggles with timidity given greater responsibility, although only as much timidity as any Astartes could reasonably display. As the conflict reaches a fever pitch, he’s started loosening up with his usage of the blade, and he’s growing into his role as a leader of men. With his vengeful heirloom sword, Arctos cleaves a bloody path across the battlefield as his men cover him with raging storms of fire. One would not be remiss to assume, if Chapter-Command were satisfied with the Crusade, that Arctos would pursue the path of the Chapter’s Bladeguard Veterans.

Anyways, moving on. Here’s my first painted Khorne Berzerker. I think he looks really good! He wasn’t too hard to paint, the most difficult bits were the trim. Washing a mini in its entirety before running over it and highlighting with your base color is the move, I think. It looks super clean. I’m still undecided on basing, but I want to do a classic desert dunes meme for my Khorne boys. Blood and sand.

To close, here’s the gnarly effects of Blood For The Blood God technical.

[constarellations]

𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒. independent, semi-selective, mutuals-only roleplay blog for various characters of Genshin Impact. AU & Crossover friendly. Condensed rules under the cut, full rules available on blog. Penned by Kosmic, 28, they/he.

𝐀 𝐒𝐓𝐔𝐃𝐘 𝐈𝐍. Connections and the bonds we forged through life, the curse of both mortality and immortality, and the secrets we keep close to our hearts.

𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑. Aether ( top priority ), Xiao, Wanderer, Layla, Freminet, Lyney, Lynette.

𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐀𝐍𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒. Memes | Starter Calls | Interest Checker

All rules under the cut!

✦ Basic rules apply here, such as

✶ no godmodding✶ no infomodding✶ multiverse✶ multiship✶ mutual-only

✦ Despite having Aether as a my main muse here, I do not RP him with Paimon in mind. As such, there are parts of my portrayal that differ from canon due to her lack of presence. This also means that she should never be referred to in our threads!

✦ I’m not a meme archive, so don’t treat me as one. Unless you send in a meme, try to reblog from the source when possible. If the source is unavailable, I probably already know this and don’t mind if you reblog from me.

✦ While I don’t have a rules password because hardly anyone sends one these days, I always send in rules passwords when I see them. If I follow and haven’t sent one in, it’s because I haven’t read your rules but I won’t interact at all until I do read the rules.

✦ Some of my headcanons on this blog are gathered from canon and fanon, while others are more personal. I’m not going to go after another RPer who has similar headcanons, but if I find evidence of direct stealing, I will not let that slide.

✦ Unless I ask first, don’t get me involved with drama. Unless there is a serious issue, don’t come to me with accusations about my RP partners either. I’m here to write and have fun. That being said, if I am doing something that is upsetting you, please let me know. I’m not a mindreader, and I value the safety and happiness of my writing partners.

✦ I don’t participate in callout culture, nor do I tolerate it. If I see untagged callouts or drama on my dashboard, I will block the person who put it on my dash.

✦ Serial vague-bloggers will also not be tolerated.

✦ My preferred writing length is a paragraph minimum, but averaging with three to four paragraphs per reply. While I don’t expect to be matched in length, do give some effort and something for me to reply to. Larger word counts take more time for me to reply to, so don’t feel discouraged if I don’t reply to those threads as often.

✦ Don’t rush me for replies unless I’ve explicitly given you permission to do so, or if it’s been two weeks since my last reply to you.

✦ I don’t care if you format your replies, and you don’t have to match my formatting or icon usage. If you need me to not use small text for replies to our threads, just let me know.

✦ Heavier topics like violence, negative mental states, etc., can all be found on this blog. Common triggering topics will be tagged as “cw TOPIC”.

✦ I may be multiship, but I’m also selective in it. I don’t seek to write romance all the time, I also want to write familial, platonic, and even rivalries with my muse.

✦ I might write sexual content on this blog, but it’s not the focus of this blog. I won’t be talking about sexual content of any sort with any mun under the age of 18 at all. Granted I won’t talk about that stuff with just anyone, but I’ll never do it around minors.

✦ I don’t do Mains or Exclusives, but I will have an Associates page where all the people I regularly write with will be listed!

✦ I also like duplicates, so I will be following blogs that might contain ‘duplicates’ of my muses!  However, I won’t be approaching for duplicate vs duplicate interactions unless it’s brought up by the other party.

✦ While I would like to interact with everyone I choose to follow, I’m usually okay with lurking and watching those on my dash roleplay! So never feel pressured into having to follow back or whatnot! I like my dash to have content I wanna read, so I follow those that interest me in some manner. ✦ If someone posts a lot of drama, vagues, etc, I will softblock/hardblock that person. I came here to relax and unwind, not deal with more stress. ✦ When it comes to sideblogs, your main blog must be following me, and I follow your sideblog. For multimuses, I will probably be following just Genshin Impact multimuses.  Exceptions may be made for blogs who contain other fandoms, which if I follow a blog like that, it means I want to write with you!

✦ I am open to Genshin Impact OCs and crossovers from franchises I’m interested in!

✦ Hi, I’m Eryn. 28, they/he pronouns. I’m just here to chill and RP. My Discord ID is available for mutuals when privately requested. ✦ Besides Genshin, my other interests are Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, Persona 4&5, The World Ends With You and its amazing sequel, and other things that I always forget to think about unless prompted. ✦ My Genshin and Wuthering Waves UIDs are available for mutuals when requested! I do not play Honkai Impact 3rd or Honkai Star Rail however, so there is no UIDs for those games. ✦ I’m not here for internet drama or discourse, so don’t bring it around me. I abide by ‘ship and let ship’ and ‘don’t like don’t watch’ rules, regardless of my own preferences.

[bite-the-bloody-hand]

Alone, Secret, and Betrayal for the ask meme >:3 (dramatic eyebrows on the emoticon for Zell)

For the OC Asks - Not-So-Nice Edition

Darling you spoil me as much as I must spoiler tag these answers! You know I’m feral and this is all gonna be about the ship; surely this was unplanned on your part. But here's a fucking NOVEL I guess you DEVIL(love you)

alone: How does your OC deal with loneliness? Have they ever been completely alone before? How do they act when there's no one around to see them?

Zell is practiced at being alone if not completely isolated, but that doesn't mean he enjoys it. If he's forced to be alone and can find something to keep his hands occupied, he's generally okay, but without something to do he can get into pacing/stress workout mode pretty quickly. Gotta do push-ups to keep evil (self-destructive) boredom at bay or else he starts trying to chew his own limbs off. He's not necessarily claustrophobic, but he doesn't like being caged.

If he's alone on his own terms and relaxing, IE winding down in his room or somesuch, that's generally when he'll be playing a little music or spinning up yarn with a drop spindle; usually muttering to himself about whatever crosses his mind. If it's a high pain day (and he has the luxury), he'll be isolated because it makes him real twitchy and reactive. The last thing he wants to do is bite someone because of a migraine.

Loneliness is another beast, however. He can handle Being Alone, to an extent, but he isn't great at it. In being lonely he is an *expert.* He's used to being isolated while surrounded by people; his youth in Ustalav was being one of a small handful of teenagers among hundreds of severe adults with no patience for his whimsy. Meanwhile the ones his age were distant and wary of their Dhampir cohort, as all Ustlavians rightly are. The overall vibe of Mendev’s military is quite similar, which is something that truly bothers him about being Commander, and the mythical status he’s gained. The charisma he cultivated to bright people closer as a regular person has become far too isolating for someone at his… level.

During the first few days in Kenabras, before the attack on Gray Garrison, he really enjoyed the bizarre camaraderie that had begun to form among what would become his, well, followers. Or his *subordinate* for fuck's sake, for a job he never wanted and didn't ask for! However, as soon as he realized there was no escaping the job, the necessity of formality started to slip into everything, depressing the hell out of him. He tries not to be too dismissive of what his rank means to people, but it really is god-damned lonely at the top. Being unwanted but kept anyway isn't the act of love some people think it is.*

It's hard to make friends when every interaction has the background radiation of being the last hope of mortalkind as well as a terrifying and alluring monster. Rare are those who don't elevate or mythologize his existence; in fact he can count those people on one hand.

When no one's around the mask finally slips away and the worry shows through. He drops the cool half-smile and all the stress lines start showing; he talks himself through his own stress and tries to strategize around the insanity of his life, to the point where it can be something of a one-man show. His monologues would be excellent theater if he was of a mind to put that much raw emotion on a page, but that's never really been his thing. This is when he engages with his most difficult and secret of tasks: Research.

secret: What's one secret your OC never wants anyone to know about them?

Zell is something of a collector of secrets, so exploring what he keeps close to the vest is fun.

It seems so minor in the grand scheme of things, but hiding the fact that he's dyslexic and has a migraine disorder has been one of his Major Efforts since being conscripted. He plays it off by saying he refuses to read or learn anything that is uninteresting to him; in reality it's just hard for him to read at all. It makes him feel deeply self conscious and fuels a lot of the imposter syndrome. Unfortunately he just can't do it without giving himself a terrible migraine. He gets around this by encouraging other people to read aloud; or when handed an important document that's for his eyes only, he gives it a brief context scan, says 'everything is clear to me,' then takes the doc to read it later very slowly with a cutout bookmark and frequent breaks. Later, Aivu reads for him.

It does make certain things especially difficult, such as the aforementioned private research he does while alone in the dead of night. The war is a big distraction to be sure, but this man operates on a level of ADHD unfathomable to most mortals and he is also a NOSY bitch.

For example, the secrets surrounding the Arendae family and Mendev's noble legacy are far too enticing for him to ignore, so he opts to pull a few strings of his own and see if he can spot anything that escaped Liotr's notice. Eventually, Zell's secret folio becomes less about his own curiosity and more about securing The Hawkblade's attention somewhere other than assuring Galfrey's heir is conveniently put away and insensate. It's no longer just about helping Liotr destroy The Other - it's about making sure Daeran is safe after.

Of course, he keeps The Other's existence a secret. Of course it terrifies him that anyone else would discover and reveal it. But none of these are his secret.

Zell asks, after their first night together, if Daeran wants to keep what happens between them just between them. Not that he's ashamed, or worried about either of their reputations, but because it can be theirs. They're both public figures, both beholden to sharing if not a genuine facet of themselves at least a carefully curated face to the public at all times. Daeran's willingness to be vulnerable with him in those private moments feels precious; he doesn't want to turn that into being some kind of... propagandistic power couple for Crusaders and Socialites to speculate.

Certainly there will be rumors; they have a habit of outrageous flirting when they aren't throwing barbs at each other.

But the true secret isn't the relationship. It’s that he realizes he’s rapidly falling for Daeran. Completely unspoken but secretly shared in a dozen small, silent ways, in a coded language of glances; hidden under layers of quips and gab.

Zell wants to keep their relationship a secret, so they can both pretend it’s just a casual tryst, because he fears no one – even Daeran, at first - would understand where the love comes from, if it were ever to be known. He's an outsider, a usurper, a monster. He betrayed Daeran’s trust by leveraging their friendship to access his secrets; he has to make up for the fact that it's him.

-

betrayal: Has your OC ever been betrayed by someone they thought they could trust? Has your OC ever betrayed someone who trusted them?

In the abstract, he can certainly remember the sensation of being betrayed, but cannot remember the details clearly. He knows that he's had vulnerabilities exploited; knows it Feels Bad in such a way that thinking about deliberately making someone trust him for the explicit purpose of betraying them makes him feel ill. He also knows how easy it would be to do, for him especially. With that being said...

Zell is, at heart, a man of the theater. A man of comedy. He is primed to always Commit To The Bit. He is extraordinarily good at not breaking character. However. Something about casually asking Daeran if he could tour Heaven’s Edge felt… wrong. He already liked Daeran. They were already rather friendly with each other, in their own way. Therefore the invite was surprisingly easy to win, which made him feel even more guilty.

He had been teasing at the party, when he'd said it was destiny that brought them together. He wasn't expecting Daeran to bring it up later, with the unspoken assurance that he hadn't really dismissed the thought before. Or for Daeran to agree to that it should remain just their secret - for now. The trust and friendship between them would always be marred by that first lie by omission.

(To say he did not secretly hope that Daeran would pick up on the meaning of him always wearing the key would also be a lie.)

When Daeran reveals his fears during their time in the abyss, Zell’s love turns to absolute devotion. Even so, he knows that as soon as they escape; Liotr will be waiting, and his very first task will be to betray Daeran’s trust again to save his life.

What’s worse is the method of that betrayal. Yes he’s doing it to help and of course he doesn’t mean a single cruel word. But succeeding, admitting he’s known the whole time, that he leveraged their friendship to gain access to something so volatile… even the best outcome seems to reinforce the idea that his nature is to hurt the ones he loves, even if he’s trying to be kind.****

*The first few months as Commander were really hard, and put a big strain on those blossoming friendships. He really gets in his own head about this shit, but he does eventually figure it out.

**Previous incarnations he's been a bard when he wasn't a druid; but I just wasn't thrilled by the available builds so I went bloodrager. Imagine my delight when the Azata allows him to have a little bit of both anyway!

***funny story, the head generation mechanic for the severed heads showing up during rests is broken for me, so the heads only show up from Kenabras to Leper's Smile and then don't show up again until act 4. Zell wakes up after the first sleep in the abyss to find a severed demon head The Other left like some sort of horrible cat leaving him food in the night. He thought the first heads back at camp were someone hazing him for being a Dhampir and straight up did not put two and two together until Daeran's birthday, but at that point they'd stopped showing up so he didn't snitch about it to Liotr. When they started showing up in the Abyss it was like 'is... is it trying to feed me? Are these gifts? A warning? b...both????' This game is so much funnier when you're half vampire I am just saying.

****Daeran: ‘“I’m soooo sorry I stumbled upon your deepest secret because your Cousin had the Inquisition on your ass and I wanted to help. PLEASE forgive me for saving your life and having the sheer charisma to convince them not to throw you away forever.” That’s you. That’s what you sound like. IDIOT.’

Folks, they love each other.

[enderwolf91]

╓┈⌑◦☓◦☙◦♡◦☙◦☓◦⌑┈╖

name: Ender

pronouns: They/She

age: 19

language: English

┈⌑◦♡◦⌑┈

Interests:

Overwatch, Fnaf, Helluva Boss, My Hero Academia, Pokemon, Scott Pilgrim, Undertale/Deltarune, Supernatural, Minecraft (there's a lot more but these are main interests I'll probably post about the most)

Current Hyperfixation (Aka Brainrot Town):

- Overwatch: Console Support main (Mercy & Illari main, but I can play all supports) (I used to play on pc but my pc is getting old now, gotta get an actual computer tower), Damage off role (mainly Sombra, Widow, Symm, and Echo) bt: Enderwolf91#1527

- Venture Overwatch (when I tell you I have been brainrotting over them since the play testing- I am in dire need of any and all Venture content to continue surviving)

- Pokemon: big Pokemon nerd, I love my little pocket monsters. Rewatching the anime series is on my to-do list once I get some time to watch anime again

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

This is my main blog where I'll talk about pretty much anything- and while I don't post often, when I do it'll probably be a lot of random rants and simping over characters I'm a little too obsessed with

I am 18+, so there will most likely be posts with nsfw included, just to be aware. I'd like to discourage minors from interacting with mature content but I'mma be honest I've been fully aware of it since I was a preteen so... just be safe about it please!

I'm happy to chat with anyone! Just know if you start being weird (homophobic/transphobic/racist/sexist; anything that's basic dni criteria) you will be blocked. I don't take discriminatory behavior lightly, even if we have shared interests and otherwise connect really well. Otherwise, I'm happy to chat! Be it to talk about shared interests, random ideas/thoughts you wanna discuss, interests you have (I'm happy to learn about it if I don't know about it!), you need to rant to someone, or if you just wanna send random memes and cat pics, I'm all for it!

**Please do not take credit for my art. Reblogs are welcome, but I do not tolerate reposts claiming my art as your own. I put time and effort into my art that will not be taken for granted. I make art for myself and for others to enjoy.**

carrd! - includes a bit more info about me and some of my other socials like discord!

╙┈⌑◦☓◦☙◦♡◦☙◦☓◦⌑┈╜

[artsybookworms]

A pointless thread in which I rate my pointless threads (finale):

A pointless thread in which I rate…

The original PJO book covers: 10/10

The one that started it all <3 Also, I still stand by my ratings and love the art

The original HOO book covers: 10/10

I think I was adequately entertaining for this one, and believe it or not I do put a lot of effort into these ratings :,)

The original PJO art: 9/10

Ok I know I’m biased but I think I’m pretty funny in this one. I’m taking off a point because I forgot to point out how the background in Nico’s art makes it look like he smells😭 just why. Why did we deserve this

The new HOO book covers: 9/10

Once again, I tried to make these entertaining to read bc there just wasn’t anything great to talk about for these :(

The new PJO book covers: 8/10

Didn’t really have much to say in this one, but I still stand by my ratings!

The TLT international covers: 10/10

I really loved seeing all the different versions of TLT! I’d been wanting to do something about all the international covers, so I’m glad I rated some of them.

The PJO book covers SPECIAL EDITION: 10/10

One of my good friends gave me these book slips for my birthday, so this thread is very special to me. I am honestly in love with them.

The seven demigods: 6/10

It’s an okay thread I guess? I feel like it’s only interesting to people who care about my opinion tho since these are solely based on my personal opinion (the book covers are semi-objective because I could talk about composition and color theory)

Trios from PJO/HOO: 8/10

I thought this one was kinda interesting. There’s just something fun about putting different characters into trios and seeing how their dynamic changes.

The TOA book covers: 4/10

Confession (not really if you’ve been following me for a while but) I’ve never read TOA. This meant I was probably more objective when rating the covers as an artwork, but it also meant I wasn’t able to talk about if the covers accurately captured the atmosphere of the book they’re for, which is an important element of book covers.

The animals/creatures of PJO/HOO: 5/10

This thread was very obviously rushed because I barely say anything about any of them💀 I would give it a 4 but I’m adding a point because I think the Tempest one is funny

Minor PJO characters: 6/10

It’s okay? I have some interesting things to say, but it was p clear I didn’t know what to talk about some of them.

The MGCA book covers: 4/10

Refer to my TOA review

Secondary PJO characters: 8/10

I had much more substantial things to talk about in this one since I actually remember the characters lmao

PJO fanfic tropes/cliches: 3/10

This one makes me so mad because I really like the concept but for some reason I couldn’t think of many tropes. It was only after I posted it that I was like oh I should’ve talked about this and this and this😐

The PJO books: 10/10

I feel like the last 5 threads were just me trying to think of something to rate, and nothing had substance. I actually had some worthwhile things to talk about in this one, and it took me a while to make this thread, so I’m pretty happy with it.

The HOO books: 10/10

I feel bad ragging on this series because I honestly do love it, but there are just so many flaws (PJO has them too, but they’re just so painfully obvious in HOO). I stand by my ratings tho.

Ancient PJ memes: 8/10

Let’s be real, this was very clearly nostalgia bait😂 But we all need a little nostalgia now and then right?

My pointless threads: 8/10

At this point, I’m out of ideas. I might post one once and while, but for now, this is gonna be the last rating thread :( I thought a pointless thread rating my pointless threads would be a fitting conclusion 😌 Hope you guys enjoyed them!

[whythehellnaut]

The secret brilliance behind Nickelodeon All Star Brawl‘s marketing

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the Nickelodeon fighting game after it was announced, progressing from mild interest to ironic excitement to unironic excitement for it.  So many jokes and memes have been made about it that they’re almost impossible to avoid.  But when I thought about it, I realized that that’s exactly what the marketing team for this game wanted.  The idea of the game is so absurd that no one would expect it to exist, but they figured out a way to make absolutely sure that it would create just the right buzz to get people like me to take serious interest in it.

Watching the trailer again, I figured out that every character they picked to showcase in that minute and a half trailer were carefully and strategically chosen to cater to as many people as they could.  Even the order of their appearance had deliberation behind it.  Here are my thoughts:

Michelangelo comes first, establishing that the game is combat focused.  After all, who better to show off first for a fighting game than a character that has already appeared as a playable character in at least two of them?  Plus, the Ninja Turtles are the oldest characters in Nickelodeon’s library when you consider that they first aired in the 80′s, before Nickelodeon even started making cartoons.  This is a character that everyone recognizes, parents included.

Lincoln Loud comes next, a more modern character that adults might not know but kids will.  This is to quickly lure the kids, who have less patience than adults, into watching the rest of the trailer, assuring them that it won’t just be older characters like the turtles that show up.

Powdered Toast Man comes next to snatch up the other side of the equation, the adults/90′s kids who remember him from the original Ren and Stimpy show from 1991.  I’m not sure if it’s still airing as reruns on Nick today, but considering I hear very little about the show online, I’m guessing not.  This is a bit of a surprise to the adults who thought it’d be a kids’ game, so it lures those folks into staying for the rest of the trailer as well.

Sandy is important to show off early for a number of reasons.  Spongebob is popular among kids and Millenials, and is arguably the only property here as well known as Ninja Turtles, so they’re luring in more fans.  It also serves to imply that other Spongebob characters will join, as, even though Sandy’s passion for karate makes total sense for her to appear in a fighting game, you still can’t leave out Spongebob himself.  Showing her first implies more possibilities of characters to come, proving it won’t just be a festival of protagonists like Jump Force was.  It also shows off their female representation to keep women interested.

Patrick is just a fan favorite to get out of the way before the sponge shows up, so he’s only here to confirm that the game is going to be full of characters that people actually want to see.

Oblina was personally a shocker to me, as I barely remember Ahh Real Monsters from my own childhood, but I remember enough to know that she wasn’t the protagonist, necessarily.  I also know it’s relatively obscure in comparison to Spongebob or Ren and Stimpy, so they proved that they are willing to take characters from more obscure shows that the young kids won’t remember.  This solidified my interest as I could tell that they are doing more to cater to the 90s generation than just confirming Powdered Toast Man.

Nigel Thornberry is arguably their most important addition at the halfway point.  Outside of Spongebob characters and maybe Stu Pickles, I would say Nigel is the internet’s favorite Nickelodeon character to use for memes.  The marketing team had to have known this.  After getting some of the core audiences hooked, they now have the memer crowd invested, ready to spread the word about the insanity of this game’s premise across the internet.  This is exactly what happened, and why the trailer has 2 million views on Youtube right now.

Lucy Loud is shown off quickly to remind the younger crowd to keep watching, and to add a little bit more female representation.

Spongebob is shown off a little bit late, but since we were expecting him to show up, it’s just to make sure the casual fans who only know the big names stay watching.

Helga is an older character, but I recently saw a young kid wearing a Hey Arnold tee shirt at the supermarket, so I’m positive it’s being shown as reruns on Nick today, so most Nick fans of all ages will be excited about her.  Moreover, since she came immediately after Spongebob, who is a protagonist that was introduced after Sandy, a side character from his show, it gives an implication that Arnold will also appear.  Although he is not introduced in this trailer, it allows the fans to speculate that he will soon be showcased, perhaps in the next trailer.  Also, she’s the fourth female character shown, confirming that the game is being fair and inclusive to both sexes and not simply catering to male gamers, like say, Jump Force or Dragonball Fighter Z.

Reptar is another shocker, because although Rugrats is very popular and well known throughout the generations, he is a very, very minor character in the show.  He is literally a fictional character within a separate fictional universe.  The marketing team threw him in to show off that just about any character from any Nick property, no matter how minor or obscure, has a chance of making it into this game.  Again, this forces the fans to speculate about future announcements with even more creative thinking, as we now know that it won’t just be major characters joining the fray.

Zim is a well thought out choice because he caters to a specific crowd that I’d describe as the alternative niche.  That is to say, there are people who are fans of Invader Zim who don’t watch other Nick shows, so they are luring in the folks you’d expect to see at Hot Topic and the like.  It was an edgy show with a feel and fanbase unlike other shows of its era, so it’s important to use him to diversify the roster.  They also showed off Gir as his assist, and although that may deconfirm him as playable, it still pleases the fans, who often prefer Gir over Zim.

Danny Phantom is the only character that comes strictly from the 2000s era, so they are making sure to maintain the attention of the teenagers who watched that show as kids.

Leonardo seems like an odd choice to end on, maybe even anticlimactic, since they started with Michelangelo, but it makes sense when you think about it.  They couldn’t show just 1 turtle, or else it might imply that the game’s roster was small.  But if they showed all 4 turtles, they would have needed to leave two other characters out of the trailer to make room for them, and they didn’t want to make it look like a Turtles fighting game with guest characters.  So having exactly 2 turtles allows them to show off enough characters from other properties, while also confirming unofficially that the other turtles would appear later, since you can’t just have 2 of the 4 turtles in the game.  By leaving it open like that, they’re giving an implication that the roster is going to be huge.  So big that the turtles were just a small portion of it.  They end the trailer this way to leave the crowd speculating again: how many characters will appear in total?

The only characters that curiously don’t show up in the trailer are the cast of the Avatar franchise, who are quite popular.  However, one of the stages shown is clearly the Air Temple with Aang’s glider in plain sight, implying that Avatar characters will be announced later.  Another smart move to instill hope in the fans.

Finally, the Rollback Netcode announcement that came afterward solidified a very important group- the serious/competitive gamers.  For those who don’t know, rollback netcode is relatively new technology that speeds up online gameplay to cut down on input lag, which is super important for fighting games in particular, as they rely on strict timing more than other game genres.  It’s so new, however, that not all competitive fighting games use it.  Popular tournament fighters like Super Smash Bros, Tekken, and Dragonball Fighter Z have not implemented rollback netcode for their games yet, so of all games, Nickelodeon All Star Brawl beating them to the punch is causing a stir.  This is a sign that the devs are putting serious effort into making the game enjoyable online, which could potentially help its chances to be taken seriously in competitive settings.  Only time will tell if that truly happens, but it’s a sign of quality, nonetheless.

So ultimately, this short trailer and announcement manage to cater to dang near every crowd that may want to play it: Kids, teenagers, young adults in their 20s and 30s, parents in their 40s, men, women, memers, casual fans, alternative fans, and serious gamers, and opens up a ton of potential for speculation regarding new announcements.  That’s a fantastic way to start off and explains why this game, which for all intents and purposes should have been nothing more than a thought experiment that people joke about in the car with friends, has been trending so much for the past two weeks.  Congrats to the marketing team for what they put together.

[azulapropaganda]

Hello everyone. Today (August 2nd 2020) I noticed a blog who earlier tried to accuse me of being a terf has once again made another post about this. This time she accused me of some other things and since her post suddenly started gaining attention, I decided to clear some things up and reply to every single claim she makes in her post.

I’m genuinely tired of all of this.... So, there’s a insanely popular atla TERF (@what-would-azula-do) blogger that’s been attacking me and my friends, and she worked with a group of TERFs to ban my og spop blog. I literally just made this blog but I’m tired of getting attacked by TERFs, so I’m making a call out post (ew ikr) to end this.

I am not a terf. I did not work with a group of terfs to ban your blog, you did this to yourself by tagging your post with “terfs please interact”, “terfs do touch” and other tags. You’re attacking a minor with false claims that are easily debunked. I have not been attacking you or your friends, I don’t even know who your friends are. I specifically added the “please do not send op any hate” tag when I called you out so my followers wouldn’t harass you.

First off, what-would-azula-do is a pretty obvious crypto TERF. She reblogs and creates a ton of TERFy posts that might flow off the radar of cis people, but directly harms trans people. She constantly reblogs and makes exclusionary feminist posts that exclude trans women, and use TERF rhetoric, and she doesn’t have any trans or non-binary mutuals. She also just posts full on TERF shit a lot, and whenever she gets called out she gets defensive and deletes the evidence. I got this info from an anonymous trans woman that pmed me, but she also used to just be a full on out TERF in 2016, and posted transphobic slurs and memes regularly, and also was a SWERF. Allegedly she deleted the blog and remade with her new main and the what-would-azula-do sideblog. Again this is just an alleged anon tip but I believe it. She also ships a pretty TERFy atla ship (tyzula) that à ton of TERFs on tumblr ship. Now I’m going to go to a huge pile of shit already, ONE OF HER MUTUALS IS LITERALLY AN OPEN TERF.

You say I reblog and create a ton of terfy posts. Which ones? I only talk about atla on this blog and actually make an effort to tag anything else as “off topic”. I don’t think I even made a post about feminism on my blog. You also say I don’t have any trans or nonbinary mutuals, do you have any proof of that? You contradict this claim further in your post (“Has trans mutuals even though she’s a TERF”). You say I post “terf shit” a lot, could you provide screenshots of that please? And according to you, “whenever” I get called out I delete the evidence. I got one anon once when I accidentally reblogged something from a terf I wasn’t aware I was following. I personally wouldn’t call my reply to this anon “defensive”. You say you got info from an anonymous trans woman that I used to be a full on terf in 2016 and that I posted transphobic slurs and memes regularly. In 2016 I was 13-14 years old and I didn’t even have a tumblr blog. I don’t even know how to address the tyzula thing. How is a ship “terfy”? And just because I reblog art, doesn’t mean I actually ship it? I reblog art of several ships just because I like the art.

Unholy-lesbian is one of what-would-azula-do’s TERF mutuals (she has about three crypto TERF mutuals too) that’s just a full on TERF. She was really into the TERF sphere a month ago but went crypto when she became mutuals with what-would-azula-do (probs to protect her crypto TERF identity) she said she’s not a TERF anymore, but she still reblogs TERF rhetoric and all her mutuals are TERFs. She also put TERF in quotation marks which means she probs thinks it’s a slur, which is TERF rhetoric. She’s also a gold star lesbian which means she excludes trans women from her dating pool. I’d go into this bitch more, but this callout ain’t for her.

Could you please give me the usernames of my three cryptoterf mutuals? Look I’m not going to deny that unholy-lesbian was a terf a while ago. She told me this yesterday or two days ago when I talked to her about your post. She also told me she was done being a terf because the community was so hateful all the time. She’s 15 years old, don’t pull her into this.

I’m friends with her so she can find a welcoming and nice community in the atla fandom. She’s on the right path now, do you seriously want to go hate on her for this?

This is a lighting round of all the shit she did, and also her track of aphobia and ableism, so here we go:

I literally have autism and adhd myself.

Used the t slur on her old blog (alleged)

No I haven’t? Could you provide proof of this please?

Has trans mutuals even though she’s a TERF

You contradict this earlier in this post, once again without any evidence.

Misgendered an artist on what-would-azula-do and didn’t apologize

Who? I use “they” whenever I don’t know the gender of an artist. I wasn’t aware this ever happened and I’d like to apologize to said artist of this claim is true

Liked an aphobic meme

Which meme? Also my likes aren’t even visible.

Mutuals with an aphobe that bullied an ace kid off tumblr

Who?

Uses her queer followers as props to denounce her being a TERF

This is ridiculous. My followers know I’m not a terf so of course some of them are going to defend me and support me.

Gaslight her former nb mutual

Who?

Reblogged from a TERF with TERF in her username

Yes and I addressed this already. Someone sent an anon about this, I deleted the post, unfollowed the user I wasn’t even aware of following in the first place, and thanked the anon for telling me about this.

Said the r slur on her main

No I didn’t? Do you have a screenshot of or a link to this post? Also I literally have autism, as I have mentioned earlier on this blog.

Slandered a queer artist on what-would-azula-do

Who?

WORKED WITH TERFS TO DEPLATFORM ME (A NB LESBIAN OF COLOR)

I reported your post once because you were accusing me of untrue things and harassing me, a minor, and you were threatening to murder my followers. I didn’t work with terfs at all, they came to your post after you tagged it with “terfs please interact”

And what does your sexuality and gender even have to do with this?

Even if she wasn’t a TERF (which she is lol) she worked with TERFs to ban my blog that exposed her, which is violently lesbophpbic and nbphobic.

Your blog was banned because you were harassing a minor and throwing around false accusations, not because you are a lesbian or nonbinary. I did not work with terfs to ban your blog, as I have mentioned twice earlier.

So y’all really shouldn’t follow or support her anymore, unless you’re a TERF just like her. (Dm me for screenshots, I didn’t want to post them here since she’d just gaslight me)

Please post all of the screenshots you have in a reply to this post.

Also, could you stop harassing my followers. This is just incredibly gross behavior.

PREVIOUS POST

[thisdancingheart]

Remember YFIP?

My Year of Grief and Cancellation

What was I trying to accomplish with my anonymous Tumblr?

By Liat Kaplan Feb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/style/your-fave-is-problematic-tumblr.html

If you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, you may remember a blog called Your Fave Is Problematic. If not, its content should still sound familiar to you. The posts contained long lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so on) statements and actions — the stuff that gets people canceled these days.

That blog was my blog. I spent hours researching each post; as you can probably imagine, my search history was pretty ugly.

Your Fave Is Problematic had around 50,000 followers at its peak, in 2014, when I was a high school senior, but its influence was outsized. I got in a feud with a prominent young adult fiction author over his inclusion. One actor submitted himself, perhaps as a dare (or a plea) to dig up his worst. “Problematic fave” became a well-worn meme; even after I stopped posting, my blog was cited in books, articles, podcasts and think pieces. Through it all, my identity stayed private.

The blog started, as so many anonymous online projects do, as vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism. I was fine-tuning my moral compass and coming into my own as a feminist. So when I noticed classmates making sexist jokes on Facebook, including some about me, I started taking screenshots to post on a Tumblr called Calling Out Sexists. My policy was that I would take down a post only if its author publicly apologized.

A group of students brought the blog to the attention of our school’s administrators, who threatened to take legal action if I continued to write about them. Meanwhile, other Tumblr users had begun submitting screenshots featuring statements from minor celebrities. With graduation hanging in the balance, I shifted my focus away from my peers and toward public figures. I rebranded. Money and fame had protected them since time immemorial. What harm could my little blog do?

So I posted photos of Lady Gaga in V magazine with her skin bronzed to an unnatural brown. I pulled out troubling quotes from an essay Lena Dunham had written about a trip to Japan. I noted Taylor Swift’s since-changed homophobic lyric in “Picture to Burn.” My most popular posts tended to be about women — which makes sense, because the celebrity press tends to be more critical of them.

As it turned out, I had bigger things to worry about than dissecting the careers of celebrities I’d never met. On a winter morning, I woke up to the news that my older sister, Tamar, who was studying in Bolivia, had been in a bus crash, and the outlook was not good. I pored over research to escape from what felt like an impossible situation: my sister slowly dying of treatable injuries in a rural area thousands of miles away.

We held a public memorial service for Tamar in our hometown. Some of my classmates showed up, including a few who had written nasty things about me online. I found their shows of kindness insulting now, during what was quickly becoming the worst year of my life.

I tried going back to school after a few weeks, but I found myself picking frequent arguments with classmates and teachers. The school made an arrangement with my parents: I would be placed on “medical leave” for the remainder of the semester. I would graduate on time, but I wouldn’t return to campus.

Stuck at home, I devoted myself to Tumblr. What was I trying to accomplish? Mostly, I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals. I also enjoyed being popular, controversial, discussed. When a comedian I had posted about name-checked my blog on Twitter, I was giddy.

Then I started receiving threats. Someone sent me a screenshot of a house from Google Maps, claiming to have found my IP address. It wasn’t my house, but still. I realized that for every person on Tumblr who looked up to my blog, there were many more, online and offline, who hated it — and me. I started posting less and, eventually, stopped posting at all.

In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.

There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. Meanwhile, other movements — local, global, unified in their purposes and rooted in progressive philosophies — were organizing for actual justice. Looking back, I was more of a cop than a social justice warrior, as people on Tumblr had come to think of me.

These days, there’s no shortage of online accountability efforts, the large part of them anonymously run. Some accounts post typically anodyne but occasionally explosive celebrity gossip. Others are explicitly aimed at naming, shaming and punishing people for all kinds of actions and missteps. My own work fell somewhere in the middle, I think; the information I posted was out in the open, but I was cataloging it to make a case against the veneration of the rich and famous.

As many have noted, the coronavirus pandemic has pronounced the distance between celebrities and the rest of us. And their actions have been subject to greater scrutiny — the vacations they’ve gone on, the parties they’ve held, the access they’ve had to testing and care during a health crisis that has taken millions of lives.

But celebrity culture began to crumble long before Covid-19. Mounting accusations of many kinds, whispered between industry professionals, had become too loud to ignore. Social media, which gave celebrities more control over their images and influence over their fans, also opened them up to new kinds of criticism. People have lost jobs and entire careers because of the kinds of errors my blog cited. Others have apologized for work and behavior that, re-examined in a contemporary context, just doesn’t hold up.

For years, I’ve regretted the spotlight I put on other people’s mistakes, as if one day I wouldn’t make plenty of my own. There can be an unsparing purity to growing into one’s social conscience that is often overbroad.

My brain wasn’t ready for nuance. I was angered by hypocrisy and cruelty; what I did about it was apply a level of scrutiny that left no room for error. I’m not saying that I should be canceled for my teenage blog. (Please don't!) I just know what we all should know by now: that no one who has lived publicly, online or off, has a spotless record.

For these reasons, I’ve thought about deleting my Tumblr. But doing that would mean erasing my own errors of judgment. I almost feel like I need to leave it up to punish myself for having made it in the first place. That, and I know someone could (and probably would) just pull it up on Wayback Machine. The internet, after all, never forgets.

~~~~~~~

[crusherthedoctor]

Can we have some unpopular Sonic opinions?

I tried to cram in a lot, so I hope this satisfies you. :P I tried to stick to the ones that I haven't brought up quite as often, since by this point, we all know that I think IDW's storytelling is dire, SA2's story is overrated, X Eggman is an embarrassing portrayal (at least from season 2 onwards), Blaze shouldn't be handcuffed to Silver, Shadow's backstory had issues with or without the Black Arms, Neo Metal Sonic looks silly, etc. But anyway, here we go:

- Knuckles may be tricky to incorporate into plots that don't relate to Angel Island, but making him obsessed with his duties is no better than having him forget about Angel Island entirely.

- I like Marine, and never found her annoying. Oh, I understood what they were trying to do with her, but I honestly wasn't put off by her, and found her Aussie lingo more endearing if anything. Since her debut was during the period in my life where where I couldn't stand Sonic himself, I instead thought he was irritating (and hypocritical) for getting annoyed with her for doing shit he would often be guilty of.

- Silver is just as guilty of being shoehorned into games and plots as the Deadly Six are. Having more fans than the latter is irrelevant, since we're still talking about a character who constantly has to time travel in order to be present.

- Speaking of Silver, if he has to stick around, please do something different with him. They've pulled the doomed future routine multiple times now, and it's been boring every single time. I wasn't interested when it involved Iblis. I wasn't interested when it involved Knuckles drinking the edgy Kool Aid. I wasn't interested when it involved a council of dumbasses... give it a rest already.

- The Tails Doll can work as a mildly creepy thing, with maybe more to it than meets the eye when it's time for a boss fight or what have you. But the memes about him stealing your soul are just dumb, and I thought it was dumb even back in my teenage youth.

- “Eggman is supposed to be clownish!” Yeah, well he's also meant to be a genuine villain with a 300 IQ. These qualities don't have to be mutually exclusive.

- “Sonic is supposed to have attitude!” Yeah, well that's not the same thing as being an absolute cunt. Sonic was only ever meant to come off as having an edge compared to Mario. He was never meant to be a GTA-tier protagonist.

- Rouge is not a villain, and never was a villain. Literally the whole point of her role in SA2 was to reveal that she was working against Eggman and Shadow the whole time, albeit using sneakier tactics to do so. You'd think all those people who exult SA2's story would remember this, but apparently not. She barely even qualifies as an anti-hero, since aside from stealing the Master Emerald, she rarely does anything morally questionable otherwise. She's got a lot more good in her than people give her credit for.

- Captain Whisker is a better Eggman Nega than the actual Eggman Nega. And as far as robot characters in this franchise go, Johnny's design is pretty underrated.

- I don't like Iblis or Mephiles, but I DO like Solaris, and it annoys me that it was out of focus for most of the story due to all the time spent on its less interesting halves. Had they kept the backstory with the Duke and his experiments, and worked from there, I think they could have provided an interesting contrast with Chaos (since Solaris can also qualify as a monster with a sympathetic backstory) instead of recycling the surface level schtick.

- Black Doom may technically be just as bad as Mephiles, Nega, Scourge, Mimic, etc, since he's yet another villain with one-note characterization and fucked over Eggman. But because he never gained a disproportionate fandom, he doesn't annoy me to the same extent. It's easier to ignore him by comparison, and his Dr. Claw voice and face shaped like a lady's delicate part make him enjoyable to mock.

- Likewise, while Lyric is also on the same level as these other villains, it's easier to dismiss him because I was never invested in the Boom games anyway, and being an obvious alternate universe (compared to Sonic X or IDW, which retain the Modern designs and plot elements), it never had an effect on the main series. I also unironically like his design, and if nothing else, at least this snake didn't start a hypnotism fetish across the internet.

- Sally - and the rest of the Freedom Fighters for that matter - have had their importance in the franchise severely inflated. They may have been lucky to be the face of popular media (SatAM and Archie), but they're not these magnificent entities that the game characters are but a speck of dust in comparison to. Having a “legacy” doesn't make them more entitled to shit than any other character, old or new.

- Conceptually, the treasure hunting gameplay is one of the better alternate gameplay styles IMO. But it was let down in SA2 by its one track minded radar (the levels may have been big, but I don't think that would have been an issue on its own if the radar was better). If they brought it back and made it more like SA1's treasure hunting, I'd be all for it, although it would probably be better suited for a spinoff title.

- This goes for a lot of games, but when it comes to 2D, I prefer sprites over models. Not that the Rush models are bad (though the ones in Chronicles sure as fuck are), but the sprites in Mania and the Advance trilogy are just so charming and full of character.

- I actually like Marble Zone. Yeah, the level design is a bit blocky, but I love the concept of an underground temple prison, mixed with lava elements in a zone that otherwise isn't a traditional volcano level.

- I also like Sandopolis Zone. Again, completely understand why it's not the most popular zone around, but I've been a sucker for the Ancient Egyptian aesthetic since childhood (you can thank Crash 3 for that), and Act 1 is visually stunning.

- I prefer the JP soundtrack for Sonic CD over the US version overall... but I also prefer Sonic Boom over You Can Do Anything.

- SA2's soundtrack isn't bad by any means - I love Rouge's tracks, and The Last Scene is one of my favourite pieces of music - but as far as variety goes, it's a step down from SA1's soundtrack.

- If Sonic X-Treme had been released, it probably would have been unenjoyable and confusing. Whatever your thoughts on SA1, it was probably the better option between the two as far as Sonic's first legitimate translation into 3D goes.

- I have no qualms with Modern Sonic and the other Modern designs and characters, but I also fully acknowledge that changing gears from Adventure onwards - and doing it with a great amount of fanfare - was always going to create one of the biggest divides in the fandom, and fans shouldn't act surprised that this happened. The fact that they felt the need to hype up a new design and direction in the first place (compared to Mario, who has mostly been the same since the beginning, with only the occasional minor change with little fanfare) also indicates that they weren't confident enough in Sonic and his universe being the way it was, which often gets ignored by all the “SEGA have no confidence!!!” complaints you see with their recent games.

- Unleashed did not deserve the incredibly harsh reviews it received back in the day... but it doesn't deserve its current sacred cow status either. It had more effort put into it than '06 to be sure, and I can respect that, but much of it was misguided effort, and even if you like the Werehog, you have to admit that the idea came at the absolute worst time. The intro cutscene may be awesome, as is the Egg Dragoon fight, but 2% doesn't make up the entire game. Chip was also quite annoying, and I wasn't particularly sad when he pressed F in the chat at the end.

- On the other hand, while Colours definitely has its shortcomings, and people have every right to criticse those shortcomings, a lot of its most vocal detractors tend to have a stick up their arse about the game because people actually enjoyed it, and it had a gimmick that people actually liked. Yes, it may have been the first game to have those writers everyone hates, but then SA1 was the first game to give the characters alternate gameplay styles and have other villains upstage Eggman, so...

- Forces is absolutely not on the level of '06. It's nowhere close. A game being flawed does not make it the next '06, clickbait YouTubers. Or should I say, the game they want to retroactively apply '06's reception to, since they've been trying hard to magically retcon '06's own quality...

- To echo @beevean, ALL of the 3D stories have their issues. SA1 is probably the most well-rounded of them on the whole, but even that one isn't perfect.

- To echo another opinion, although I do love SA1, I'm not crazy over the idea of a remake, and would prefer them to just take Sonic's gameplay from SA1 and work from there. Because with a remake, you're stuck in a hard spot: Do you keep it the way it is bar the expected graphical upgrades, and risk accusations of not doing anything to actually improve the experience? Or do you try to address past criticisms, and risk the wrath of the fans who will inevitably go on a #NotMyAdventure crusade about it? What people fail to consider is that the Crash and Spyro remakes were accepted gracefully because their original iterations were still unanimously beloved for the most part, whereas SA1 - and especially SA2 - have always been divisive, and have only gotten moreso over the years.

- People take their preferences for the character's voice actors too seriously. I have my own favourites like anyone else, but I don't make a big deal out of it.

- And with fandom voice actors, they usually focus too much on doing a basic impression of their preferred official voice actor, and not enough on the acting. So you end up getting a lot of fan voices who sound like decent impressions of Ryan Drummond or Jason Griffith on the surface, but they sound utterly empty beyond that impression, because there's no oomph or depth to the actual emotions. They think about the actor rather than the character, when it should really be the other way around.

- The thing with Ian Flynn is that he is capable of telling a decent story, and he can portray some characters well. But he's proven time and time again that everything will go off the rails if he's given too much freedom (ironic, given how quick he is to point the finger at mandates when something goes wrong).

- Ian Flynn and Shiro Maekawa are not the only people in the world who are allowed to write for Sonic. I understand that one should be cautious when seeking out new writing talent, but for all the fandom's accusations of playing it safe, they sure aren't in a rush to experiment outside of their own comfort zone.

- And of course, the big one: You don't fix the franchise's current problems by crawling back to its previous problems. It's much more helpful and constructive to discuss the good and bad alike with each of the games. Less “THIS GOOD, MODERN BAD”, and more “This could work, but maybe without that part...”

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Feb 2018

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called "alt-right" — a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.

On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life. At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.

But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed seven in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a sprawling manifesto filled with hatred of young women and interracial couples (Atchison went by “Elliot Rodger” in one of his many online personas and lauded the “supreme gentleman,” a title Rodger gave himself and has since become a meme on the alt-right).

Including Rodger’s murderous rampage there have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead and more than 60 injured (see list). Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement.

Like Atchison and Rodger, these perpetrators were all male and, with the exception of three men, all under the age of 30 at the time they are alleged to have killed. The average age of the alt-right killers is 26. The youngest was 17. One, Alexandre Bissonnette, is Canadian, but the rest are American. 

The “alternative right” was coined in part by white nationalist leader Richard Bertrand Spencer in 2008, but the movement as it’s known today can largely be traced back to 2012 and 2013 when two major events occurred: the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin and the so-called Gamergate controversy where female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death. Both were formative moments for a young generation of far-right activists raised on the internet and who found community on chaotic forums like 4chan and Reddit where the classic tenets of white nationalism — most notably the belief that white identity is under attack by multiculturalism and political correctness — flourish under dizzying layers of toxic irony.

The Killings Started in California

The timeline for alt-right killers began on May 23, 2014.

On that day, college sophomore Elliot Rodger stabbed his three roommates to death before driving to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and shooting several women. He then killed or injured several pedestrians with both gunfire and his vehicle before exchanging fire with police and eventually taking his own life. He ultimately killed seven and wounded 14.

Rodger left behind a sprawling 107,000-word manifesto titled, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” which contained passages lamenting his inability to find a girlfriend, expressing extreme misogyny and various racist positions including disgust for interracial couples (despite the fact that he was multi-racial himself (half-Chinese)).

“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself,” Rodger wrote. “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”

Rodger frequented PUAhate, a deeply misogynistic forum populated by failed “pick up artists” dedicated to revealing, “the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community to deceive men and profit from them.” Discussions about women on the forum are at best objectifying and at worst, violent.

The term, “white sharia,” allegedly coined by Sacco Vandal of the popular alt-right site Vandal Void, is a radical response to Patrick Buchanan’s argument in Death of the West: that the increase in immigration and decline of white birthrates is leading to the end of Western civilization. Rodger’s celebration at the 504um, one of the premier alt-right forums, is the rule rather than the exception, and locates misogyny at the core of the alt-right.

Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist, has his own troubling history of vicious misogyny, tracking all the way back to high school.

In the aftermath of Rodger’s killing spree, a user at 4chan/b/ posted a photo from Rodger’s Facebook page with the note, “Elliot Rodger, the supreme gentleman, was part of /b/. Discuss.” This sentiment was echoed by other /b/ users who found similarities between his lexicon and that of the noxious board, including the term “beta,” used by men online to describe themselves as lacking the physicality, charisma and confidence associated with alpha males.... The term resurfaced on 4chan/r9k/ in the wake of a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, by Chris Harper-Mercer, who killed nine and wounded at least seven others at the college on October 1, 2015. “This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun,” one anonymous user wrote. “Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs to this revolution.”

Although never proven, it is widely speculated that Harper-Mercer was a user on the board as warnings against attending school the following day that circulated on the eve of the shooting. Authorities believe Harper-Mercer, who like Rodger was multi-racial, was also motivated by white supremacist ideas. The Government Accountability Office categorized the Roseburg killings as “white supremacist” in an April 2017 report.

2017: A Year of Alt-Right Violence

The first killing in 2017 that can be tied to the alt-right occurred on January 29 in Canada. A 27-year-old university student named Alexandre Bissonnette allegedly brought a semiautomatic rifle into the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City and shot and killed six worshippers while injuring 19—two critically.

On May 20, 2017, Sean Urbanski, a 22-year-old University of Maryland student, allegedly stabbed and killed newly commissioned Lt. Richard Collins, III. Authorities described the attack as “totally unprovoked.” Urbanski approached Collins, who was black, and two friends at 3 a.m., seemingly intoxicated, and said, “Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you.” When Collins refused, Urbanski stabbed him. Urbanski, however, was a member of a Facebook group called “Alt Reich: Nation”.

Less than a week later, Jeremy Christian, a 35-year-old Portland resident, allegedly stabbed and killed two people and severely wounded another passenger on a train while they were defending two young women from his anti-Muslim and racist remarks. Christian, who identified as a white nationalist and had a history of violence and mental illness, had a Facebook page filled with racist and bizarre political content. Witnesses at an alt-right free speech rally in the month preceding the stabbing saw Christian wearing an American flag cape, yelling racial slurs and making Nazi salutes. 

Two months later, on July 14, 2017, Lane Maurice Davis, 33, allegedly stabbed his father, Charles Davis, to death at the family home in Skagit County, Washington, after accusing his father of pedophilia. Davis, a conspiracy theory obsessive who went by the name ‘Seattle4Truth’ online and accused his father, not based on his own experience, but instead on his belief that liberals around the world are participating in secret pedophilia rings. Davis was reportedly a researcher for Milo Yiannopoulos and claimed to have ghost written pieces on Breitbart News for the former tech editor. 

In the months leading up to Unite the Right, members of the alt-right colonized and organized themselves on the gaming chat platform Discord. This includes Auernheimer who was a frequent participant in the Daily Stormer’s server, “Thunderdome,” where he regularly interacted with site readers and put out calls for action.

Young, White, Angry, Male

According to Dr. Eric Madfis, author of a 2014 paper on the intersectional identities of American Mass Murderers, young, white, middle class, heterosexual males commit mass murder at a disproportionately high rate relative to their population size in the United States.

The rate of mass murders spiked in the 1970s and 1990s. Between 1966 and 1999, there were 95 cases of mass public shootings. Between 1976 and 2008, mass murders occurred roughly twice per month, claiming an average of 125 deaths each month. A more recent study published by Mother Jones identifies 95 mass shootings in the United States since 1982. Of those, 55 (59%) were committed by white men.

FBI crime data suggests that ages 16 to 24 are peak time for violent crime. According to Dr. Pete Simi, Director of the Earl Babbie Research Center at Chapman University, "This is a period of substantial transition in an individual's life, when they're less likely to have significant attachments in their life that deter them from criminal violence."

Madfis’s 2014 paper from the University of Washington investigates the role of intersectional identities in mass murder incidents and argues that young, white males' unique downward social mobility, relative to his expectations, accounts for their overrepresentation as perpetrators of mass murder.

Only one in five mass murderers are “likely psychotic or delusional,” however, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University.

A 2001 study conducted by Meloy examining 34 adolescent perpetrators of mass murder found that 59% were the direct result of a triggering event. That rate jumped to 90% among adult mass murders. 

Dr. Elliott Leyton, an expert on serial homicide, argues that contemporary mass murderers often target the perceived source of lost financial stability or class prestige. The alt-right, which couches its mission in terms of surviving literal extinction, routinely laments so-called reverse racism and affirmative action as well as immigration in all its forms.

The grievances collected by those motivated by the white nationalist ideology at the heart of the alt-right often do not begin with racist propaganda, but rather in the toxic communities of the men's rights movement... The age-old racist argument - that black men are 'taking our women' — is made regularly. Racist slurs are chucked around casually. There seems to be a significant overlap with organised white supremacy." 

Andrew Anglin once wrote “[o]ur target audience [for the neo-nazi website Daily Stormer] is white males between the ages of 10 and 30.”

Wiring Young Neurons

“Our target audience is white males between the ages of 10 and 30,” Anglin wrote in his “PSA: When the Alt-Right Hits the Street, You Wanna be Ready.” “I include children as young a ten, because an element of this is that we want to look like superheroes. We want to be something that boys fantasize about being a part of. That is a core element to this. I don’t include men over the age of 30, because after that point, you are largely fixed in your thinking. We will certainly reach some older men, but they should not be a focus.”

[Richard] Spencer told Mother Jones in December of 2016 before a contentious speaking engagement at Texas A&M University. “I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible.”

Undeniably, their efforts have had success. Mainstay racist conferences, like the annual gatherings of American Renaissance and the National Policy Institute, are attracting larger audiences, no longer dominated by their once singular demographic of middle-aged white men.

On a panel at Harvard University in October, Derek Black, son of longtime white supremacist Don Black, who once represented the future of the movement until he renounced racism during college, described his surprise at seeing so many young participants in Charlottesville:

I can say for sure my entire life in white nationalism I went to conferences many times a year. I spoke at them. I tried to organize them. I organized online through my dad's site [Stormfront] through organizations whether Jared [Taylor]'s AmRen or David [Duke]'s EURO or Council of Conservative Citizens … Everybody at these things is gray-haired. Me and two other people would be under 40. That was it. Which is partly why I took this impression that this is not gonna last. And a lot of that is because young people have a lot to lose … Young people who show up to a rally like that are going to get their identities exposed online and then it's gonna be hard for them to get jobs … I cannot actually explain what changed. The one striking thing about Charlottesville…was there's a ton of young kids like college-age or actual college students who got on buses and went to this who I don't think had been to an event like that before. 

Alt-right groups such as Identity Evropa and Vanguard America are marketing themselves exclusively to college and high school-aged individuals.

Then, on October 19, barely two months after the chaos of Charlottesville, the University of Florida was forced to host a Spencer speaking engagement under threat of a lawsuit........................ Hours later, three of his supporters were arrested for attempted murder after an alleged confrontation with protestors in which Spencer’s supporters threw stiff-armed salutes and one fired a shot at the urging of his accomplices. 

Not Even 21

James Alex Fields was only 20 years-old when he drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of attendees and protestors during August’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Fields stood with members of Vanguard America during the rally and carried a shield with the militaristic, alt-right group’s insignia on it.

According to police records, Fields also had a troubling history of childhood domestic violence — which experts see in about 1 in 6 mass killers. In 2010, Field’s mother called 911 after he attacked her for telling him to stop playing a video game. Other records reveal that he brandished a 12-inch knife at her on a separate occasion. His disabled mother uses a wheelchair.

Just three months prior to Unite the Right, another young, white man with a history in the alt-right, 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, allegedly killed two of his roommates... in Florida. Arthurs, who was taken into custody by authorities after holding employees of a tobacco shop hostage, had converted to Salafism, an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam, and begun defending ISIS online a year prior. He was previously a leader of a National Socialist group known as the Atomwaffen (“Atomic Weapon”) Division which formed on the fascist forum Iron March. 

In the year leading up to the shooting, Arthurs appeared to be blending his alt-right beliefs with his newfound adherence to extremist forms of Islam. His username changed from Weissewolfe to Kekman Al-Amriki, a combination of the trollish god of “meme magic” common to 4chan and the name of an American member of al-Shabab, an Islamic militant organization. According to VICE, Arthurs also spoke of “white sharia,” a concept exemplifying the brutal, misogynistic core attitudes of the alt-right and those it has inspired to violence.

Leaderless Resistance

In 2014, after longtime Klansman Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. killed three at a Jewish community center and a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent published an article on the topic of “self detonating lone wolf vanguardists.” According to Griffin, “a ‘self detonating lone wolf vanguardist’ is someone who is radically alienated from society and who has given up on persuasion, a fanatacist who is inclined toward violent methods of bringing about eschatological political change, who usually acts alone or with an accomplice in the name of a movement without the support of assistance of any group, and who typically explodes, lashes out, or ‘self detonates’ without warning in rampage shootings, murder-suicides, and bombing campaigns.”

In its just over four years of operation, the Daily Stormer’s audience included at least three readers who were either convicted or indicted for murder. 

"An Age of Ultraviolence"

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Storm Roof killed nine African-American worshipers and wounded one while attending a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof, then 21, told his victims, including Reverend and State Senator Clementa Pickney, that, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

In a manifesto posted to his website, lastrhodesian.com, Roof cited the Trayvon Martin case as his inspiration for searching on Google for “black on White crime.” According to Roof, “I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief.”

On March 22, 2017, another Daily Stormer reader, James Harris Jackson, was arrested after stabbing 66-year-old black man Timothy Caughman with a sword in Manhattan. Jackson, an army veteran, was 28 at the time of the alleged stabbing. He travelled to New York from Baltimore, Maryland, to conduct a “practice run” for what was intended to deter white women from race-mixing. He told a media source after his arrest that, “the white race is being eroded.” 

On Friday, December 27, a 17-year-old white male, reported to be Nicholas Giampa, allegedly shot and killed the parents of his ex-girlfriend in Reston, Virginia, before turning the gun on himself. According to reports, the parents had facilitated the break-up after learning that Giampa held neo-Nazi beliefs.

Giampa’s account also attempted to engage with those of alt-right leaders and organizations like Mike Peinovich, VDARE, the Traditionalist Worker Party, Identity Evropa, as well as Vanguard America, the neo-Nazi group that James Fields was photographed with in Charlottesville. One of Giampa’s main obsessions, however, was the hardcore neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen.

2018 is already off to a disturbing start. On January 2, Blaze Bernstein, a college student who was gay and Jewish went missing and was later found murdered. Friends of the accused murderer, Samuel Woodward, told ProPublica that Woodward was a committed neo-Nazi and member of Atomwaffen which may have as chapters in as many as eight states.

This former Atomwaffen member also said that the events in Charlottesville had a major impact on the group. Its membership doubled.  

(selected sections of article)

[purkinje-effect]

OC Survey Meme

Let’s try that again!! Wrong side blog. RIP

It was too long to paste into Discord, so I’ll post it here under a cut.

Thanks for cluing us all in on this post, @bigbraincel !

Since there isn’t a spoiler CSS on Tumblr, I did strike-through on spoilers instead. There aren’t many, and it’s relatively minor, but still.

I did the selected questions for both ‘Choly and Sticks.

Melancholy (Sole Survivor)

2: What's 'Choly's sexuality? He's always been exclusively teratophilic. Prewar he thought himself as ace. He's bi, but only for nonhumans.

14: What's 'Choly's favorite food? How often does he get to eat it? Piretti's next do to Walden Drugs Concord had his fav arancini and pierogis. It's not the same of course, but he loves the occasion he gets to have dumplings.

18: What languages can 'Choly speak? Where did he learn these languages? Russian and English. He's from Sverdlovsk originally. He knew enough conversational English before moving to Mass, but the DIA appointed him a Mister Handy to speech train him to blend in better both with the other chemists at Deenwood and off base.

23: Does 'Choly get lonely easily? He doesn't handle loneliness as much as he thinks. He's pretty oblivious when loneliness is the root of whatever he's dealing with emotionally. The whole Rip van Winkle thing has got him screwy in that regard: it's less that everything's so unfamiliar, but more that everything familiar is centuries behind him despite feeling like they existed very recently. The fact radios still have broadcasts goes a long way to alleviating the feelings of isolation, at least.

39: What does 'Choly's happily ever after look like? Two different answers, depending on whether it's his true ending or what he wishes it were! He lets himself get lost in self-destructive mental spirals very easily, and his teratophilia has a tendency to fuel that. He *wants* the full Kafka experience, and his fantasizing often goes to great lengths to lay out all kinds of hypothetical insect-related scenarios to befall him. The true-to-this-AU canon happy ending I have for him, he ends up finding someone who can cherish the little bits of freakish in him in their own way. Several someones, actually.

40: Who does 'Choly trust most? Is that trust mutual? He trusts his DIA Mister Handy Angel the most. He's known it longer than any tissue-based lifeform. Boundary issues abound, often where 'Choly trusts Angel to cut the boundary lines, but Angel trusts 'Choly to communicate with it within those boundaries rather than avoid them altogether. He loathes disappointing it. Does Angel trust 'Choly? It doesn't trust him to be in control of his reckless self-destructive behaviors, but it does ultimately trust him to get them through conflicts in one piece.

50: How would you describe 'Choly's style of clothing? How would he describe his style of clothing? Tailored menswear, mixed with a bit of military and golfing cuts. He's set on looking nice, without looking like he's spent a fortune just to do so. Form > function, with the exception of his orthotics. He sometimes also experiments with mixing tailored women’s sportswear in; one of his prewar favorites was something of a romper-pantsuit.

57: How does 'Choly feel about sex? Is he a virgin? He insisted that he was a virgin, prior to doing anything with Sticks. In reality, it's one of many examples of his cryogenesis-induced interpersonal amnesia: He experimented a lot in his twenties, as it took a while for him to accept his asexuality.

62: Has 'Choly ever been betrayed? How did it affect his ability to trust others? He felt betrayed by Vault 111 staff, foremost that his intake paperwork had included both he and his roommate only for staff last minute to let just one of them in, but they also incinerated his belongings. He didn't so much feel betrayed as used, after everything that happens in Lowell. A future betrayal ends up breaking him, but he blames himself and still thinks there surely must have been some kind of misunderstanding.

78: Who does 'Choly consider to be his best friend? Angel, for sure.

88: Does 'Choly have an accent? It's subtle. When he's tired or under the influence, it's more noticeable. It was much stronger prior to Angel's speech training.

89: What's 'Choly's D&D alignment? Something adjacent to Lawful Evil. He's usually only got a conscience after the fact, when consequences of a failed attempt impact people besides himself.

============================

Sticks (Ghoul OC)

2: What is Sticks's sexuality? Overwhelmingly straight, but recently has been a bit bi-curious the longer he’s been alive.

14: What is Sticks' favorite food? How often does he get to eat it? He loved his lobster, and still highly resents that he still hasn't found a breed of Mirelurk that comes close to the original. As the owner of an ice cream parlor, he's also been known to make an understandably massive deal out of the handful of times he's been able to make brahmin ice cream: before the war, he spent a lot of time in a soda shop to nurse a Nuka Float habit. (Nuka Quartz was his fav. Putting his hands on a bottle these days is like obtaining a fine wine, and he keeps it for special occasions.)

18: What languages can Sticks speak? Where did he learn these languages? Just English.

23: Does Sticks get lonely easily? He doesn't really need company to get by in everyday life, but it invigorates him to be in control of social situations, if even in a passive way. He didn't realize how proximity-starved he was until 'Choly showed interest in him.

39: What does Sticks's happily ever after look like? He thought he attained his Happily Ever After, after succeeding at his grail of a con he'd attempted for going on a century: To somehow liberate the Deenwood Compound of its military chem secrets, so that he could sever ties with its General and hand over manufacture to a chemist that wasn't so difficult to do business with. He thinks there's no greater sense of control as a chem dealer, than to be able to pick not just your customers but your manufacturers. The second half of that H.E.A. is to get 'Choly set up with the equipment and means, to act on the promise that he would be one such chemist for Sticks. Achieving this through his partnership with 'Choly motivates a large swath of events in Third Instar.

40: Who does Sticks trust most? Is that trust mutual? He doesn't trust anyone, but he’s not remotely shy of interaction despite it. He tells backhanded truths as a way of "technically" not lying.

50: How would you describe Sticks's style of clothing? How would he describe his style of clothing? Simple, practical, relaxed fit.

57: How does Sticks feel about sex? Is he a virgin? He's no stranger to using sex favors to seal agreements and deals. Just like cooking meals, sex acts are largely contractual for him.

62: Has Sticks ever been betrayed? How did it affect his ability to trust others? He hedges just about every situation he possibly can, so even if one side does betray him, it rarely ever prevents him from seeing some reward for the effort.

78: Who does Sticks consider to be his best friend? The Furrier Ick.

88: Does Sticks have an accent? He's from Maine, but has lived in Mass long enough the local accent's all but usurped it.

89: What is Sticks’s D&D alignment? Somewhere between Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil. A lot of what he does, he does because he can... but ultimately it's all selfishness and his ability to manipulate others.

[solarmorrigan]

rules. it’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought to the world in 2020. tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

Would you believe I completed this in the first week of January and then forgot to post it? True facts. I am aware it is now May, but I’m gonna post it anyway because why the fuck not. No time of year is a bad time to show yourself some appreciation

I was tagged by @midrashic, whose writing is a joy, always such a smooth and insightful read, and who has kindly tagged me in many of these memes in the last year, which always makes my day. I actually did a lot of writing in 2020, but posted very little of it. Much of it was in bits and pieces, or I was too shy to post it, or I was too tired/busy/etc. to edit it and throw it up (so hey, maybe expect to see more shit from me this year, I’ve got a bit of a backlog)

So first: honorable mention to my NaNoWriMo fic, written for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, which is operating under the working title of “The Life in Your Years.” I wrote 58,000 words in less than a month and I was quite proud of that, and would like to polish it up and post it this year, but since I can’t link it or show anyone here, we’re not going to count it as part of the list. Instead, we have:

Agents of Death [James Bond - 00Q] Life after death wasn’t quite what Bond had expected.

Not that he could altogether recall what he had expected. He was fairly certain, though, that he would have expected the afterlife to include light and peace – or perhaps darkness and pain. Maybe he thought he would have faded to nothingness after dying.

He didn’t expect to have a day job, was the short of it.

This was the fic I wrote for the 2019/2020 00Q Reverse Big Bang. It took a lot of energy and stressed me the hell out and somehow ended up as one big slow burn fic, despite the fact I regularly profess distaste for slow burn, but I’m kind of pleased with this one anyway. I really did enjoy playing with Bond’s character and letting him bounce off of Q a bit, and the worldbuilding was fun to do

In the Details [James Bond - 00Q] Bond's housekeeper begins to notice some changes around the house

This was one of my favorite things written for last year’s 007 Fest. I had a lot of fun writing it, probably because it mostly combines domesticity and outsider POV, which are two of my favorite tropes. I was also glad that people really seemed to like the housekeeper character I made up! It’s been a long time since I’ve put much effort into an OC, so that was nice

“Bond has never fallen in love like this.” [James Bond - 00Q] Bond has never fallen in love like this

It has always been all at once, a cinder block to the sternum, never this steady drip of feelings that comes with every damned picture Q texts to him

This was probably actually my definite favorite thing written for 007 Fest last year. It was just meant to be a silly headcanon post at first and turned into something longer but that I actually really love. I just... I really love portraying people falling for the little details of a person, bit by bit, and that’s all this is, really. I keep meaning to edit it and put it on Ao3, though it’s not all that long, so maybe I’ll get around to that soon [spoiler from the May 2021: I did not]

That one headcanon about Aziraphale being knowledgeable about gardening [Good Omens - Ineffable Husbands] Okay, yes, the fanon that Aziraphale was a terrible gardener and that it drove Crowley up the wall and he had to go out and fix the grounds so “Brother Francis” didn’t get fired is amusing, but I feel like we’re missing out on an opportunity here

I was so glad (if startled) that this became one of my most popular posts. Part of the reason I kind of drifted away from the GO fandom was that I was so tired of seeing all the one-sided and apparently unrequited affection and effort that would come from Crowley, as if Aziraphale never did a damned thing to encourage or maintain their friendship. The fact that this one--a thought I had about Aziraphale making an effort to learn about Crowley’s interests--took off was very nice!

The Height of Amusement [Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - Abery] ...is about 5'7"

(In which the world has, on average, gotten taller since the 1800s, and this causes minor inconveniences.)

This is probably the weirdest fandom and absolutely the weirdest pairing I’ve ever been into. I try not to think too hard about it. The thing is, these books kind of reminded me to have fun with my writing, and that’s all I did while writing fic for this fandom. This particular piece isn’t my favorite out of what I’ve written, but I did just really enjoy being silly with it (and it’s one of the few I’ve actually published), so on the list it goes

I’m gonna tag some people now because, I repeat, no time of year is a bad time to show your appreciation. Go dig through your stuff from last year and find the happy. (If you already did this, I’m sorry, just ignore me. If I didn’t tag you and you want to do this, go for it): @spiritofcamelot, @soufflegirl91, @christinefromsherwood, @azure7539arts, uhh... maybe I shouldn’t have done this at 1 AM, I can’t think of anyone else I’m sorry THIS IS WHY IT TAKES ME SO LONG TO DO THESE THINGS