#certainly got a lot of people who posted a lot about immigration!

[sharlmbracta]

this

I spent the last 11 months working with my illustrator, Marta, to make the children's book of my dreams. We were able to get every detail just the way I wanted, and I'm very happy with the final result. She is the best person I have ever worked with, and I mean, just look at those colors!

I wanted to tell that story of anyone's who ever felt that they didn't belong anywhere. Whether you are a nerd, autistic, queer, trans, a furry, or some combination of the above, it makes for a sad and difficult life. This isn't just my story, and this is your story as well.

I also want to say the month following the book's launch has been very stressful. I have never done this kind of book before, and I didn't know how to get the word out about it. I do have a small publishing business and a full-time job, so I figured let's put my some money into advertising this time. Indie writers will tell you great success stories they've had using Facebook ads, so I started a page and boosting my posts. Within a first few days, I got a lot of likes and shares and even a few people who requested the book and left great reviews for me. There were also people memeing on how the boy turns into a delicious venison steak at the end of the book. It was all in good fun, though. It honestly made made laugh. Things were great, so I made more posts and increased spending.

But somehow, someway these new posts ended up on the wrong side of the platform. Soon, we saw claims of how the book was perpetuating mental illness, of how this book goes against all of basic biology and logic, and how the lgbtq agenda was corrupting our kids.

This brought out even more people to support the book, so I just let them at it and enjoyed my time reading comments after work. A few days later, then conversation moved from politics to encouraging bullying, accusing others of abusing children, and a competition to who could post the most cruel image. They were just comments, however, and after all, people were still supporting the book.

But then the trolls started organizing. Over night, I got hit with 3 one-star reviews on Amazon. My heart stopped. If your book ever falls below a certain rating, it can be removed, and blocked, and you can receive a strike on your publishing account. All that hard work was about to be deleted, and it was all my fault for posting it in the wrong place.

I panicked, pulled all my posts, and went into hiding, hoping things would die down. I reported the reviews and so did many others, but here's the thing you might have noticed across platforms like Google and Amazon. There are community guidelines that I referenced in my email, but unless people are doing something highly illegal, things are rarely ever taken down on these massive platforms. So those reviews are still there to this day. Once again, it's my fault, and I should have seen it coming.

Luckily, the harassment stopped, and the book is doing better now, at least in the US. The overall rating is still rickety in the UK, Europe, Canada, and Australia, so any reviews there help me out quite a lot. I'm currently looking for a new home to post about the book and talk about everything that went into it. I also love to talk about all things books if you ever want to chat. Maybe I'll post a selfie one day, too. Otherwise, the book is still on Amazon, and it's also on YouTube as well if you want to see the full story for free.

[nothorses]

About that "a trans man committing a mass shooting proves trans people really are the gender they identify as" post: women have committed mass shootings too? Okay it's a lot less statistically frequent, but it happens (as the song "I Don't Like Mondays" demonstrates). It reminds me of the time TERFs on Reddit assumed the woman who shot up the YouTube HQ in 2018 was trans, and then when she turned out to be cis, someone immediately speculated she was getting justified revenge on an abusive BF who worked there (though that comment got downvoted and may have been a troll)

I took this opportunity to look more into statistics around mass shooter demographics, and interestingly, there are a lot of myths tied up in this issue.

This article looks into a few studies and databases to investigate the "90% of all mass shooters are white men" myth, and finds that in actuality, "It really depends on what type of mass shooting you’re talking about. Several of the highest-profile mass shootings in recent memory [...] were committed by white males, such as the 2017 Las Vegas attack by Stephen Paddock. But much beyond that, the stereotype breaks down; Muslim man Omar Mateen killed forty-nine people at a Florida nightclub in 2016 on behalf of a terrorism group; white male Adam Lanza killed twenty-seven people in 2012 at an elementary school, though Asian student Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007. And so on."

This article fact-checks the gender-specific claims as well, in the context of trans people, and finds that there have been more claims that shooters are trans than can be reasonably substantiated, and that even this number is overshadowed by the number of cis women who have committed mass shootings.

I bring this up because I think the first article in particular brings a lot of much-needed nuance into the issue:

"The whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme does serve a useful purpose in that it helps displace another myth about mass shootings: that they’re most often perpetrated by angry immigrants from travel-banned countries, and that nothing is more dangerous to America that the scourge of Islamic terrorism. … These are worthy ends, but we shouldn’t have to build another myth to reach them.”

What are we saying when we talk about these kinds of incidents this way?

What I find interesting is that in a lot of these conversations around crime, we recognize that crime is often the result of poverty. Indeed, this study finds that the number of mass shootings increases in countries that experience an increase of income inequality.

We can also often recognize that these numbers are skewed because they rely on media coverage, arrests, and criminal charges; all of which are influenced by societal bias. The first article on mass shootings notes that, "mass shootings with white victims tend to get more attention, both from journalists and those on social media, than those with victims who are people of color. This is a well-known pattern and explains why the public is quicker to react to a missing young blonde girl than a missing young black girl."

Are white mass shooters covered more because their targets- being overwhelmingly people and institutions they have ties to- are also usually white?

If "white men are overrepresented as mass shooters" means white men are particularly dangerous and must be feared, what does this imply about other demographics overrepresented in certain crime statistics? What does it mean when we find this isn't true- is there suddenly just is not an issue of white cis male violence? I would certainly disagree.

And I think this gleeful claim that "trans men are proving their gender" by committing acts of violence- again, far more rare than cis women doing the same- only plays into these issues.

Is crime the result of entitlement and privileged anger, or is it the result of a broken system failing its citizens? Are cis men committing acts of extreme violence because they are all- regardless of race- whiny pissbabies who take joy in hurting others, or is this the result of a system that teaches men they can only express emotion through anger and violence? That human connection is not for them, and that needing things makes them unworthy of manhood, love, or even life?

I'm not saying we need to coddle and woobify mass shooters. I'm asking: is this an issue we fix by fearing and hating and wishing death on whole demographics of people based on how represented they are in criminal statistics, or can we make systemic and cultural changes that meaningfully prevent this from happening in the first place?

Do we condemn groups as Bad because some of them have done violence, or do we examine the causes and work toward meaningful solutions?

Obviously, trans men and trans people in general are not in any way "overrepresented" as perpetrators in mass shooting statistics. But I think the people reveling in any new trans male shooter are making it very clear that they don't care about solving problems; they're just interested in looking for reasons to hate, fear, and condemn this specific group of people they already dislike.

[centrally-unplanned]

That Thompson quote in the previous post is more contextual than the typical response lets on - it was made in 1972. Elections were just a *lot* swingier back then. Its exaggerated - you see things like Reagan's electoral victory in 1980:

Which seems like a devastating win, but he only got 50.7% of the vote, Carter got 41.0% (and independent John Anderson got ~6), the shifts were just broadly distributed. Still, its definitely more swing than you see today. Politics was less sticky, outcomes more surprising.

There are a million reasons for that but one of them was certainly that information was more centralized. If you had a political opinion and you weren't a political insider or some kind of radical, you got the news for your opinion from hierarchical information sources; newspapers, television, connected political groups. In this environment the idea that you could just get some with charisma and new ideas to sweep the electorate and authentically change minds wasn't that fantastical. You don't have to play to the median, people's median isn't that settled, you can pitch another way and create a new median. And if you can get a short-list of organizations to agree with you they will cooperate in broadcasting that new idea.

This is the idea someone like Thompson has; it seemed to him like the "center" was defining the median for voters, and people occasionally did come along and shift what the center was about in new directions. So his agenda could have its turn under the sun, that was possible. Particularly in 1972, with the counterculture movement fading sure but still very recent in memory, that seems like a viable idea, even if yeah overstated (oh, a writer, overly focused on the role of media and media figures? Shock!)

Its pretty dead-in-the-water today. The idea that politicians or even presidents get to "set the national priorities" is antiquated - no one cares what they think. The information environment is much flatter, there is scant ways for a politician to tell voters to stop caring about immigration or healthcare and start caring about national defense or w/e. The electorate is more partisan, more confident, and more bottom-up in how it forms opinions. While presidents can highlight *new* issues and sometimes raise them to prominence, they really can't change minds much. Honestly its a wonder campaigning does anything at all!

Of course this is papering over the complexity of today as well, but overall its just a bad political environment for this whole idea of running someone outside the median who like radically changes things via the process of running for that election. They are probably just going to lose, and almost certainly won't get congressional majorities. You gotta pursue other strategies for change.

[thewickerking]

hey. what?

well. For context everyone im assuming this ask is referring to this post and my tags below

im assuming because of the. The.

Many. Prev tags on it lmao but anyways here's more context. ill try to keep specific elements vague cause i don't want to doxx my grandma and by extension myself. But yeah let's go

my grandma (maternal) ran away from home in her teens (not sure the exact year/age but 70s ish) to join the circus and worked there for an amount of time doing ticket sales and miscellaneous jobs that aren't performance based

she met a guy also working there and they dated. this guy joined a satanic cult after joining the circus (? I think. Mightve been the other way around) and performed ritualistic sacrifice within the cult/with his murder victims. he was not in charge of the cult but was an active member and serial killer across around 4 states, maybe more (evidence was found for about 4 states iirc)

anyways he got caught for evidence of multiple murders but confessed to upwards of 20 (they couldn't find evidence of this so its unclear if he was exaggerating or if there simply wasn't enough irrefutable evidence) and went to prison while my grandma was pregnant and she was also arrested as an accomplice and had her kid in prison. She was 18 at the time. Idk how long she spent in prison but it was long enough to have her son taken away

her son (first of her four children, was my oldest uncle on my moms side) has adopted parents who changed his first and last name and didn't let him know about his biological parents (and were also extremely abusive) and so my mother and her siblings and her mom did unsuccessful research to find him over the years and he found our family a few years before he turned 30 (my moms ten years younger than him btw) and we've been in contact since and he was my personal favorite of my moms siblings

Oh also the serial killer got sentenced to life without parole and is currently on death row. My uncle died last year from unrelated circumstance (I posted about it some last year if anyone remembers) and my mom adopted 2 of 3 of his kids (3rd was a legal adult already) and then they got kidnapped and their kidnappers won the custody battle against my mom so. Yeah

Oh also worth noting my mom is the youngest of the four. my grandma had four kids with different men so im not related to the serial killer but he is in my family tree? Anyways yeah different fathers. My grandma remembers the serial killer and my moms father (my abuelito ♡ love him) but doesn't remember the fathers of the middle children (my aunt and uncle). So they're my moms half siblings technically and nobody knows if the middle children have other half siblings on their dads' sides 🤷‍♂️ but my mom has a half sister on her dad's side! She's 2 years younger than me bc my abuelito got married to his ex wife later in life but they're not together anymore (?) Not sure. They broke up idk if they legally divorced but they live in different countries and don't talk to each other. So.

Id love to meet her someday! But I don't know if thats feasible. She lives in Mexico and only speaks spanish so it would certainly be difficult. But I want to.... she almost immigrated to the United States like. 6 years ago?? My mom paid for documents to be legally translated and stuff but stuff happened and it didn't go through.she also tried to kill her mom once. But she's doing better. That's all a long story. We have a picture of her in our house from when she was little!

Ok thats very tangent-y. I have a lot of family stories. But also if anyone was curious this post below was also about my maternal grandmother

shes a white woman who likes to weaponise having "friends" in nepal when people are mean to her. She's a character. if ppl are curious abt any of this i will answer btw i love talking abt my family they're deranged

[dragoneyes618]

There’s a popular slogan in Israel that appears on car stickers, jewelry and suchlike: Ein Li Eretz Acheret, “I have no other country.” The phrase comes from the title of an iconic and extremely moving song written by Ehud Manor, with music composed by Corinne Allal, and originally recorded in 1986 by Gali Atari; we will mention those names again later. Its opening lines and chorus are Ain li eretz acharet, gam im admati bo’eret, “I have no other country, even if my land is burning.”

A neighbor of mine, who was experiencing considerable war anxiety about the land burning, told me that he didn’t relate to it at all. He said, “But I do have another country. I can go back to Teaneck!” And he said that if things got worse, he would seriously consider doing so.

At the beginning of the war, I was wondering the same thing. I do have another country – two, actually. I have UK citizenship and my wife has U.S. citizenship, and our children have both. Maybe we should go back to live somewhere safer? One of the commentators on the previous post was talking about Lakewood as being a safe and excellent place to live with a rich Jewish life.

Now I could continue by talking about how special and beneficial it is to live in Israel, about how it’s both the Promised Land and our historic homeland, about how it’s the only country with Jewish sovereignty. Which would all be true. But there’s a different point that I want to discuss in this post.

Yes, I do have another country that I could go to (though it wouldn’t be at all straightforward, especially for my children). So do lots of people in Ramat Beit Shemesh and the rest of Israel.

But there’s also lots and lots and lots of people who don’t.

There are millions of Jews in Israel who just don’t have anywhere else to go. There are those who simply don’t have the money for it and would find it too difficult to find employment in a country where they don’t even speak the language. There are those who are too old or ill or who have young children that would suffer from a move. There are those who have crucial responsibilities here. There are those who are just too deeply embedded here.

Even more to the point, there are also millions of Jews who literally don’t have any passport other than their Israeli one. What other country will let them in? The Jews who came from Iran and Egypt and Syria and Yemen are certainly not able to go back to those countries! Nor are Russia and many European countries a safe place for Jews. And even countries which are relatively safe and allow some immigration are not going to accept millions of Jews (and if they did, those countries would likely quickly become not very safe for Jews).

In fact, that’s one of the main reasons why Israel came to exist in the first place. As antisemitism grew in Europe, many Jews realized that they needed to get out, but simply had nowhere to go. Twenty years before the Holocaust, at least 100,000 Jews were massacred in pogroms in the Ukraine, which also created 600,000 Jewish international refugees and millions more who were displaced and threatened.

At this point, many people realized that an even greater catastrophe might happen. But the countries to which the largest numbers of Jewish refugees were fleeing all revised their immigration policies to prevent further Jewish immigration. This included not only Poland and Germany (which obviously wouldn’t have been a good long-term solution anyway), but also the United States, Argentina, and British Palestine. In the U.S., Henry Ford’s newspaper published pamphlets about the Jewish problem, claiming that the national debt was Jewish-inspired to enslave Americans and other such hateful slurs to keep Jews out.

Then things got even worse in Europe, with the rise of Hitler. Some people managed to get out. The parents of Ehud Manor, writer of Ain Li Eretz Acheret, fled Belarus and managed to get into Palestine.

Yet still no country was willing to take in millions of Jews. The U.S. convened the Évian conference, bringing together 32 countries to find a home for Jewish refugees. But aside from the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, no country, including the U.S., was willing to accept Jewish refugees in any remotely significant number. Consequently, millions of Jews were killed in Europe.

And even after the horrors of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors still had nowhere to go! Some of them went back to their home towns in Poland and were killed in a pogrom. Others languished in Displaced Persons camps for years, some of which were actually in concentration camps. My late mother-in-law spent the first years of her life in a DP camp; her parents were lucky enough to have a relative in the U.S. who eventually managed to bring them over, but most Jews did not have such an option.

Many Jews, very understandably, realized that a Jewish homeland was needed. It wasn’t about it necessarily being the safest place for a Jew to live. Everyone always knew that Palestine was in a hostile and dangerous part of the world, and that there would be a challenge with the resident Arabs (though it was generally assumed that some sort of compromise would be worked out; there was no broad plan to drive them out). And on the eve of the War of Independence, it was assessed that there was only a 50-50 chance of survival!

Israel has not yet been, and still is not, the safest place in the world for Jews. But not everyone has the option to live in the safest place in the world – many people just need somewhere that is safer than where they currently live. And in any case, having a homeland is not about attaining the greatest safety – it is about having a home, a place that Jews historically belong, a place that Jews can always come to when they fear persecution or experience discrimination, where we can take responsibility for our own safety, and where we can put being Jewish into action and expression.

While Israel won the War of Independence – at a cost of 1% of its population – this created a crisis for nearly a million Jews in Muslim countries, who were persecuted and had to make immediate use of Israel as a refuge. The parents of Gali Atari, singer of Ain Li Eretz Acheret, fled Yemen for Israel, while composer Corinne Allal’s family fled from Tunisia. But it should be born in mind that even if Israel had not come into existence, the existence of Jews in Muslim lands was difficult and very precarious.

And so we reach the situation that we are in today. Israel is home to over seven million Jews. Most of them do not have another country to go to, even if they wanted to (which they don’t). Ain lahem eretz acheret.

(As Haviv Rettig Gur notes, this is the fundamental mistake made by many Palestinians and their supporters, who believe that they can rid of the Jews with violence just as the Algerians successfully used violence to get the French colonialists to go back to France. They don’t grasp that most Jews just don’t have a country to go back to, and thus violence won’t achieve anything and will even be counter–productive.)

Now, there are some Jews who only look at things in terms of their own personal interests. “Where is a safe place for me to live? What is a spiritually safe environment for my children?” And if, as a result, others are less safe physically and spiritually and have to take on an even larger cost to their families and jobs and religious life, then that’s just too bad.

But others feel a sense of responsibility to the rest of our people. It’s not “me” and “them” – it’s us. The correct formulation is not ain li eretz acharet or ain lahem eretz acharet. It’s ain lanu eretz acheret.

Millions of Jews need Israel. And Israel needs a strong army and a strong economy to finance it and a flourishing national Jewish life. Each and every one of us has a responsibility to help with that.

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

2023 Movie Journey #17: Elemental

elemental. i watched this one earlier this week with my family...and i'm finally caught up on movie reviews! which means i can now post new ones right after i see the movies. yay.

this movie's cast has some actors who i know, probably most notably a guy i enjoyed in jurassic world dominion. but much, much more importantly, the star of this movie is leah lewis, so even if i hadn't liked the movie overall i still would have had a great time watching it.

i fell immediately in love with leah lewis's portrayal of george when i started watching nancy drew this year. and i mean immediately--i was watching with somebody who loved bess the most, and i had seen so much ace on my tumblr dash that i knew i'd like him too, but george was still my favorite character by the time i finished the pilot. without even knowing how great and rewarding her season 1 arc would be, or how much depth she would eventually have beyond her introduction as 'grudge-holding black sheep nancy's boss,' i could just tell she was my type of fave.

and even after watching the whole first season of nancy drew, it wasn't until i was rewatching it to show it to @actuallylukedanes that i accidentally learned george was played by leah lewis...and that i already knew her! she was in the half of it! which i watched and reviewed in 2020, and loved so much that i've wanted to get other people to watch it ever since. i didn't connect her performances at all, but even my review back then raved about how she was what made the movie good.

so when i realized she was starring in this, i was thrilled. and what i love about her is that she's consistently the kind of actor who has a real presence: she makes her characters engaging and stands out in a big way for somebody still young (though she started acting as a kid, so i know she's not new just cuz she's newish to me). she's signed on to the matlock reboot with kathy bates and i don't expect to love that cbs show, but i am very excited to try it anyway.

as for the movie though: i couldn't help but spend the first half just hearing george, in all her lines. not in a distracting or bad way, but a nice familiar feeling. i suspect the goal with animated disney heroines is to not make them too distinctive, because there's kind of a 'friendly normal' sound to the modern ones regardless of the actress that means even when i can recognize who's speaking, they all sound a little more similar than i would ever say they do in live action work. (either that or it's just me not being able to differentiate as well in animation, which is certainly possible.)

anyway, i loved everything about her work in this; she was the reason i cried a few times. in my opinion that's always a mark of good work, making an impressive amount of connection with viewers using just your voice.

i also really liked her parents and wade, despite the movie's core conflict revolving around all of them--this movie did a good job of explaining who everybody was as things went along, in a more than superficial way, so that it was much easier to still like people when the Bad Times came because they made more sense and were more sympathetic. as family conflicts go, compared to encanto and turning red, this one was my favorite because of that. no matter how angry or disappointed her father got, or how much that affected ember, i could still sympathize with him too and believe that his love for her was more important than anything else.

now, i know this movie got mixed reviews (or possibly worse? i only saw vague headlines) but i'm not really sure why! the metaphor they used to tell the story about immigration and a diverse society was maybe more blunt than usual, but i don't think that's a bad thing. and while it did center on themes that disney movies cover a lot (family expectations, parental disappointment, feeling like a failure, being an outsider, etc)...there are reasons those themes pop up so much!

especially when pixar movies are trying to appeal to both kids and adult audiences, i think it makes total sense to keep coming back to the 'classics.' again, there were a lot of thematic similarities between encanto and turning red and this movie (despite their differences in the details) and i watched those other two--encanto more than once--but still cried just as easily when ember confessed to her dad that she was a bad daughter, and when they bowed to each other before she left. the wounds between us and our parents never really heal, i think, at least not for everybody. so this movie tugged at me by just representing those feelings well, and making me care about the characters.

and when it comes to caring about the characters, probably my favorite thing about the movie besides the cast was the way the plot genuinely surprised me. i expected a happy ending, because it's a disney movie. but based on the trailer, i didn't know what to expect between ember and wade beyond 'they meet and things happen.' and the movie does such a good job of setting up the world they live in and the rules they live by that i believed them.

so in the beginning, i figured they were going to become unexpected friends, and navigating that alone would be a challenge. in that story, presumably the happy ending would've been something like, she learns that wade is right and she doesn't have to stay with fire people and never interact with the rest of the world, and they get to have further adventures.

but then! it turns out that this movie is going for romance. weirdly, i don't expect that from disney movies--you'd think i would when they're the home of princess culture and everything, but i wasn't a 'princess meets her prince for a happy ending' kid. i grew up with disney classics but didn't imprint on any of them.

instead, i was a don bluth kid! singing music from an american tail is literally one of my earliest memories, and my animated love story growing up was anastasia. if i squint, i can kind of see overlap between that animated romcom and this one, in terms of traumatic family history and a guarded, feisty female lead who gets what she thought she wanted all along just as she's also fallen in love with someone whose difference threatens her new fulfilled goal.

i'm not saying the two movies are very alike, lol...a zombie sorcerer belongs nowhere in elemental, obviously. but they both treat their romances with less sentimental sweetness, more sparkage and sincerity. the flirting in this is cute, and i loved them more the further along we went.

but of course, there's still that pesky plot-established problem that makes them a doomed romance. so once it was clear that their dynamic was about falling in love, not just befriending the 'other'...then i honestly expected a bittersweet ending where friends is all they can be. because this is disney, not pushing daisies, and in a world where nobody seems to have invented the elemental version of saran wrap for characters to safely kiss through, what kind of future could they have?

i did not expect them to give us this story where the characters are all believable in how firmly they believe (or don't, in wade's case) that different elements can't mix, and then for the story to show us those differences being overcome. i mean, that theme isn't exactly a new one, love conquering all, but the differences were so much more concrete here--it was life or death for them! when the parental disapproval alone was almost enough to ruin their chances!

i suppose you could flip my reaction to this movie and look at it the opposite way, and complain that their ability in the end to do what the story all along told us couldn't be done made it a waste of time, like the stakes were fake even if they didn't know that. maybe if you predicted the ending from the beginning, it could have felt that way.

but i didn't have expectations for the ending. so while i was really hoping ember and wade could be together, i was prepared for the alternative, a more modest 'crossing the aisles' journey of discovery for them both that opened her world and future and allowed him into her life from a safe distance going forward. instead, their whole story was wonderful and i love them and i'm so glad that they get to be the odd couple they are in a very divided world.

one last fun (if also slightly vexing) thing about this movie is that while it does end, it leaves a lot open, too. and i wanted to get to see ember start her internship; i wanted to learn about their new life and if it goes well for them once they're out in the broader world. i guess i wasn't ready to say goodbye to them, really, is all.

but that was fun at least on the level of seeing this with my family--it meant that after it ended, we were discussing what a sequel could be about, and that segued into a discussion about whether ember and wade could have kids or if they'd have to adopt--and how cool it would be if them having kids would create new elements or something. i love that idea a lot.

and i enjoyed this movie a lot. it was super pretty, i liked most of the characters, and it was unexpected romcom fun. i'm officially rooting for pixar to make more love stories now.

[6stronghands]

FOOOOOOOD

yesterday my kid gave me cream filled milk bread, meat stuffed croquets (both were even better than they look in the baking videos, like genuinely wonderful baked goods, am now a bit obsessed with milk bread and croquets) and fried cheese curds and fancy tea (like extremely posh and gorgeous stuff, this kid worked in a tea shop for years and knows from tea yo) and our family friend (who is running a store but should be a highly paid locally famous chef, everything she cooks tastes like perfume, she’s incapable of making mediocre food; people think I’m exaggerating until they taste her cooking and then they freak out too, she’s that good) made one of the best cheeseburgers I’ve ever eaten (WITH a fried runny egg, good lord) and fried potato discs

AND my kid got a very decent job in their field!!!!! first real post college job (after a metric shittonne of gig work and like yearrrrrrs of HARD labor for min wage). this kid went through college slowly because we’re so broke, and has worked so hard for so long and they’ve been through so much family and personal tragedy, like the kind that’s so brutal you don’t talk about it much, if ever, and they’re gorgeous, literally, and brilliant, literally, but they’re really really quiet and calm and always serving other people, always propping up others, so they get overlooked A LOT alot a lot. this job is a big deal. they’ve been through so much, they’re afraid to be too happy about it but I’m freaking delighted for them, they deserve all the money and promotions and accolades, like allll of them i mean goddamm

and our chef friend GOT BEYONCE TICKETS and this girl lives and dies for Bey, she’s already planning her outfit and nails for the fall concert (there are going to be the most incredible Looks and Fan Homages at the shows, cannot wait to see all the pics)

food and job and tix, all on the same day 

this is a big deal for our friend, she loves Beyonce the way I love Keanu. I know everyone is suffering, but she’s an artistic genius who got a degree in business because she’s a first gen child of immigrants, so she’s running a grocery store in freaking lawrence kansas during the apocalypse. she’s always had to deal with racist and sexist shit but lately? if i could get her to wear a bulletproof vest to work, i’d feel a lot better. she gets all the bullshit and danger and none of the perks, literally none of them, not from her bosses or her employees, certainly not from abusive customers. getting Bey tix is like winning the lottery for her, it’s such a big happy thing 

everything is broken and hard and awful but there’s still incredible food and precious family and friends

feeling grateful, wanted to share because other folks good news feels personal and wonderful to me lately, like community victories, so am hoping my nice day is a good thing for yawl the way your personal victories and fun stuff is so lovely for me

[madam-melon-meow]

Arranged marriages

Whenever i see arranged marriage as a trope the only thing i can think of is my great-grandmother, who as a young adult in Italy had a guy she loved, but when her father arranged a marriage between herself and a fisherman, that guy quietly disappeared from the picture , so when my great-grandmother, 40 years later and 30 years a widow, was walking in a market in boston with her grandaughter (my mom) and ran into that old boyfriend, she quietly expressed to my mom that it was “too late” to ever reconnect with him.

There’s a lot more i could say about my great grandmother, how her father chose the fisherman for his ability to provide, “the war” killed the fisherman even though he was not a soldier- blown up by a landmine infront of his eldest son. how the resulting poverty of a single mother raising a half dozen kids on her own led to them boiling grass for food and seawater to sell the salt. How she managed to raise the funds to get them all to america, including her now married son and his wife, and bribed an officer because one of her sons had stolen a bicycle and wasn’t allowed to leave. How she and her children lived in an unheated attic in boston in winter, in her brother’s house, until the wife tired of them and kicked them to the streets. How my own grandma, who was twelve, learned english at school and taught it to her mother and other Italian immigrants each evening (and my mom would be recognized by those people years later, by those who were grateful for those lessons). How she made sure all her children, including my grandma, were able to adapt to america, and still made sure to host big sunday dinners as her family grew with each grandchild born. All the things she experienced in her life , until that day in the market, walking with her grandchild, seeing the face of a man she had loved when she was young, a man who had not argued when her father said she could not marry him. There was not much romance in her life, certainly not with the fisherman, long since dead and buried. But it was too late to reconnect with this man, even as a friend. That time had passed. So she walked on with my mother, and watched her family grow. I don’t know when the dementia began, if she was clear-minded when i was born, though i know she spoke only Italian in my only real memory of her, when we visited her before her death, when i was 8.

This post was meant to be a “why i dont see arranged marriages as a romance trope , instead seeing them as something that can remove romance from a person’s life, but stories without romance are still powerful anyway”. I got caught up thinking about my family history, and the arranged marriage i know of personally.

[analytically]

“Immigrant” merely refers to the act of moving from one place to another. It doesn’t tell you anything about culture, IQ, time preference, propensity towards cooperation, language, values, religion, philosophy towards law, etc. Saying “your ancestors were immigrants therefore immigrants will become like you” is like saying “1 is a number and 2 is a number, therefore 1 = 2.” Something missing from this conversation, yet necessary to create, is a demonym term for the Americans who descend from the original “immigrants.” The ones who aren’t red indians yet are native to this country. The Americans whose ancestors rode the mayflower or fought in the revolution or civil war. I’ve seen Amerikaaner proposed, but not really catch on. (Personally, I’m not a huge fan of it, but it’s at least better than USian.) Anyway, that’s what’s clouding this conversation. America is the way it is because of Amerikaaners or USians or whatever you want to call them. Those people made America what it is. Replacing that demographic will change not just the culture, but all material conditions. Look at Detroit: when it was populated solely by Amerikaaners/USians, it was almost paradise on earth, it was a beautiful place. They were replaced, and Detroit isn’t so nice anymore.

“Immigrant” merely refers to the act of moving from one place to another. It doesn’t tell you anything about culture, IQ, time preference, propensity towards cooperation, language, values, religion, philosophy towards law, etc.

these things are not immutable; they can and do change in populations over time.

Anyway, it sounds like you're asking for a term for Americans who aren't indigenous and whose ancestors arrived before 1850 or thereabouts? That's fine, maybe call them pre-1850ers or something? (It's worth noting that I'm not one of these people.)

Detroit doesn't seem like a good example for immigration/non-pre-1850ers causing trouble, though. Detroit is certainly struggling, but its population is 78% African-American and 11% white; presumably at least 80% of those black Detroiters are descended from slaves (as opposed to post-1850 voluntary immigration). Detroit got a lot of 20th-century immigration from Europe, so let's say only 10% of white Detroiters are pre-1850ers. That still makes Detroit 63% pre-1850, and its population in 2010 was only 7% foreign-born.

In comparison, lots of other cities like New York, Phoenix, Dallas, and Boston have many times more immigrants than Detroit, and probably have a greater proportion of non-pre-1850ers than Detroit. Do you think Detroit is a better place to live? It seems other factors are more salient than presence of pre-1850ers.

[jonfarreporter]

Sonoma Valley Jazz Society Mourns the Loss of a local musician

Members of The Sonoma Valley Jazz Society were saddened by the tragedy and untimely death of Alto Saxophone musician Andrew Speight which occurred on December 1.

Shocked at the news which travelled quickly throughout the Jazz music community of the San Francisco Bay Area, SVJS President Janis King wanted to express her condolences.

“When Andrew played here in Sonoma many people had not heard him previously but once he took the stage everyone recognized immediately that he was a stellar player.”

The exact details of his death are unclear as to why his car was stuck on the tracks. As reported by the San Jose Mercury News, The fatal collision was reported around 1:40 p.m. that Thursday near the Broadway Caltrain station in Burlingame.

A suburb along The Peninsula about 30 minutes away from San Francisco, Burlingame is where Speight lived. It wasn’t specified as to whether he was going to the City or coming back; only that his car got stuck and was struck by a southbound train and then by a northbound train.

In addition to his many performances throughout the Bay Area and elsewhere Speight was part of the faculty at San Francisco State University. He taught classes such as jazz ensemble, improvisation and jazz history. And he was a ‘Lecturer of Music.’

Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1964, he was the son of jazz pianist John Speight. Officials at SF State U noted that the younger Speight followed in his father’s footsteps by studying at the Sydney Conservatory of Music, though his preferred instrument was the alto saxophone. Sometimes referred to as a common instrument, Speight was able to make an impression early on as he was able to go on tour with Benny Carter and Nat Adderley.

He immigrated to the U.S. in 1992 to join the music faculty at Michigan State University. He moved to San Francisco in 1998. Not confined by teaching he continued performing. He was a part of the award-winning Wynton Marsalis Band and was able to perform at The Lincoln Center in New York City.

By the end of the decade he and his band the Andrew Speight Quartet, won the 1999 the Australian Recording Industry Association Music Award for ‘Best Jazz Album.’ (An “ARIA” is the land down under’s version of a Grammy Award).

“His arrangements were amazing and so were his solos,” said King.

Respected by students and faculty, Speight didn’t let the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic stop the music. As Café Stritch, founder in San Jose, Steve Borkenhagen told the SJ Mercury News. “When COVID-19 hit, Andrew stepped up and created a beautiful ‘jazz club’ in his home … and he held weekly concerts with many of the brightest lights in the jazz firmament,” “We will all miss him dearly.” Borkenhagen added.

Pointing out how quickly and how profoundly Speight made an impact, King said in her grief, “Our Jazz Society here in Somoma received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from Andrew's concert.  The crowd loved him - When he played it was apparent to everyone that he was living his dream.   

Described by several as “a consummate professional and a gentleman,” Speight made friends wherever he went.

As King noted, “I only knew Andrew Speight for his great playing but he was also known for his teaching and friendship which was very obvious at his memorial.”

The outpouring of grief as well as appreciation for Speight’s talent and generosity were expressed on social media. Like the SVJS people many places were shocked and stunned.

 “So many students were present at the memorial,” said King. “And, a whole lot of friends. Andrew was certainly keeping Jazz alive by sharing his love of jazz with his students,” she added.

His family in a Facebook posting asked that those who knew him “Please take a moment to pray for his peace.” Andrew Speight was 58.

[misnomera]

On racial stereotyping of the Haans in TMA...

Right so as someone who is ethnically Chinese I have NO FUCKING clue how I didn’t notice this more distinctly in my initial binge of tma (going too fast and not paying closer attention to character names and descriptions, probably) but the Haan family storyline is, all horror elements aside, pretty fucked up in terms of racial representation re: stereotyping. This got long as hell, but please please please take a moment to read through if you’ve got time for it. thanks.

To start off, the Haans are one of the few characters in tma with an explicitly specified race and ethnicity—Chinese—and pretty much the only explicitly Chinese characters in tma, other than the mostly unimportant librarian (Zhang Xiaoling) from Beijing. But like, Haan isn’t even a properly Chinese surname, at least not in the way that it’s spelled in canon (it should be Han, one a. A quick google search tells me that Haan as a surname has...Dutch origins??).

Of course, that could be chalked up to shoddy anglicization processes within family histories, which certainly isn’t uncommon with immigrant families, so I’m not going to dwell on names too much (although I also find it interesting that John Haan’s name is so specifically and weirdly anglicized that he changed his own surname?? Hun Yung to John Haan is a very big leap of a name change and frankly not very believable. ANYWAY, this is not that important. I don’t expect Jonny, a white Englishman, to come up with perfectly unquestionable non-Cho-Chang-like Chinese names, though it certainly would be nice. Moving on).

What really bothers me about the Haans is how they almost exclusively and explicitly play into negative Chinese immigrant stereotypes. I don’t even feel like I need to say it because it’s like...it’s literally Right There, folks. John Haan (in ep 72) owns and operates a sketchy takeout restaurant. They’re all avatars of the Flesh—and John Haan is Specifically horrific and terrifying because he cooked his wife’s human meat and fed it to his unknowing customers. Does that remind you of any stereotypes which accuse Chinese people of consuming societally unacceptable and ethically questionable things like dog/cat/bat meat (which, if it’s not already crystal fucking clear, we don’t. do that.), which in turn characterize us as horrible unfeeling monsters? John Haan’s characterization feeds (haha, badum tss) directly into this harmful stereotype that have caused very real pain for Chinese people and East Asians in general. 

And Jonny does nothing to address that from within his writing (and not out of it either). And, speaking on a more meta level, Jonny could’ve easily had these flesh avatars be individuals of any race (like, what’s Jared Hopworth’s ethnicity? Do we know? No? Well then). Conversely, he could’ve easily, easily had a Chinese person be an avatar of any other entity. So why did he have to chose specifically the Flesh?

(This is a rhetorical question. You know why. Racial stereotyping and invoking a fear of the other in an attempt to enhance horror, babey~)

On Tom Haan’s side, Jonny seems weirdly intent on having other characters repeatedly comment on his accent (or rather, lack thereof) in relation to his race. Think about how, in ep 30 (killing floor), the fact that Tom Haan had spoken a line to the statement giver in “perfect English” was an emphasized beat in that statement, and a beat that was supposed to be “chilling” and meant to signify to us that something was, quote-unquote, “not right” with Tom Haan. Implicitly, that’s saying that it was unexpected, not “normal”, and in this case even eerie, for someone who looks Chinese to have spoken in fluid, unbroken English. Mind you, the line itself was perfectly scary on its own (“you cannot stop the slaughter by closing the door”), so why did Jonny feel the need to note the accent in which it was spoken in? Why did Jonny HAVE to have that statement giver note, that he initially “wasn’t even sure how much English [Haan] spoke”? 

This happens again in episode 72 with a Chinese man (and again, his ethnicity is Explicitly Noted) who we assume is also Tom Haan. This one is rather ironically funny and kind of painfully self aware, because the statement giver expresses surprise at Haan’s “crisp RP accent” and then immediately “felt bad about making the assumption that he couldn’t speak English,” and subsequently admitted that thought was “low-key racist.” Like, from a writing perspective, this entire passage is roundabout, pointless, and says absolutely nothing helpful to enhance the horror genre experience for listeners (instead it just sounded like some sort of half-assed excuse so Jonny or other listeners could say “look! We’ve addressed the racism!” You didn’t. It just made me vaguely uncomfortable). And again, having other people comment on our accents/lack thereof while assuming we are foreign is a Very Real microaggression that east asians face on the daily. If Jonny needed some filler sentences for pacing he could’ve written about Literally anything else. So why point out, yet again, that the crazy murderous man was foreign and Chinese? 

At this point, you might say, right, but yknow, it was just that the statement givers were kind of racist! It happens! Yeah sure, ok, that’s a passable in-universe explanation for descriptions of Tom Haan (though not John Haan, mind you), but the statement givers are fake made up people, and statement’s still written by Jonny, who absolutely has all the power to write overt discrimination out of his stories. And he does! Think about just how many minor (and major!!) characters are so, so carefully written as completely aracial, and do not have their ethnicity implicated at all in whatever horrors they may or may not be committing. Think about how many lgbtq+ characters have given statements, and have been in statements, without having faced direct forms of discrimination, or portrayed as embodying blatant stereotypes in their stories (though lgbtq+ rep in tma certainly has their own issues that I won’t go into here). Jonny can clearly write characters this way, and he can do it well. So why, why, am I being constantly, repeatedly reminded in-text of the fact that the Haans are East Asian, that they’re from China, that they’re Chinese immigrants, that they’re second-generation British Chinese or whatever the fuck, and that they’re also horrifying conduits for blood, gore, and general fucked-up-ness? It’s absolutely not something that is Needed for the stories to be an effective piece of horror; the only thing it does is perpetuate incredibly harmful and hurtful stereotypes.

And listen, I love tma to bits. It’s taken over my blog. I’ve really loved my interactions with the fandom. And I am consistently blown away by Jonny’s writing and how well he’s able to weave foreshadowing and plot into an incredibly complex collection of stories. But I absolutely Cannot stop thinking about the Haans because it’s just. It’s such a blatant display of racial stereotyping in writing. And I’ve certainly seen a few voices talking about it here and there, and I don’t know if I’m just not looking in the right places, but it certainly feels like something that is just straight up not on the radar for a lot of tma fans. And I’m disappointed about that. 

Just, I don’t know. Take a look at those episodes again and do some of your own thinking about why these characters had to be specifically Chinese (answer: they didn’t.). And in general, PLEASE for the love of god turn a critical eye on character portrayals and descriptions whenever they are assigned specific races/ethnicities (Some examples that come to mind are Jude Perry, Annabelle Cane, and Diego Molina), because similar issues, to an extent, extend beyond the Haans, though I haven’t covered them here. 

You shouldn’t need a POC to do point out these problems for you when they’re so glaringly There. But for those of you who really didn’t know, hope this was informative in some way. I’m tired, man. If some of the only significant Chinese characters you write are violent cannibalistic men with a perverted relationship with meat, just don’t do it. Please don’t do it. 

EDIT: Since the making of this post Jonny has acknowledged and apologized for these portrayals on his twitter and in the Rusty Quill Operations Update, which went up September 2020. A long time coming, but better late than never. This of course doesn’t necessarily negate the harm done by Jonny’s writing, and doesn’t make me much less angry about it, but is appreciated nonetheless. For more on this topic there’s a lot of productive discussions happening in my “#tma crit” tag and in the notes of this post

[no-reply95]

Funny story: I was first introduced to the "No Pakistanis" version of Get Back through a callout post on Tumblr back in the early '10s. It took the song WAY out of context and painted them as a bunch of anti-immigrant racists. I had never looked further into it because of that, fearing that I couldn't look at the band the same way. Fast forward to the new Get Back movie, and I was relived to see that was meant to be a satirical jab at the anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK at the time. (cont.)

Hi anon, thanks for the ask! :)

This is a really interesting topic that I’ve thought about on and off for some time so thanks for giving me the push to discuss this!

I think the two main factors behind the negative takes on John are the natural negative pushback to his deification and the advent of the internet.

I think Goldman’s book was certainly one of the first to take aim at the myth of St John, along with books from May Pang, John Green etc. I haven’t read Goldman’s book, but from what I understand, his book was almost universally negative, no context was given to John's actions, evidence of John's good nature was ignored and the agenda behind it was clearly to tear down the messianic image of John that was born on 8 December 1980. When Goldman’s book came out it was trashed by Yoko, Paul, Rolling Stone, pretty much anyone who had anything to do with the Beatles implored the general public not to read or believe it and, by and large, that’s what happened, it was a critical and commercial failure. I think, even by 1988 when The Lives of John Lennon was released, the general public weren’t ready to confront the less savoury aspects of John’s personality and life that were (gleefully) recounted in Goldman’s book. The fact that the book had the bipartisan condemnation of Paul and Yoko made it easy to dismiss it as unfounded lies by the same man who had also published a similar hit piece on Elvis Presley. It didn’t help Goldman that when he was confronted with criticisms he was arrogantly defiant and, on publication, from what I understand, a series of his sources came out to say that their words had been misrepresented or taken out of context. In the late 80s there was no demand for the content of Goldman’s book, its findings were universally rejected and Albert Goldman, as a person, was the ideal hate figure, all in all, on release and in the years subsequent, Goldman’s book didn’t do much to move the dial in the way John and his legacy were perceived.

However, as John’s murder got more distant and became more of a historical event than a contemporary tragedy, I think people were able to view John more objectively. A factor in this was that those who were close to him in life (Paul, Yoko, Cynthia, Julian etc.) were more comfortable talking about the negative side of John’s personality, addressing the fact that he was more than a symbol of peace, but had actually been a flawed man, friend, husband and father. With respect to Goldman, as the decades have gone by, aspects of his book have been confirmed as fact (i.e. Yoko's heroin relapse in the late 70s/early 80s) and prominent Beatles authors (Doggett, Lewisohn etc.) have praised the level of research Goldman did for his book, making it harder to dismiss the John portrayed as complete fiction. I also think, that after a certain point, the deification push from the Lennon Estate reached a saturation point where, after that, it was just diminishing returns, the more and harder the estate pushed it, the less likely people were to believe it. The general public loves to raise up celebrities and put them on pedestals but more than that, they love to knock them off, so I think that’s what happened with John, that natural instinct to want to pull a celebrity down a peg or two collided with the other great equaliser, the advent of the internet.

I think in the 80s and 90s, pre the advent of the internet, the print media and the Beatles/estates had a lot more control over their narratives. If you wanted to know anything about the Beatles you could get a biography, watch a documentary (Compleat Beatles, Anthology etc.), watch interviews or read articles on the band and their history (Rolling Stone, Mojo, etc.) there was only so much information you could find and a lot of it was directly controlled or influenced by the Beatles/estates (granting interviews to publications that gave them favourable reviews, maintaining friendships with magazine editors/authorising books on their lives and granting those books access to close associates and archives) I think the influence that the Beatles had on narratives and their public perception started to breakdown when the internet started to gain traction.

The point that I come back to is that the internet is the place that nuance comes to die. I think people get a kick out of making statements, or taking things out of context (I.e. "John Lennon was a wife beater", "the Beatles were racist", "John abandoned Julian" etc.) once these types of statements are out there, they spread round the internet like wildfire and any additional context or nuance is beaten away to leave a sound bite that’s easy to digest till all you have left is a caricature where a human once was.

With the internet, it became a lot easier to find resources that were going counter to the myth built up by the Lennon Estate, you could read up on Goldman’s takes, May Pang’s, John Green’s, Fred Seaman’s, all books that took chunks out of the ballad narrative that had been spun for decades. Fans were finding it easier to mobilise on online forums to discuss topics, such as the Lost Weekend, that were pretty much taboo in mainstream media, all of these otherwise off limit talking points now had a home on the internet and I think that helped to move the dial on what people were willing to believe about John and the extent they were going to swallow what his Estate had been giving them for years, I think that groundswell attitude also seeped into the mainstream media.

I think things really start to come to a head when people detect any hint of hypocrisy. The Lennon Estate for decades, and even to an extent to this day, built John up as an icon of peace and a proponent of non-violence. The song most prominently pushed by his Estate is Imagine, that song alone is the corner stone of the image of John they project but John himself, during his lifetime, made it clear that Imagine was just a song, not his timeless manifesto. Before I got into the Beatles fandom, you could have told me that John was murdered the day after he released Imagine and I would have believed you, his Estate doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that he released anything after Imagine (aside from Double Fantasy of course), that strategy helped to build up his mythology but it’s also been the biggest source of its downfall. It's hard to sell John as a peace loving, non violent, politically strident hippy to a generation who has the internet at their fingertips and can easily google quotes from Cynthia, May Pang, even John himself, discussing his violence. It's hard to push the image of John as the househusband devoted to raising Sean, being married to Yoko and only baking bread, when Julian has given plenty of interviews about being abandoned by his father, when Yoko herself has admitted to using heroin into the 80s and when May Pang has spoken about maintaining a sporadic sexual relationship with John well after the end of the Lost Weekend. I think the commodification of John worked better pre-internet when it was a lot harder to do independent research into John, past the way he was described in mainstream media, once the internet came around there was an overload of information that anyone could access, a lot of information that the Lennon Estate didn't want shared and that filled in the gaps in the story that the Estate had glossed over.

Ultimately, I think in this current age of celebrity people really value authenticity and they're really suspicious when it looks like they're being fed a fairytale. Because the Lennon Estate weren't proactive in sharing the less savoury aspects of John's life (i.e. promoting the man that John was rather than the myth they created) there's now a disconnect between the John they promote (serious, peace-motivated aggravator and one half of "JohnandYoko") and the John people use to tear down the sainted image (wife-beating, politically hypocritical, absent father in a sham marriage). I think both versions of John lack nuance and don't reflect the complex human he was (as we all are of course). Even with Get Back, you saw the disconnect between actual John and the versions of him that have dominated public discourse in the last decade or so ("John was funny?!!" "John didn't spend 100% of his time being angry" "John was actually a caring person to someone other than Yoko after 1968?!!").

So to bring this long winded ramble to an end, I don't think Goldman is the ultimate reason behind the negative takes you see about John on social media. I think the two underlying reasons are the passage of time (John is no longer the sacred cow he was in the 80s/90s, people are a lot more comfortable talking about his flaws) and the dominance of the internet as a medium in celebrity discourse (prevalence of clickbait, poorly researched information getting passed off as facts and barely a hint of nuance). I don't think Goldman's book is that widely read per se, at least when it comes to the widespread condemnation that John gets in some internet circles, but I think a lot of his research has gained in credibility over time so it's very likely that his findings will become more prevalent as time goes on, hopefully if that's the case, that information is presented in the proper context and with the appropriate level of nuance.

[the-hellsing-organisation]

Ordinarily I do not indulge in callout posts, unless a person's mental health might be in serious danger - and it's not a petty lie somebody made up, providing no screenshots, or simple ones taken out of context.

I have received multiple messages now, proving to me that the Hellsing Discord server 'The Hellsing Fanserver' lead by 'Artillery' is unfortunately a place people need to be warned about.

While everyone could assure me they do offer good scans of the Hellsing manga, the members of the server indulged in:

- Purposefully misgendering people

- Making fun of triggers, trans people and people with severe mental illnesses

- Purposefully using triggers against other server members

- Manipulating other people to use the triggers against the person they concern and shifting the blame on them afterwards

- Bringing explicit sexual themes to a server with minors

Afterwards they would celebrate their 'success', making fun of the people they hurt.

The so called 'trolling' (though I wouldn't dare to call such a hurtful behaviour this) was encouraged on the server, so I would deem it an unsafe environment for everyone whose mental health might be affected by such things.

Please be careful if these things concern you and please do not encourage such behaviour.

It's not only hurtful, it is downright cruel.

The invitations, though the links are expired.

Here you see some of the accounts that were directly involved.

Please be careful.

Tumblr Accounts

Discord Accounts

I can only assume alts mean something like alternative accounts he and his friends created in order to do these things, engaging others on the server to do the same.

He then proceeds to share the success of the hurtful behaviour on before mentioned Discord server, commenting such:

^ The “he” they are referring to is a demi girl. And yes, on the other server the pronouns are clearly stated and everyone is asked to respect them.

He is downright admitting openly to have his friends manipulated other people to use the triggers against another person.

(For context: A server members triggers were ‘Borderlands” and ‘Kingdom Hearts’.

He stated this trigger a few hours before and unfortunately the mod, after a sleepless night, was unable to memorise it during that time so ‘Abd’ took advantage of it.

Another mod quickly drew attention to her mistake and of course she apologised to the person she triggered and was forgiven.)

Unfortunately many screenshots - involving the sexual advances and the 'making fun of transgenders' are missing due to the default ban option of the server, but several eye witnesses were able to confirm them.

There was a person pretending to be a transwoman to make fun of transpeople (The person was introducing themselves like: ‘Hello, I am a man, my pronouns are he/him, but I wish to be a woman’ It didn’t sound very genuine to the trans people on the server), people making up all sorts of triggers to make fun of people who have triggers, a person pretending to be a kin, and people, who were trying to spread paedophilic messages with spreading the news that ‘age is just a number’.

And in case people still believe it was an accident:

They deliberately threaten people and plan to hurt them, while making fun of their triggers.

I’m truly lost for words…

For everyone who didn’t know: It is not your place to judge triggers and for the love of God, please don’t make fun of them.

You don’t know the history behind them. It’s good if you have none yourself, it really is, but it shouldn’t make you blind to another person’s suffering.

And you certainly shouldn’t encourage other people to “hunt” people with triggers “down” and “go to war” against them.

Also the owner of server is openly hostility against lgbtq + people - especially trans people - , PoC and antisemitic jokes are the norm there.

They too use nationalist-socialist symbols as emojis in their servers, so people who are triggered by such symbols should be careful.

“Jew Alert”

Blaming one group for the action of singular people should us remind too much of darker parts in history.

I know people with the same experience, that doesnt mean they should actively seek out ot destroy the mental health of all trans people, because one of them hurt them.

Let the submitted texts speak for themselves.

And just in case if anybody believes those are fake:

As soon as Satan saw them, he pmed another person:

Those screenshots are real. They are not fake, like he claims they are and he admits that making fun of trigger and trans people was part of his “troll introductions”.

And just in case anybody is wondering if there are truly toxic trolls on this server? This is a submission I got:

When the original is:

Im sorry.

What they did should speak for itself, but don't try to add lies here. Lies that are obviously having their origin in the server itself.

If you still believe the attacks on this blog didn't come from the server:

This is what Artillery posted as soon as he found this post.

After this the attacks started [as you can see here], so don't tell me your server is not responsible and keep your NSFW implications out of a server with minors and away from this blog!

Also you being an immigrant has nothing to do with the fact, that your server is not safe for minors, lgtbq+ people - especially transpeople - people with trauma and poc.

Even if you claims are real - your and your friends prejudices against the other groups remain.

Satan apologised openly and promised to take better care of people mental health.

The emojis however will remain, though we have been told they have specific channels for offensive jokes.

“In our discussions with the tumblr group, we realized that the situation was far more complicated than we realized. There is a a third party, not associated with us or the tumblr group, who is deliberately spreading false information with the presumed agenda of causing drama and conflict between us. With this in mind, we've agreed the best course of action is to mutually end the escalation of conflict and apologize for what occured. Following that, I want to again make clear that nobody should be going after the tumblr group, their discord server, or anywhere other online spaces. We don't know where the tumblr trolls came from, but we do not support them. Their statements were racist, antisemitic, and violent. What we did in their server was wrong and a mistake. 

I want to personally apologize to a few specific people for what happened. Their server got raided, and during all of it we did not take their mental health into account, causing a lot of people to have panic attacks. Their triggers were invalidated, and people were manipulated. There were also a lot of innapropriate and offensive statements involved. While many things happened without my knowledge, it spiraled out of control because of the initial server raid, and I want to offer my sincerest apologies for that, and for everything else.”

Update:

He lied. He doesn’t regret anything.

Do you remember how he claimed he never ordered an attack on anybody?

Yes.... that was a lie.

He did plan to attack, though one member - the one they would later throw out of the admin team stopped him from attacking more people.

It should have given us red flags they would ban the only member from the team who was actively against the bullying.

And as we see here they did attack the second time as soon as the opportunity arouse when Artillery were sending people after us after saying we should suck his d*.

So he didnt learn a thing. Please survivors stay save.

[dalyankiz1981]

I’ve just gotta take a minute to remind myself of the things I do know and separate them from the things I don’t because all this euphoria surrounding the possibility of a development with Armie then the whole lot coming crashing down has addled with my mind and caused me to lose sight a little bit. So…

Things I am clear on:

* Tyler WAS wearing a mask with Hammer Time written/stuck on it (and posted it on IG knowing he’s got thousands of Armie fans who follow him)

* The word “immigration” DOES get thrown around a lot by people who merely mean “border control” - I’ve seen and heard it countless times.

Things I’m not clear on:

* Why exactly Timmy posted a story involving Warwick Court in London.

* Why Tyler has now removed his courthouse story from IG (I suspect because he didn’t realise we’d all put 2+2 together and make 5).

Saying that I certainly don’t feel shame for clinging onto every scrap of hope that comes our way even if it is wrong, it only goes to prove how utterly committed this fandom is to see justice brought about for our lovely Armie and his children.

[olderthannetfic]

I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

--

Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

--

The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

--

There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

--

Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

--

Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

--

Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.

[appleciders]

ok listen you’re SO right about beforeigners, I love the concept and my linguistics-loving heart skips a beat when they break out the old Norse and 19th century norwegian and I just WISH the show did not do so many of the other things it did because it could be so much better. forgive me for barging in I just saw your post and yeah

oh dude NO need to apologize it's so good to find someone who's watched it other than my parents lmaooo. no i so agree with you, there's so much POTENTIAL there and while it's enough to keep me watching i do have so many "imagine if they could do right by this super cool concept" daydreams. this got super long so im gonna stick it under the cut lol

like first off i wish they didn't feel the need to limit it to a cop show? like i get that it's easy and has automatic intrigue and a tried and true success record, but it's kind of lazy. aside from being Very Over the glorification of cops, i really am so invested in the idea of a show that explores the intersections of all the different spheres that were impacted by the repercussions of their worldbuilding? like you have this setup! now show me the teachers and childcarers. the social workers. clothing production and the food service world. the economic differences—the old norse who are trying to rely on the gift economy only to be hit by the closed fist of capitalism. show the tensions and social movements. actually explore the neo-luddite plot instead of throwing it away after a few episodes because yeah, actually, the industrial revolution has fucked a lot of shit up!! dig into it!!

like alfhildr is great and i did watch all of season 1 in a day so maybe i missed it but i still don't even remember if i know why she wanted to be a cop, of all things? it feels like her moral compass—and history as a shieldmaiden of the old ways at a time when christianity was crusading and trying to impose their authority on her people and her way of life—would chafe against that kind of imposed bureaucratic authority on her community. if they desperately wanted to keep the murder mystery component, i would've been more interested in an "alfhildr works a minimum wage job to pay off her student debt, unable to find better paying work because of temporal discrimination. one of her friends/coworkers/neighbors is killed and the authorities don't pay any attention and want to sweep it under the rug. she works to try to solve the murder—often at odds with local law enforcement—while also protecting her other friend/coworker/neighbor because she's wrapped up in the human trafficking of time displaced people. there still can be the intrigue of her origins, too!

in this situation, her co-protagonist is her coworker/neighbor who isn't time displaced, but is a migrant of color. maybe like lars, they have a family they love deeply and complexly, which parallels and foils alfhildr's strong non-biological kinship ties. paired together, the two allow a fuller, more nuanced exploration and interplay between the dynamics of this fictional time-ism or whatever they call it and the already established xenophobia and racism that pervades norwegian society, the differences there, and the shared experiences of poverty. discrimination, loss of home, and adapting to a new language. they of course also have a fun interpersonal repartee like the duo in the existing show!

and like okay sure fine if we're not Overhauling the whole series...if they had to make it a cop drama (which again. formulaic in a way that undersells how cool this setup is!)...they could've still had lars be the above. and in either iteration they should have people of color/immigrants/jewish people in the writers' room! they'd be able to craft the narrative far more fully and address the Bigger Issues i was speaking to in that post (which almost certainly come from a writers room that's almost entirely white).

and as far as season 2 goes....like the first three episodes and the last three episodes were Completely and Entirely different. why did i have to care about the people who were pretending to be the scotland yard people at all again? i don't feel like they had any bearing on the overarching plotlines? why did they have to accuse their only jewish character of being jack the ripper for most of his featured time??? what was the point of starting the season with his family's shabbat prayers if it wasn't going to be relevant?? and if alex was going to play the role he did, it would have been great if he'd been developed. i don't really have any feelings about him,because they never really let us know him. i feel like his twist could've paid off so much more if we'd had an attachment, you know? also, season 2 could've stood to mention alfhildr's best friend like, at least once!

i do wonder - and this will of course be revealed in time - if they learned they weren't going to be able to have a season 3. because the reason i can see for why you would shove so much together like that in such a rushed way (like the reveal at the end!! which i saw your post about and if you want to talk about my dms are open!! bonkers!!) is that you're worried you won't be able to unfold it in later episodes and you want to leave your fans on a kind of satisfied note? like in fairness to them, that's a pretty wild ending stroke!! and i guess if it can't be renewed, i don't feel like i have 16000 unanswered questions, which we would have, if we'd ended without finding out any hint of alfhildr's origins.

but then maybe they were just working within the parameters of 6 episode seasons and tried to bite off more than they could chew lmao! anyway, i totally hear you on the linguistics thing—it's cool. just like the intros—showing all the confluence and syncretism of people from different time periods is cool! and is why i cared enough to write out this whole essay!! anyway you're absolutely not barging in, thank you for dropping by <33