#cut off his internet access for the next month

[confessxcheese4tcc]

my dad took me to a knfdm concert recently if he finds out what theyre associated w thru this new shooter im COOKED

CONFESSION #323

[the-light-finds-its-way]

A most sincere thanks to everyone

So I mean this for both this blog as well as those who are on my main @dwarf-vader-of-middle-earth

I wouldn't have fucking made it through 2024 without any of you.

TW for a very long post below the cut involving mentions of suicide (not regarding me, but others), lots of general death, and abuse.

For those who didn't know me from the beginning of '24, this day last year I was sobbing as I waited to hear if my mother was alive or not.

Back during the summer of '23, my mother was having back pains and got an xray done. 2 days later she received a call saying the xray showed she had a calcified heart valve. Thus began her journey to schedule open heart surgery and get a valve replacement.

But that Thanksgiving, she suffered a sudden heart attack. I was panicked, terrified, worried sick as hell.

She came home from the hospital the next day, and thus began a very long spiral of hell which became the absolute worst fucking year of my life.

A few days before Christmas, my mother went in for the valve replacement. When she got up, the surgery was successful. But on Christmas day her heart stopped entirely and she almost died.

I was broken. My mother has been my biggest and often sole supporter in my life. She's the only person in my house who helps me medically and mentally, who advocates for me mentally and physically even against my own father, she's been my biggest and greatest ally.

And I almost lost her.

I felt like my life was over because I couldn't bear to live with my horrible father alone, no mother there to help keep his ass in place.

When my mother got the pacemaker in, she was in the hospital a few more days but home for New Year's Eve.

Then she was out by 9:30pm and being rushed to the hospital again. This time she got airlifted to another hospital and endured more surgery.

Several more surgeries in just a 3-day span.

The first day of 2024 I was fucking lost and terrified. I had no idea or way of knowing if she was alive. But that same exact day? I was supposed to go into work until someone I live with asked to borrow my phone. And they didn't say why, I just knew they were distraught as hell, and their phone was taken by police.

That wasn't like this person at all. I had no clue what was happening.

I didn't see them at all that day, really. Turned out that person's partner at the time had been arrested for some VERY abhorrent shit that deserves to have the idiot imprisoned for life.

I didn't get my phone back until later that day and so I never got to call into work and let them know I couldn't come in because I was trying to keep this individual ok and myself ok and I was sick to my stomach about the fact that I had no way to know if my mother was alive or not.

By 11:30pm that night, a good friend of mine had been on a rooftop and turned off his phone after saying he didn't want to be here anymore. I called the hotline, and the guy didn't take any action despite me giving him a huge breakdown of days and actions taken on those days and things that had been said on those days. This friend had a huge history of wanting to end himself but because I had nothing recorded for the last month, the hotline kept refusing to take action until I outright BEGGED them. I ended up having to call the police in this friend's town many states away, half the damn continent away.

Said friend lived.

But I was incredibly fucking distressed because when I called the hotline? They thought I was the person who used my phone earlier in the day.

That person I lived with was about to end themselves earlier, my mother was very possibly gone, and a friend of mine nearly ended himself for certain this time.

And a few days later, I was fired from my job after they cut me down from 5 days a week to just 1 or 2 on limited hour shifts.

So my father became a fucking abusive monster who would not give me any phone or internet access at all until I got a job. But I couldn't get a job without either of those, and my world felt so incredibly small. I felt hopeless to say the very least. I lost contact with all friends and outside help.

I couldn't get any help.

And I got ready to actually run away in the middle of the night to my friend's place to live with her without ever letting my house know, all because I couldn't mentally handle living here anymore.

Eventually I was turned down for that because said friend's mother got injured and the family ran into many major issues.

Thusly, I figured out ways around the wifi blocks at least. My technological skills alongside many open-source projects and secondary devices allowed me back doors to gain what I had lost and made it absolutely hopeless for my father to keep my internet off in any capacity.

And through the friends I had, that one friend who almost ended himself?

It turned out, when a very close mutual was talking to him with a licensed psychologist in the car and he didn't know, he was toying with a gun and manipulated our friend saying he was just doing all this for attention. Everything he did, all the "attempts", he openly admitted word for word were just him trying to get attention, several times, because he wanted her to be his girlfriend.

He wound up in inpatient for 2 weeks, and I haven't spoken to him since March. I can't forgive him. I never will. The fact that I endured the worst day and night of my life and that the majority of it was due to him just wanting fucking attention and I legitimately thought I would lose him and 2 others close to me all in one day?

I am glad to say I haven't spoken to him since March, and I've blocked all forms of contact. I won't hear from him again, nor will he hear from me. As it should be.

But the following 6 months were spent with me helping my mother full time to recover. Many more trips to the hospital ensued, and several mornings I even had to drive her in for various things just to stay the day or 2 days.

But as things went on, I had no job still. I became disabled and lost my insurance several times over. I was starving without much food at all to eat. Many days I literally had nothing but ingredients that couldn't make a meal, such as a few sauces and some spices but no actual food.

And it was you guys who helped me TREMENDOUSLY in this regard.

You folks paid for commissions from me which funded my meals and medication. You bought my artworks and gave me money for gas to go get food, or have food delivered.

One kind stranger from the other end of the country even paid for a bunch of groceries for me and had them ready for pickup at my local Walmart because she'd been in the same position herself years ago.

I struggled. A lot. I really did, and I did go hungry on a few occasions.

But I made it.

Midway through the year, I got a part-time job, and my mother was finally home to stay.

And needless to say, I'm far better off now than I was before. I've not gone hungry once since then. I'm now on medication that has virtually eliminated my arthritis pain after 15 years of suffering and not walking at all only limping.

I can walk.

That's right. I had to teach myself how to walk, at 24 years old, and damn it was weird. One leg was stronger than the other, and just the movements? Awkward.

I actually attended a ton of Renaissance faires to get myself motivated to learn how to walk. Those places can be intense with many miles gone in just a few hours. Limited seating so I was made to stand and strengthen my legs. Plus when you add heavy plate armor on top of everything? Yeah it gets pretty intense lol, but gives a ton of strength. It's like carrying cool body weights that are decorative!!

And as my physical health improved with my pain gone?

I no longer needed my mental health medications.

I'd been on pysch meds since midway through high school, but I graduated 7 years ago. Not a day passed where I wasn't a depressed and stressed hot fucking disaster.

It's been about 10 months without mental health meds because I have concluded with my doctors' assistance that I no longer need them.

I actually look forward to most days now, and being happy to experience them. I hardly take depression naps, my nightmares and night terrors which were a nightly issue for a decade have virtually halted save for the stressful nights.

And I'm well for once.

Thanks to the help you all provided me through the last year with kindness, supportive words, lending an ear to hear my worries and hate, giving financially, and just generally being here for me.

I'd literally not have made it through the year without all of you. :)

You're truly the greatest people I could have ever hoped to know. I'm eternally grateful for each and every one of you in ways you'll never know.

I owe you all EVERYTHING! And I mean that.

So in the new year to come, I want you all to know I'm rooting for each of you. I'm here to offer kindness and love if you need or want it. And I'm hoping all of you have the most wonderful year ever to come.

You never know where things will lead whether for better or worse, but time goes ever onward regardless.

This, too, shall pass.

And we will endure this journey together. :)

[illfoandillfie]

Advent 2023: Day 2

This one was an original idea that I had a while ago. It follows on from the other clone-a-willy fics/blurbs I've written. One and Two.

Warnings: references to pornography/masturbation/anal/oral, piv sex, sex toys (dildos), sex tape. Not properly edited.

It didn’t surprise you that Ben watched porn. He was an adult with a relatively high sex drive, a man who’d had access to the internet during formative teen years, of course he watched porn. You watched porn sometimes too, so there was nothing shocking about Ben doing it. But what caught your attention was the sort of porn he’d been looking at. POV style – the camera showing nothing of the man but his cock, and nothing of the woman but her stretched ass or cunt, occasionally tits depending on position. Admittedly, you didn’t know whether those examples were indicative of his habits. You never intentionally went looking for what Ben had watched. All you knew came from a couple of moments when you’d opened his laptop to a still open browser or walked in on him by accident. Perhaps it was just coincidence that the handful of times you had seen something, it was the same style. Afterall, Ben had showed you porn a couple of times (and vice versa) as foreplay or inspiration for your own sex and none of that had been POV, so he must watch other things. But it did stick with you that he liked the POV stuff, and every so often you’d remember that fact and wonder how you could use it.  

The opportunity came around his next birthday. You’d bought him something he could tell his friends about, but you wanted something a bit sexy too, something just for him. After your conversation about training, Ben had bought a second kit in a different colour and you’d been working on anal training, so you'd originally thought that your first time with the real thing would make a suitable present. But you’d gotten a little too eager a few months previous and had already crossed that bridge. It wasn’t quite as special now that you’d done it half a dozen times. So you were at a bit of a loss what to do, until you remembered the porn.  

You did your research as you waited for a suitable day to record, watching some examples to see what the framing was generally like and what might be included. Truth be told, even after watching half a dozen videos you didn’t totally get the appeal of the POV style. You much preferred being able to see everyone involved fully, but then your tastes trended a little kinkier than Ben’s - bondage and spanking scenes to his fairly vanilla preferences. Either way, Ben seemed to enjoy the premise and so you did your best to imitate what you’d seen the first chance you got, when Ben was out for an entire Saturday with his mates.  

You tried not to rush too much, despite being excited for Ben’s reaction and a little nervous about being on camera. But you wanted to get it right, so you forced yourself to stay calm as you set your camera up, doing a handful of test shots to check your positioning before you were satisfied with the framing. It would have been easier had the clone dildo had a suction base, but you made it work. Riding it seemed like the most sensible option for the type of porn you were recreating, so you figured you edit the video so it’d start with you already working your fist up and down the toy, spreading lube along it’s length. Most of the videos you’d seen during your research had cut in min-penetration if not with the woman halfway to a slightly unbelievable orgasm anyway.  

Once you were ready to go you stripped off and took your place on the bed in the spot you’d worked out. The lube was close to hand, just out of frame, so you squeezed some out onto your palm and raised the toy, trying not to giggle at what you were sure must look like a very rapid erection coming into view. With a steadying breath you got started for real, holding the dildo with one hand as you began to jerk it off the way you knew Ben liked. Then, when you felt you’d wanked it long enough, you moved over it, lining it up and sinking down onto it with relative ease. It felt familiar in the oddly unfamiliar way you’d become familiar with – filling you just the way Ben did but recognisably not him. You had no trouble riding it though, practically forgetting the camera was on you as you lost yourself in the rhythm of it, moaning and telling Ben how good he felt and how much you loved his cock. And then you came, legs going Shakey as you tried to keep the stimulation going until you were through it. Watching back made you feel a little embarrassed and a little perverted and more than a little horny. You hastily edited it, trimming out the awkward beginning bit like you’d planned, then watched it through to make sure you’d stayed in frame. By the time Ben got home you were practically ready to tackle him so you could have the real thing.  

Ben’s birthday fell on a weekday when you had to work. So you decided to leave the present where he’d find it while you were out. You knew you’d be distracted all day wondering what he would think of it, but it was worth it to surprise him. You just hoped he’d send you some sort of text when he’d watched it. Thankfully he did, though it took a little longer for him to find it than you’d have liked. He’d spent most of the day on the couch playing video games, only finding the laptop you’d saved the file on after he’d found your note wishing him a happy birthday and telling him there was a surprise in the bedroom. He probably wouldn’t have worked out the surprise was on the computer without your helpful post it note telling him to press play.  

He called you within the first five seconds.   “Y/N, I bloody love you.”  You laughed, “Hello to you too honey. I take it you got the videos then.”  "There’s more than one?”  “Yeah,” you laughed, “Well, kind of. See, I wasn’t sure if you’d like um,” you paused, realising you were at work and probably shouldn’t say words like cunt or arse out loud, “front or back more. So I wanted to do one of each for you but the back one was a little harder to manage while keeping it in the same, like, style. So I did the front one like that and then did a second one from behind but it’s easier to tell it’s,” you dropped your voice to a whisper and hoped no one was listening, “not you fucking me.”  Ben barely seemed to hear your explanation, groaning as he located the second video, “what time are you getting home?”  “Uhh, not for another few hours I guess. How come?”  “Just wondering if I have enough time to get off to both of them and recover. I’ve never, and I mean this with the utmost respect and love, I’ve never wanted to pound you harder than I do right now.”  You fell into giggles again, nervously checking around you and hoping you weren’t blushing noticeably.  “I’m serious Y/N. You’re so fucking sexy and incredible and god, just looking at how well you ride me has me so fucking hard. I want to ruin you. I want to fuck you so hard you can’t walk for a week and I haven’t even seen the anal one yet. The second you walk through that door I’ll be on you. In you.”  If you’d managed not to blush before you were sure you must be now, so tried to keep your voice as professional as possible, “Well I’m glad you like them. I look forward to this evening.”  Ben hummed, “I think it should be enough time. But I s’pose if I’m not quite good to go when you get here, then there’s two more of my cocks to get you started.”  You bit your lip to keep from whimpering or moaning and swallowed hard before you managed, “That sounds very reasonable.”  “If I wanted to be really mean I’d keep you on the line while I watch so you could hear me getting off to you.  You whined his name quietly, “Honey I’m at work.”  He laughed, “Sorry babe. You just really turn me on. I’ll show you how much tonight.”  “Okay,” you managed, “Happy birthday, love you.”  “Love you too. So much.” 

[witchgirltricks]

It has been quite an eventful year...before any of you get excited that I'm awake, I've been adding to this for about a month and a half, so you are speaking to a ghost. My sincere apologies.

To start, it would be foolish of me to not acknowledge that in terms of the system and the body's situation as a whole, our situation is not good. We are still quite limited in both budget and physical ability, as well as needing to ration internet access like protein during the war. However, we obtained and retained a job, that seems to think highly of our ability (demeaning treatment nonwithstanding). With all luck, we will be able to grow in the company and will not be constantly subject to people yelling at us on the phone.

As for me, I believe I'm close to becoming a person; Pinocchio is noticing his arms feel softer than wood, the clone has decided to cut and dye her hair. I've made a great effort to be social this year and I have succeeded in gaining three partners who can't get enough of me, which is delightful. The cheering of the crowd when I come around is absolutely motivating in the tough winter months where coming to front is like falling into a spike pit.

I'm happy to proclaim that I am the reason multiple people have gained more confidence in themselves, even if only a little. I help my protégé with understanding divination when I can, I engage in vapid but entertaining word combat with a worm, I discuss religious history with a bat, and craft costumes with a cat. Truly the world is endless in its possibilities, and I'm lucky to have caught so many people to share it with. I hope to bring the forest's bounty to all of them in time, perhaps next year we will be more mobile?

Fighting with the host of the system over gender presentation continues to be an issue, though they have conceded on many things they refuse to let me shave the body despite the feeling of hair moving on my legs seems to set off the delusion of spiders crawling everywhere. They claim this doesn't happen to them and that I'm unique. What a fun way to be unique, so special I am... I do not know a clean and elegant way to resolve this, and I do slightly fear that our success in life may lead to the host gaining access to what, to them, would be gender affirming surgeries, which would leave me with less of the things I would like to have while made to take physical form. I suppose that is a bridge that can only be considered while crossing.

As well, my journeys in being social have not been all sunshine and rainbows. Being an introject, one who seems to be close enough to the "source material" for people that do not know what I am, I have been subject to much mockery. People jeer about things that I'm sensitive about, some spitting at me saying I've "become too soft for the face I claim to wear", others that I'm too scary and overwhelming. I can say the only one I can look back on and giggle about was one person that didn't seem to understand that I don't see myself as a cheetah, I just have a fursona. They still ask me if I like my steaks raw...I do, but it's unrelated. I'm a little psychotic girl. Though I have gotten better in the course of the summer, I still get comments mocking me for my tone of voice or choice of words, or people will join in in mockery of me. People think I am not real, and thus have little reservation in treating me as a target for their punchlines or talk as if I am not a real person that can hear them. Truly, the more things change, the more they stay the same... I do think my dear Bato had it worse though; I can handle people thinking I'm a villain, it's something I'm made to do, but every time he showed up in public people decided he was entirely without agency and incapable of doing anything right... it saddens me, but I entirely understand why he prefers direct messaging me instead of engaging in group conversation. We are planning on ways to subvert this harassment we get, but his ideas are...well, other people won't immediately want to mock him, but I do. It's different when it's me though, right? 💖

Resolutions, resolutions...what could I possibly want that is both reasonable to achieve but I haven't already obtained? Should I resolve to ravish my partners when we meet in person? Should I simply aim for the stars in a fleeting desire for a miracle? I cannot simply resolve to fix our broken body, as much as I would like to. Perhaps learn more contemporary history to keep up in conversations with one partner? Or experience more artsy media, to confound the other? This is the part that has absolutely taken the longest to write, as I simply turn over and over the possible things...but, I believe I have an answer. In the next year, we shall obtain a new doctor.

Have a happy new year, whoever decided to click the readmore and suffer through all my musings. May it all treat us better. Especially you, Rose. I know it would cheer many to see you once more.

[theuniversitychallengereview]

Not So Smart Meter

On Friday our smart meter told us we had been charged £9 for heating, which spurred me into fiscal action. Well, I say it spurred me into action; I haven’t actually done anything, but it did alarm me. More so for some reason than any of the other do of money I have spent over the past 6 months. £100 at Asda, £37 on the bus to Glasgow. All fine, apparently. But £9 for a day of heating! That’s one step too far.

It turns out that this is because we had put the thermometer display thing in our bedroom, which had the radiators off (it gets too hot at night) so the system was desperately trying to heat up a room over which it had no power. This realisation calmed me down a bit (it was only £4 yesterday), but I’m still going to post my Patreon here for the first time in a while.

Get more from The University Challenge Review on Patreon

creating Irreverent Blogs

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I write reviews of old episodes over there, and they tend to be a bit more in-depth (read — even longer and more self-indulgent) than the ones here. The latest one is due out tomorrow and is on the quarter-final between Bangor and Imperial from 2012/13. Subscribe for as little as £1/month (that’s 11% of one day of heating if you forget you’ve turned the radiators off in the bedroom.)

Turn the internet off.

I’ve been doing Local Month of Writing a Novel this month (as explained in a previous edition of this blog), and most days it has taken me upwards of 2 hours to get the 1667 words down.

Today, I turned the wifi off and blasted through 2000 words in one hour. This could just be due to the fact that I struck a rich vein of inspiration, but it’s also definitely at least partly due to the fact I wasn’t periodically on the Fantasy Football Reddit, or Twitter, or Bluesky, or Instagram, or YouTube, or…

Its incredibly simple, but if you cut off access to these timesinks then you cannot access them. Meaning that you get through your work a lot quicker, leaving you plenty of time to write tips on how to get through your work a lot quicker.

Anyway, onto this week’s episode, the second repechage match, between SOAS and Durham.

The University Challenge Review

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www.quizposting.com

Here’s your first starter for ten.

Unfortunately at this point I’m going to have to turn the internet back on because I need to rewatch the episode. Here’s hoping I can avoid clicking on the Youtube shorts tab. Wish me luck.

Brookfield-Pertusini introduces herself by saying she is ‘quite literally reading English literature’, which I personally find to be a bit cringe, but perhaps I am just becoming an old man.

Nash hits back for Durham with pheromones, but he talks himself out of five points on the bonuses because he doesn’t believe that the football team Villarreal could possibly be from a town called Villarreal.

Provinces gives Hasler his first points of the night, then both sides miss the picture starter, on the word turnip in different languages. Roberts hears the word Ra and buzzes with Egypt, winning Durham the picture bonuses, of which they take one.

Rajan calls, and Nash is first to pick up with telephone on the next starter. They are thirty points clear, but Lambert sneaks in with Trojan horse to keep SOAS close.

Another for Hasler gives SOAS the lead going into the music round, but Brookfield-Pertusini is quickest to recognise the Peep Show theme song and steals it back.

Brookfield-Pertusini, who, as we remember, is studying English literature, takes the picture starter by recognising a wordless version of the cover of The Bell Jar. She is good on the bonuses too, but mistakes Normal People for Conversations with Friends. A mistake I made too, because I thought Normal People was red, which it often is, but not in the original printing.

Makaton gives Dorn her third starter, and further ten-pointers from Lambert and Hasler give SOAS a fifty-five-point lead with two minutes to go.

It would have been a sixty-point lead had Dorn been allowed her answer ‘af Klimt’ when the correct answer was ‘af Klint’. I think this demonstrates sufficient knowledge, and presume that it was disallowed because of the artist Gustav Klimt. But she said the ‘af’ so it is clear she knows who she is talking about. Very harsh, in my opinion.

And very important.

Nash keeps Durham in the game with ER, and they do a very good job of answering the bonuses very quickly, passing quickly too when they don’t know. Roberts takes another with Richard II, and a hat-trick put them ten points adrift.

Ten points which disappeared with scattering from the skipper. A single bonus would win them the game, but the gong beats them to it.

Tiebreak.

A question with the answer slipstream was dropped by both teams.

A second question was also dropped by both teams but cut from the show — thanks to Bluesky user trainingmontage for pointing me in the direction of the YouTube comment by one of the SOAS team.

A third question with the answer llama is buzzed on by SOAS’s Lambert, but unfortunately he says alpaca.

A fine guess. I don’t know how much more obvious the rest of the question would have made it that the answer was llama not alpaca, but it was a good tactic to be first on the buzzer here. It’s just a shame that he was wrong. And a shame that ‘af Klimt’ was disallowed.

SOAS 145–150 Durham

Incredible comeback from Durham. As Youtube commenter Ramboost007 says, they remind us that in UC 55 points is just a 3-possession lead.

Tough to take for SOAS, but a very entertaining show for the viewer.

See you next week for the first of the second-round matches.

For now, I’m off to check my smart meter.

[warningsine]

After 15 years in power, Bangladesh’s prime minister has suddenly resigned and fled the country. Sheikh Hasina’s departure came after weeks of student-led protests were met with deadly force, and has been greeted with jubilation on the streets of the capital, Dhaka.

What led to this?

Students protested for fairer access to government jobs and were met with violence, including the killing of nearly 300 people, sparking a broader movement for justice that has forced Hasina to step down.

The students had originally demanded the removal of a quota system that reserved 30% of government jobs for the families of people who fought for independence from Pakistan in 1971. But the government’s harsh response to the protests since mid-July meant they continued even after the supreme court largely met their demands on quotas two weeks ago.

The internet was entirely cut off during the worst of the violence but images that emerged showed police and members of the ruling Awami League party’s student wing attacking protesters with live fire and machetes and running them over with vehicles. People in Dhaka have described nonstop night-time raids, which have led to 11,000 people being arrested.

The raids continued overnight before a mass protest that had been called for Monday – but then came the surprise announcement that Hasina had fled the country by helicopter.

Who is Sheikh Hasina?

The 76-year-old was the longest-serving female prime minister in the world, having been in power since 2009 and before that from 1996 to 2001.

She led the party founded by her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, widely considered Bangladesh’s founding father, closely tying the party’s legitimacy to his legacy. In 1975 Hasina survived the assassination of her father and their whole family in a coup by army officers only because she and her sister were in Europe at the time. Shortly afterwards she became the party’s leader.

Her most recent term delivered strides forward in development and economic growth, especially in the garment sector, but many have felt the benefits are mostly concentrated on Dhaka and an extremely rich elite.

Her rule has also been characterised by growing levels of authoritarianism. Much of the opposition, especially the Bangladeshi Nationalist party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami, have been attacked and arrested. Extrajudicial killings have been widespread and journalists have said they feared doing the most basic reporting in case it was deemed to reflect badly on the government.

Elections under Hasina have had claims of election fraud and the most recent, in January, was boycotted by the opposition.

How is Bangladesh’s independence still relevant to politics today?

Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan was won in 1971 after a bitter nine-month war during which Bangladesh claims 3 million people were killed and hundreds of thousands of women raped.

The country’s violent birth still plays a divisive role in Bangladesh’s politics, and Hasina and the Awami League have projected themselves as the protectors of the independence legacy.

There has long been a bitter and often violent divide between the Awami League and the main opposition BNP, whose leader, Khaleda Zia, was married to Ziaur Rahman, the party’s founder and the president after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in 1975. Ziaur Rahman’s supporters have argued that it was in fact him, then an army officer who revolted against the Pakistani forces, who first declared independence and not Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Hasina has also often used the collaboration of some groups with the Pakistani military to denounce her opponents. During the current protests she angered the students by saying those on the streets were razakars – a term referring to a Bengali militia that supported the Pakistani army.

What happens next?

The military has announced it has taken control and will be forming an interim government until elections can be held. Many are hoping the country will not fall into the same patterns as before. The Awami League and BNP have tussled for power since the 1990s, when democracy was restored after a period of military rule, but the role of students in the recent protests has raised hopes of an alternative to break the cycle.

The military chief, Gen Waker-Uz-Zaman, has called on protesters to return to their homes and promised an investigation into the killings.

A helicopter reportedly took Hasina from Dhaka to India and she is expected to seek asylum abroad.

[soupum]

What is happening in Palestine at the hands of Israel is genocide, plain and simple. Access to medicine, electricity, fuel, cellular service and internet has been cut off entirely, with the supply of food and water severely limited, if not also entirely cut off. Due to the lack of power sources, over 100 preterm babies on incubators are expected to die within the next three days. 47 Palestinian family bloodlines have been entirely destroyed, from the elderly to children. While death tolls are impossible to estimate, and will likely remain heavily underreported for months, perhaps even years after the current conflict, over 7,000 Palestinians are confirmed dead as of this time.

That is not just a statistic. That cannot be allowed to become just a number. Each of those 7,000 Palestinians was a human being, the same as you and me, filled with hopes and dreams and love and so so much more. The buildings are rubble, and the streets are filled with blood and body parts. As the survivors mourn their parents, their children, their friends, their neighbours and their loved ones, Israel continues to bomb the Gaza strip at an unprecedented rate. Since October 7th, Israel has dropped an average of 1,000 bombs every single day. That's one bomb being dropped on Palestine every 19 minutes. The stars and moon cannot be seen at night through the smoke and fire. Israel has also begun using white phosphorus in civilian areas, a chemical that ignites instantly upon contact with oxygen, sticks to clothing and skin, can burn through bone, and is liable to reignite suddenly, even after treatment.

White phosphorous is not classed as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

To be clear, I have not taken this position out of a hatred for the LGBT+ community or out of anti-Semitism. Multiple large scale protests and demonstrations across the globe have been organized by and attended by those countries' Jewish populations, and I condemn only the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government, not the actions of those Israelis who oppose the conflict. While it is regrettable that LGBT+ education and acceptance are not common in Palestine, it cannot be reasonably expected of a country whose schools are destroyed, and information supply restricted. As initiatives such as Queering the Map (https://www.queeringthemap.com/) have demonstrated, LGBT+ Palestinians exist, and have always existed, just as LGBT+ people exist across the globe, and they all deserve to be protected so that they can live truly and authentically.

All of the information I have presented here is easily verified, and I implore you to do your own research. You should not be getting your information on a major conflict and humanitarian crisis from a white guy that runs an archival project for an all-ages mascot platformer video game series in his spare time.

So, what can you do about it?

DONATE: https://www.map.org.uk/ https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/g... https://www.pcrf.net/ https://www.msf.org/

CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES: https://linktr.ee/savegaza https://ceasefiretoday.com/ https://www.map.org.uk/campaigns/emer...

LEARN: https://decolonizepalestine.com/ https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/

Free Palestine.

[its2bit]

Strange feeling has come back. Talked with boyfs about it last time, but it persists still. With a plague-like fervor, I might add.

a LOT more under the cut, if you're interested. mostly venting about a few different things.

edit: forgot to turn off reblogs, but the comments here and my DMs are welcome if you want to talk about anything

I feel like with everything going on in the world (Fascist America, the discarding of anti-oligarchy views due to trends "dying off", the disenfranchisement and disruption of immigrants, trans/gnc people, and anyone who questions the power, ALL THE FUCKED UP SHIT iN GENERAL)...

I'm in a very awkward position, being who I am.

For instance, I do consider myself queer. However, on the surface, I'm a cis, white, freshly 18yo man, with decent access to knowledge. By all accounts, I fear that the queer community would be one to push me out if i questioned one too many things, especially with how much fucking infighting goes on here, and how much it's the same fights, over and over again, rehashed in a new light.

I fear that if someone questioned me on my "queerness", that no answer would suffice, because of who I am. Someone who "wouldnt fit in" with "the misfits", because of how they see me.

But more than that, I fear being on the other side of the war - someone against queerness. If there was an alternate version of me who was like that, I'll fucking kill him. Zero hesitation. But only because it's a "me" that I never want to be. I fear it because i know how little it would take for me to become that - the fear fights their fuel.

But in neither community do I feel as if I'm allowed to approach my fears, because of all the priviledge people see, and that I try to acknowledge.

but i'm not SUPPOSED to feel this way, IM PRIVILEDGED, I AM UNDER NO THREAT BY ANYTHING GOING ON UNLESS I GET DRAFTED OR NUKED.

that's what I hear from some of the queer community, that my existence, irrelevant of my support or involvement, that i'm a bad person for having priviledge, and that i'm the evil they're fighting.

yeah, i get it, not everyone who fits in the categories I do care as much about being the best person they can as I do.

but i'm a no-name. whenever people speak so generally about hating "people like me", i feel under threat, despite actively condemning the actions they speak of. i still feel like a target, no matter how I rationalise it.

i feel like some smartass who reads this is gonna say something like "this is exactly what [minority group] goes through on a daily basis, welcome to the club" and like yeah, i get it.

I genuinely think I do. I can say that making comparison is not a bad thing, and helps me empathise with those minority groups more, even if they wouldnt assume so. (if i said so, they'd look at me like i was fucking with them by fake-empathising) But the point is that if they're valid for having thosse fears, am I allowed to have that fear too? or do you want to make me force it down, because of my priviledge?

eugh. there is toxicity everywhere online, and the only place that feels safe is anywhere but here - on a planetary scale. Not just the internet, not just my country (run by oil companies lobbying the 2 major parties, but not the next biggest) (guess which country :P), but everywhere except the arms of those who share love with me.

i just hate feeling like i'm "not supposed" to feel certain ways because of what people expect of my attributes.

and i want to hug my boyfriend before the end of the world. 18 month online-only long distance relationship, and we've only ever looked at the other through a camera lens and a screen. it makes me want to cry every time i grapple with the thoughts of either never feeling his touch because of tragedy, or having to wait potentially another 12 months to spend two weeks with him, and we cant even have sex unless we're completely secluded.

the whole "other people have it worse, suck it up and move on" mindset, that still plagues my lexicon and thoughts, has destroyed my ability to allow my pain to pass. it's not even the autism that made me bottle my feelings anymore, at this rate.

I'm tired.

and no, i dont mean i need sleep. i said i'm tired.

i dont know if i want out, but there's no guarantee i'll get a choice in that matter, anyway.

sorry if i used too much of a "strawman", btw. i try to keep my use of it in check.

[icarlycarl]

Superstitious Beliefs and Other Pamahiin

We've all heard the classic Filipino superstition, "Pag makati ang palad, may padating na pera!" or the familiar gesture of knocking on wood to ward off something from coming true. These superstitions, or pamahiin, have been passed down through generations, shaping our beliefs and behaviors. But, do people still believe in these, especially people from the newer generations?

Superstitions or pamiahiin are a fascinating blend of culture, psychology, and a touch of fun. Rooted in our cultural heritage, these beliefs have been passed down through generations, connecting us to our ancestors and traditions. The placebo effect also plays a role, as believing in something can sometimes manifest into reality. The power of positive thinking can influence our actions and outcomes. Beyond their psychological impact, superstitions can add a bit of whimsy and excitement to our lives. Sharing and discussing these beliefs with others can be a fun and lighthearted experience. Like just a week ago, I was discussing with my bestie and his partner about all the pamahiins we grew up with and still believe in. There are even some I haven't heard of until now. You learn something new everyday.

But, did you know that In the digital age, superstitions have evolved? We now have internet superstitions, like the fear of the number 4 or 13, the belief that certain symbols can bring bad luck. It's a fascinating blend of old and new, tradition and technology.

So, the next time you catch yourself knocking on wood or not sweeping at night because it's malas, don't be too hard on yourself. After all, a little superstition never hurt anyone. Just remember to keep it lighthearted and don't let it control your life.

Here are the top pamahiins I found on the Internet:

Knocking on Wood = To ward off bad luck after saying something boastful or negative. I still do this to this day and even articulate it when I'm telling a story. i.e. "Knock on wood that he finds out the bad news."

Pagpag: = To avoid bringing home bad spirits after attending a wake, one must stop somewhere before going home directly. Yeah, we still do this too. Actually, might also be an excuse to grab a bite to eat and not to go home just yet.

Tabi-tabi Po = A phrase said to ask permission from spirits when passing by a cemetery or other supposedly haunted places. I still do this to. You never know!

Cutting Your Nails at Night = Believed to invite bad luck or attract spirits. I don't believe this. If I don't have time to have my nails done at a salon, I do this myself and usually do this ain the evenings.

Sweeping the Floor at Night = This is considered bad luck as it is believed to sweep away good fortune. No matter what time of the day, I see a mess, I'll sweep it up.

Eating at the Kitchen Table = It is believed to bring poverty. Nope! Don't believe this is true. It's actually the best place to eat because you have quicker access to food.

Eating While Standing = This is considered disrespectful to food and can lead to bad luck. Don't think so. Whoever made this I think hasn't heard of cocktail tables and the need for them in standing room only catered events.

Sleeping with Wet Hair = This can lead to headaches or even blindness, according to some beliefs. I've done this a lot. I am partially blind, but not because of this.

Eating 12 Grapes at Midnight on New Year's Eve: = This is believed to bring good luck for each month of the year. I sometimes do this just for the heck of it and because I love grapes.

Wearing Polka Dots on New Year's Eve = This is believed to attract wealth and prosperity. This is also the same as keeping money in your pockets during New Years Eve. I still do this sometimes. It doesn't hurt.

These are just a few of the many pamahiins that Filipinos believe in. While some may seem outdated, they continue to be a part of Filipino culture and tradition.

Do you have a pamhiin you still believe in?

[marketingprofitmedia]

Vidhive Review – Next-Gen Video Hosting & Marketing Platform

Welcome to my Vidhive Review Post, Where I will discuss the features, upgrades, demo, price, and bonuses, how Vidhive can benefit you, and my opinion. The world’s first and most powerful technology Let us upload, customize, and publish unlimited videos at lightning speed for an unbeatable low one-time price, skyrocketing your sales and leads.

Every time we wish to learn something, we use the main search engines to look up online training programs. Because of this, the e-learning industry is now the one expanding at the highest rate and is expected to reach a market size of $398 billion by 2026. The primary cause of this is the global rise in internet users, which also presents you with an AMAZING opportunity to access this enormous industry and raise your income. And you can do so with ease thanks to Vidhive, which gives you the ability to make your own playlists and video channels and sell online courses in order to profit greatly from one of the marketplaces with the quickest growth. Also, you may enjoy fast uploading without buffering or delays in providing consumers with high-quality video content while saving thousands of dollars on video hosting platforms. “Vidhive” is a Powerful & Proven Solution for Effectively Marketing Items and Services through Video Hosting.

Vidhive Review: What Is Vidhive?

Vidhive is a cutting-edge Video Hosting tool that dazzles your audience with lightning-fast, seamless video playback on any website, page, or device. With the power to create custom channels and playlists, you’ll captivate your viewers, drive more product sales, and elevate customer satisfaction to new heights.

Imagine being able to host, Manage and publish thousands of 8K videos without any uploading issues or buffering issues without worrying about reaching any uploading or viewing limits or being forced to pay every month for your business.

Vidhive Review: Overview

Creator: Laxman Singh

Product: Vidhive

Date Of Launch: 2024-May-02

Time Of Launch: 11:00 EDT

Front-End Price: $17 (One-time payment)

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Product Type: Software (Online)

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Vidhive Review: About Authors

Vidhive was created by Lalit Chhipa and Laxman Singh. They have changed the world of video hosting and marketing with their joint knowledge and love of technology. Lalit & Laxman here a 6 fig Internet Marketer with my partners Laxman & Lalit. Two veteran marketers who have been running a 6-figure online business for the last 5 years. We’re blessed to be living a Laptop Lifestyle. Together we have spent 15+ years in the Online Marketing Space and generated millions of dollars in sales. And we are always looking for that golden niche that we could Tap into for making more profits.

His portfolio includes a number of significant products, including ODIO, Fab AI, Vidvista, 360HUB AI, InboxSumo AI, Audio Journal AI, MindPal AI, MusikPay, Fiverrpayz, and many others

Vidhive Review: Features

Upload, Store & Publish all your videos in just 1-click!

VidHive comes with HTML 5, supporting all kind of videos.

VidHive supports FFMPEG video conversation, you can upload all kind of videos with resolution upto 8k.

Create channels & playlists to keep your audience engaged with videos.

Play videos on any website, landing page, online shop or membership site in simple steps.

In-Built Thumbnail and Image Designing Feature.

FREE COMMERCIAL LICENCE

100% Newbie Friendly.

99.99% Up Time Guaranteed.

Nothing to download and install. Get Started in 2 minutes.

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Vidhive Review: How Does It Work?

All It Takes Is Just 3 Steps To Start Your Own Video Hosting & Marketing Agency

STEP #1 — Login & Upload

Login and upload one or more videos at a time and let VidHive optimize them for faster delivery on any browser, page & device.

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VidHive comes with HTML5 Players, supporting all kind of videos & advertisment. It supports FFMPEG video conversation, you can upload all kind of videos with resolution upto 8k.

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Vidhive Review: Can Do For You

Host Unlimited Videos: There is No Limit to What You Can Do and Make money with VidHive. You can upload UNLIMITED videos, capture unlimited leads from unlimited visitors.

Ad-Free Videos to Skyrocket Engagement: Being Ad Free Means You Don’t Annoy Your Viewers… It goes without saying that annoyed visitors don’t buy. Plus, you’re never going to lose your hard-earned traffic to other people with their sneaky ads…

SEO Friendly: Give your video a meta title, description, kws & thumbnail image for better ranking. You also can disallow search engines with no follow or no index settings in few clicks.

Create Playlist/ Channels: Organize all your videos seamlessly into easy-to-manage playlists to bump up engagement levels. Keep your audience closely connected by giving them their preferences & don’t let them get distracted.

Unlimited Audience: No limit on visitors. Get as many as visitors we will not charge a single penny for it.

Unlimited Views: There is No Limit on views like other third-party platforms. Capture unlimited views from unlimited visitors.

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100GB Storage: Host upto 100GB of videos without any restrictions, to get you started with creating your channel & playlist.

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Ultra-fast Bandwidth: Every single second delay in your videos and content loading — can decrease your sales, visitor engagement & customer satisfaction by 20% We make sure that the videos play without buffer/delay on any mobile or desktop device — with minimum internet bandwidth every time.

Ultra-Light & Attractive Player that works on any Device: It’s also completely customizable to your exact specifications. The HTML Player is Perfectly Optimized to play videos on ALL devices & it’s 100% Mobile Responsive.

Embed anywhere with embed code Feature: Publish Your Videos Anywhere You Like by just copy & pasting 1 Line of Embed Code on ANY Website, Landing Page, Online Shop or Membership Site!

Support all types of videos format: Add Videos in MP4 or FFMPEG format to optimize them to deliver at lightning-fast speed on any device with full 8K support.

Go Viral with Social Sharing Feature: Get numbers of visitors interested in what you have to say on video page & allow visitors to share your videos on top social media sites for viral traffic & lead.

Commercial License: For a limited time only. VidHive comes with a commercial license… Which allows you to sell this as a service to anyone if you want.

30 Days Money Back Guarantee: Your purchase of VidHive is backed with Iron Clad 30 days money back guarantee, if you think it is not worth.

Vidhive Review: Verify User Feedback

Vidhive Review: Who Should Use It?

Business Coaches

Affiliate Marketers

Ecom Sellers

Digital Marketers

Software Seller

Online Gamer

Video Editors

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Vidhive Review: OTO’s And Pricing

Front End Price: Vidhive ($17)

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Vidhive Review: Why You Must Grab It

Next Generation Video Hosting Technology

Play videos on any website, landing page, online shop or membership site in just 3 easy steps.

Create channels & playlists to keep your audience engaged with videos.

Image editor to edit images to create captivating thumbnails for your videos.

Free hosting included — up to 250 Gb bandwidth/month.

Get 5 attractive video player with complete customization & optimized to work on all devices.

Have 100% control on your traffic — no traffic leakage with unwanted related videos.

Seamless integration with top autoresponders.

Zero technical skills required. A-Z complete video training included.

Upload unlimited sales, e-learning, training, client prospecting or demo videos.

Sell more products or services and get more customer satisfaction.

Super-fast delivery (after all, time is money!) No buffering. No delay. Get up to 20% more conversions.

100% mobile responsive video pages and player

Vidhive Review: My Unique Bonus Bundle

My Unique Bonus Bundle will be visible on your access page as an Affiliate Bonus Button on WarriorPlus immediately after purchase.

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Vidhive Review: Free Bonuses

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Vidhive Review: Money Back Guarantee

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Vidhive Review: Pros and Cons

Pros:

High-performance hosting: Ensures fast video delivery worldwide.

Marketing & engagement tools: Add CTAs, capture leads, and encourage social sharing within videos.

Monetization features: Sell videos through pay-per-view, subscriptions, or built-in advertising.

Analytics & tracking: Gain insights into video performance and audience demographics.

Cons:

You cannot use this product without an active internet connection.

In fact, I haven’t found any additional Vidhive issues.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)

Q. Is this a desktop software? Does it work on a PC?

This is a Cloud-Based App that doesn’t require any Installation. Simply access it from anywhere, anytime in the world just as long as you have an internet connection!

Q. I already have such a tool. What do I do?

You don’t have such a tool. What VidHive does there’s no other tool out there that does that. We checked before we got started. Sure, you may have a tool for creating videos — but what you’re getting today is just extraordinary. My sincere advice to you would be to cancel your existing subscription and get grandfathered access to VidHive at a low one-time price right now.

Q. Do I need video creation or editing experience?

None at all! The dashboard & canvas make creating custom videos literally point & click simple. We’ve tested this interface with brand new beginners to ensure it’s 1–2–3 simple!

Q. Can I create & sell videos to clients?

Yes! You can create an unlimited amount of videos and sell them to businesses when you purchase our Commercial License package during the launch period. There are no limits. Set the price you want to charge and keep 100% of the profits. You will never have to pay us any royalties or additional fees on the money you make.

Q. Are there any training videos included?

Yes! Even though VidHive is simple and easy to use, we make it even easier for you with step-by-step training tutorials to get up and running even faster.

Q. How much do updates cost?

Yes! We are constantly working on updating the software and providing you with the latest patches. When you purchase VidHive updates are automatic and provided free of charge.

Q. How do I get support?

Easy! Just email us and we will gladly answer any questions you may have.

Vidhive Review: My Recommendation

Vidhive emerges as a powerful video hosting platform ideal for creators and businesses seeking to unlock the full potential of their video content. Its robust hosting infrastructure, coupled with marketing, engagement, and monetization features, makes it a compelling choice. However, pricing might not suit everyone, and some advanced features require higher tiers. Ultimately, evaluating your needs, budget, and desired functionalities will determine if Vidhive is the right platform to elevate your video content strategy.

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Check Out My Previous Reviews: Coursiify Review, Azon AutoSites Review Konnect App Review, Healthifier AI Review, TelleBotAi Review, AI Beast Review, Share Ai Earn Review.

Thank for reading my Vidhive Review till the end. Hope it will help you to make purchase decision perfectly.

Disclaimer: This Vidhive review is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Before making a purchase decision, we recommend conducting your own research and exploring the software.

Note: Yes, this is a paid tool, however the one-time fee is $17 for lifetime

[thefairyquill]

this is going to be potentially long and personal, but im going to write it here because there is no space for it elsewhere.

I'm nonbinary. It's a decision I've come to (or, more like, something I've discovered?) a while ago. It took longer than figuring out my sexuality or romantic endeavours (perhaps because those typically involve someone else, and that person can be asked things. I do not have many friends, and of those, all except one are cis).

I didn't know how to tell anyone. I did, in a kind of vague, unsure, mumbley way. The responses were varied. Some just ignored it, some made unsavoury jokes, my one similarly nonbinaried friend gifted me a trans pin, and years later, a nonbinary flag. I keep it hidden, but I do take it out to look at it sometimes. To feel it, and to try not to feel like it's not mine.

I do not like the way I present some days. I wish I could change some things. I wear what I can to flatten my chest. I cut my hair. I practised taking up space when sitting, dropping my voice when I could. I can't use the nonbinary bathrooms at college, because they consist of one separate stall that also happens to be the single wheelchair accessible toilet. Multiple wheelchair users have complained about 'getting lumped in with the gays'. I get double takes in the women's bathrooms.

I tried to go to events with trans people. I was met with a white group of twenty somethings that went to the most prestigious university in the country, majoring in English and History, worrying about clubs and societies and not how they would eat near the end of the month. They passed around a dictionary of gender identities and neopronouns, laughing, chortling about taking internet jokes too far. They invited me to drop in again next Saturday. I had a 10 hour shift that day.

On holiday with a friend, I bought a bright orange 'they/them' enamel pin. I wore it to a different job, on the induction day. After having it go ignored, I took it off. Near the end of my temporary position three months later, I was called into an office with HR and asked about how they could make the construction site and surrounding engineering offices more friendly to nonbinary people. I told them it's an antithesis to the construction site.

I didn't change my name or my pronouns. My name is not English, and all names in the language are gendered- new, gender neutral and anglicised names feel cheap and plastic next to my surname. It's not like either would make a difference, because no one in my circles would use them, and half would make fun. I pretend it doesn't bother me because it's my friends and not malicious strangers on the street. My parents don't and will not know.

Today, meeting up with my friends, one approached me, nervous and anticipatory. He said he wasn't sure when we would meet up again, if it were to be before Christmas, or if it were to be after New Years, or before my birthday in January, and he wasn't sure what to get me- he got a job in his career, he had money now!- but he saw This and was sure it was right.

I opened it later, at a dining table in a restaurant. My friend was worried I wouldn't like it. I said it was a gift from him, so I'd cherish it regardless. A cube of a box, with a bulbously headed figure inside, complete with large, dull black eyes. Haruhi Fujioka, Ouran High School Host Club. It was a surprise, but my eyes panned down to focus on the pale yellow dress the figure was wearing, tied off with a pink ribbon. A special edition without the uniform that made Haruhi look more... like Haruhi. The table was alight with choruses of how much it looked like me, and of my friend proudly explaining that he thought so as well and knew for it to be the correct choice. I couldn't explain the hollow feeling inside my stomach, that seemed somehow both shallower and deeper than the lunchtime hunger.

So this goes here, where they cannot read it, and where maybe someone else will, and will understand.

[narcissistshandler]

𝗗𝗘𝗔𝗟 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗘𝗩𝗜𝗟 𝗜𝗜

𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗿. male reader x lee jinho (how to fight/viral hit)

𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀. dom!amab reader, sub!jinho, top reader implicit, assassination attempt, talk about murder, paranoid jinho, reader calls Jinho "deer" (not in a very affectionate way), captivity (?), blowjob, deep throat, spanking implicit. minors dni.

𝗮/𝗻. lee jinhoo argh. I lied, that shit has 2.9k words. I'm rewatching hannibal, what inspired all this erotic murder talk, I can't help it. likes and reblogs are welcome. Part one here.

You insisted he wasn't a prisoner, the rickety glass walls, the Internet access, all the doors to the luxurious penthouse in central Seoul open at his leisure. Jinho disagreed. Your control was smooth, mischievous, so light that anyone else could agree with you and surrender to your meticulously placed words. Jinho knew better than that. The chip removed from his phone prevented him from making or receiving calls, and the tight, armed security at the front door and the rest of the building prevented him from having contact with the outside world. He could not be trusted, was your argument, he could slip through your fingers at the first opportunity and to stop that he needed to be trained. Like a damn house dog.

Jinho wasn't going out of his way to please you, despite seeming to have accepted his new routine, between eating, sleeping and exercising, he occasionally found time to kill one of the men you put to watch him. He would spend two or three days quiet, peaceful, and the next day he would cook a human tongue for you. You were hard to piss off, you weren't bothered by his silent teasing, with the body left like a gift spilling blood on the living room carpet, and you weren't bothered by the scar cutting your stomach that Jinho had given you with a kitchen knife. Instead you smiled at him, brought him expensive gifts, treated him to fine dinners and started to keep your promise ── he watched the news slowly changing public opinion about him, about how everything was a big conspiracy against him and how he had only been a pawn used in a larger game, a political power game. And so, as the image of the politician who previously helped him became more and more dirty and How to Fight's subscribers dropped, Lee Jinho found himself able to step out into the sunlight again. At least could, if you didn't keep him locked up.

Jinho thought he could live a little in the role you wanted, until you trusted him enough to give him an opening, until you gave him the power that would be your own downfall. It wasn't hard to wait months or years, he'd done it before. Sitting in front of a whiteboard that was slowly taking shape, wearing sweatpants and a black t-shirt, Jinho was trying to stay on paper. Your eyes were on him, he could feel it. The silence in the empty room you had given him to serve as a studio was only interrupted by the soft strokes of the brush in his hand and the rustling of the pages of the book you were reading. But even after two weeks, Jinho still didn't know exactly what your intentions were. Keep him like a trophy wife? Use him as a sex toy? Or was this all an excuse to keep him trapped, cut off from the outside world and unable to exert any power, against you or anyone else? Maybe the news was fake, created to deceive him. Maybe you never intended to help him. Maybe he should kill you, right here and now and be done with it all ── stick the wooden brush across your eye and revel in the dread on your face, smear himself with your filthy blood and and…

"What are you thinking about? Your gaze turned dark." Your voice woke him up, amused. Jinho doubted you would still find it amusing if he spoke his thoughts out loud.

"I'm thinking about what it would be like to kill you," he tried, as normal and placid as talking about the weather.

"Oh?" you exclaimed. "And how would you kill me?"

Jinho turned around on the stool to face you. Sunlight burst through the glass wall, spilling like liquid gold over your tranquil figure as you sat on the turquoise sofa in the huge room filled with only two paintings on the wall, a deer took shape in one, and what looked like the animal's ribcage split open and filled with bloody flowers painted the other. Your watchful eyes were already on him, seeming to bore right through him. Book discarded next to crossed legs, face resting against hand, entertained, comfortable, confident… Jinho wanted to rip all those positive emotions out of you with a knife.

"With this brush." He turned the object between his fingers, the perfectly manicured brown wood gleaming in the light, the Kolinsky sable bristles at the tip stained dark blue. "Simple and quick, I'd poke your eye out before you even had time to blink, maybe the brush would break if I wasn't careful with my strength, but that would only make everything even more painful for you."

Your mouth opened, then closed, as if searching for the right words, before finally speaking. "And then?"

"Then I'd prick the other one with my fingers and hang you with the same hand smeared with your blood, wood sticking shallowly into your eye so the fun wouldn't end so soon." Your eyes dropped to his hand, the fingers long and elegant, deft even as they closed around that knife, touching it with as much mastery as when he held his tools of art. Your tongue darted out to wet your dry lips. An electric current shot through Jinho's traitorous body, he continued, unable to make the words stop coming out, "You would scream, beg me for mercy and I wouldn't have."

You didn't look scared, your calm made him uneasy.

"They say there is no murder more intimate than one committed with one's own hands," you said.

"There's nothing intimate about killing animals, whether with your bare hands or a knife."

The clock on the wall ticked, the low sound deafening in the silence that filled the room. Their eyes met, turbulent with strong and unusual emotions. None of you dared to dodge, feeling as if a war would be lost if did.

"Do you think about hurting me often?" You broke the silence, voice sounding low and deep.

Jinho looked at your pretty face, not a hint of anxiety or dread, the soft lips and vulnerable neck, the skin so so easy to crack and tear. And he replied, feeling as if were confessing his darkest sins:

"Every day."

"Good."

Jinho chuckled, the sudden sound surprising even himself as it reverberated in his ears. A smile of its own spread across your lips, free hand slipping over the linen fabric of your pants. Unconscious, Jinho followed the movement, his mouth suddenly dry as your hand slid between your legs and up, squeezing the obvious erection there. Unable to look away even when you rubbed your cock, Jinho didn't know what he was supposed to feel. You weren't normal, he was feasting on images of you in pain and suffering and dying and there you were ── hard, hard for him, hard for the aggressive words that came out of his mouth, hard for the image of Jinho above you, cold face and blood painting his clothes, like a holy painting. The blood seemed to run faster in Jinho's veins and he forced his feet against the ground, afraid to fall.

"It turns you on," Jinho said in disbelief, realization hitting him hard. "Sick bastard, do you want me to kill you?"

Your brow furrowed, finally looking displeased with something he said, but your hand didn't stop moving against the hardness in your pants, thumb stroking the wet stain growing in the fabric, breath coming out in soft puffs. Something in Jinho's body wanted to reach out and touch you. He stifled that desire.

"Get too close to my eyes and I'll break your fingers. No, I don't want to die." You snorted, opening your legs to give Jinho a better view. He wanted to look away, to mock you, but he couldn't, swallowing hard as a groan escaped your mouth, fingers pressing your outlined cock against the fabric. "But the idea is exciting, isn't it? You're hard too."

Jinho's legs pressed together against your gaze, suddenly very aware of the heat in his body, the hardness in his sweatpants, and the hungry look on his face. He wanted to devour you, touch you and hurt you with the same need.

"Come here," you said ── an order, because you didn't ask and didn't like to be refused, the scarred marks on his thighs and ass reminded him well of that.

Jinho blinked, trying to get his head back in place, it was difficult when in your presence. Putting the brush in place and getting to his feet, he walked towards you, taking his time, the pride still there despite how many times you've worked to break it. Your hands worked on the button and zipper of the pants and even before the next order, Jinho already knew what you wanted from him.

"On your knees, hands behind your back." He ground his teeth, but obeyed. Your hands were close to his face, reaching into your pants to pull a thick, heavy cock out, head glistening with precum. It had been inside him before, an irritating little voice reminded him. Once, the day he took that ridiculous deal. His ass clenched at the memory. Kneeling between your legs, erection dangerously close to his face, Jinho squashed the instinct that screamed to bite your cock off as soon as you tried to put it in his mouth. It wouldn't kill you, but it would be painful enough, an everlasting memory searing your skin. "Open, deer."

The pet name make him grind his teeth, managing to see the painting of the deer on the wall out of the corner of his eye. If you were trying to tease or humiliate him, he didn't know.

Against whatever primal instincts screamed in his mind, Jinho opened his mouth, almost eagerly as you brushed the tip of your cock against his thin lips, wetting them. Contrary to his thoughts, his body seemed to have other ideas, tongue darting against his lips to capture your taste, moan catching in the throat as salty pre-cum flooded his senses. He pursued your taste, leaning forward so he could lick the sensitive head, seeking more of that taste, unlike anything he'd felt before. A sigh fell from your mouth, heavy hand falling against the back of his neck, something in that sound drew him in, soft lips closing against the bulbous head in a careless suck. Everything about his movements was sloppy, it was obvious that Jinho had never sucked a cock, but the inexperience of that powerful and dangerous man only seemed to make you even harder.

You grabbed a handful of his hair, pulling him back. "Open it for me, sweet." You guided your cock with the hand to his willing mouth, tip sliding easily into the wet heat. Fingers tangling more tightly in the strands of his hair. "I'm going to teach you everything you need to know, so relax for me."

Jinho rolled his eyes, that superior attitude still untouched even with your cock pressing into his mouth.

"Use your tongue," you ordered, hips slowly pushing your length into his mouth. Your cock filled his mouth, hot and heavy against his tongue, salty with sweat and pre-cum, the tip against his cheek. He found himself moving his tongue, following its length and dragging against the prominent veins near the head, curious about how it would feel. You moaned above him, one hand slumped against your thigh, squeezing the fabric of the pants, the other caressing the skin at the back of his neck. "Suck it for me, deer."

Lips pressing against you, Jinho sucked, the wet, obscene sound echoing in the silent room, his skin heated, cock twitching between the legs. Spit pooling in his mouth, he made an attempt to move the head, spittle running down the length to your full balls as part of your cock pulled out of the heat of his mouth. His breath huffed against your damp skin.

"Breathe through your nose. No biting." His eyes were sharp, letting your length fall from his mouth to catch breath, even with his cheeks flushed and moisture pooling in the corners of his eyes, there was wit there. Do not tell me? He would probably say it if he wasn't afraid his voice would crack. You held your cock, stroking yourself through all the saliva Jinho had wet on you, thumb squeezing the sensitive head carelessly. Heat blooming in his stomach, it took everything in Jinho not to squish through the sweatpants, he didn't want to give you that satisfaction. He dug his nails into his arm hard behind his back, trying to anchor himself to something so he wouldn't sail away.

"Let's try something different," you said, voice steeped in pleasure as you slowed down stroking yourself close to his face, legs tensing as you stopped the movements, dick visibly twitching.

You took a deep breath, directing your cock to line up with Jinho's mouth. Parting his lips, Jinho couldn't help but groan as that thick, heavy cock slid back over his tongue. He closed his lips around and sucked, but you were already pushing farther back, into his throat. His hands were shooting out before he knew it, pushing your legs, head pulling out of your grasp. He was immediately released, coughing and wheezing, saliva running down his chin.

You pushed his hair back, seeing the sight of tears falling down Jinho's flushed face before he wiped them away, throat still fighting involuntary contractions and the feeling that he was going to throw up. You waited until he recovered before pulling him back to the front. "Let's try again."

"I'm going to kill you," Jinho threatened, voice low and husky, broken.

"Until then, you're going to make me come, so open your pretty mouth for me."

The words of protest stayed on his tongue, but Jinho couldn't voice them, opening the mouth to take your cock back, more eager than he would ever admit to anyone, even though anxiety not felt in years gnawed at his insides. Jinho breathed in through his nose, relaxing his throat as you began to slide deep, slowly, thick cock threatening to choke him. His throat constricted immediately, gag reflex kicking in as the head of your cock reached in too deep. His eyes closed in an effort not to cough and gag, tears running down the cheeks, not realizing he had moved the hands to press against the front of his pants.

"That's it, deer. Stay open for me. Just relax." Firm hand holding him in place and forcing him to stay still as your length pressed deep, fucking past the tightness of his throat, Jinho didn't expect his body to react so strongly, heat under his breath and an unknown pleasure bubbling in his stomach. He made the most beautiful sounds as your cock slid down his tight throat, but all he could hear was you ── your heavy breathing and soft moans and words of "you are so beautiful like that", "good boy", "touch yourself for me" and "you've been made for my dick", clouding his senses. He rubbed himself into the pants hard and fast, groaning against you each time the thick fabric dragged against his cock head, making a mess on his underwear.

Jinho willed his throat to relax, feeling your thick cock twitch as his throat flexed around it. Lashes grew heavy and wet, nails squeezing his length through the fabric until the stab of pain had his feet squirming against the floor. He dragged his teeth against your cock, lightly, in a threat or a tease, none of you knew, but the movement had your hips stuttering, groin pressed against his nose as your cock twitched one last time thrust deep into his mouth, before cum in his throat, forcing him to swallow so he wouldn't choke. Jinho whimpered, thumb squeezing the damp head of his cock, hips rocking against his palm in search of his own release.

"You can come Jinho." Jinho wanted to say that he didn't need your permission, that he would come even if you said otherwise, but the words make something inside him snap. With the salt filling his throat and your cock softening inside his mouth, Jinho's breath hitched for a minute, his whole body tensing… His cock spilled into his pants, saliva running down his chin and moaning around you. His ears go numb and he thinks he might need a few minutes to get back to reality, his legs shaking, his whole body shaking.

You gently pull back, cock sliding out of his mouth and Jinho lets his head fall against your thigh, teeth pressing into your skin hard enough to draw blood. For a second you think he might be looking for an artery in an attempt to make you bleed to death, the thought makes your flaccid dick twitch. You let him dig his teeth into you, fingers stroking his sweat damp hair and head against the back of the couch. You knew you made the right choice, Jinho would soon become your perfect pet, attempts to kill you or not.

[swap-meetog]

(part three! sorry for the delay all!)

(Greg’s POV)

I can’t believe this little shit just dumped me into his shitty life.  The last month has been the most embarrassing, upsetting, and uncomfortable one of my life.  It was weird enough having to get used to being a small thin gay boy, but then to be forced into the military... if I had enlisted in my own body I would have dominated the recruits.  But in Lewis’s body, no such luck.

Before I could even have my things unpacked in my new lodgings, a couple of my bunk mates demonstrated their power, and what would be our new dynamic.  I wasn’t gay before this swap but I found myself sucking both of their cocks with a skill that I must have inherited with this body.

I couldn’t keep up with the boot camp.  This body was just not cut out for a life of hard work.  I got punished daily by the drill sergeants, and then at night I was basically passed around the bunk, forced to either suck off or get fucked by each of the guys in the room, all of whom could easily over power me.

When I got sick of being treated like a sex toy, I tried to fight back.  The next day someone planted some weed in my bed before the daily room check.  

Returning back to Lewis’s home was a relief, no matter how I happened to return there.  I felt so defeated, but at least I would be home and I would be able to confront Lewis for stealing my body and get it back.  My new parents were furious that I got the boot from the army, and on the drive back from the bus station they told me I had two weeks to find myself a job and get out of their house.  Seems like I can’t catch a break as Lewis.  Can’t wait to be done with all of this.

My heart sank as we pulled into the driveway.  There were a couple children playing in my lawn.  When I asked about “Greg”, .my parents just shrugged off my questions, saying he had sold his house a couple weeks ago.  They don’t know where he had gone.  This little twink had literally stolen everything from me.

It took me another week or so but I did finally manage to track him down.  He now lived in the downtown area, in a nice apartment.  I was going to destroy him when I got him in person.

He opened the door while I was still knocking and pulled me inside.  He looked me over for a few seconds, then slammed me against the wall and started kissing me!  Soon he forced me into what was a very familiar position, me on my knees with a cock waving in my face.  Only this time it was my old cock, and it looked intimidating from this perspective.

After he forced me to swallow his load, he told me that there was no way he would give up everything he now had.  Especially since “Lewis” had nothing going for him.  He also told me that he would allow me to move in with him, under a couple conditions.  First, he wanted me to know that the body swapping device was in a safety deposit box at the bank, and he was the only person with access.  So if I moved in with him, I would basically be saying that I completely agree with the current body situation and I wouldn’t try to get my old body back.  The second was that he saw how my body reacted to his aggression because of the military men, so I had to agree to be used by him as a sexual object whenever his dick got hard.  

And the third, well that’s what I’m working on now.  He has all the money I have saved before we swapped, but he thinks I owe him rent for being allowed to stay with him.  Now, while he goes out to the gym, or goes out on dates (which he has a lot of, he is using my dating profiles a lot more than I did when I was him), I retreat to my small room, pick out the skimpiest outfit I own, and put on a cam show for the internet.  I’m not making a ton of money, at least not yet, but I have a roof over my head and more sex than I could possibly ask for.  I will always want to be Greg again, but for now I have to accept that I am Lewis. 

[wordsintimeandspace]

she, like a summer night

Jon, trying to find the right pronouns.

Jon/Martin, rated G, around 1400 words. Read on AO3! Credit for the title goes to Hello from the Hallowoods. :)

Somehow, Jon feels like coming out should have been the hardest part of this whole thing. The awkward “Martin, I’ve realized that I’m not a man, I’m nonbinary and I hope it will not be an issue because I know you’re gay” bit - but no, Martin is Martin, kind and understanding and head over heels in love with Jon. That made this part surprisingly easy. The hard part begins when Martin takes Jon’s hands in his, presses a kiss to Jon’s knuckles, and asks about Jon’s pronouns.

Jon doesn’t know what to say. Somehow, next to everything else, it completely slipped Jon’s mind until now.

“Um,” Jon begins, looking around the cottage as if the right set of pronouns might be hidden somewhere in the overfull bookshelves or Martin’s knitting supplies. “I- I don’t know.”

Martin gently runs a finger over the back of Jon’s hand. “I mean, you don’t have to change them if you don’t want to,” he says with a shrug. “Do you still feel comfortable with he/him?”

Jon mulls it over in his head, and grimaces. It never bothered Jon before, but now it makes Jon’s skin crawl. “I’m… no. No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay,” Martin says, giving Jon’s hand a squeeze. “That’s okay.”

Jon lets out a long breath, and leans a little closer towards Martin. The couch creaks beneath them as Martin embraces Jon and presses a kiss to Jon’s head. “I don’t know what else I want to use though,” Jon mumbles against Martin’s chest. “I’m sorry, I should have thought about this before telling you.”

“It’s fine. We can think about it together, if you want.”

Jon nods. “I- I’d like that.”

Martin lets out a thoughtful hum, his chest rumbling beneath Jon’s cheek. “I mean, they/them is what most nonbinary people use, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you like it?”

Jon frowns, and tries it out in their head. Their name is Jonathan Sims. They used to be Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute in London until they eloped to Scotland with their boyfriend. They aren’t sure if they is the right pronoun for them, but it’s definitely a better option than he. “It’s… it’s fine,” Jon finally says.

“You sure?” Martin asks, pulling back a little to look at Jon. He doesn’t seem convinced.

“Y-yes. It will be adequate, I believe.”

“Adequate?!” Martin gapes at him, brow furrowed. “Jon. We’re aiming for gender euphoria, not gender adequacy.”

“I-” Jon breaks off, frowning. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s when something makes you feel good about your gender. Makes you feel comfort or joy or something like that. Not just… I don’t know, indifference.”

Jon hums and leans back, watching Martin for a moment. They’ve talked about Martin being trans before, in the few months they’ve now been together, but never about this. There’s still so much more Jon wants to know about him. “What made you feel that for the first time?”

Martin blinks, surprised by the question, before breaking out into a bright smile that makes his eyes light up.“When I was eleven, I cut all my hair off for the first time. I used some blunt kitchen scissors, so it looked awful. My mum was so mad, but the feeling of looking in the mirror with short hair was incredible. Like I could finally see myself for who I was.”

Jon smiles, heart jumping at seeing Martin like this, happy and comfortable with himself. “That sounds nice.”

“It is,” Martin says softly. He reaches for Jon’s hand and gives it a squeeze. “And if they/them doesn’t do it for you, we can keep trying.”

Jon lets out a long breath. “Okay.”

Martin bites his lip, thinking for a moment. “How do you feel about neopronouns?” he finally asks. “There’s a lot of options. Maybe we can look some up online next time we’ve got internet access.”

Jon knows some people using these - there was someone back in Research using xe/xem, and Martin often talks about someone in his knitting circle with fae/faer pronouns. Still, it seems like a bit of a hassle. “I’d just be correcting people all the time, wouldn’t I?” Jon asks with a grimace. “”It’s just a bit… complicated, for others. I don’t want to be a bother.”

Martin’s face falls. “You’re allowed to be a bother, Jon,” he says, softly but determined. “You’re allowed to take up space to make yourself comfortable.”

Something in Martin’s voice brings tears to Jon’s eyes. Jon gulps, and has to look away. “I- I know.”

“Do you?”

Jon huffs. “I’m working on it. Still, I don’t think neopronouns are right for me.”

“Okay.”

Jon lets out a sigh and looks back at Martin. He gives Jon an encouraging smile. Jon manages to smile back and moves closer again, pushing Martin down onto his back so Jon can properly wrap every limb around him. With Martin holding Jon close and Jon’s face buried in the crook of his neck, all of this mess is a little easier. “I’m sorry,” Jon finally mumbles. “I don’t mean to make this complicated.”

Martin rubs a hand down Jon’s back, and some of the tension floods out of Jon. “You’re not making it complicated,” Martin says. “It just is.”

“Was it for you?”

“I mean, yeah. It was at the beginning, although I was pretty sure by the time I came out that I was a man and wanted to use he/him.”

Jon groans. “God, I wish I was sure about any of this.”

“You’ll get there.” Martin laughs, and moves his hand from Jon’s back into Jon’s hair. Jon melts under the caress, leaning into his touch.

“Maybe.”

They’re quiet for a moment. Martin continues his ministrations, gently scratching Jon’s scalp and working the tangles out of Jon’s long hair. “No pronouns is always an option,” he finally says, just when Jon is nearly drifting off to sleep. “Otherwise… well. There’s she/her as well?”

Jon stills. That isn’t an option Jon has considered before. There’s something about it, something soft and gentle yet fierce. Something defiant. Everything Jon wants to be, to soften the gruff exterior of scarred skin and the all too frequent looks of pity people direct at Jon. Jon gulps and pulls back a little, enough to see Martin’s face. “Try it out for me?” Jon asks, voice a little hoarse.

Martin smiles softly and thinks for a moment. “This is my partner Jon,” he finally begins. “She likes her tea way too sweet, always leaves her dirty socks beside the laundry basket and she promised to do the dishes last night but didn’t.”

Jon huffs out a laugh. “I was distracted with having a crisis about my gender.”

Martin’s grin widens in response. He cups Jon’s face in his hands, running his thumb over the cheek. “She’s also the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen and I love her very much. And I feel incredibly lucky that she trusts me with something so personal as trying out her new pronouns.”

Jon smiles, a little teary. “Of course I do.”

“So, what do you think?

Jon gulps, still a bit at a loss of words. She can’t really describe how these words make her feel. Mainly, they just feel right, and leave a warm, giddy feeling in her chest. She nods. “I… yes. Yes. I think I understand what you mean with gender euphoria.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. That’s… it's very good.”

Martin grins and leans in close to press a kiss to Jon’s forehead. “That’s great Jon.”

“Thank you,” Jon says, curling her fingers into Martin’s jumper to keep him close. She lets out a content sigh as Martin tucks her head beneath his chin, and slowly the anxiety building in her over the last few days leading up to her coming out melts away. It’s been a constant buzz beneath her skin, keeping her up at night. And yet, she wouldn’t want to have it any other way. It feels like a privilege, having the space to worry about this instead of statements and fears and the end of the world.

Another thought crosses her mind, and she looks up at Martin again. “What would you say if I wanted to try wearing dresses sometime?” she asks carefully.

Martin laughs, brightly and fondly, and it fills Jon's heart with warmth until there's simply no more room for any anxiety in her chest. “I’d say," Martin starts, grinning down at her, "we can stop by the thrift store tomorrow.”

[innuendostudios]

I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

[bastardbvby]

every time those freaking thinning scissors came out i got more and more upset i wont lie. his hair was so good, so thick, so full. we could have had so much he just needed a couple inches off and some shaping, just to get rid of dead ends and clean it up a bit.

i hope the la gang loses internet access for the next month so i dont have to hear jokes about this deadass because i just. WHY. like u know what cut a few inches off sure ! we've seen him pull off longer hair at all stages it looks absolutely fine ! but they were shearing him like a mf SHEEP !!!!!!! when they got it short and kept cutting because 'its so addicting to just keep taking it off lol!' like gensrs there will be karmic intervention