#ever since getting suspended on twitter I've decided. fuck that site.

[deoidesign]

Me when time and time again finally comes back from hiatus

[tasteful-side-blog]

I was wondering if when you asked for their discord or when you exchanged discords, they were also verified? Cherp rules are kinda confusing and contradictory in certain parts like when it says you can’t move off site unless all are verified, but then the next rule says no discord exchanges or any social media exchanges. So then how would we move off site? Is it even okay if all are verified, but then you can’t even drop your discord handle without being banned?

lmao thank you for reminding me abt all that shit with Cherp it's been so long since i checked up on it. For the record it's still the only place (online or irl) I've ever been permanently banned and I think it's a really funny example of how you can take an active IP with a built in user base and still manage to fuck it up by being so deeply unprofessional and toxic that you're not worth putting up with. Twitter wishes it could blow up like Cherp.

If you think the rules are confusing and contradictory now you should have seen them back in the day, Throughout Cherubplay's entire existence there was never a ban on off-site promotion or exchanges and Cherp's rules about when/how interaction are acceptable have been showing up piecemeal ever since. At the time i was permanently banned the website had recently updated their rules stating that exchanging information was liable for a week suspension. Another user and I (who told me they regularly requested discord usernames with no issues and was not suspended when I was) exchange discords, I log in the next morning, my account has been permanently removed.

I join their discord group and learn that in the discord they decided the rules are changing now and all information exchanges are a permaban, if you weren't in the offsite discord to know that then tough shit, you're still gone.

I went through most of the important people on the mod team trying to discuss this, most seemed pissed that I dare question their supreme judgement Reddit mod style. I'm not exactly surprised the types of personalities who ran and ruined old-school RP forums still exist in lots of nerd spaces. I remember specifically bringing up that at the time the rule I'd been perma'd for still showed up on the website as a max 1 week suspension, the response was "we can decide to ban you for any reason, go away."

Like yeah! You sure can do that! It also just makes you a raging asshole and the last person that should have a customer facing position in your team.

One day someone's gonna do a YouTube essay deep dive on all the random bullshit that happened with their donations/ID verification/etc. but my brief experience with the whole team made me feel like they were the last people you should trust your personal information with. Also I'm not saying I'm a cyber crimes expert but either the problems the site faced w the FBI were unique (in which case, what the fuck) or they were trumped up to cover their asses when they faced public pushback (in which case, what the fuck).

idk dude all i can say is that i hope one day the nerds get the roleplay site they deserve

[beigeshiba]

A conversation with my intrusive thoughts

Why didn't you go back to Twitter?

Multiple reasons rather than any short, single reason.

I go through these phases of phases of having a lot to say and phases of running out of things to say and deciding it would be a good idea for me to shut the fuck up and listen for a while. Around about when I got banned from Twitter, I felt like I had been repeating myself and running out of things to say and that it would only be a matter of time before people figured that out.

When I got suspended from Twitter, it came as a relief. The decision had been made for me and I could simply accept it, so I did.

I avoid trying to reenter places where it's been made clear that I am unwelcome. Even though the internet is a husk of its former self, it's still big enough that trying to get back into a site you've been kicked out of is a sign of unhealthy obsession.

Speaking of which, whoever finally suspended my account was so pissed off by me they nuked me from orbit. I wasn't suspended for TOS violation or hate speech or any of that stuff. They brought out the big guns: Platform manipulation.

I have never run alt accounts, tried to evade a ban or suspension or bought engagement, never needed to. Still, this meant I had to apply for a review to my suspension about half a dozen times to actually get a response and only recently, did I finally get a response. Yup, they're keeping the suspension permanent for TOS violations. Anyone surprised by that? I'm not. I was really just doing it to show that I tried and hadn't just given up on people.

What have you been up to since?

Mostly, getting my shit together IRL.

I've left behind a lot of things that were negative influences in my life: Melbourne, Victoria and the IT industry in particular.

I moved towards something more positive, a girl I met on Twitter and formed a relationship with kicked off initially by running a D&D campaign and then just talking a lot about religion and spirituality in DMs between sessions. She's currently being initiated into the Roman Church (she was brought up Wiccan, hasn't been baptised yet) and we're planning on getting married later this year.

OK but why are you on Tumblr, of all places?

Because the most obvious place that all the edgy dissident bois are going is Substack, which just makes it a big, tempting target the next time the Empire feels like swinging its dick around.

Meanwhile, nobody gives a fuck about Tumblr any more. The place is less moderated than 4chan and ever since the ban on pornographic content, the most toxic part of the userbase collectively fucked off to Twitter, because it was the next most lax social media platform for pornography. Sure, they'll make lots of bratty bottom noises about Elon letting a lot of people back onto Twitter whom they don't like, but frankly so long as that bunch of coomers can still share nudes, the place could turn into a carbon copy of /pol and they'd still show up. Addiction makes people do some pretty fucked up things.

Why were you away for so long?

For most of it, I simply felt I had nothing new to say, that was worth saying.

Now that I do feel like I have things to say, I'm rather worried that a lot of people who liked my content back on Twitter, aren't going to like the things I have to say now, because I've changed a fair bit.

I'm not going to pull any of that "I've grown up and become a better person" nonsense, because that's bullshit. I'm still a sinner in the eyes of God just as much now as I was back then. People just change as time goes on and that's as true for me as it is anyone else.

Some of the things I went through changed me a lot. The cyberpunk dystopian nightmare that was Melbourne's lockdowns and mandates radicalised me intensely against capitalism. Seeing the extent to which my government was nothing more than a service provider for the most wealthy, eagerly pimping everyone out to the highest bidder for such a tiny slice of the profits forcefully extracted, was a real eye opener. I'm never going to unsee the reality that this world I live in isn't my world, I just live in it for as long as the wealthy can profitably extract something they value from me.

For a lot of people in the dissident right, the idea that capitalism isn't their friend is a bitter pill they're just never going to be ready to swallow. They'll simp for vampire corpos to the bitter end because they've internalised that idea that every alternative to the status quo leads to mass death. I always knew that expressing that opinion was going to piss a lot of people off and have them grumbling that I've "gone commie" and frankly I didn't feel like disappointing people with that and dealing with the results of that disappointment.

I've never tried to hide the fact that I have read Marx and do find some of his ideas useful, in particular his conception of the dynamics of class struggle and particularly the concept of alienation. The fact that Marx's critique of alienation has been almost entirely abandoned by the contemporary left in favour of trying to defictionalise Ian M Banks "Culture" novels is one of my biggest disappointments with that part of the political spectrum.

Also, I don't think I'm ever going to vibe with people who think that "Dialectical Materialism" is anything other than the two stupidest ideas known to mankind doing a Dragonball Z Fusion Dance.

At the same time though, I fail to see how setting up a totalitarian state with even greater concentration of capital than we already have now, without any safeguards against abuse of power, is going to improve the lives of the common man. Because that's what the manifesto more or less proposes as a solution and while Marxism has moved on from a lot of things from the original material, it's clung to that vision laid out in the manifesto like a barnacle.

Why are you back now?

Well, I have things to talk about now, other than myself. I just wanted to get that out of the way for the sake of those who were curious.

What I have been getting into, during my extended absence, is studying the Western Esoteric Tradition in depth.

I am sure this concerns some. Just to make things clear: I am still Roman Catholic, quite orthodox in my beliefs and I am staying the hell away from sorcery and gnosticism. A lot of what I am studying frankly was pretty mainstream folk Christianity back in the Renaissance.

This said, it's been very healing for me in a lot of ways. It has helped cure me of the despair I had that ideology was a completely impotent force for improving our earthy lives. I still believe that to be the case, I've just learned to accept this without despair.

In particular, it's helped me to re-engage with the world from an enchanted perspective again, to see the world as a beautiful place full of non-human living beings. It's quite the improvement over seeing the taint of human sin ruining everything and letting it fill me with hate.

It's been odd, taking the teachings and wisdoms of Druids and Shamans and Taoists and using it to help bring me closer to God. Still, that's how it's turned out. And I feel like these understandings I have come to as a result of all this study are things that I have an obligation to share with people.

Because unlike all the piss and vinegar I was venting out with my political hot takes on Twitter, this might actually improve people's lives in some way instead of just being some sound and fury which recognised the pain other people were feeling.