#good way to kick off my blm series though

[dianight]

Bit of a long ramble

Don't really like putting or seeing transphobia related shit on my dash, but this one has been cooking for a while on and off.

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You see, there is this one streamer who I will not name and who we will simply refer to as this dude. For someone who by chance happens to know of this dude, it would be very easy to guess who he is, but I don't imagine many people are aware.

So. There is this dude. Member of a certain community I was also a member of (still kinda am, but meh). To this day he remains the only person kicked and "unpersoned" by his attitude and words, as opposed to being kicked for cheating, as a few others have.

As a player, he has amassed quite a few achievements and was well known and respected for a long time. This part is just context.

As a person, he has always been very outspoken about certain topics that streamers usually avoid. Topics about race (he is brown, in his own words), about sexism, about politics, you get the idea.

Now, I don't like the expression "rent free in X's head" because I don't believe in the concept of rent. But I often reference his case, as I remember it happening in real time, as the archetypical example of how transphobia rots your brain. Nothing in this paragraph is meant as a joke. Fully serious including the rent part.

For added context, this dude was someone that I "took seriously" as in, I expected that if a conversation was about a serious topic, he would actually treat it as a serious conversation instead of saying some platitudes or treating it as unimportant, as streamers are known to do. When I talk about this dude there is sadness in my voice; not sadness because he could have gone differently, as I consider him a lost cause, but sadness in the choices some people make and how they end up much worse as a person.

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Although the timeline is not exactly as I'll explain, the general idea remains the same. It's been years, so any mistakes are a product of my bad memory.

Around the time the BLM movement was a big thing, this dude got caught in a rather unfortunate series of events.

He got into a twitter argument involving a developer of a game congratulating a white player for a (relatively speaking) minor acomplishment when compared to his own. His point was to call out the racism of ignoring a brown player while praising a white one. For what it's worth I think he was in the right here, as much as I roll my eyes when typing twitter argument. Nothing good came out of it, as the developer did not "reward" him in the same way they did for the white player. What it did though, was attract a lot of bad faith viewers to his chat. You know the ones that like to stir shit up, debate me kind of guy.

This influx of assholes, coupled with the fact that BLM was big at the time and the fact that this dude loved talking about complex issues assuming others are looking for a conversation, to learn from each other and all that, instead of the obvious trolls he was getting, he started getting very defensive about things.

This dude used to have a blog, he's moved urls last time I checked, where he would write out his thoughts. He wrote about a very extensive list of controversial topics and his stance on them, in what I can only assume was an effort to have to explain himself less every time he streamed.

Among these topics was younger people's access to hrt, although with a far more dramatic phrasing. The arguments he posed had a telling stench to them, the fake concern that you get from sources marked in red by shinigami eyes. He got "called out" as I see people say, and he did admit that he was not well informed, that he would do more research and all that.

During all this one of his closest family members passed away. He talked about what it meant for him on his blog. I'd rather not expand here.

As this dude stopped streaming for a while (around a year perhaps?) when he came back he was a bit changed, to put it euphemistically. Aparently he had been getting harassed on twitter by people who disagreed with him over those topics, and he eventually doubled down and kept getting more into the circle that quotes the likes of jordan peterson and other such cockroaches.

Not being involved in this kind of thing, when I got notice of this changed behavior I was skeptical. This dude, who calls out anyone being racist (to him, or to others) is now talking about these grifters? Surely it's a misunderstanding (how naive...). At some point he got kicked out of the community I mentioned earlier. Many in his audience literally begged him to reconsider what he was saying as it was getting too bigoted. At some point I simply blocked any mention of this dude on platforms I use.

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Make no mistake.

Occasionally he comes up when discussing the history of the earlier mentioned community, as he was there when it was started and he got his contributions, which have been erased and are not talked about unless strictly necessary.

I feel no sympathy for someone like this dude. Many such cases, sadly.

I just want to illustrate a point that we keep seeing time and time again. People tanking their careers, driving away those who care about them. And what for? To tell people that kids taking blockers is dangerous? To shit on those who can't access hormones? To mock those who don't present on a socially acceptable way? To cling to some idealized worldview rooted in bigotry and violence?

I don't know what this dude's point of no return was. I can only guess and I won't out of respect for those who are no longer there.

But past a certain point I stop caring, stop giving chances, stop giving the benefit of the doubt. You can either stand against all bigotry, and I mean all of it. Or you are an enemy, someone to be ignored and forgotten in the best of cases. Or. Should fascism not be squashed before it's too late, someone to be rid of, violently.

No mercy. No excuses.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media

In William Gibson’s 1992 novel “Idoru,” a media executive describes her company’s core audience:

“Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

It’s an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune.

It’s also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV’s role in a societal “dumbing down,” that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK’s ideas, but to Nixon’s terrible TV manner.

Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves To Death” was a watershed here, comparing the soundbitey Reagan-Dukakis debates with the long, rhetorically complex Lincoln-Douglas debates of the previous century.

(Incidentally, when I finally experienced those debates for myself, courtesy of the 2009 BBC America audiobook, I was more surprised by Lincoln’s unequivocal, forceful repudiations of slavery abolition than by the rhetoric’s nuance)

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/01/20/lincoln-douglas-debate-audiobook-civics-history-and-rhetoric-lesson-in-16-hours/

“Media literacy” scholarship entered the spotlight, and its left flank — epitomized by Chomsky’s 1988 “Manufacturing Consent” — claimed that an increasingly oligarchic media industry was steering society, rather than reflecting it.

Thus, when the internet was demilitarized and the general public started trickling — and then rushing — to use it, there was a widespread hope that we might break free of the tyranny of concentrated, linear programming (in the sense of “what’s on,” and “what it does to you”).

Much of the excitement over Napster wasn’t about getting music for free — it was about the mix-tapification of all music, where your custom playlists would replace the linear album.

Likewise Tivo, whose ad-skipping was ultimately less important than the ability to watch the shows you liked, rather than the shows that were on.

Blogging, too: the promise was that a community of reader-writers could assemble a daily “newsfeed” that reflected their idiosyncratic interests across a variety of sources, surfacing ideas from other places and even other times.

The heady feeling of the time is hard to recall, honestly, but there was a thrill to getting up and reading the news that you chose, listening to a playlist you created, then watching a show you picked.

And while there were those who fretted about the “Daily Me” (what we later came to call the “filter bubble”) the truth was that this kind of active media creation/consumption ranged far more widely than the monopolistic media did.

The real “bubble” wasn’t choosing your own programming — it was everyone turning on their TV on Thursday nights to Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons.

The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped media into two categories: “lean back” (turn it on and passively consume it) and “lean forward” (steer your media consumption with a series of conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).

Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and recommendations.

I remember the thrill of being in a hotel room years after I’d left my hometown, using Napster to grab rare live recordings of a band I’d grown up seeing in clubs, and striking up a chat with the node’s proprietor that ranged fondly and widely over the shows we’d both seen.

But that sociability was markedly different from the “social” in social media. From the earliest days of Myspace and Facebook, it was clear that this was a sea-change, though it was hard to say exactly what was changing and how.

Around the time Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, a close friend a blazing argument with a TV executive who insisted that the internet was just a passing fad: that the day would come when all these online kids grew up, got beaten down by work and just wanted to lean back.

To collapse on the sofa and consume media that someone else had programmed for them, anaesthetizing themselves with passive media that didn’t make them think too hard.

This guy was obviously wrong — the internet didn’t disappear — but he was also right about the resurgence of passive, linear media.

But this passive media wasn’t the “must-see TV” of the 80s and 90s.

Rather, it was the passivity of the recommendation algorithm, which created a per-user linear media feed, coupled with mechanisms like “endless scroll” and “autoplay,” that incinerated any trace of an active role for the “consumer” (a very apt term here).

It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I disliked about algorithmic recommendation/autoplay, but I knew I hated it. The reason my 2008 novel LITTLE BROTHER doesn’t have any social media? Wishful thinking. I was hoping it would all die in a fire.

Today, active media is viewed with suspicion, considered synonymous with Qanon-addled boomers who flee Facebook for Parler so they can stan their favorite insurrectionists in peace, freed from the tyranny of the dread shadowban.

But I’m still on team active media. I would rather people actively choose their media diets, in a truly sociable mode of consumption and production, than leaning back and getting fed whatever is served up by the feed.

Today on Wired, Duke public policy scholar Philip M Napoli writes about lean forward and lean back in the context of Trump’s catastrophic failure to launch an independent blog, “From the Desk of Donald J Trump.”

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-trumps-failed-blog-proves-he-was-just-howling-into-the-void/

In a nutshell, Trump started a blog which he grandiosely characterized as a replacement for the social media monopolists who’d kicked him off their platforms. Within a month, he shut it down.

While Trump claimed the shut-down was all part of the plan, it’s painfully obvious that the real reason was that no one was visiting his website.

Now, there are many possible, non-exclusive explanations for this.

For starters, it was a very bad social media website. It lacked even rudimentary social tools. The Washington Post called it “a primitive one-way loudspeaker,” noting its lack of per-post comments, a decades old commonplace.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/trump-online-traffic-plunge/

Trump paid (or more likely, stiffed) a grifter crony to build the site for him, and it shows: the “Like” buttons didn’t do anything, the video-sharing buttons created links to nowhere, etc. From the Desk… was cursed at birth.

But Napoli’s argument is that even if Trump had built a good blog, it would have failed. Trump has a highly motivated cult of tens of millions of people — people who deliberately risked death to follow him, some even ingesting fish-tank cleaner and bleach at his urging.

The fact that these cult-members were willing to risk their lives, but not endure poor web design, says a lot about the nature of the Trump cult, and its relationship to passive media.

The Trump cult is a “push media” cult, simultaneously completely committed to Trump but unwilling to do much to follow him.

That’s the common thread between Fox News (and its successors like OANN) and MAGA Facebook.

And it echoes the despairing testimony of the children of Fox cultists, that their boomer parents consume endless linear TV, turning on Fox from the moment they arise and leaving it on until they fall asleep in front of it (also, reportedly, how Trump spent his presidency).

Napoli says that Trump’s success on monopoly social media platforms and his failure as a blogger reveals the role that algorithmically derived, per-user, endless scroll linear media played in the ascendancy of his views.

It makes me think of that TV exec and his prediction of the internet’s imminent disappearance (which, come to think of it, is not so far off from my own wishful thinking about social media’s disappearance in Little Brother).

He was absolutely right that this century has left so many of us exhausted, wanting nothing more than the numbness of lean-back, linear feeds.

But up against that is another phenomenon: the resurgence of active political movements.

After a 12-month period that saw widescale civil unrest, from last summer’s BLM uprising to the bizarre storming of the capital, you can’t really call this the golden age of passivity.

While Fox and OANN consumption might be the passive daily round of one of Idoru’s “vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organisms craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed,” that is in no way true of Qanon.

Qanon is an active pastime, a form of collaborative storytelling with all the mechanics of the Alternate Reality Games that the lean-forward media advocates who came out of the blogging era love so fiercely:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#other-hon

Meanwhile, the “clicktivism” that progressive cynics decried as useless performance a decade ago has become an active contact sport, welding together global movements from Occupy to BLM that use the digital to organize the highly physical.

That’s the paradox of lean-forward and lean-back: sometimes, the things you learn while leaning back make you lean forward — in fact, they might just get you off the couch altogether.

I think that Napoli is onto something. The fact that Trump’s cultists didn’t follow him to his crummy blog tells us that Trump was an effect, not a cause (something many of us suspected all along, as he’s clearly neither bright nor competent enough to inspire a movement).

But the fact that “cyberspace keeps everting” (to paraphrase “Spook Country,” another William Gibson novel) tells us that passive media consumption isn’t a guarantee of passivity in the rest of your life (and sometimes, it’s a guarantee of the opposite).

And it clarifies the role that social media plays in our discourse — not so much a “radicalizer” as a means to corral likeminded people together without them having to do much. Within those groups are those who are poised for action, or who can be moved to it.

The ease with which these people find one another doesn’t produce a deterministic outcome. Sometimes, the feed satisfies your urge for change (“clicktivism”). Sometimes, it fuels it (“radicalizing”).

Notwithstanding smug media execs, the digital realm equips us to “express our mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire” by doing much more than “changing the channels on a universal remote” — for better and for worse.

Image: Ian Burt (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/267206444

CC BY: https://creativecommo

ns.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[talvin-muircastle]

Am I Queer? It’s Controversial.

This is going to be long, and it’s going to cover a lot of ground, so please bear with me.  

Recently, this article came to my attention:

https://www.healthline.com/health/gender-nonconforming

I have spent a fair amount of time questioning my own sexuality/identity, and having it questioned by others.  Now approaching five full decades of life, I feel comfortable saying:

I identify as Male, and Straight.

I am Gender Non-Conforming by the standards of the culture I come from.

But I am not comfortable saying this qualifies me as “Queer” or otherwise under LGBTQIA+.   

That article (which is by no means the Last Word on the subject) identifies several areas where I do not conform to my AMAB status as culturally defined:

I have long hair.  But I also have a thick beard and moustache, and I like that combination.  Still, I grew up in a place where long hair on a guy meant you were A) Queer or B) into Heavy Metal.   Even though my teen years saw me sporting a military-style buzzcut more often than not, I tended to hang out with the Metalheads.  My long hair continues to be a point of contention with my conservative relatives and in-laws.   Some of them think I am a Hippie, which is funny because I am allergic to Cannabis.  Wanna watch me fight for breath and puke?  Blow weed smoke in my face.  

I am a Stay-At-Home Dad and Homemaker.  I have been the breadwinner for this family, but that is not part of my identity.  I am quite content to let my wife handle that part of things, and so is she.  I have been a Dad longer than I have been a father, in fact:  for most of my life I have been mentoring teenagers that find their way to me seeking advice, comfort, acceptance, and guidance.    I spent a lot of time worrying about what career should I follow, and it took me far too long to understand and accept that Dad was what I was after.  A woman seeking motherhood as a career is validated, a man seeking fatherhood in the same context is not conforming.  

When I was younger, I got hit with one hell of a double-standard: while wanting to be a Dad as a goal is not acceptable, I was supposed to go out there and sow my wild oats.  OK, I wasn’t really supposed to get girls pregnant, but I was supposed to try.  Wait, what? Try that again?  OK, if you were a teenaged boy in the 80s and 90s and I am pretty sure before that (not sure after, AIDS changed a lot of thinking all around), you were not supposed to get a girl pregnant, but you were supposed to make an attempt as often as possible, in fact you were supposed to score but fail.  If you are confused, don’t feel bad: I was living steeped in this paradox 24/7/365 and came out of it real confused.

Meanwhile, I was looking for a long-term, meaningful relationship with a woman who could be a partner in my life, and avoiding the one-night stands I was supposed to be after according to the standards of my culture, and so many of the people around me—parents, teachers, peers—decided that I must be Queer.  And that was Not A Good Classification To Find Yourself In in Rural Tennessee of the 80’s and 90’s.   Lacking real support, I entered adulthood like a trainwreck still skidding down the tracks, confused as hell and desperately trying to please people whose opinions mattered to me far more than they should.  I did finally find that relationship, and we celebrate 21 years of marriage this month.  Meanwhile I can’t keep track of who has gotten divorced and remarried from that crowd anymore.   

I am not a fan of American Football.  (I am not a fan of soccer, which is football to the rest of the world, but that’s not going to get you labeled Queer in the USA as yet.)   Even so, I got recruited to be the Football Manager for my high school football team, and then I spent several years studying to be an Athletic Trainer in college as an add-on to my English and Education degree.  The fact that I spent 7 years of my life on the sidelines of football games (and basketball, and baseball) and still do not really understand the rules of those sports should have been a clear sign to me that I was trying to conform and failing badly.  An American Male of my generation is supposed to like these things, he is supposed to scream at the television or scream from the stands when watching a game, he is supposed to have a Favorite Team and Wear Their Stuff.

Yeah, that’s not me.  I don’t like combative sports.  I like things that involve grace, beauty, and art.   Figure skating (either gender, singles, but especially pairs) is fun to watch.  The more artistic of gymnastics events are nice (uneven bars and vault are kinda boring, but I love watching floor exercise.)  Watching someone do tricks on a skateboard is more interesting to me than an MMA bout.  I enjoy the art of it.   I used to watch WWF Wrestling as a kid, but I found I enjoyed the “story” more than the violence.  Martial arts practice that is done like a dance is more interesting than watching two people try to kick each other in the face for real.   

I’m told I am supposed to like these things.  I am told that not liking them makes me less masculine.  

This extends into online gaming as well.  Oh, I like some combat games.  We aren’t going to talk about how many hours I have played the XCOM series.  But…I don’t like PVP or multiplayer. I like the story arc, and accomplishing things.  Minecraft?  I like building, and killing mobs is very secondary to that.  In single-player I usually just go peaceful mode and explore the world, build grand railways and tunnels, create comfortable houses or make a home under a lake with a glass roof under the water.  In World of Warcraft I spent more time exploring the world and getting cool screenshots than worrying about getting Phat Loot and XP.  I would take a whole afternoon just to escort a couple of new players through dangerous territory so they could find their friends.  

I have gotten a lot of grief over that.  I am supposed to go out and kill kill kill stab stab stab get the loot!  

And I am supposed to get more than the other person.  It’s competition.  Men are supposed to compete.  And if you can’t get more than the other guy you go dump buckets of lava on his house and laugh at the noob.  

I hate that.  

By the standards I was raised with, I am gender nonconforming.  I most definitely do not conform to the expectations that were laid upon me from my youth.

Does that make me Queer?   I am not comfortable claiming that.

The standards I was held to can also be considered Toxic Masculinity.  They hold that Queer==Less Of A Man.  “Queer” is not “Less.”  I was raised to think it is, but I have learned, and grown, and I know that it is not.  I also do not accept that I, myself, am Less.  The very premise of me being labeled Queer by those people is wrong on all counts.   I am different. I have always known that.  I believe that “Man” and “Male” can encompass more than violence, bullying, and competition.  I also know full well that many who identify as “Woman” and “Female” embrace those as ideals as well.  

I am no stranger to violence.  My life has often been violent.  I have fought off muggers who were armed with knives, I have stared down the barrel of a gun, I have been beaten because someone else wanted to establish himself as the dominant male in our school just after he moved there.  I am not a pacifist: the only reason I have not killed another human being in self-defense is because I was outnumbered.   I just don’t feel that defines my gender, and I have been told it should.  I fight to survive and to protect others, not to prove that I can.  

Others who look like me are guarding statues of Columbus with their Assault Rifles because they feel their masculinity is threatened.  This is another area where I do not conform to my expected gender roles.   Not only do I not feel my masculinity is threatened by BLM, or Pride, or the existence of Trans folks, I no longer feel my masculinity can be threatened.  I spent so many years under attack from “my” side, and gotten so much support from “their” side, that I now understand that my gender is not about what THEY think.  It is MY identity. I OWN it.  I am who I am regardless of their perception of me. Nothing someone else does can take that from me. 

And if anything about me is Queer, it is that: the understanding that my identity belongs to me and not to those who seek to mislabel me.  

I have been told by some in the Queer community that I am welcome among them, and I am grateful for that.  So, so many of my stories can be prefaced with, “There I was, the only Straight Guy in the room, when:”  I am proud to be an Ally.  

But calling myself Queer?  I’m not comfortable doing that.  I could, and I know some who would accept it.  But I feel it is more important to me to break the toxic definition of Masculinity and show that things like nurturing, caring, creating, dancing, loving, uplifting, and oh yes parenting, these ARE Male Qualities, always have been, and should always be.   No criticism of GNC folks who take the Queer label intended or implied: they are not Less, they own their own identity, they are valid.   They are themselves, and have a right to be. 

I am me.

I am a Man.

I will never be the Man they wanted me to be, and I am PROUD of that. 

Happy Pride Month.  

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

[astro-break]

Thoughts on the 8th ep of Hypmic Rhyme Anima. Spoilers beware

Ep.1 | Ep.2 | Ep.3 | Ep.4 & 5 | Ep. 6 | Ep. 7

Love that every time its a MTC centric episode im so busy that i can’t watch it the day it airs

I like how the beginning of the episode kinda mirrors the events in MTC’s story in ARB

hey hypmic you wanna try making it Less obvious who the culprit is? like damn you’re just giving away secrets like its candy. First Ramuda, the Ruikawa and now these two assholes. Might wanna keep your cards close before you spoil the ending of the anime oh wait they already did that nvm :p

Samatoki please have some sense of self preservation and ask what its about before accepting something. but I guess it also speaks to how trusting he is of those he lets close to him which also explains a bit more as to why he hates Ichirou’s guts

Love that Jyuto is actually choking the information out of someone and Samatoki is actually gathering intelligence and creating boards out of it. Most people expect the opposite from their characters and it such a great dynamic

I find it hilarious that Rio uses older computers but that brings up the question of “How far into the future really is hypmic?” bc those computers look to be from early 2000′s which would be A N C I E N T and completely unusable for hacking come a time when WWIII happens

Iris on a bike has no rights looking as hot as she does. The vehicle CGI is really nice too and so is her character model on top of the bike. Loving how Iris completely owns the two cops

The MTC love here is jsut. through the roof i can die happy now that i’ve seen Samatoki aggressively caring for his teammates animated and voiced. like, please. just. help. I can.t/ MTC care so much for each other I would hug them all and tell them good work, you can finally go rest now uughghghgh MTC guys. MTC

But mannn Iris is so cool, approaching MTC without any fear

I find it hilarious that Saburo would pose as a game dev from dubai which yknow doesn’t make any sense if you think about it. but whatever it just makes me laugh at how easy it is to fake a lot about yourself because yeah! it is easy! 

The whole conversation about cops and good cops seems a bit off considering ACAB but considering Japan who has largely swept both BLM and ACAB under the rug it isn’t surprising. That isn’t to say that Japan doesn’t care, its just that these movements aren’t on the spotlight so topics like these don’t carry as much weight

lol yeah he should have expected to be stabbed from the front lol

SRKHFSKJD Rio please stop living in the water, i can’t believe he did that lol

Love the SamaJyuto subtext in the translation lol

Jyuto’s sequence is kinda cute in a way ahaha

The kurosawa-esque b&w screens are a nice touch to the song as well as the MC Name drops and hypnosis speaker drops. Idk about Rio’s 2DIE4 reference though since it doesn’t really rhyme nor does it add much to the rap itself

The song itself is pretty nice but it isn’t a bop like Fallin’ was. It has a different more gritty feel to it that i don’t hate but isn’t my style

Of course Iruma pulls this situation into his favor, its so typical of him.

Rio didn’t speak much here and took a general backseat to everything. I wonder if it was because during the time of recording this episode, Rio’s VA, Kamio Shinichiro, went down with The Virus (you know the one) so he couldn’t record much. Who knows but best boy. just let me hear best boy’s voice please

Ramuda’s phone vibrate actively annoys me oh my god it makes my skin crawl

If Ramuda’s sleeping on the couch then that really does confirm that Ramuda lives in his studio. Not surprising considering everything we know about Ramuda but at the same time, please get like a futon or smth sleeping on a couch will only hurt your back

Ramuda just busting in is fun

but im not sure how to feel about two divisions shoved into one. like this is basically telling us who is the important divisions, Ikebukuro and Shinjuku. Obviously BB are the protagonists of the series what with the staff coming out to even say that Ichirou is the hero, and if you know what happens then you know why Shinjuku is also highlighted which. also gives away the ending of the anime. again. I’m just glad that the team decided to stick with the irl results bc if they didn’t, they’d have a lot of angry fans

Back to my main point tho, this just. pisses me off. I love FP and MTC and to see them sidelined like this doesn’t feel fair. they deserve full eps to themselves bc if I’m being honest, these two teams have some of the best inter team dynamics out of the current cast. I understand that budget issues and episode constraints exist but this is just kinda frustrating that my main division has been tossed aside and the team that gets the most overall development gets thrown away too

Im not surprised that they cheated because gambling anime is about who can outcheat the other and the mind games played. thats the thrill of gambling series is the psychological factors in it

Ramuda emulating Gentaro’s speech is cute

The mindgames are not present at all and I expected that lol

thats.... midly gay gentaro lol do you always go around pressing shit into people’s mouths while leaning in close? thats pretty gay lol i love the homoerotic subtext present in this episode. First SamaJyuto and now GenDice

no speaker summon sequence? thats slightly disappointing but whatever. the anime is really doing FP dirty by cutting a lot of corners with their episodes

I never noticed that Ramuda and Gentaro hold their mics in their left hand while Dice holds it with his right. neat detail

I love how even in a battle FP still keeps their preppy attitude

Gentaro looks so awkward to the little sway and kick thing in the song lolol

This is probably one of the songs that I like the least. Jackpost is a very Dice song and not really fitting for either Ramuda and Genaro. I think i’d like it more if it was a dice solo or dice centric but the emphasis was pretty cleanly spread so that makes it pretty hard to enjoy

Oh hell yeah FP meshing as a team is just, so cute. Though that foreshadowing with Ramuda and his candy is just. wow

Yup they kept the og brackets so I think the anime’s going to stick with the IRL results. Which means that any tension they try and build won’t work for ppl who are already familiar with the series but I hope they don’t take that fact as an excuse to slack off

[gohyuck]

School of Sports/Arts AU!Mark

based on this post by @roh-tae

donghyuck | mark | sicheng

i know jackshit about baseball and this is all based off some quick research - so if this is super bad i am super sorry

he wears #10 and it’s become his lucky number and favorite number

the number is basically his everything, to be quite honest - when you meet him he’s been playing baseball for 10 years 

and you meet in a 10 am class which happens to be MP-10 (music production) and basically change his life so yeah - 10 is a pretty comfy number for him

anyways he’s fourth in the batting order - the cleanup hitter, the most powerful hitter on the team, second highest batting average (third in the lineup, Jeno Lee, has the highest) 

invented the idea of a grand slam he’s GOOD at what he does

that being said, it’s hard to tell that’s he’s practically a baseball pro by looking at him - at any point in time mark is bundled up in baggy sweatpants (possible stolen from his roommate donghyuck) and a massive sweatshirt (definitely stolen from donghyuck), eye bags so large they could be michael kors, round wire glasses perched precariously on the bridge of his nose, tripping over thin air

he’s pretty overworked, to be fair; he’s in like a million clubs and protests a million things on the weekends (sometimes it’s “stop with puppy mills” sometimes it’s “help end racism in the workplace” and it’s something new every week)

between extracurricular stuff, his job as a barista at the local coffee shop, underground rapping gigs, baseball, and his engineering and music majors, mark is half dead 99.99% of the time

the first time you meet him in MP-10 he basically crashes into the seat directly in front of yours in the lecture hall

there’s a small cup of coffee in one of his hands and his bookbag is slung over him crossbody as he pushes his glasses back on

you notice him immediately because he’s wearing his white split jersey unbuttoned with a light blue shirt underneath with black jeans and honestly he looks goddamn amazing, especially compared to you because you’re 100% wearing what you rolled out of bed in

you later (as in the next class, when he shows up in orange sweatpants and a green and red christmas sweater sweater looking zombified, toting a humongous thermos of coffee) find out that he was only dressed semi-well that first day because he had a meeting after that class with some city councilwoman about his most recent series of planned protests over a series of altercations between minorites and the local police 

at least that’s what you think he says when you ask; he’s kinda dead on his feet and is slurring his words, not fully awake yet

despite how he looks and stuff  and what he’s wearing and how he’s mostly only giving you one word answers (read: michael kors eyebags and general lack of sleep) you find yourself inexplicably drawn to him

lucky you! his double major (yeah - double. boy really just. doesn’t love living) in music production and electrical engineering and your major in the fields you love mean that you guys see each other a lot and have classes at a lot of the same times

also, you always end up in the library studying (and crying, just a little) at the same times he is, although while you tend to be alone when trying to study he’s always with a friend

or 8 (the other guys are, you learn later, his roommate and the guys from the other rooms in their dorm) 

sometimes their whole 15 person squad is there and that generally results in all of them getting kicked out

which is not good for mark’s stress levels tbh like. they’re already sky high

this is why one day instead of sitting with his roommate, who you think is the quarterback, and a couple of others from the baseball team (you recognize jeno and renjun, and there’s a couple of other guys like lee chan and a guy who goes by rocky) he makes a beeline towards the nearest table to him that’s in the back of the library

it happens to be your table

mark misses the dirty (albeit shortlived) look donghyuck throws at him and how he mouths “ditcher” at his best friend’s back 

you don’t, though, and send an apologetic grimace to the qb

later you become close to donghyuck - it gets to where mark kinda wants to rip his hair out because his datemate and best friend are constantly pranking him and putting him on edge

rip mark lee 2k17 free him

anyways he slides into the seat opposite you, gives you a small smile and a “hi” and goes about his own business

both of you are cliched as hell - whenever he’s studying and not noticing you is when you’re staring at him AND it’s vice versa 

he gets in x10 work than he does other days so he starts sitting with you in the library from then on, you guys have like some symbiotic relationship - you give him a place to study away from his hell friends and he gives you silent company so you don’t feel lonely 

over time he gets more chill and less high strung because he’s getting more done

you, on the other hand, are becoming more and more panicked and honestly you just. really need a break

and mark being an absolute sweetheart notices this and he knows that he should do SOMETHING even though you guys aren’t too close apart from the occasional convo in MP-10 and sitting together and studying 

“let’s get dinner - we’ve both been here for like eight hours. i’ll pay” “oh what no mark you don’t have to it’s totally fine i have to get this shit do-” “you can take a one hour break, it’s better that way anyways because everything you’ve learned will settle in i swear” “...fine, yeah. alright.”

one hour turns into four and he walks you back to your dorm at like 2 in the morning and you guys are laughing and having a generally good time

until he gets a call from a guy named doyoung

“dude what do you mean i can’t come home tonight” “yuta, jaehyun, sicheng, and donghyuck are drunk off their asses and taeyong and i can’t deal with your clumsy ass on top of these fools, find somewhere else to sleep you have like a million other friends, call jaemin” “doyoung wh-” click

cue a lot of swears

“mark you can just stay over in my room tonight” “is that a good idea? i can really just call jaemin, him and jeno are probably crying over some drama right now i don’t need to impose” “my roommate’s definitely over at her boyfriend’s place right now, it’s fine and it’s not imposing. you bought dinner i can give you a roof for a night dude” “...ight”

both of you know you should sleep but honestly you’re having fun getting to know each other so instead you both take a (sad, lukewarm) beer from the package that’s sitting on the counter and watch crappy cartoon reruns on your laptop while just talking

you learn about mark’s friends and tell him how you chose your major and promise to attend the BLM rally on saturday even though mentally you know there’s no time (you’ll make some)

you and him go to MP-10 together at 10 and instead of sitting in front of you he sits beside you 

you guys are basically bros at this point like real friends right here

yes ok so fastforward to confessing

mark’s been psyching himself up to ask you out for a while so when you’re like “hey i kinda like you and it’d be cool if we went out sometime on a date” really chill-ly he’s like fml all the planning for nothing

but he says yes and you guys go out to an actual restaurant before deciding that the best dates are staying in and chilling and pigging out to netflix while complaining over professors 

soon you guys are that couple the one that’s practically married at like.20 something

always wearing mark’s jerseys or shirts!!! he never stops telling you how amazing you look in his clothes

it’s like his favorite thing

when you wear his jersey though

favorite number + favorite person?? winning combo right there

never missing a baseball game and really quickly picking up on a bunch of baseball lingo and understanding what’s going on tbh (mark considers himself your tutor in the “greatest sport ever known to man”)

just. really wholesome relationship like you’d be so supportive of everything he does and he can always count on you to be there for him and is always there for you and i’m screaming it’d be so cute!!

his friends like fake gagging at you guys but secretly they’re all pretty jealous

becoming fast friends with all of his friends (especially with donghyuck, as aforementioned, and with jeno)

y’all are all one big happy family <3