#how can i make a request without doxxing myself | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

raven-at-the-writing-desk · 2 years

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I use media like twst as wish fulfillment and escapism but I have to say I derive a lot of masochistic pleasure from your character romance analyses and how angsty the truth is because realistically speaking, a lot of these guys would be terrible partners or you just won't be able to be together. even with trauma and emotional constipation aside, circumstances/lifestyles will probably make it impossible to healthily date others. like with malleus and his duty as crown prince, and vil and neige would be difficult too, since they're both extremely popular celebrities. real life idols are even forbidden to date in order to sell the fantasy that they "belong" to the fans. their darling won't be able to survive the cruelty that is the public eye 💀 you just know that their fans would be cancelling their s/o every second of every day or doxxing even. I would love to see your take on vil as a partner someday but THIS IS NOT A REQUEST, just expressing how much I love your analyses on the characters! keep it up miss raven!!

[You can read my TWST analyses here!]

abhldiulaidadyasdi I’m happy to hear that you like my analyses so much! 🥺 As someone that also looks to fiction for escapism, I think it’s fun to reexamine media through a critical and sometimes more realistic lens. I can still enjoy the source material as it is and imagine whatever I like with it, but I also like to analyze the characters and their lore to gain new perspectives on them.

Maybe I’ll do an analysis on Vil as a “realistic” love interest someday, but it’s a topic that I’ve admittedly avoided discussing in detail due to personal discomfort I have on the subject.

I’ve mentioned before that celebrity characters aren’t something that I like, and it’s namely because of the fostering of extremely unhealthy parasocial relationships (depending on the genre and the nature of the media in which the celebrity is presented). While TWST isn’t a dating sim, the fact remains that a significant portion of its fanbase does, in fact, choose to enjoy its characters through the lens of romance. I don’t fault anyone for enjoying TWST in this way (as it’s something I do myself from time to time), but I think real issues can arise when it leads into romanticizing certain things without realizing or acknowledging how toxic those ideas can be, especially when taken to an extreme. It is this lack of self-awareness that can become frightening, particularly when generalized to a real-world context 💦

***CONTENT WARNING: I will be discussing bullying, harassment, doxxing, stalking, self harm, suicide, and parasocial relationships (as they pertains to celebrities) below the cut!!***

Stan culture in general can get so intense at times that it honestly scares me 😔 and it’s something that I feel is greatly perpetuated by the idol industry. I don’t know how widespread this is (as someone who is pretty ignorant to the inner workings of idol culture), but even I’ve heard of the contracts which prevent idols from dating, especially for female idols. It’s to retain their ‘purity’ and to sell the image that their fans are the ones that ‘own’ the idol... and that’s a level of intimacy and possessiveness that just feels off-putting to me. It becomes particularly dangerous when some fans (NOT all fans) start to rely on an idol for their happiness, or when they start taking extreme measures to be ‘closer’ to the object of their affections, such as stalking and/or threatening harm upon or harassing the idol’s friends, family, and other loved ones. This is something that is very real and has the potential to hurt real people, and it personally makes me really uncomfortable when these kinds of things are translated into tropes for fiction in a romantic context.

I understand that there is a line that divides fiction and reality, and I don’t necessarily take issue with the topic of parasocial relationships being brought up in literature and other forms of media (in fact, I think this is one of the few ways the topic can be safely explored and discussed). Where I start to have problems is when intense parasocial relationships are used as a plot device to further a polarizing romantic narrative. It typically paints the fans of a fictional celebrity as ‘crazed’ and ‘jealous’ rivals, sometimes even making them act comedically evil and straight up spiteful. I don’t condone any of the bullying or harassment tactics they employ, but I also think that this kind of a portrayal is extremely unempathetic.

In these kinds of scenarios, the S/O of a celebrity is treated like a saint that has done no wrong, they’re just being bullied by hateful people for no real reason (often without taking consideration that those ‘crazy’ fans may also be in a fragile mental headspace and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect just the same as any other human being, regardless of their terrible actions). This greatly oversimplifies the matter and portrays the S/O as someone who is purely good and “just a victim” and the fans as people who are clearly bad and “catty/petty rivals”. It creates the fantasy that you can have a celebrity partner and gain notoriety through them, while also having that partner defend you and stay at your side despite all the backlash--but it also ignores the real pain that comes with being a public figure. Idols and/or their partners have actually been put in unsafe situations, self-harmed, or even ended their own lives because of things like this, and at the same time, this kind of portrayal doesn’t show empathy towards those suffering from their intense parasocial beliefs (which can sometimes tie into poor mental health or a general lack of happiness with one’s own life).

This is something that’s so integrally tied to the real world, and in this context, it’s being used in a way that I disagree with. I don’t like that demonizing either side of a very complex problem is considered a “proper” solution to a story, and nor do I think it should be done, even in a fictional setting, to push the idea of a romance with a celebrity character.

It promotes this unhealthy idea that being bullied and harassed by others is just another means of strengthening your romantic bond with a partner. It ignores so much nuance in favor of propping up one side over another. It’s just not something I can ever find myself standing by or being entirely comfortable writing about 💦 Of course, that’s not to shame anyone that does happen to enjoy these tropes, it’s just something that I don’t personally vibe with 😅

#Vil Schoenheit #Neige Leblanche #notes from the writing raven #feedback for the writing raven #tw // parasocial relationships #tw // bullying #tw // harassment #tw // doxxing #tw // stalking #tw // self harm #tw // suicide

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neon-junkie · 4 years

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Hey everyone,

This will be my final post addressing the fandom conflict that has quite frankly gotten out of hand. Although it’s very likely this post will be picked apart, no matter how well intended it is, I will no longer be addressing, interacting, or responding to any further accusations made against me. Of course, if people have questions from a genuine place of interest, I will be happy to clarify anything for you, either via DM’s or non-anon asks. I will not be answering anonymous asks on this, as I do not want anything else posted on this topic.

As a side note: For anyone tempted to wade into the debate, I sincerely ask you not to get involved. Do not make yourself a target, do not feel you need to ‘pick a side’, and please do not think you have an obligation to reason with either side. It seems to be well past the point of that, so please find people you get along with in this fandom and curate a space for yourself away from all this conflict.

Warning: This post will contain uncensored slurs, mentions of racism, paedophilia, transphobia, LGBTQ+ phobia, death threats, threats of violence, targeted harassment, and abusive language.

To start off, I want to apologise to everyone who has somehow gotten drawn into this mess by either defending me, following me, or interacting with my content. This whole situation with me began well over a year ago when I wrote a crack-smut fic featuring Javier/Micah, posted back in August 2019. A crack fic is defined as “a work of fan fiction that is absurd, surprising or ridiculous, often intentionally.” It was inspired by a camp interaction between Micah and Javier, and like many other fanfiction writers, I decided to write smut about it. The fic was titled ‘Dirty Fucking Greaser’, and if that shocks you, I’m sure you can imagine how shocked I was to be informed afterwards that ‘Greaser’ was in fact a very serious 19th century slur for a Mexican individual. My first encounter with this word as insult was via RDR2, where it was used like a very casual insult. My only prior knowledge of this term was in regards to the greasers youth subculture, so the severity was lost on me. This obviously does not excuse my ignorance, and I should have researched the term better, but this is just again to apologize for that oversight, the insensitivity, and to highlight that my use of this term was not meant maliciously. Following this being pointed out, I proceeded to make 3 separate apology posts [Unfortunately I can only find the third one: HERE], renamed the fic, and added slur warnings in both the tags and the fic description. When I continued to receive complaints and increasingly aggressive abuse (which included being told my apologies weren’t good enough and I should delete my account and even kill myself), I attempted to delete the fic and mistakenly abandoned it instead. I contacted AO3 to see if it could be removed, but they said there was nothing they could do. I contacted their DMCA takedown team, who also said they couldn't remove it. Please note that all this happened 7-8 months ago, and has been dragged on for almost a year.

So, from this one unfortunate incident, I’ve been branded a racist, and someone who attacks POC, when all I have done is tried to defend myself and correct my past mistakes. I could have done this more gracefully in the past, but frankly when you’re suddenly the target of unrelenting callout posts and nasty anons, it’s very hard to be open to criticism of this sort, but this is what I’m trying to move past.

Over the course of the year, this one mistake has spiralled, and the crusade against me has somehow coincided with moral conflicts over certain characters and ships. This has devolved into dehumanizing abuse, witch hunts, death threats, doxxing, anon hate, and much more unpleasant behaviour.

I have been in fandom for a very long time, and at the heart of all fandom circles is the fear of censorship and subsequent purges, so the ‘ship and let ship’ mentality was more or less the pinnacle of fandom philosophy. And yes, this can be problematic in some contexts. People have their right to be uncomfortable with content, have a right to be offended by content, but that is not content meant for you. This argument has devolved into ‘what material is morally right to engage with’ and that is a mentality in which fandom will not survive, because for every person who is telling me I’m an awful person for writing about Micah, there are three other people telling me how much they appreciate me making that content. For every fic in which I characterize Javier and Flaco a certain way, some people are made uncomfortable by it and others tell me they enjoy it. And this isn’t just white people, but POC too, which makes it very difficult to know whether I am genuinely in the right or the wrong, especially when it comes to the concept of ‘fetishization’ which I have been made aware I need to educate myself on. I intend to do so, but I disagree with the common accusation that finding non-white men romantically and sexually attractive is inherently fetishistic and makes me racist. It’s pushing a catch-22; don’t find POC sexually attractive? Racist. Find POC sexually attractive? Racist.

I am always willing to be (politely) approached about anything my readers may be concerned about, but if it’s something I’ve specifically tagged for (such as themes, scenarios, etc.) I’m afraid you consented to reading it and with that I cannot help you. You are just as responsible for curating your space and what you see/read just as much as I am responsible for tagging it appropriately.

On the topic of racism, I want to bring up my prior use of ‘white racism’ which has obviously been a point of contention among both white and people of colour. The (literal) black vs white concept of racism is incredibly American-centric, and as someone from Europe, which has a history of oppression against white cultures and those of people of colour, it feels inaccurate. However, this has recently been discussed with me and I came to the realization that while growing up, especially in the UK, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘racism’ were marketed as one and the same. So, with this little revelation in mind, I will no longer be using ‘white racism’ (Or ‘reverse racism’) to identify the abuse I have been receiving, but will instead call it by what it really is; dehumanizing, debasing, xenophobic, puritanical.

Very briefly, I will also touch on the NewAustin situation, which has also been dredged into this. I did not ‘chase a POC from tumblr’. NA was a minor who for some reason was on my 18+ blog and took issue with me, likely from the ongoing discourse regarding my fic and initial mistake, as well as my interest in Micah. They were subsequently harassed into deleting their account by anonymous hate following various conflicts with other users for their support of me or their ships in general. I have never encouraged my followers to target anyone, and have always asked to be blocked and blacklisted by those who do not like me or my content. When NewAustin messaged me following the deletion of their blog, I was admittedly indifferent to the point of being unkind, and accused them of sending the hate themselves. This was based on the anon hate being racially-driven without there being any prior knowledge or publication that NA was a person of colour. This aside, I should have at the time, whether I believed it was my followers or not, condemned this behaviour. Regardless of the issues I’ve had with these people, it is never ever ok to send hate to anyone, no matter the motivation behind it, and that should have been stated at the time.

All I can do at this point is acknowledged and apologize for my past mistakes, and try to improve myself going forward.

It is not my place to dictate the morals of the character/ship-aspect of this argument, and I am not interested in waging a war of opinion. This post is simply to clarify how I am involved in this, and why I am so viscerally targeted. You can draw your own conclusions, but I am no longer interested in this endless back and forth.

To my mutuals/followers, I stand by my request to not interact and to block and move on, as this is what I’ll be doing too.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope it makes things from my perspective a little clearer.

-RAT <3

EDIT: Just after this post was made, the fic in question was finally removed. I had to go through a DMCA take down, which can take months, since I originally abandoned the fic, thinking that meant delete. I explain this in more detail above. Said fic is gone, and has been gone since this post has been around.

#the tea #apology #long post

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deans-baby-momma · 4 years

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The Padackles Link-Chapter 84

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, in the next few chapters is anything I would ever wish to see or happen with any of the people portrayed in this. They are REAL PEOPLE, I know and what scenarios I am putting them in is just a means to an end for my story. Please do not send hate to my inbox. I know this is most unlikely to happen.

I get JJ settled into her seat in the truck and climb in the front, taking my phone off bluetooth and calling Jay.

“I got her.”

“Thank god. Listen, I’m trying to get a flight home now. From the sounds of what the officer I spoke to earlier said, Dani is going to be in a lot of hot water. I’ve got to come home and handle the fallout from that.”

“Okay. See you when you get in. I love you,” I tell him although I’m wondering what he means by ‘fallout’.

“Love you too Drea. Give JJ and Jackson a kiss for me. I’ll try not to wake you up when I get home.”

I hang up and drive back to the house, parking in the garage and proceed to get the sleeping little girl out of her seat and into her bed hopefully without arousing her.

Kayla’s eyes widen when I walk in with JJ on my shoulder and I just smile as I head to the bedroom.

Thankfully JJ stays asleep as I tuck her in and I flick the night light on before leaving the room, making sure the door isn’t shut all the way, in case she were to wake up.

I walk back into the kitchen to find Kayla scrolling on her phone.

“Dang Ms. Murphy,” she says. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”

“What?” I asked, confused.

She turns her phone to show me an alert on her phone.

‘BREAKING NEWS: One Tree Hill alumni Danneel Ackles involved in a fatal collision. Drugs and booze suspected to be involved. Stay tuned as we will report more as it becomes available.’

‘Oh shit.’ I think to myself. ‘This is what Jensen meant about a fallout. Someone died! Fuck.’

“Kayla,” I begin, hoping to make her understand what I’m about to tell her. “I know this is all big news and all but I need to request your full reticence in this situation. Please do not speak a word to what you know. Promise me, please?”

“Of course. You don’t have to worry about that at all. I understand completely.”

“Okay, thank you,” I say as I reach into my wallet to pay her for her time, plus a little extra for the short notice.

The babysitter smiles at me as she accepts the payment and then turns to leave, opening the front door and walking out of it.

I sigh as I turn the lock and head to my bed. I knew tomorrow was going to be insane, what with having two kids to take care of and the questions JJ will have about going to sleep at the hotel and waking up here.

It is still dark out when I woke up to movement in the room. I open my eyes and can barely make out Jay’s form.

“You made it,” I whisper as he crawls his now undressed body into the bed.

“Yea. Sorry I woke you honey.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You find out any more?”

“Yea. Dani was with some guy named Marcus. I have no idea who he is or how she knows him. It doesn’t matter. They were in her car, he was driving. They hit another vehicle, a mini-van. A fucking family car. Thankfully it wasn’t full but still the driver was killed.

“Drea, they’re saying both Dani and Marcus were high and intoxicated.” I could hear the break in his voice. “What was she doing out with someone like that? How could she be doing drugs when we have a daughter?”

I pull him to me in a hug. “I don’t know Jay. Let’s get some sleep and we’ll go over tomorrow and try to put the pieces together. Okay?”

He nods and lays his head on my chest, silently crying himself to sleep.

The next morning I wake up before anyone else. Jensen is still sleeping beside me, his back to me now. I can tell by the way he is breathing that he is having a fretful slumber.

I get up and get dressed before making my way to the kitchen to get the coffee pot started and figure out what to make for breakfast. I’m sure waking up in her room at her dad’s house is not how JJ thought her morning would be.

A little after I get the bacon sizzling I hear her footsteps as she comes into the room.

“Dea? Where is my Gmaw and Gigi?”

Smiling at her nicknames for her grandparents, I scoop her up and sit her at the table.

“Well, they had something they had to take care of, so I came and got you last night. Bacon and eggs okay?” I ask, hoping to change the subject.

Jackson’s cries come through the monitor as I am pouring the scrambled eggs onto her plate.

“Brodder!” JJ says with a smile.

“Yea, your brother is awake. Be a good girl and sit here and eat while I go get him, okay?”

“Yes ma’am.”

I peek into our bedroom as I pass by it and see that the bed is empty. The shower is running in the ensuite so I know Jay is awake and is showering, probably trying to procrastinate what he has to do today.

As I walk back into the kitchen, my phone rings. I place Jackson in his high chair and pour some Cheerios on the tray as I answer.

“Hello.”

“Oh my god Drea,” Gen exclaims. “I didn’t realize how bad it was going to be.”

“Yea Jay got in early this morning,” I tell her and watch as JJ is trying to show Jackson how to eat his cereal. Her head pops around and she looks at me wide-eyed at the mention of her father.

“Dad’s here?”

I nod and then sigh. “I hate this. He has to do all this by himself. God only knows what he’ll find out at the hospital. I don’t even know how Da-ahem- she is. He told me there was d-r-u-g-s involved.”

“What do you mean, do this by himself? Are you not going with him?”

“How Gen?” I ask. “I have JJ and Jackson to take care of. He doesn’t need them to be there, they don't need to be there. It’s just a shitshow.”

“Bring the kids over, Drea. I’ll watch them for you. Jay does not need to be alone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay,” I concede. “I’ll discuss it with him and let you know.”

“M‘kay. Love you baby.”

“Love you too,” I respond and then mine and Jay’s conversation from a few nights ago come to mind. “Hey Dox?”

“Yea?”

“There is something you and I need to discuss once all this blows over,” I say. “It might just be what Jay needs to get back to normal.”

“Okay. I’ll be here. We can talk whenever you want.”

I hang up as Jensen walks in, headed straight for the coffee pot.

I wait until he has some caffeine in his system before I bring up going with him.

“Gen offered to watch the kids so I can go too,” I tell him after he greets Jackson and gets a huge hug and kiss from his daughter. “If you want that.”

The tension and stress in his shoulders waft away and I see him visibly relax. “God yes, please!”

@lostinaseaoffictionalbliss @carryonmywaywardcaptain @darlingpeanut @sunskittlex @sea040561 @pretty-fortune @squirrelnotsam @death-unbecomes-you @sandlee44 @internationalmusicteacher @kricketc29@natura1phenomenon @mannls @nickie-amore @spn-tw-37 @frozenhuntress67 @blacktithe7 @supernaturallymarvellous @thetardishasaquidditchpitch @sirod-30 @heyitscam99 @smoothdogsgirl @i-just-wanna-run-hell @paintballkid711 @closetspngirl @starfirerules @vickiq9761 @rainflowermoon @spnbaby-67 @drakelover78 @jessieray98 @81mysteriouslyme @travelingriversideblues-x @akshi8278 @keymology @topthis808 @lilulo-12 @onethirstyunicorn @i-love-superhero @tftumblin @markofdean79 @thevelvetseries @larajadeschmidt13 @delightfullykrispypeach @deanmonandnegansbitch @midsummereve1993

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bettsfic · 5 years

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socknography: the importance of preserving fan creator biographical data

i wrote earlier on utilizing collections and bookmarks to boost the archival power of ao3, and in that post mentioned how i wish authors would fill out their bios so we can preserve fanauthor information as well as we preserve the fics themselves. so, here is my rant about WHY WE ARE SO IMPORTANT.

for my masters thesis i wrote about the layered pseudonymity of fanfiction authors, and after doing a ton of research, i find myself still thinking of the pseudonymous/anonymous divide as it pertains to fic. we have authors we consider “famous” and ones whose followings eclipse that of traditionally published authors, but unlike traditionally published authors, we don’t put a handy bio at the end of our fics. in fact, if you want to find out about the author, you have to hope they’ve linked somewhere to their tumblr or twitter or dreamwidth, or they have consistent pseuds across platforms. and from there, you have to hope they have an ‘about me.’ but most, myself included, don’t.

unlike traditional publication -- where amazon and goodreads and even the back of the book contains biographical info -- and even unlike the rest of fandom archival etiquette -- which, despite having virtually no committed rules still maintains its organizational structure -- there is no standard etiquette on fanauthor biographical data.

i speculate the reasons fanauthors are hesitant to write their own biographies is very complicated:

there is no “ask” for it or existing standard. when i publish stories under my real name, i’m required to provide my bio, which contains my accomplishments, where i got my degree, where else i’m published, and my website. all literary author bios follow this formula, so they’re pretty easy to write. other than this post, i have never seen a request for fanauthor bios. so without an editor demanding it, and without a standard formula or platform to draw from, a total lack of information becomes the norm, and almost any info other than the standard “name. age. pronouns. ao3 name. list of fandoms and/or pithy one-liner” of tumblr or occasional ask game is seen as a deviation from the norm. even ask games get a bad rep sometimes, and they’re transitory, a post you see as you’re scrolling through to somewhere else, not static, like a dedicated profile page.

pseudonymity veers too close to anonymity. an anonymous author cannot have a biography. a pseudonymous author can, but biographies may be seen as defeating the purpose of writing under a pseudonym, or multiple pseuds. a sock account is a sock for a reason -- you don’t want it associated with your main. moreover, i believe fandom creates an environment in which to acknowledge your accomplishments and promote your own content is seen as narcissistic. fanfiction can sometimes be seen as a genre of selflessness, donating time and energy into a community centered around a shared canon, not personal gain. to acknowledge the self publicly is to invite attention, and attention is contradictory to anonymity.

shame and humility. the more information you have on the internet, the easier you are to find. very few fanauthors use their real names, or feel comfortable connecting their fan identity to their real one. i hear pretty constantly how often fanauthors hide their fannishness from their coworkers and loved ones, how only the people closest to them know they write/read fanfic. moreover, you might think “my most popular fic only has 10 kudos and 1 comment, nobody wants to know about me” (which is so not true, but i’ll get to that in a minute).

fandom is constantly changing. with a central archive for fanfiction in place, it’s easier now to be in multiple fandoms at once than it ever has been. if you want to read all sugar daddy fics, there’s a tag for that, and if you’re not picky about canon, you have an entire buffet of fandoms to choose from. communities are growing and shifting and changing shape. i move fandoms, and i keep my friends and readers from previous fandoms. i get dragged to new fandoms frequently. my interests and inspirations change, but i don’t erase my history or identity every time i move, i only add to it. i am always betts whether i’m in star wars or the 100 or game of thrones. but if you only read my fic, you don’t know the stories behind it. many people don’t know i entered fandom in the brony convention community in 2012, or that i was sadrobots before i was betty days before i was betts, or how fandom changed my life and led me through a path of personal trauma recovery, or that i co-founded wayward daughters, or ran the fanauthor workshop, or all these other things about fanfic that is not fanfic itself.

if you are a fan creator, your fannish personal narrative matters. telling your story helps preserve the metatextual history of our genre.

i think constantly about what our genre will look like in 30 or 50 years, if it will be like other genres that began as subversions of the mainstream: comic books, beat literature, science fiction. genres that, at the time involved groups of friends creating stories for each other, bouncing ideas off of one another, experimenting with or distorting other genres, and which became, over time, well-regarded forms with rich histories.

maybe one day, like the MCU, we’ll have a dedicated production company that churns out adaptations of longform coffee shop aus written between 2009 and 2015. maybe “BNFs” will be read in high school literature curriculums. maybe our work will end up on the real or virtual shelves of our great grandchildren. and if that happens, if fanfic goes entirely mainstream, how will fanfic authorship be perceived? how will fanpeople in 2080, if humanity is still around by then, interact with the lexicon we’ve created and preserved? what would you do if you found out Jane Austen wrote under five different sock accounts across three platforms over the span of twenty years? how would you, a fan of Pride & Prejudice, even begin to find all of her work?

we have so many social constraints pushing against us. there’s purity culture, which encourages further division of identity -- fanauthors may write fluff on their main and have various sock accounts for underage/noncon fics. if you’re a scarecrow, you’re much harder for a mob to attack. there’s misogyny, which dictates women/queer ppl shouldn’t be writing about or indulging in or exploring their sexuality at all. there’s intellectual property and a history of DMCAs, which, although kept at bay by the OTW, may still have influence on the “illegal” mentality of our work. with social armies against us, it’s easier to exist in the shadows, on the fringe. we change URLs based on our moving interests, and split our identities a million different ways, and keep sarcastic “me” tags full of self-deprecating text posts. we are difficult beasts to catch, because we have not been allowed to exist.

i spent a lot of time today googling the word for “pseudonymous biography” and came up empty-handed (if someone knows of an existing word, pls let me know. “pseudography” is apparently a fancy word for a typo; “pseudobiography” is a fake biography), so for lack of anything better, i’ve come up with the term “socknography” because 1) it’s funny and doesn’t sound intimidating, and 2) it encapsulates the sensitive and complicated way fanauthor identifying conventions work. and also i think “fanauthor biography,” “bibliography,” and “profile” just doesn’t cut it for the actual work of these pieces. they don’t necessarily include IRL biographical data, they include more historical/community context than a bibliography, and the words “profile” and “about me” don’t really inspire interaction, or acknowledge the archival importance of this work.

astolat’s fanlore page is my go-to example. astolat writes under multiple pseuds and has major influence in the history of fandom. she’s also a traditionally published author, but you notice, her ofic novels are not mentioned, nor any other real-life identifying information. fanlore has a really good policy on this in place, for those concerned about doxxing.

(moreover, i am not suggesting you centralize your socks. they’re socks for a reason. but most everyone has a main, and that main identity has a story.)

there are 2 existing spaces to preserve socknographies.

fanlore, a wiki owned by the OTW, you can make an account and create a user page (which is different than a “person” page) using a user profile template

ao3′s “profile” page, which is a big blank box in which anything goes

(i’m not including tumblr on this list because i don’t think it’s a stable platform.)

fanlore’s template is straight to the point and minimal, which doesn’t really invite narrative the same way a literary bio would. ao3′s big blank box leaves us with the question -- wtf do i say about myself? how do i say it? how much is too much? and because of that, most profiles are either blank or only include a policy on translations/podfic/fanart, and maybe links to tumblr and twitter. but let me tell you, if i have read your fic and taken the time to move over to your profile, you better believe i am a fan. and as a fan, i want to Know Things.

here are the things i want to know, or

a potential template:

introduction (name/alias, age, location, pronouns, occupation)

accomplishments (degrees, personal history)

fan history (fandoms you’ve been in, timeline as a fan, how you were introduced to fandom/fanfiction, what does fandom mean to you -- this is where your fan narrative goes)

fandom participation (popular fics/posts, involvement in fan events/communities, side blogs, interviews, etc. 3 & 4 might be one and the same for you)

spotlight (which of your fics are most important to you/would you like others to read and why? what are the stories behind your favorite fics you’ve written?)

find me elsewhere* (links to tumblr, twitter, insta, etc.)

policies on fanart, fanfic of fic, podfics, and translations

*you cannot link to ko-fi, paypal, patreon, or amazon on ao3/fanlore per the non-commercial terms of service

i’ll be working on filling this out for my own profile as an example, but you can also see how my @fanauthorworkshop participants filled out their fanauthor spotlights, and the information they provided. obviously, you should only share that which you feel comfortable sharing, and as your fandom life changes, your narrative will change too. it’s not much different than updating a CV or resume.

tl;dr the goal is to provide a self-narrative of your fan life/identity for posterity. who are you and why are you a fanperson? why do you create fan content? what are you proud of and what do you want to highlight to others? who are you in this space?

#socknography #fanfiction #ao3 #otw

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witchcraftingboop · 4 years

Text

Further Insight on Briar's Recent Discourse & Prim's Apparent Grooming of Younger, Newer Witches

It was suggested to me that instead of making one long post (which I was genuinely sorry for creating in the moment as well), that I should offer the second half in a separate one so that it is easier to share and harder to simply ignore as a wall of text.

Here is the link to the first half of the current JBird and Briar discourse floating around. I highly encourage everyone involved in the Witchblr community to review both posts and not just this final addition.

Regarding Prim stirring the pot, I actually do have proof of that on my page somewhere if you wouldn't mind my sending it to you? The person I reblogged it from, Mahi, also received death threats from Prim when they were only 16 and Prim was 20 (I can't ask him to share that though because Prim has since used her following to drive him off of Tumblr and he's still fairly [and justifiably] sensitive about it.)

Regarding Briar's statements more specifically though, I can see where the confusion is coming from. After the "in France" part, she's just defining a relevant term (hence the use of "irrelevant details) and then giving an explanation of how she came to be so knowledgeable about that term/concept. I wouldn't say she's calling Prim's activism an "irrelevant detail," but pointing out how Prim uses it as a shield against backlash whenever another blog (not just tradcrafters) calls out her platform. I don't expect you to fully understand or see what I mean when I say that, of course. Because you are still new, and these are habits I've observed of hers from nearly a year of following their interactions. I would, however, like to point out that Briar doesn't say anything racist about Prim and does not once bring up her race. In fact, I think if you read her entire post and not just point 3 as Prim has it cropped out in all of her mentions of it, you would see more fully the depth and amount of frustration Briar is trying to express. Similarly, Briar never threatened to dox Prim. She has, in fact, repeatedly tried to point out that Prim should be protecting her online information and be more aware of how to stop others from finding out about her private life/situation. These statements, however, have since been warped by Prim and her followers to come off as a threat on her life. Briar's statements above aren't a threat of doxxing. She's never once posted Prim's personal information or told others to find it or use it in any way. She has, however, searched for Taglocks on Prim, something witches especially are known to look for. In that search she found more than she was even looking for, despite trying to tell Prim repeatedly to stop being so open online with the information she posts about herself. Doxxing though is not racist. It is something used by them, sure, but it is not inherently racist.

Additionally, Prim has raised money, sure, but I still have not seen any actual receipts as to her *actually* donating it to any public or private organizations. This, for me, is highly suspect. In reality, we still have no idea where that money is. Whereas with Briar, she took no money in for a couple days on her readings and instead merely asked that those requesting a reading first submit proof of donation to an organization linked in the post. She raised substantial money for the BLM movement, but no one seems to want to bring that up in all of their "she's a racist" discourse. Also, the observation that someone is misleading or gaslighting their following is not racist. Just because she said Prim was recently using her BLM reblogs & promotions to do it *this time* still does not make it racist. Questionable wording is just something the reader disagrees with, in my opinion, and should be addressed as such.

I'm not going to lie, I do feel a little frustrated at this point. I was really hoping to come to you and see that you had concrete proof to offer that Briar is a racist. I do understand that you have your own reasons for feeding into the assumptions and twisted outlooks already taken on Briar's words, but I don't have enough energy in me to fully swallow my tongue on this one. I really do hope that you at least consider what I've said here. I'm not sure what I can say at this point because all of the information I've read from you thus far has been purely conjecture or assumptions or just "not feeling right" about the wordings on a single post. A racist, from my perspective, is not something I would ever feel comfortable calling someone off of this lack of evidence.

I understand it is hard to separate preconceived notions from your mind when reading through the words of others, but I really do miss when you were more open to the words of others. If I could ask one thing of you, it'd be to please try to read Briar's post again but from the perspective of seeing it how it was meant to be: a witch who has been on the butt end of Prim's harassment for going on three years now. She is tired of the wild accusations and constantly having to defend herself, and even when she supplied her proof a couple years ago, no one wanted to hear her. She has, largely, given up on being heard, and now screams into what feels like a void when attacked.

Proof of Prim stirring the pot that I offered: An example of Prim actively seeking out the community and trying to stir the pot with an already dealt with situation that had passed over a year ago.

A direct source that I offered as further proof of what has occurred already: This is one from the account mentioned before who was directly involved with the previous discord server where the Trio incident took place a couple years back.

[A Reply.] I think, to be fair, I saw your comments on her previous posts through your main, and with how much aggression you packed into those messages, I don't necessarily blame her for deciding not to engage with your private messages. As I've said, she's very used to people attacking her like that, and in her mind, unfortunately, you've probably been added to the list of aggressive people ready to fling the blame at her rather than look at the situation as a whole. I do apologize for the way her post may have made you feel, but I think it's also important to remember the potentially aggressive things you left on her page (I'm not saying you meant to come off that way, but even I couldn't help but read that way). Also, regarding the ask, it's no small secret that the occultists of the tradcraft group are skilled and well-versed in hexes and curses. When reading her posts about how she may respond to further antagonism on Prim's part, I see a fully realized occultist wielding their most well kept and trained weapon: baneful magic. I'm sure Prim herself also understands that the "threat on her life" she's saying she's so afraid of, isn't a physical threat, but a metaphysical one. She has repeatedly and continually tried to drag these people through the mud, and now that they're refusing to just sit back and be canceled, she's afraid. She knows how strong their magic is, and they aren't shy about it 🤷‍♀️

[A Reply.] No, I completely understand where you're coming from. I, personally, have seen your willingness to talk things through, despite how aggressive you can come off at times in the things you say, so I think that's why I was genuinely so surprised to see your comments on some of her posts. But I do think her response and refusal to further directly engage with you is warranted and her right. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell who is genuinely open to talking and who is just trying to bait and add to the problem. And with how aggressive your comments were, 8 honestly think she most likely was responding from a place of "oh look another young Prim follower here to bait and berate me." I don't think she looks down on you for your age, but her views are likely a reflection of the fact that a lot of 18yos follow Prim and have openly harassed her without even asking for her input on the matter.

At this point, I would like to talk about the second half of the title of this particular post. Grooming. This is a very serious allegation against Prim that I have not spoken on previously because I had no proof that it was happening. With this person's permission, I would like to share how exactly they wound up fighting Prim's battles for her.

I will note: I am highly disgusted by what follows.

[A Reply.] Oh no! You cannot fault yourself for this! Prim is a known manipulator, and the fact that she was able to make you somehow think this is part of your being "gullible and naive" is just testament to the fact that she's gotten wayyy too good at what she does. This is in no way your fault or because of some fault within you. Practiced manipulators are cunning and dangerous even to the best of us. It was unfortunate that she chose you, but her twisting you around is in no way a bad reflection on you as a person!

I've chosen to include my reply to this person rather than our continued discussion because of how personal and involved our conversation turned. I've included it to show, as well, that grooming others to fight your battles is (though this should go without saying) NEVER OKAY. Prim has shown her true colors, in my opinion, and while I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt time and time again, I simply cannot permit myself to ignore the harm and damage she's inflicted on not only the tradcraft community, but also this innocent group of friends. A group who that has hitherto dedicated their time to sussing out predators, terfs, nazis, and racists. A group that should never have had to deal with being gaslit and manipulated by a well-known and respected blogger on this platform.

I cannot reiterate enough how sorry and deeply shocked I am at the information this person has brought to my attention. I am still stunned by Prim's activities and unable to fathom how many other potential individuals are out there being groomed to support and fight for her cause. I am sorry to the Witchblr community as a whole. I feel as if I have sat by and watched as Witchblr has been manipulated and am therefore complacent in the damage and needless hurt that has been allowed to spread throughout our community. I am just so very, very sorry.

I will be taking a couple days off of Tumblr because of this, as I feel as if I need space and time to think, but my inbox is always open and I am always available to speak with others on my return.

#witchblr #witch community #witchblr discourse #discourse #nightshadeandroses #grooming tw #grooming in the witch community #tradcraft #traditional witchcraft #beginner witch #novice witch #baby witch #witch predator #long post #gabrielle #chthoniaa

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derbycityjbgc · 4 years

Text

To the Louisville Protest and Movement Community from Medusa:

A dox was recently released about me by a group calling themselves Louisville Radical Federation. This group consists of Louisville ARA members, RAM (Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement) members, Louisville Street Medic members, and others associated with them. It contained a lot of information, incorrect information, while also revealing information about myself. I would like to take this time to address accusations against me and highlight the who and the why behind all of this.

Poor Security/Snitch:

These accusations against me come on the heels of attempts to call me a snitch and blame me for poor security culture. The basis for this accusation is me mentioning “the uhaul dox” on the LMPD live feed from Sept 26 (which is no longer on their Facebook page).

The “uhaul dox” was a reference to a situation created by Louisville ARA members who rented a uHaul in their own names, but with an old address on their license

Well-known (both locally and nationally, and in far right, white supremacist circles) Louisville ARA members were recorded on video unmasked handing out gear (hard banners, masks, goggles, etc) to protesters in an open parking lot

They were identified by far-right activists and the uHaul truck identified by its license and serial number

An employee at uHaul leaked internal call logs with the account information related to the rental with names and addresses included

A phone call of someone pretending to be uHaul was recorded with an ARA member where questions are answered and more information is given away

All of this is documented over and over again on YouTube.

It became a national story, trending on twitter, with even New York Times and Politifact articles written about it, with many right wing media incorrectly attempting to connect organizations and people to George Soros

While it was absolutely a poor choice on my part to mention “the uhaul dox” to anyone, especially police, there is no grounds for blaming the entire situation on me. In fact, the use of poor security culture by Louisville ARA created and enhanced the entire situation from beginning to end.

The accusation of poor security culture is a deflection of their own poor security culture choices highlighted above. Repeated actions of those associated with Louisville ARA, RAM, and other groups have created unsafe situations at the park over and over again.

Unwanted Sexual Advances:

Yes, I have been under the influence of drugs and alcohol while engaging in sexual activity. I admit to that, while also wanting to point out that I have also taken steps over the last year to minimize my usage of different substances and when I have slipped up, have been accountable for it and asked for forgiveness with a renewed promise to do better. Those people know who they are and there is no reason to drag them into anything.

In regards to the specific instance mentioned in the dox:

Both individuals involved were under the influence of substances

We had sex twice - once before sleep, once after sleep

I repeatedly asked for consent during the interaction, as each step progressed

This person then stayed at my house for multiple days after the interaction

The insinuation of a power dynamic around age disregards the other power dynamics that existed, such as this person’s connection to a founding member of Louisville ARA

I was later told by this person’s friends that they were in a committed relationship with someone else during the time of our interaction

This person denies that they were in a relationship at the time, but I have been approached by others given similar information much later after the interaction occurred

The twisted version of this interaction is not what was told to former partners of this person

This person repeatedly approached me this summer regarding our interaction describing it as “great” and saying “I wish we could do it again”

The interaction took place almost two years ago and I have not been a part of the community for almost a year, there has definitely been ample time to address the interaction or any issues with it before now without power dynamic issues or threat given that I was not a member of the community

I have not once been approached by Louisville ARA or their affiliates regarding accountability for this interaction since it occurred

The other individual a part of the interaction in the past has been repeatedly called in regarding consent issues, defense of far right political personalities, sex work shaming, transphobic behavior, toxic masculinity, and other issues and in fact, left Louisville ARA because of the accountability call in for those things

If the intent was to hold me accountable, spreading rumors of rape in bars or a public call out without any attempts at restorative and transformative justice is not constructive or appropriate.

I do want to hold space for those I have hurt though, intentionally or unintentionally, with my actions. I am truly, deeply sorry if anything I have done has resulted in making anyone feel unsafe. Should there be a genuine request for an accountability process, I would wholeheartedly engage in it.

Ignoring/Disregarding POC on Sept 26:

The accusation was made that I presented myself as a police liaison on the night of Sept 26, despite being asked not to do so by several POC.

I never once refer to myself as a police liaison, nor have I ever

The decision to approach the police line was made by a group of people tasked with protecting protesters and the church, and clergy:

Clergy and armed protection asked folks to go into the church building when the explosion occurred

Multiple intel sources, including bike scouts, indicated LMPD was gearing up to enter the church property with or without a warrant (confirmed by Interim Chief Schroeder in testimony to Metro Council)

LMPD sent all media away from the location, so we invited a 502Livestreamer to come with us to document the exchange

I was not approached by any POC or Black organizers at any point during these conversations

Multiple members of the armed protection team were initially going to the police line but the others were called back to deal with a situation

When a group of three Black individuals approached the police line after we had already talked to police, I immediately stepped away and created space for them to negotiate.

All of this is recorded on camera, including church security footage with sound, and can be confirmed by members of the clergy and the other people who were a part of the interactions

Ultimately attempts at negotiation were finalized by the Black woman who came forward

When the offer to return home between 3-3:30am was given, I actively encouraged people to stay at the church, but later was informed that members of Louisville ARA and their associates went behind me and told people to leave, that staying was a trap.

In fact, the trap was telling people they could freely and safely arrive home

LMPD arrested 28+ protesters on their way home, some were disappeared for a number of hours before it was known what happened to them

POC Claim:

The accusation is made that I am falsely claiming to be a person of color based on an immediate relative’s DNA test.

At no point did a “calling in” conversation take place, no actual conversation around this specific issue ever took place. Comments made in passing or a two minute conversation absolutely do not qualify as a calling in.

I did not know it was considered an issue to others until it was screamed in my face during an outburst that had nothing to do with my identity

This is being claimed by a group of people who have no knowledge of the growth, journey, insights, or nuances I have experienced, nor was there ever an attempt to have those conversations

This group repeatedly discussed their feelings and thoughts about me without my input, knowledge, or clarification, including with other organizers in an attempt to discredit me

Out of state persons with whom I had never conversed about my identity publicly dragged me in a large group Signal chat referring to me as “Rachel Dolezal” among other name calling and abusive behavior

This is complicated. Yes, I discovered Roma in my family through a DNA test, that is true. I spent a large amount of time studying the culture, digging into my family’s background to understand better how we tied into the Romani, learning my heritage and history, and had many, many discussions with POC and Black folks about what I was learning. In fact, several of the POC I had discussions with, who had encouraged me to identify as POC and to embrace my Roma heritage are the same people now accusing me of being fake. The main source of those accusations though, come from white people, specifically ARA members who have been unsupportive from the very beginning and showed their indifference to even attempting to engage in conversation.

I am not going to try to convince anyone of who I am or am not. I have spoken with Roma elders; I know my Vitsa; I have Romanipen. I practice my beliefs as Roma. I am Roma. Who I am, my identity, is not up to someone else to debate.

I have never attempted to engage in oppression olympics with anyone. I have rarely ever even discussed my own experiences regarding racial profiling. I have occasionally shared articles or images highlighting Roma history and present, which is a story of oppression, and held discussions around educating people about oppression and profiling Roma have experienced, including the use of slurs such as g*psy or the appropriation of aesthetic such as bohemian or g*psy “soul”. I have argued that the fight against white supremacy and Nazism is a fight for Roma, because it is. Unfortunately, Roma and other ethnic minorities have been excluded from the conversation of liberation at the square to such a degree that most feel unwelcome and unwanted there.

If the disagreement is around the concept that someone cannot discover parts of themselves late in life and find a source of identity in that, I would argue that is engaging in gatekeeping, exclusionism, and toxic internalized white supremacy.

If the disagreement is around the concept that Roma people are not people of color, that is racist.

Roma are not even recognized as a people group in the US. Claiming that my identity is invalidating to POC is antiziganism. My identity is mine. Those who take issue with it are transferring their own insecurities regarding their identity on to me. It is toxic, racist, and unfair.

Bad Intel Sharing:

Intel is a communal effort and comes from many, many sources, not one; generally intel/information I share has been passed to me by others

Constantly moving actions, pieces, and groups create an impossible situation for having ALL the information before making decisions

Louisville ARA, RAM, and others associated with them refused to participate in standard communications that other groups and people were a part of (including Signal chats, Zello groups, radio comms, etc)

They encouraged people at First Unitarian Church to leave the property despite curfew causing multiple arrests

They have repeatedly attempted to spread wrong intel about fellow activists to discredit them and push them out of the movement

They have failed to show up to situations when back up or help was requested

They refuse to cooperate or engage with information that comes from any source other than themselves, gatekeeping regarding issues of safety and security for protesters

They have gone as far as claiming that the vouches of other people are invalid based on their personal assessment, not on any empirical evidence

Grifter/Jumping from group to group:

I am not originally from Louisville and I have only been a part of the leftist scene here for about four years. Many of the people in different organizations and communities have a history that I do not share. So, yes, I have spent time in different groups, trying to find my place in the movement.

I truly thought I had found that place with Louisville ARA, but after the two years of toxicity, I couldn’t handle it anymore. When I distanced myself from them, I lost my friend group, my community and it broke my heart.

However, I believe in cultivating healthy relationships and community, not one based on codependency and narcissistic centering. When I left Louisville ARA, I immersed myself in studying intentional communities, transformative and restorative justice, and how to address conflict/harm.

I wrote out my dreams for a community. I shared those dreams with some others who I thought also believed in them. Rather than engaging healthily when the dox came out, most of those who I thought shared my vision of community left me standing alone rather than putting the ideals we had agreed to into practice. It’s been a very painful realization for me to know where people truly stand, but I would rather know who is true than not know.

Conclusion:

While we all make poor decisions, and I am not excusing mine in any way (and have been willing to admit to them, accept correction, and remove myself when necessary), I have always maintained that if people feel unsafe, they should only engage to their comfort level.

Certain people who are now accusing me of these things had inserted themselves into conversations that they were intentionally not invited to because of their discomfort with certain actions. In every instance of an action or idea, I have made clear that only people who are willing to take on the danger of an action should be involved. I would not want it to be any other way, even if that means people backing out or removing themselves from an action. Safety is, and always has been, my greatest concern.

Many actions and ideas were brought up throughout the summer that eventually were tabled or decided to not complete due to safety issues. I am certainly not the only person who has had ideas in this movement and it is the height of hypocrisy to claim one person is unsafe, a subjective term at the very least, during a revolutionary movement in which so many engaged in ��unsafe” actions.

The accusations against me are a spiteful smear campaign and an attempt to divert attention from their own actions that have created unsafe situations for multiple people

It’s an attempt to lash out and place blame on anyone other than themselves for their actions

I distanced myself from Louisville ARA in Sept/Oct of 2019 and officially left the organization in December 2019, having not been a part of their work for several months

I did not reconnect with members until May 2020, when the movement kicked off

I left Louisville ARA because I witnessed, and was the recipient of, toxic, manipulative, abusive behaviors

I had multiple anxiety attacks due to narcissistic, controlling behaviors

I felt they no longer represented or acted in connection with their supposed points of unity

By doxxing me, they revealed my legal name to the far-right movement - despite pictures of myself on social media, I had been so far undoxxed by the alt/far right

Doxxing of fellow activists is a huge faux pax in the antifascist community

I had not yet been publicly doxxed by anyone

They deadnamed me, as a trans person, by giving far right activists my legal name

This is completely against any sort of socially acceptable standard

Put me, my partner, and my child in danger

This was an act of betrayal, a way to manipulate against someone to cause them hurt and harm.

The lies, manipulation, and mind games existed from the early stages of the movement in May behind my back

Louisville ARA, specifically, manipulated and used me to gain information

They used my connections to people they thought were undesirable to work with as a way to manipulate the movement

Once I became independent of them, I was considered undesirable to work with as well

They fabricated relationships with me as a way to continue to use me for their enjoyment and gain

They have continued to terrorize and threaten me, implying that physical harm would take place, even so far as to stalk me at the memorial for Travis where I was grieving the loss of a friend (who, incidentally, was someone they refused to work with and had no relationship with)

They have consistently engaged in a “my way or the highway” attitude toward relationships and the moment someone doesn’t fall in line, they are ostracized

I truly believed I was in community with them. They took advantage of this to manipulate and abuse me

Louisville Radical Federation has also displayed incredibly abusive and unsafe behavior outside of simply doxxing me:

Cis members of Louisville ARA physically threatening trans people, and when there was push back on it, declared they did not care of it made them transphobic

Stealing untold amounts of money from comrades, including using my debit card without my knowledge or permission after their dox in an attempt to terrorize me

Repeated fatphobic comments and behavior

Openly threatening physical harm on myself and my partner

Making disparaging comments about fellow protesters, houseless folks, organizers (including Black women), and others

Engaging in clique behavior, while mocking those not “in” constantly (and often behind people’s backs)

Refusing to return borrowed items totaling around $500 including my tactical kit and body armor plates

Running abuse survivors out of the movement because the abuser is their friend

Allowing abusers to remain in the community with no accountability process and making excuses for behavior

Constant misgendering of trans folks, often intentionally

Behavior indicating non-binary trans people are not trans or not trans enough to be a part of conversations around the murders of trans folks

Conducting medic trainings with old, outdated, and incorrect information without certification and refusing to correct their inaccuracies when they were pointed out

Actively engaging in gatekeeping, gaslighting, and disrespect toward others, going so far as to claim to others that vouches or recommendations were invalid

Political purity and gatekeeping of the movement

Repeatedly re-escalating dangerous situations during high risk actions that had already been deescalated by Black folks and other protective minded folks

Deliberately choosing to not respond to information about Nazis or local alt-right figures being at bars or other locations, failing to uphold their own points of unity

Lying to therapists, psychiatrists, and other mental health workers to keep from being accountable for actions, behaviors, and abuses

Centering whiteness in conversations about race and racialization

Tokenizing POC and Black people, as well as trans comrades

Gatekeeping trans, POC, and other marginalized communities with standards set by themselves as cis, white folks

Disregarding claims of abuse against individuals in their community, gaslighting survivors

Stalking and harassing former members of the community

Building a reputation of toxic, manipulative, exclusionary behaviors among antifascists circles

Appointing themselves as the authority on antifascism, especially in regards to organizing, being in the streets, and actions

Invalidating the trauma of other antifascists from actions such as Charlottesville

Consistently carrying firearms without proper training or discipline and/or without knowledge of the specific firearm they were carrying

Using their trauma to manipulate others from being actively engaged on the streets when it was needed

Engaging in oppression olympics, especially with a mindset of harmful behavior toward others when they were the most privileged people in the space (having a complex about anyone with more oppression than themselves)

Putting businesses they frequent at risk by bringing in underage people to drink

Hosting parties and events where underage people engaged in drinking and substance use, putting everyone in the space at risk (sometimes without consent)

Stigmatizing certain mental health issues and using them to manipulate others against persons

I am in no way absolving myself of bad, toxic/harmful behavior. I am absolutely guilty of causing harm, of engaging in toxic attitudes, and making very poor judgment calls. We all are toxic. We all have caused harm. We all engage in bad behavior. No one is innocent. Should I be called in about some things, most assuredly. And those who have taken the time to sit with me, to ask questions, to discuss the issues, have not shied away from telling me where I have faulted. If I have made anyone feel unsafe, compromised, and invalid in any way, I want to apologize sincerely and would love the opportunity to do so in person.

A community that supports and believes in itself exercises grace, compassion, transformation, and restoration with itself, with each individual. To intentionally dox, ostracize, and scapegoat a person is not community. It’s not engaging in liberation work. Harm does not fix harm. We will never get free if we can’t free ourselves from the internalized toxicity that each of us has. Liberation is undoing toxic behaviors, not branding someone as unfixable. Liberation is freedom to fuck up and do better. Liberation is grace. Liberation is learning, transforming, restoring. Liberation is who we choose to be, how we choose to live, what we choose to believe in. I chose liberation.

#antifascism #louisville

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branch--chief--faba · 5 years

Text

Branch-Chief--Faba

It's me, the former owner of branch-chief--faba.

Someone I know pointed out the post @trash-troll made and after reaching out to them they did imply me with their post. So let's start out with the obvious; me writing this post means I'm alive. Though I should add 'barely' to that.

Trash-Troll showed me screenshots of people talking about me. And after them convincing me to do it I've decided to write my version of what happened or more importantly.. how I feel about the whole thing. I am not here to debunk anything.. because it will become a he said/she said thing. Let’s just go into this wall of text by saying both parties fucked up.

The end of 2017 and all of 2018 were pretty bad for me, mentally. I was hurt and lost and I didn't know what to do. A year prior to that I made the blog. It was fun! I never had so many people reaching out to me and willing to spend time to me. That was a whole new experience and in hindsight I didn't know how to deal with it. This isn't me debunking or saying something did or didn't happen but I guess I was in over my head. I had never been popular or even had friends before. Or friends who weren't forced to hang with me because of college or them being co-workers. You know how proud I was that people found me cute or pretty when I posted a selfie? Yeah that never happened before. It boosted my self esteem sky high.

I did some things that in hindsight weren't smart or downright stupid. I let people play me. I fought battles for people I should have never fought. I was just so afraid that if I didn't do it- they leave and I'd be alone again. I didn’t purposely stick my nose in other’s business. I just wanted to help and now i feel that some people really took advantages of that. In that sense this blog was both a blessing.. and a curse for me. I was so obsessed with keeping everyone happy that I forgot my own happiness and I forgot to look further than the tip of my nose and to please some people I hurt some others, unintentional at the time.. but I understand now and I’m sorry.

I can only apologise for it now. I am to blame for my actions even though they were inspired by others and sometimes it was peer pressure. I admit that I should've been stronger when i was in a discord made to slam a group of people. I've been a fool and absolutely stupid. You know those PSA’s when they tell you doing nothing is as bad as the bullying? Yeah. At times i was the bystander... and I wish I could undo it but I can’t.

I feel like (now that I've seen screenshots..) that sometimes I was set up to vent about a person only for it to be shared. Was it fair for me to vent? Yes and no. In my eyes- I was hurt by a few people and I thought the person i was talking to (this venting only happened one on one, never in a group.) was someone I could trust. I know better now and I feel stupid. I said things in pure emotion and in confidence. I was angry and hurt and I just wanted to vent those feelings. Again, I'm the fool for walking into such an obvious trap. I don't blame anyone but myself. I should’ve know better. I really should. However, this isn't just about me.

There are things people did that are wrong too. Things that hurt me. I will never forget me finding the courage to call someone out on how their actions harmed me mentally and them saying that 'It was my own fault for being too emotionally attached to them'. That's painful and that hurts, even today it haunts me to my core.

I won't forget that I was doxxed, that i got daily anons to kill myself, that they wish I had cancer, etc. Even though I enjoyed writing Faba up till that point I just had to slow down. I had up to 1000 asks at the end of it and a lot of them were nasty anons. I deleted one and two came in it's place. Eventually I just had to stop for my own sanity. I know people suggested and would suggest now that I just should’ve turned the anons off but again. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought that turning them off would mean people wouldn’t like me anymore, because there were good anons too! I figured ‘why should they suffer because of a few’ and in hindsight.. I should’ve just turned the anons off. I know hindsight is 20/20 but..

It was around that time almost everything went sour and I still don't know why. This is not me being a idiot, I really don't know why. I am still so socially awkward and figuring out human emotions is hard for me. Sometimes I don't understand until someone tells me 'Hey I'm mad at you because you did X or Y' I'm working on it though but it's not easy.

I won’t forget how a duo of a cis man and a cis woman reached out to someone and pretended to be a gay couple. And I will never forgive myself for not stopping it. And if you were the victim of this and if you read this then I’m so sorry. Know that I am absolutely disgusted with myself.

I will not forget how a new discord was made without me.. and the reason I wasn’t welcome? I was a supposed transphobe. I am not. Since deleting I’ve had A LOT of time to myself and I came to few conclusions about my gender and my sexual identity. DO NOT even think about use my dead name. I can’t believe someone would say that about me.

I know people think I’m just some money hound and out for that but I’m not. I don’t give a single shit about money. I care about happiness and I’m not getting it and because of it I’m not growing as a person.

I won’t forget how hurt I was by the actions of a few. And I can’t forget because I feel it .. even today. It consumes me and I already hear people laughing about it. Because ‘haha look at this dumb fuck, right? It’s been a year.” but I just can’t. It’s etched so deep inside me that it makes me sick.

I know you know who I'm talking about it. And I know you know it's you. I’m doing a favour and not tag anyone I’m going to leave the responsibility to owe up to your actions to you and if you don’t.. then that also speaks volumes about you as a person. And those people I'm talking about need to take a good hard look at themselves. Instead of posting that 'the evil is defeated' gif or celebrating someone deleting out of despair. Because this is not the only story to tell. There are LOADS more. Trash-Troll showed me. Please just be kinder..

I cannot change the past and I will never deny myself having some part in it.. but no one should feel like I do over fandom stuff. NO ONE. And no one can really help you if you see someone get doxxed, bullied or threatened and you sit back thinking 'eh they deserve it' no one deserves it. I know we live in an age where internet is part of our lives. But for many the internet is a safe space where they can just be a little looser than usual. Just block people.

What happened after I left this blog? I started by deleting my Discord, there were too many bad memories attached to it so I just dumped the whole thing out. I send a message explaining why I did it and send a few people who I thought I could trust my new discord. That not a single soul accepted my new friend request.. yeah that stung pretty hard. So, after keeping it up for two months and resending the friend requests.. I just deleted that one too.

I stopped using my other socials, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I had to quit my job. If you can recall it wasn't a job that required a lot of thinking so my thoughts were allowed to run wild. Sometimes I started working and I just didn't know how I got to the end of my shift. It was just.. there. I'd black out thinking about the whole mess. I was feeling numb for months, nothing would bring me joy or sadness. It was like I was stuck in the ocean. Just below the surface and not being able to reach out. I could see people on the shore and I could swear they could see me too, but it was safer to let me drown.

I deleted all my tumblrs too. All of them. I didn't want anything to do with this place. I moved to twitter for a bit when I got lonely but that didn't stick. I had a few odd conversations but Twitter isn’t really the best place to talk about things I figured.

I tried to get myself to draw and write again but I couldn't.. I just couldn't. I tried but every time I opened a word document or put pen on paper I'd get antsy and panic-y. I couldn't bring myself to create anything at all. Not writing, not art, nothing. Even drawing original characters or other fandom stuff. I couldn't.

I was and still am too afraid to share anything with anyone. My brain goes through a whole series of 'what ifs' when i'm trying to write or draw. "What if they like it and we get talking and I mess up again." or "What if I put a lot of effort in a work and people will ignore it on purpose because they know it's me?" those kinds of thoughts.

My whole memory is warped. What really happend and what did my brain make up. I am not saying I’m not to blame for things, either partly or wholly but I NEVER had the intention to hurt people on purpose. I’m not hiding behind anything but fact remains that I am socially malformed. I don’t understand things. I spend the first 16 years of my life basically talking to no one and when I did.. I was the ‘weird kid’ or I heard my peer saying ‘Don’t talk to the freak.. so weird!’ I was never raised to be social and then I was dropped in a very social group full of very colourful people.I didn’t know how to handle it and it drove me literally nuts.

I feel into a deep depression and the last two months of 2018 are a haze for me. I barely remember anything. I don’t remember Christmas, I don’t remember New Years. It’s a blur. I almost died a couple of times, it's no secret. And for that I have the permanent reminder... I'm glad I didn't do it though.

Now it's 2019 and 2019 is almost over; how am I doing now?

Not much better. I still have the fear to create. I want to but I can’t. I still barely touch my socials because of my paranoia of people finding me and the whole circus starting again. I use my instagram because of cosplay commission stuff and I only use my Twitter to support some artists on there. Even then I keep this ‘neutral-someone-everyone-can-like-persona’ just this safe ‘brand type’ posts.

I'm only back on Tumblr for this and I won't be coming back. This isn't a revival tour. It's like one last song to send everyone on their way.

Please leave others alone. I truly am not on Tumblr and do not plan to come back not now or ever. I do not have a sneaky hidden blog. All the blogs I used to own are either dead or I just gave it to people who used to own blogs with me.

It's very painful for me to write this all out. I know I'm missing a lot of parts. To summarise; while I did some things that I'm not proud of. I cannot believe the lengths people went to to make me feel horrible about myself.

I cannot believe you guys would share some things about me that I wanted to keep private. That I thought was pretty private and you would understand. I'm sickened by the lies told about me and disgusted that it's still going in 2019, almost a year after I deleted everything.

I gave my new discord to people and those people never accepted and that's fine, it hurts but it's fine. I never bothered them or sought contact. I will admit that I once accidentally send a snapchat to someone.. but I promise that was an honest accident. I didn’t mean to. But I just don't get the feeling the same thing is happening and I have proof from people that I'm right.

Can you not post my trauma for all to see? That's not justice that's just being a dick... I have no other word for it. Being an evil dick. I never spoke badly about any of you after the whole thing. I will admit that .. in my anger when it all was going on, I did vent to people and TRUST me I regret that. I thought it would stay between us but it leaked..

Do the same for me and please have the decency to apologise for the things you did and just.. stop putting my private shit online without my consent. What I shared, I shared because I felt I could trust people. It was never about sympathy because I do not want it.

You gain nothing except the satisfaction that you gave me a kick again by sharing it. Which is a horrendous move. You’re not getting even, you’re winning at being a dick..

I want to be left alone. I want that confirmation of 'hey we're leaving you alone now'. I want to go back before I was paranoid. It’s not a fun thing. It’s maddening to think something behind EVERYONE’s action. Deep down.. I know better but I can’t stop. It’s a problem and I’m working on it.

I want NOTHING to do with Pokemon OR it's fandom. I won't be purchasing games or other media from it. I just gave away my copies of the 3DS games to people who wanted them. The whole thing is too triggering to me.

I wish I could pick up a pencil or pen and draw and write again without having a panic attack and I wish I could show myself on my private social media again without people watching me.

I know you guys doxxed me before using my Facebook- It's not weird of me to think people could do it again.

I don't mind it, if you hit me up and talk to me via this blog. You can reply to this post or just us DM. My only rule is to be civil. I am being civil too even though I feel empty, numb and sick.

And finally.. I apologise for EVERYONE who people thought were me. You don’t deserve that. No one does.

Well I guess this mystery is solved, what happens next is wholly up to you. I am not going to reach out myself. I made that promise.

I’m posting this because I have nothing else left to lose. Please show me you’re capable of human decency. And some things only God can forgive. That goes for me too.

And just to proof it’s me; I will be tagging this post as I always did; using my old tags.

#branch-chief--faba #spring bean text #faba #branch chief faba #pokemon #pokemon rp #pokemon rp community #aether foundation

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dragonofdarknesschaos · 6 years

Text

Look at Me Twirling my CVS Receipt!!

DelaneyArt said:

Me again.

Here. If you wanna get yourself involved even more than you already are. This is what Sky said to me recently. And I’ve agreed to her terms. Me and her are MUTUAL I never said we were friends.

Transcription if the image does not load:

From Skyrawathi, 12/24/2018

Okay so I have read your letters. I understand what you mean. I am just not sure if you are honest with your apologizing and with willing to end this war. I mean it is hard now for me to trust you because I am afraid that you will start insulting me again soon. I hope I am wronf. [sic] Maybe I just need some time. I guess we both need to calm down. Especially it is Christmas now. Emotions are hard to handle. I am also sick of this situation already. But if what you say is true and you want to be honest with me, ans [sic] you don’t want use [sic] anymore to be enemies then it is so cool

I could show you how you can develop your art, where you can find inspiration and how to use them to create sth original. You really don’t need my art that much and you don’t need to redraw them. I mean it is so cool if we could inspire each other, but you have to start first creating something original. And yeah, you can because as you have mentioned that comic Possessive of yours, you prove with this that you can be creative and inspiring for other artists. Just lets calm down because I never intended to be your enemy, I never wanted to. But you see how far this conflict went and it is stupid? Don’t you think?

I understand that sometimes it is hard for everyone to come up with sth new and we lack new ideas. Every artist suffer this so it is nothing to be ashamed of. I can show you how to fix that so you will always have awesome ideas in head.

But first you definately [sic] have to credit me. And if you want to make a redraw of my work then you should write in post that this pic is study of Skyrawathi’s art. And it is nth wrong because lots of artists study others. Me either. I always mention the source of the pic that I used as reference.

So yeah, we can definately [sic] end this war and come to agreement. But just please, do what I ask. Credit me when you use my art, and if you can be that cool to ask me for permission before you do a redraw then that would be really awesome of you. Then you will never ever deal with reporting because your hands will be clean.

In return to show you that I am not evil, I can help you with improvement. I can show you how to turn your inspirations into original ideas and how to draw chamiko so well that you will never ever need someone’s pic as a base.

Does it sound ok for you?

Now, from what I’ve gathered from the first paragraph of this email along with mentions to prior emails in the same chain as alluded to in the PSA post, D decided that before Christmas–a time when everyone wants to relax and spend time with their families, friends, and loved ones; the season of comfort and joy–was an excellent time to send insulting emails and threats to her most inspiring idol, just for reporting D’s facebook page. I cannot imagine what was said, but the way Sky is reacting leads me to believe that the insults were so volatile that they may never see the light of day again. Sky might have even feared for her well being and that is why she is offering to help. If this is how D treats someone she claims to hold in such high respect and idolize, then I cannot imagine how she treats anyone below such a pedestal.

Actually, I can. For telling the admin of a closed Xiaolin facebook group that D was plagiarizing other artists, which resulted in D getting kicked from the group, I was called “a crazy bitch” back in September of 2018. I have not once insulted D, yet she continues to berate me and harass me on multiple social media sites for warning others about her. I’ll speak more on this later.

Back to the email. To summarize what Sky is saying:

Sky is tired of this war; it’s stupid and she wants it to stop

Sky doesn’t know if she can forgive D

D’s actions have repeatedly shown that she cannot be trusted

Sky is willing to help D improve so that she can get better and not need to copy other’s art

In order to get to that point, Sky asked D for four things:

give Sky credit on the art that D has already posted

start crediting and sourcing the artists whose work D “studies” or “copies to learn from”

ask Sky (and any other artists) for permission before doing a redraw of their respective artwork

create something original

At no point does Sky say they are friends or “mutuals.”

At no point in this email does Sky say that D and her are mutual in anything, but I would infer there is a mutual understanding that D must do better. None of this excuses D’s harassing and abusive behavior.

Alright, if D wants to work on herself and get better let’s see how she is doing on her end of the deal with crediting and sourcing artists. I’d give links to D’s OPs, but she has me blocked.

“Version inspired from [Sky’s real name] aka Skyrawathi”

Ah yes, I always love getting doxed when one of my fans credit me without linking back to my original work! Please don’t do this. Only villains do this.

Three instances of “Inspired from Skyrawathis version”

Again, no link? Not even going to mention the title of the piece? Sky has HUNDREDS of pictures! How am I going to know which one D is copying? How will I know where to find Sky’s original works if you DON’T LINK TO THEM???? I am but a lazy potato!

“Inspired from Skyrawathi Chamiko Great Wall Kiss”

Better, but still no link.

“Inspired from Skyrawathi “Together in Snowflakes” ”

Getting fancy with the formatting here, but WHERE IS THE LINK??????

“Original design and concept”

Ah, finally! Something original, just as requested! Although… Chase’s pose looks kinda familiar. So does that horse. I wonder…

Chase’s pose is Dashi’s character art from the Xiaolin Dragons Kickstarter art dump part one.

Oh, and Kimiko’s pose and horse are literally the second result for “mulan horse” on Google images. But, tell me again how D has changed and is crediting artists and making original drawings without reference?

If you want to credit people, please use MLA format for your citing. Or if that’s too hard to remember, here’s a handy formula:

[Artist’s username]. “[Title of Piece].” [Publishing platform or publication e.g. Tumblr, Deviant Art, Instagram, Time Magazine etc.], [date published], [source URL].

@Skyrawathi. “Together in snowflakes.” Deviant Art, December 24, 2017, https://www.deviantart.com/skyrawathi/art/Together-in-snowflakes-721748400

Here’s a more casual way to credit someone if that’s too formal for you, with links bolded:

Couldn’t get enough of @Skyrawathi‘s “Together in snowflakes” so I had to redraw it (with permission)!

Here’s an original image I made using these references: Chase’s pose (Grand Master Dashi), Kimiko and Horse.

The point is to LINK BACK TO THE ORIGINAL ARTIST. Simply mentioning them as plain text does not work. LINK TO YOUR REFERENCES. I should not have to do an internet search to find what you are referencing. The citing I did here took less than two minutes. If someone cannot take two minutes or less to show such a basic level of respect then there is no hope.

As for the matter of being “mutuals,” I am sorry for jumping to “friends,” but that is usually what “mutuals” means on Tumblr; “two people, usually friends, that follow each other’s blogs.” Not all mutuals are friends and not all friends are mutuals. I jumped the gun a bit based on personal meaning assigned to that word. However that doesn’t explain this:

Facebook status post from D that reads:

[Sky’s real name] (aka Skyrawathi) is an amazing Chamiko artist and I am truly inspired by her work. I should’ve credited her in the beginning, I didn’t think I had to but I will from now on out of respect for her work. I hope to improve my art as much as I can and strive to get my skills to her level, even though I know I have my own set of skills and will still continue to be inspired from her work and in general in the future, but I hope to not have to rely on a reference to draw. I appreciate us coming to an agreement and I hope we can be mutual in all of this. Thank you Skyrawathi, and it’s a dream come true to be able to become friends with the person who has inspired my work all this time. I will work on making original Chamiko art that is 100% from me (heart emoji)

Once again, don’t put someone’s real name with their URL. It can be construed as doxing. Do not do that. It’s highly disrespectful gesture towards someone one claims to hold in such high regard, but as has already been established, D lacks this basic understanding of respect.

I have been doing art for almost three decades. I know people who have been doing it two and three times longer than I. We all use reference. Do not set yourself up for failure by saying you “hope to not have to rely on a reference to draw,” because that is never going to happen. This goes for everyone. Using reference is not a crutch. Reference is a tool for when you do not know how to draw something. Young artists use a lot of references because they do not have the knowledge or experience of drawing a hand 500 times, or a head 1,000 times, or a leg 250 times! There is no shame in that perceived lack. Getting around it is just practice. Find photographs–either free and open stock or your own–and draw what you see. D has a great eye and very nice photos on her Instagram before it was taken down! She could learn a lot by doing studies from her own photos like this. But Sky’s art, my art, everyone else’s art is NOT anyone’s reference! It took me a while to understand that, but I’m lucky in that I didn’t get myself into any trouble with that misunderstanding. The best way around that misunderstanding, should it occur, is to first, apologize to the artist you referenced; second ask what they would like done with the artwork you made. If they want it taken down–remove it from all platforms. Do not reupload it anywhere. If they say it’s fine, just credit them, then credit them as I explained above with LINKS. “Crediting” the original artists as plain text shows that D has not changed as she claims to, or is only trying to placate her audience to believe she is telling the truth about her change.

Continuing with that lack of change, here is the text I bolded:

“I hope we can be MUTUAL … it’s a dream come true to be able to become FRIENDS…”

What is the truth, Delaney? Friends or Mutuals? Since D is so unreliable in her narrative, let’s hear Sky’s take:

Transcription of DMs:

Sky: Sorry, that I will bother you with Delaney but she has just written to me. She said that there is some drama on Tumblr. Said that she never called me and her friends and I approved it because I am hell no friend to her. And she also asked me what kind of problems people still have with her…xD and I was a bit like WTF. But I told her again that she has done so much harm to so many ppl that she cannot expect from anyone to just simply forget.

[…]

She actually left me in peace and I am happy about it. And even if she writed sth [sic] then I just ignore her, because I don’t want to have anything to do with her. But I just checked this letter about Chaos. Anyway I would very much appreciated if she wasn’t mentioning me and using my person as a ladder for her business.

This is what I also told her. She can’t expect from us to be ok with her. Nobody will start liking her just because she said sorry.

Once again, I repeat, Sky is NOT D’s friend. Sky wants nothing to do with D. Sky does not even want D to mention her at all, ever. So all that artwork I have screen capped from D’s blog should not even be posted, because–per Sky’s wishes–D cannot credit Sky without mentioning her, inevitably associating the two together. As such, D cannot have any of the artwork she copied from Sky posted without violating the wishes of someone she claims to highly respect. Furthermore, posting the artwork she claims to be “original” while still copying well known and iconic material without due credit or sourcing shows that D has not changed, or even attempted to change. All this drama has bungled things for D so much that no one is wiling to talk to or work with her. Thus, all of the terms Sky set up to help D have been violated. If D wants to claim she has changed she needs to SHOW she has changed without words, through actions.

That means that instead of finding my three month old post about her and replying “lol” on multiple occasions has to STOP. Replying to my posts about her misdeeds has to STOP. Messaging people who give notes to those posts about her has to STOP. Directly messaging people who give her original posts notes asking them to follow her has to STOP. Harassing everyone and anyone who slightly disagrees with her has to STOP. All of this:

D replied to your post: You’re so wrong. And if anyone is toxic in this, it’s you for not letting this go. You re jealous of me. Period. That’s why you can’t seem to let it go. I have apologized and redeemed myself. If you people can’t get over that, that’s on you.

D IM: You have issues if you can’t seem to let this go. Me and sky are mutual now. Not that I have to explain anything to you. I have redeemed myself and apologised to everyone. Still you people make posts about me, trying to diminish my following but it’s never gonna happen. Thanks for the publicity again

D asked me: Please get a life, It’s pathetic

D replied to your post: Again, me. Clearly. Let it go like Elsa.

HAS TO STOP.

I have made three (3) posts about D including this one (excluding reblogs). In total D has left harassing messages to me 7-10 times. Not once has she apologized for harassing me on dA, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter. Not once has she shown me any sign of changing her ways. All we have asked for is BASIC RESPECT. At every turn D promises to start respecting us and change her ways, then laughs in our faces for even thinking we were worthy of Her respect and attention.

Respect is an interesting thing. You have to give it to get it. Even a three year old understands this. Until D shows the capacity at this basic level to show respect and common courtesy to her peers, superiors, and kohai no one is going to interact with her; she will continue to be treated as nothing more than a joke.

You want to learn how to draw using reference? I have a rough tutorial for that.

You want to learn how to use and learn from your studies? I got something for that too!

You want some references? Try Senshi-Stock’s official app or what’s left of Tumblr. AnatomicalArt has thousands of references and tutorials, and with all of this on Tumblr, crediting your sources is easier than ever!

Or, you know, take some selfies and not have to credit anyone. ;D

TL;DR

D: you’re wrong; I never said Sky and I were friends; we’re MUTUAL! D: here are some terms Sky made that I agreed to–

Sky’s terms:

Give Sky credit on the work D has already copied

D must credit and source all other artists she copies

D must ask permission to copy anyone in the future

D must create something original

If all these terms are met, Sky will help teach D how to use reference correctly so D can draw better.

Receipts showing the following:

6 instances of D not properly crediting Sky

D claiming something to be original without citing referenced materials

Mini guide on how to properly cite an artist or reference:

LINK TO THE ORIGINAL POST AND ARTIST PROFILE!!

Seriously, it’s not that hard!?

Facebook status from D calling Sky both “a mutual” and “a friend.” [what is the truth.gif]

DMs from Sky saying as follows:

Sky is not D’s friend!

Sky wants nothing to do with D

Sky wants D to stop mentioning her altogether

Sky cutting ties like this means that D cannot mention Sky to credit her on reposts of the copied art.

>violates term 1

D has few other artworks to post, so she cannot credit other artists.

>fails term 2

Everyone is so hurt by D that she has been completely shut out and will be hard pressed to find anyone to give her permission in the future.

>fails term 3

D’s attempt to create something “original” resulted in copying and not sourcing more artwork

>fails term 4, 3, and 2

Please stop harassing me. Look at all these receipts! Learn some basic respect before coming back.

Have a few tutorials and resources.

#submission #long post #Chamiko #PSA #RaiKim #delaneyart

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thedogsled · 7 years

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Hi guys. I’m going to cautiously title this ‘About Zimbio, Destiel, my personal struggle with the idea of wlw vs. mlm, and why what we achieved in the vote today says a lot about our magnificent fandom’.

This is a reminder in advance that I make generalizations but I don’t mean any harm by them. I’m happy to discuss this topic and capitulate on some things, because my experience of shows is extremely limited right now (unless I want to watch them in French). Just like Dean I say ‘we’ a lot but please assume sometimes I mean ‘I’, I by no means make any claim to speak for all of the following groups at any point: bisexuals, mlm shippers, wlw shippers, television executives, social media marketers, the mainstream audience, destiel shippers--etc, etc, you get the drift.) If any of the following upsets you, please let me know, it’s not my intent to cause any harm, only reassure my friends that they did a good job.

I promised I was going to write a post on this, because I’ve seen just a little mumbling and unhappiness that Destiel didn’t make it through in the semis. I get it, it’s only natural that it’s going to lead to some hurt feelings, but I wanted to really put across to you all why I say I was proud of us for our semi-final performance, rather than you just take it for granted.

We are an old fandom. Thirteen years is a long time; it makes Supernatural the longest single run fantasy/sci fi series on American TV (and I mean I think it’s unfair to compare it to non American shows like Doctor Who anyway just on pure numbers, especially since Who has gone through thirteen fourteen? fifteen? are we counting radio drama? actors in the lead role; it’s like a different show every time.) So. It’s had a superb run. Fantasy/sci fi shows are typically considered to be niche, not massive hits (comparatively speaking; SPN isn’t Grey’s Anatomy or NCIS I’ll grant). But what networks are finally waking up to is the power of the fandom of those ‘niche’ shows, dedicated viewing power which can grow a network’s brand, particularly online, and networks are eager to wrangle that.

This modern era of television is fandom’s era of television. Netflix are promoting gamification of television watching (even for kids) as well as choose your own adventure style TV. Binging and rewatching box sets is a whole thing now, not just the domain of the “geek”, and shows which can convince people to stick around and watch something instead of moving on when they run out of material--they’re the ones gaining success, while traditional shows slip further and further as they fail to capture new demographics. We’re making strong social media contracts with the creators and actors of our shows, and making it clear to them - in a way that is increasingly being recognized for the opportunity it represents - that there must be give and take with modern audiences, especially if you seek gratification through social media. (I read a great article I reblogged that called it the ‘Brandom’ effect.)

It’s wonderful, and it’s terrifying, because both fans and creators don’t know what to do with it. They can give fans too much power and the show goes off the rails, or deny it to them entirely, and earn only vitriol. Some shows rub their power right in the face of their fans and increasingly they pay for it. Some showrunners are outright incapable of talking to their fans at all without being respectful (I’m looking at you The 100), and some fans are ghastly, aggressive and outright disrespectful in pursuing what they want (it is a different thing showing joy over your ship as it is to dox actors and send their wives hate mail). Some showrunners, instead, are more embracing of their fans, like the Earpers, and if you want an idea of how actors should be engaging with fans, check out David Haydn Jones’ twitter. That man is a saint. It’s a delicate game of mutual respect, and occasional drama, and intent is the name of the game: do you have good intent, is it honest? People crave honesty on the internet where everything and everyone is fake--and that honestly is a tough thing to achieve when studios are too heavily concentrating on their bottom line.

So, this is a changing landscape, like I said, and people are struggling with new marketing techniques, trying to find their place in the world, running into walls when they realize that in fact they don’t understand their queer audience members. When something works, shows are very quick to jump right into it, almost relieved to have evidence that if they do X thing, their fans won’t all jump ship in horror, but here’s the thing, networks are in a lot of ways far slower to respond than shows. If you want to do something, you have to prove to the person holding the purse strings that it’s a profitable endeavor. Producers are set in their ways, especially old school producers, not realizing how quickly the landscape is changing, and writers are fighting against that all the time, because they’re often a lot more in touch with the creative fandoms they’re trying to inspire. Many have come from fandoms themselves. Queer writers should mean more queer storylines, right? But it means fighting money men to make it happen. Oftentimes that leads to the whole ‘one queer ship is enough’ standpoint, and when it comes down to it, those money men are more likely to put stock in safe investments, in proven investments. Consequently, wlw is flourishing because it draws in audiences without losing them. It’s arguably less risky to make Alex Danvers gay than Castiel. It’s more PC, accepted by wider audiences, groundwork laid by Dark Angel and Buffy in my own recent memory. When good results come from featuring those kinds of ships, they appear increasingly on TV, and it’s AWESOME. There were 16 wlw ships in Zimbio March Madness, and 11 of them got through all the way to 8vs8. There were only 2 mlm ships in 8vs8, and 3 het ships. Internet fandom, passionate and social and dedicated? It speaks, and it says ‘More LGBT rep please’.

We’re in a transitional period. Changes are coming, but when you look at the big mlm ships of the last few years, you can see the uphill climb that’s still ahead of us. I spoke with our Hannigram and Johnlock friends last year about what their experience with this was like. (I haven’t spoken to Sterek folks, but I know there’s disappointment from that front too). Johnlock shippers are largely furious about how explicitly the finale no-homoed their ship when there was absolutely no reason to. Having watched the finale myself, I feel like they really went hard against shippers explicitly. Hannigram suffered too. I haven’t finished S3 even now, but what I recall of the conversation went like this: they’re together, but there was a kiss that didn’t make it to air, and then the show was cancelled. In any case, what I’m saying right here is that this is part of a pattern, a theme I’m struggling with, where mlm fans are dispirited and disappointed and feeling disrespected by the very mainstream shows they’re watching.

(Which isn’t, I’ll quickly note, that I’m saying the same isn’t true of wlw audiences. The last two ships in Zimbio this year are non canon ships, and the fans of both have been hurt by the shows they watch, but they still keep coming back and watching the show. Swanqueen is ending, but the pair have been consistently mirrored - dark and light - with the emotional journey of the show largely being made over the shared custody? I don’t know, they changed it every week while I was watching it of Emma’s son. Supercorp is clearly full of eye sex thanks to the actress’ chemistry (and McGrath is so gorgeous she’d have chemistry with a brick wall) and yet has been outright mocked by the show’s cast. If that sounds familiar to Destiel fans, I almost want to say that Supercorp have it worse; just as with Swanqueen, they’re often told simply to shut up because there's already wlw rep on the show.)

But where shows are willing to go there now, diminished risk is the key, especially as resale value of shows reflects multiple, competitive platforms constantly needing to purchase content to fill their airspace. Naked women, women kissing and women having sex - bisexual women who are explicitly still available to men - that sells, but as far as I can tell networks are struggling to sell the same narrative about mlm. Maybe that’s my perspective only, maybe that’s me watching the wrong shows (and not at all because I don’t enjoy looking at women’s bodies, I do, but variety is the spice of life) Look at the outright surprise last year when GOT gave us a beautiful, pus covered, full screen dick. GOT, of course, which is insulated because it is a Number One performer. I present to you, in terms of dicks on screen, American Gods, then. Neil Gaiman is my hero, selling the network on the premise that they could have his great stories if only they were willing to gleefully integrate peen on every episode. Or so I’m told. There’s a lot on my ‘to watch’ list that I haven’t got around to yet. I will tell you, of course, that mlm is out there, Evak were voted out against Supercorp in the quarter finals) but on a big show like Supernatural that risk is exceptional. That’s why when we talk about Destiel ‘going canon’, we make the shockingly ambitious request of them HOLDING HANDS, or mutually saying ‘I love you’, and sometimes feel like expecting anything more, like a kiss, or god forbid a sex scene, is too much to ask. Why? When lesbians and bisexual women are presented on TV, kisses and sex scenes are a matter of course. In Alex’ coming out, in Thirteen’s coming out in House, Angela’s coming out in Bones - huge ensemble shows where main characters, all women, have come out and kissed (and returned to male partners in the case of the later two). (I should point out I am talking about genre “mainstream” shows in general, not for example Queer as Folk, where the primary aim is to explore sexuality, not fight dragons or solve crimes)

Now in addition to this problem, an issue that I’ve seen for years is that from inside the fandom world we are made to feel as though we are somehow obscene or inferior for shipping mlm ships, a projection that comes from the way mainstream folks will react to you if they happen to discover you drawing dudes together. Sometimes we hide our online selves from the real world out of shame that has only built over the years, where it’s considered that supporting mlm ships instead of wlw ships makes you fetishistic, or objectifying of gay men. I’ve seen it in fanfiction spaces and in rp spaces on dw and lj that shipping wlw has been raised to a point of being considered ‘more pure’. If you ‘claim’, they say, to be a queer woman, you should wholly be supporting wlw ships. When I started hearing this dialogue I was THIRTEEN. This was before Willow/Tara. There were just less wlw ships on tv, and there were less female characters whose autonomy didn’t depend on men, or portray them as being fragile, the weakness of their gender or whatever. There were standout female characters in my youth, absolutely, but they were all independent (mostly) straight women: Kathyrn Janeway, Sam Carter, Clarice Starling, Dana Scully. They kicked out against the system, the world they lived in, intelligent and defiant ladies I still idolize. Nowadays, though those wlw ships are available, and populated by so many beautiful, powerful, progressive female characters - and yes miraculously even strong female characters who still embrace their own womanhood. In contrast mlm ships are not keeping up because, in some way, I think that the ‘impurity’ of shipping mlm has stuck. I struggle to think of even straight non toxic male role models, nevermind male role models who are in engaging, romantic relationships with the same sex. This stagnation of masculinity (apart from the rise of the geek hero which often, as in the case of TBBT, doesn’t break away from inbuilt misogyny) troubles me immensely. (I’m not saying all male characters are awful, incidentally, but it’s not a positive message to outright expose the flaws of toxic masculinity without offering understanding, lessons, and growth. But that’s another essay.)

Trust me, I’m not saying everyone feels that TV is being stacked against mlm, but as a bisexual I really feel fractured by the whole thing. I feel like I’m supposed to loathe myself for shipping mlm, particularly when that mlm ship is ‘two white guys’. The fact that I as a woman enjoy male and female bodies is irrelevant, because one desire is pure, and one desire is fetishism. There is no balance. I’m allowed to be titilated by members of my own gender kissing each other and only that and heterosexuality. As a bisexual who is currently leaning toward wlw myself (sexuality existing on a sliding scale imo), it is the power imbalance in heterosexual couples which puts me off. It’s painfully true to life. I have a particular loathing for Booth and Brennan from Bones, for example, where his toxic masculinity is unilaterally forgiven because it’s true love, while Bones, once independent and stubborn herself, is increasingly nudged further out of character in order to forgive him his trespasses. But when I ship mlm, or write fanfic of my favorite couples, any power I give them is not based on their gender. The same I imagine is true of wlw. (An unfortunate consequence of this is people project it onto real life, where power inequality and abuse can exist regardless of make believe ‘purity’, and consequently people end up believing that something is wrong with them rather than their relationship, similar issues as people face when they imagine marriage is the goal, and everything else is happily ever after, because Disney told them so. In which case I advise you to rewatch Mary Poppins.)

During voting, I was reticent to address why voting for Destiel over the other ships was important to me. It was personal. (Of course anyone could have sent me an ask if they were curious). But why I was voting didn’t matter. It was enough that I was voting for the couple I love, whose relationship my blog is devoted to, and whose love story I hope is resolved. But there is more to it than that. What’s important, I guess, is how I feel about Dean. My reading of him is of a bisexual, still in the closet - perhaps even to himself - in his thirties. He made it out of high school, but that’s it, because he dropped out of higher education for family commitments. He likes rock music and classic cars. He loves pie, and dumb medical TV dramas, and cowboy hats, and riding rodeo bulls and chatting to strangers. He struggles with voicing his true self with people who know him, and might judge him in a way he will never come back from. Dean is basically me. I am all those things. And in this case, he’s in love with a genderfluid (has been both male and female) guardian angel whose love for Dean explicitly and singularly, has been described as a profound bond, and the greatest love story ever told. Castiel’s love for Dean, his willingness to do anything for him, is all I think any of us want from a romantic partner. And yes, we all find different things in our ships, and presumably other people connect with Destiel for reasons that aren’t the same as my own, but that’s okay. My reasons are my reasons.

And yet I am still thrown into that emotional disconnect: that because this couple is an mlm couple I’m wrong to ship it, that I would be better putting my energy into watching shows I don’t necessarily enjoy as much so I can find my representation in more respectable (or potentially less queerbaity) fandoms. That Supernatural isn’t good enough because I’ve been repeatedly told by people inside and outside the fandom that it isn’t good enough. I’ve got to tell you I agree that it struggles with being progressive. While season 3 of Grey’s Anatomy was showing the struggles of a pre-op mtf woman and her wife in an ep that made me actually cry for the dysphoria represented, on the other channel SPN had just got done killing a token ‘woman with an off screen girlfriend’ character. By season 11, we’ve had two gay male couples, both holding hands and leaning into each other to express their relationship. SPN is slow. Nobody in the world would deny that.

But to be quite honest, also, finding representation doesn’t have to mean ‘a ship’, it can just be a well written bisexual woman with a badge, and you aren’t restrained to just one rep either! In fact, the more the better. I find myself particularly starved for that rep, especially since - having been fetishized for my bisexuality irl before - I see painful reflections of that on television. That’s obviously going to be related to bad writing and TV’s particular way of objectifying women in general, too, but when a woman (say Angela Montenegro from Bones) has a two episodes storyline where she makes out with another insanely attractive actress, the music rising, lit with soft shades, the camera focused in on their mouth--before the plot is forgotten entirely, it is incredibly difficult not to see that as objectification and not bisexual solidarity. I want more mlm on TV because I want more bisexuals of both genders on TV, and because of the harmful insinuation in mainstream thought that a guy who comes out as bi late has somehow been lying to himself and was gay all along, while women who are bi are just exploring their sexuality and somehow more up for it. Those views need to be constantly, constantly challenged, because, honestly, people believe them. (Probably not me or you, but it’s out there).

(As an aside: mainstream is also harsh toward female writers who write mlm stories. There have understandably, as a result, been female writers who chose male pseudonyms to pen their gay romance novels. I first experienced this to a lesser extent back in Gundam Wing fandom, because if you were a ‘male’ author it legitimized you and people would read your stories in preference to those penned by girls. Back then it was a numbers game. The prejudice does remain. Audiences are sometimes outright cold to female authors who pen mlm stories! You need only look at the conversation about boycotting Love, Simon because it was written by a straight woman to appreciate just how deeply we’ve built this disconnect, as though to write something the author must always write from personal experience. If that’s the case, I feel terrible for Thomas Harris and Jeff Lindsay, and JK Rowling (who speaks about choosing her moniker because it was genderless) must certainly have had an exciting childhood, what with all the magic and dragons.

As a result I think we (or at least I) have internalized some harmful things about who has the right to interpret themselves in stories told about men, or male protagonists. And in lashing back at girls who for years have been doing just that, considering it to be lesser if I find a role model in Dean instead of Angela, we have harmed the integrity of mlm fans themselves, who increasingly struggle under a burden of self imposed guilt. It is reflecting back poorly on mlm performances, even as wlw stories flourish. In this raising the pedestal of wlw purity, the ‘ethical’ alternative, we dismiss what people can learn about themselves from male role models too, something that we instead encourage if it’s a teenage boy finding a role model in Elsa. My closeted bi self loving Dean Winchester harms nobody, but I am still made to feel lesser for doing so, even if sometimes that feeling is ridiculously self imposed. Hell, maybe I’m alone in this feeling and the rest of this is bullshit, but that’s why I said ‘I vs we’ was definitely a part of this commentary.

In any case, this is what I think this means to the Zimbio vote: As wlw rep has been increasing, mlm has been facing a disappointing deficit. Those once big fandom movers ‘Superwholock’, the Hannigrams, the Sterek shippers--have fractured and splintered off. Destiel has come in waves but it’s still somehow here, without its original opponents from back in the day. It’s here, even with setbacks after season 8 and 10 that had fans breaking away from Supernatural entirely. Optimism now reflects optimism felt before, but let’s face it Castiel was killed permanently at one point, and Bob Singer said outright, even just a few years ago, that Destiel and social media stuff just didn’t come up in the writing room (pr is not showrunning, etc). People are hugely entitled to struggle with optimism for non canon mlm ships because history repeats itself. Add into that feelings like I described above, and the struggle is real. It can sometimes feel like you’re fandom’s three legged, one eyed donkey.

Add to that how old Destiel is. Every fandom coming into existence now, every ship built around, comes into contact with Destiel at some point. If you type ‘queerbaiting’ into Wikipedia, our ship is cited. In Google, we come up first. Thanks to antis (and some genuinely bad behavior from bad apple shippers over the years) we’ve earned a reputation, and it moves before us into every ship interaction we have. Because of that, we can appear both intimidating and as something to be avoided, because ‘what if you meet a crazy one’? You’d think seniority would be a good thing, but few people see us as a ship that’s been there and done that, as they do Swanqueen. We aren’t the ship that can perhaps offer advice on things going on in whippersnapper fandoms based on our experiences, as it would be in an ideal world. We’re not a ship to be aligned with, and because of this odd perception of wlw vs. mlm, there was simply never any potential that support for Supercorp wasn’t going to skyrocket. It was a fight against ‘That monolithic mlm ship that just won’t stop’, as it were, because here we still are hanging onto threads hoping our ship will go canon, and based on past evidence, the fall of other mlm ships, and only looking in from the outside, that seems like wishful thinking.

So we were unlikely to gain allies from heartbroken mlm fandoms. We were unlikely to find allies in wlw fandoms. It’s sad, of course, because for all the talk of representation in media, the desire to express a balance and cheerlead for mlm, imo an obvious representation underdog, simply doesn’t ever come up. Our friends and relatives roll our eyes at us if we talk about Destiel because we get that ridiculous light in our eyes when we do. Ultimately, that meant that Destiel was on its own. It had to unify. It had to pour its passion into voting and be a family again. It’s been knocked out in previous years - honestly based on what I’ve heard it’s been a disaster - but THIS YEAR we pulled out all the stops. That was all us. Despite antivoting, Destiel shippers - and only Destiel shippers - fought and fought - thousands of votes after thousands of votes, as we made small leads only to slip three times further. We didn’t stop. We were there and fighting right up until the end. And it may just have been a silly online poll, but I think it really goes to show what we can do when we put our hearts into it. We more than doubled the amount of votes cast in the previous round, over the exact same time scale, even though Supercorp fought back with everything they had, all the vibrancy of being a fresh, shunned ship determined to prove themselves, using social media strategy and unity to bring in votes from wherever they could get them. They fought well. They were wiley and smart, and so passionate; passionate like I thought I’d forgotten how to be.

And we kept fighting. We were in the semis, with twice as many votes more than Swanqueen, and we fought tooth and nail and almost got there, slipping just in the last half hour.

I have to believe that that’s because some people in the Destiel family have hope. I know we’ve drawn in a lot of new and returning shippers recently, I’ve seen you following me and starting out in meta writing yourselves, joining Destiel exchanges for the first time, sharing your first codas. The DCBB and Pinefest have had ENORMOUS turnouts. We are, despite all odds, growing as a ship again.

I really hope that we can overcome the shame that has somehow been drummed into us for shipping mlm. I hope that we can all, whether we ship wlw, mlm, het or poly or whatever peeps are doing these days, make sure not to raise one as an ideal over the others, because it’s not in the spirit of family, of fandom. It is never ‘us against them’, it’s never a case of moral or ethical superiority, definitely not even in everyday parlance and least of all in a shipping popularity contest.

And maybe despite the risk, we’ll get an ‘I love you’, some hand holding. Hell, maybe even a kiss (Supernatural never even gave us a kiss between Jesse and Cesar, though, so I have my doubts.) But God if that wouldn’t pave the way for better deconstruction of toxic masculinity on genre TV, more presence of bisexual men and gay men on genre TV, and more men kissing and open expression of sexuality on genre TV.

So here’s my final word. Maybe the bunnies will kiss. Maybe they’ll even do what bunnies do, who knows? And maybe next year we’ll win it.

I hope I didn’t step on any toes with this post. I felt like these words needed to come out of me, though, so here they are. Thank God there’s no more Zimbio until next year, right? Please refer back to my first paragraph for disclaimers. Thanks, though, if you read this far.

#zimbio #destiel #bisexuality #as i was writing this i was like wow i have issues #it felt good to talk about them #please feel free to disregard #shipping #multishipping #woes #personal #my bed is calling me #looooong post #dean is bisexual #what that means to me

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn

Content warning: This article includes firsthand accounts of sexual abuse.

A collection of thousands of photographs of naked women that is being used to create machine learning-generated porn includes images from porn production companies that have been accused of lying to and coercing women to have sex on camera.

The dataset, which is circulating in deepfake porn creation communities online, includes images scraped from Czech Casting, a porn production company in the Czech Republic that police have accused of human trafficking and rape, as well as still images from videos produced by Girls Do Porn, which was ordered to pay almost $13 million to 22 women who appeared in its videos, and whose founder is currently a fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list.

Much like thispersondoesnotexist.com, which uses a machine learning algorithm and thousands of pictures of human faces to produce photorealistic images of people who don't exist, the dataset is being used to generate photorealistic images of nude women who aren’t real and don't look exactly like any one person. One person using the dataset is creating what he describes as "a Harem of millions of actresses" that can be inserted into deepfake porn, while another is using the dataset to create what he describes as "porn generated entirely by AI."

Motherboard has downloaded and viewed the dataset containing images from Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn, as well as several others being used to create machine learning-generated porn.

The people who anonymously use these datasets say that since the final algorithmically-generated images they create technically aren't of real people, they don't harm anyone. In fact, they argue that their creations are a step towards a future where porn will not require human porn performers at all. But legal experts, technologists, and women who are included in the datasets described these creations as uniquely dehumanizing.

Motherboard has written extensively about how deepfakes and internet platforms' inability to sufficently curtail the spread of nonconsensual pornography upends the lives of and continually traumatizes women. This new form of machine learning-generated porn and the datasets it relies on introduces a new form of abuse, where the worst moments of some women's lives, captured on camera, are preserved, decontextualized, and spread online in service of creating porn whose makers claim to feature people who don't actually exist.

Honza Červenka, a lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, is originally from the Czech Republic and has been following the case of Czech Casting, which is owned by Netlook, the country’s largest porn company. He told Motherboard that the idea that images are less harmful because they're run through an algorithm and "anonymized" is a red herring.

"It's mad science really, and completely and utterly re-victimizing to the victims of the Czech Casting perpetrators," he said.

"It feels unfair, it feels like my freedom is being taken away," Jane, a woman who said she was coerced into shooting a scene for Czech Casting, told Motherboard.

The casting couch trap

Jane, who asked to remain pseudonymous to speak about a traumatizing incident, remembers her hands shaking as she read over a contract for Czech Casting. She was there to support her friend, who needed money for rent. They'd answered an advertisement for a modeling gig, and decided to go together. They'd both just turned 18. They didn't know what kind of modeling it was; the ad was vague about details. Someone picked them up at a metro stop and took them to a house on the outskirts of Prague.

(In an interview with Czech bodybuilder Antonin Hodan posted to YouTube, a male performer in Czech Casting videos named Alekos Begaltsis admitted that the women who show up for shoots sometimes don't know what they're in for because of deceptive advertising.

"The girls get here through agencies as well with the help of private agents or through friends, anyone can recommend," Begaltsis said. "We can't control every piece of information in the advertising. It can happen that a girl gets here thinking she'll do an underwear photoshoot. Which sucks because we are powerless in these situations. We are trying to push them to write the truth [in the ads]. Unfortunately it's not always the case. But once she gets here, we inform her about everything.")

Once at the studio, a woman at the reception desk took Jane's ID.

"We sat in a waiting room and got up to leave two or three times, but someone would always come up and tell us to stay, to not be afraid," she said. "We were scared to leave so we stayed."

A woman called them one by one into a room with a white sofa where the filming would take place, and handed them a contract saying the videos wouldn't be accessible to anyone in the Czech Republic. This part of the arrangement is similar to the lie Girls Do Porn told women about how their videos were only going to be distributed to "collectors" in New Zealand. In reality, Girls Do Porn videos were published and sold in the U.S. and promoted on Pornhub.

Czech Casting does indeed block users trying to access it from the Czech Republic, Motherboard confirmed by trying to access the site using a virtual private network. But people within the country can also easily circumvent the block using a VPN, which is free and easy to set up. Additionally, as women who accused Czech Casting of wrongdoing have said, their families and friends quickly discovered their videos, which were reposted to popular free tube sites, where sometimes their real names were doxed.

"Weeks later I started getting messages…These were mostly from men saying how beautiful I was and if they could have sex with me," Jane said. "I got so many of these messages and keep getting them. I even changed my Facebook name because of this."

After she signed the contract, a man came in and asked her if she was a virgin. She said that she felt like she had no way out, and that she couldn't leave without her ID.

"After I said yes, he took the camera and told me to get naked," Jane said. "I was told they were going to film something soft. . .I was scared to speak out."

Jane said they put the money into her hands as she was leaving. She wasn't given a copy of the contract she signed, or any proof that she'd been there at all.

"My friend found the room we were in on a porn site," Jane said. "I realised this was a massive fuck-up. I kept thinking we should have left even if it means not having our IDs on us."

In another Czech Casting video, a woman, who Motherboard was able to confirm is included in the dataset, starts crying while having sex and asks the man to stop. The man stops, and the camera zooms in to show that she is bleeding. He hands her a towel and tells her to clean up the blood.

Jane's story about Czech Casting isn't unique. Multiple women have accused Czech Casting of coercing them into having sex on camera. Czech police have charged nine people involved with Netlook, the company behind Czech Casting, of human trafficking and rape. Daisy Lee, a woman who went on to a career in porn after her Czech Casting scene and who is now friendly with Begaltsis, said the site has ruined lives.

"I was 18 and didn't know what I was getting myself into. Most girls do not. The majority of them stay, but some leave. It ruins many lives," Lee told Motherboard.

In a statement published in July by the adult entertainment news site Xbiz, Netlook denied the accusations and said it is cooperating with the police. Netlook did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment.

GeneratedPorn

In September, four years after Jane shot her scene for Czech Casting, a PhD student opened a new forum to show off his latest personal AI project: algorithmically-generated porn.

The person making these videos goes by the username "GeneratedPorn," and named the r/GeneratedPorn subreddit to post about the technology (we'll refer to this user as "GP" in this story). He said he started the project because he wanted to improve his machine learning skills. Like some of the earliest deepfakes that were posted online in 2017, what he shared were glitchy, spasming facsimiles of the images they're trained on: thousands of porn videos and images. Unlike much deepfake porn, the images GP is producing wouldn't fool anyone into thinking they are real porn. The final result barely looks human, let alone like a specific person.

Do you have experience with “casting couch” producers, or knowledge of how non-consensual porn spreads online? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Samantha Cole securely on the messaging app Signal at +6469261726, direct message on Twitter, or by email: [email protected]

But much like early deepfakes, they're rapidly improving in realism. GP has posted several experiments in the past few weeks featuring increasingly accurate naked human bodies, and even some slightly animated images, showing that convincing "porn generated entirely by AI" is not impossible.

"This all started as a quest for me to learn how all of this cool tech worked but then I ended up pivoting into the porn generation stuff as I thought it was a cool concept, especially after watching the movie Her," GP said in an email to Motherboard.

GP explained his process to Motherboard over email, as well as in detail on Reddit, posted in the popular r/MachineLearning community. He used a Stylegan2 model that's available on Github as open-source code, but loaded it with datasets of porn. It's similar to how any other face-swapping deepfake is made, but instead of using a dataset consisting of many expressions of one person's face, he pulled from multiple datasets found online.

To create the videos, GP trained the algorithms using datasets from around the web, including one that primarily consists of images ripped from Czech Casting. The datasets, which are hosted and are free to download from popular file sharing sites, are compiled by users experimenting in deepfakes and other forms of algorithmically generated images. GP found the Czech Casting dataset on one of these file sharing websites, but said that if he didn't he would have written a web scraper to collect the images from Czech Casting.

This is because of the scope and uniformity of the porn that Czech Casting has created.

A censored sample of the Czech Casting dataset.

Creating algorithmically generated videos of a full, naked body requires many images and videos of real, nude people, and it's hard to imagine a more suitable resource for the task than Czech Casting.

Czech Casting, much like Girls Do Porn, specialized in casting couch-style porn, and has posted thousands of videos of women over the years. Its production style was almost algorithmic to begin with: Each video of a woman also comes with a uniform set of photographs. Each set includes a photograph of the woman holding a yellow sign with a number indicating her episode number, like a mugshot board. Each set also includes photographs of the women posing in a series of dressed and undressed shots on a white background: right side, left side, front, back, as well as extreme close ups of the face, individual nipples, and genitalia. In recent years, Czech Casting also started including 360-degrees photographs of the women, where they pose for interactive VR-style content.

"The main reason people opt for a data source like this, is that the generative adversarial models (GAN) people use, are trying to learn a general structure of an image for the class of objects you're trying to generate," GP said. "If your images are structurally similar, the model can learn more about the finer/granular details of the item class, like dimples or freckles on a face. Which leads to a higher quality result."

GP sent Motherboard a sample of the dataset he's using, which also included images from Girls Do Porn videos. Other datasets that GP is using, which Motherboard has viewed, include images that appear to be scraped from across the internet, including other porn sites, social media, and subreddits where users post selfies, like r/roastme, a subreddit where people post images of themselves for other people to judge.

Gigabytes of questionably-sourced images

In a post to the r/MachineLearning subreddit explaining how his algorithmically generated porn works, GP pauses halfway through the explanation to address "a potential ethical issue."

"I wasn't sure what to do with it, other than it being this cool thing I'd created… I'd contemplated making an OnlyFans and offering personalised AI generated nudes that talk to people," he wrote. "But someone I knew frowned upon this idea and said it was exploitative of Males who might need companionship. So I decided not to go down that route in order to avoid the ethical can of worms."

He also noted in that post that training dataset ethics is something he's concerned about. "Are the images we are training on ethical or have the people in the images been exploited in some way[?]" he wrote. "I again can't verify the back story behind hundreds of thousands of images, but I can assume some of the images in the dataset might have an exploitative power dynamic behind them," noting that some of the images are from Girls Do Porn. "I'm not sure if it's even possible to blacklist exploitative data if it's been scraped from the web. I need to consider this a bit more."

These questions didn’t stop GP from building the project in public, on social media platforms, which means he’s perpetrating harm regardless of whatever ethical quandaries he says he may have. Much of the most harmful nonconsensual content is spread on the internet through surface-level platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, OnlyFans, and tube sites like XVideos and Pornhub.

"So many mainstream porn websites host child pornography and nonconsensual pornography, and does depict rape, and profit from those through ad sales," Červenka said.

When Motherboard contacted Reddit for comment, a spokesperson said Reddit's site-wide policies "prohibit involuntary pornography, which applies to all content, including deepfakes." Reddit banned deepfakes in 2017. Both r/GeneratedPorn and r/AIGeneratedPorn were shut down after Motherboard's request for comment.

Generated Porn's user profile on Pornhub was also taken down after Motherboard contacted Pornhub. A spokesperson for Pornhub declined to comment.

Porn tube site xHamster took down GP's user profile pending further review: "These new types of content are indeed grey areas and we will need to review with our own machine learning team and TOS team to determine how to evaluate and where necessary prevent," a spokesperson for xHamster said.

XVideos, another free tube site, directed Motherboard to a content removal form.

OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment. Patreon, where GP was asking for people to fund his project with little success, told Motherboard that while funding nonconsensual sexual content isn't permitted on the platform, if an account does contain nonconsensual porn, the platform works with the creator to bring the account within its terms of use. The project was taken down from Patreon as of Monday.

Twitter directed Motherboard to its nonconsensual nudity policy and rules for sensitive media.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images?”

In an email to Motherboard, GP expressed another ethical concern: that the algorithm might produce something that is recognizable as a real human—a result that would negate the whole point of his project: anonymity.

"It's quite possible for the algorithm to reproduce fake people who resemble real people, but it wouldn't be a 1-to-1 replication of the data it has trained on," he said. "This presents an ethical problem I'm trying to navigate around, which is identifying the rare situations where it does replicate a person from the ~7,500 images it's learning from. It's something that plagues generative networks… It's possible and I'm not quite sure how to 100% avoid the possibility of this happening. But I really do want to avoid this. I'm not interested in deep-faking anyone, even by accident, it's a bit scummy imho!"

GP is far from alone in this type of project. The creator of the first deepfakes told Motherboard almost the same thing in 2017: that he wasn't a professional researcher, just a programmer with an interest in machine learning who “just found a clever way to do face-swap,” he said.

These Nudes Do Not Exist and a subsequent project from the same creator called "Harem" most likely draws its data from Czech Casting—the images come out looking unmistakably similar, but the creator of that project hasn't responded to requests for comment on where the images in their dataset come from. Another abandoned project at r/AIGeneratedPorn did the same.

The real ethical issue plaguing this project is not the risk of parting lonely men from their money. It would take one search online of Czech Casting, and some basic awareness of the concept of pirated content being harmful to creators, to recognize the datasets these non-existent women are built from are comprised of gigabytes of questionably-sourced porn, some of it potentially depicting sexual assault.

On Monday, the night before this story was published and after his Patreon account was suspended, GP told Motherboard that he “decided to shut down the project.”

"It certainly should be illegal"

Jane told Motherboard that she was hoping her video would get lost among so many others online, and no one would find it. "But there is always someone who manages to fish it out from the depths of the internet," she said.

Červenka, the lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, told Motherboard that because some of the Czech Casting videos were allegedly edited to look consensual from the start, they have always been deceptive and harmful—and churning them through the meat grinder of machine learning algorithms doesn't make them less so.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images? It's awful, on a personal level, and it certainly should be illegal," Červenka said.

Even for professional porn performers, stolen content is an issue that plagues the industry. Adult performer Leah Gotti, whose images are part of the datasets GP is using without her consent, told me that the problem of stolen content isn't just disrespectful—it's dangerous. She's currently working to stop a stalker-fan from creating fake Instagram accounts of her and targeting her family by stealing her content and reposting it.

"It just goes back to, no one truly respects sex workers," Gotti told me. "All those things are pirated, and that's supposed to be against all the rules, but because we're having sex on camera they're like, well, she asked for it."

Earlier this year, a rumored OnlyFans leak of a database of stolen porn threatened to put sex workers on that platform in danger of being harassed or doxed.

Daisy Lee, the performer who started with Czech Casting when she was 18 but continued working in the adult industry after, told Motherboard that she blames herself for thinking that the videos wouldn't go viral worldwide.

"They don't put it on Czech servers but people download it and re-upload it everywhere," Lee said. "Every girl that goes in thinks it won't be visible to their friends and family… 14 days later [my] video was everywhere. It destroyed my reputation and spread around my home town within hours. But nobody forced me to do anything, no drugs, nothing like that."

Many of the women who were targeted by Girls Do Porn also blame themselves for believing the company’s lies claiming that the videos would stay in a certain region—in that case, in private New Zealand collections, on DVD. But the entire system of porn online, and all content online for that matter, is set up to spread videos and photos the harder one tries to remove it. Algorithms are driven by what people feed them. One Czech Casting model lost her teaching job after students found her episode online, and when she spoke out about feeling victimized by the company, people sought her video out more.

Collage by Seth Laupus

"The researcher in me feels like 'if it's been published online it's open source and fair game' however the budding capitalist in me feels like that violates IP in some sense," GP said. "I'm a bit conflicted. I've personally accepted that any data I ever create as an individual will be used by others for profit or research."

GP also said that he thinks the type of abuse Czech Casting has been accused of is "horrible," but that it's difficult to screen for this kind of abuse when creating or using datasets.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent”

"Now that the abuse is present I can opt to not use that data and source data from elsewhere," GP said. "Others in the area may not care and may decide to use it anyway. It's quite difficult to screen for this data completely. Doing a google image search for 'female standing nude' gives you a bunch of Czech Casting images. Throwing on the flag '-"czech"' catches a lot of them, but some still get through the cracks."

While GP said that he could choose not to use images produced by Girls Do Porn and Czech Casting, he didn't say that he would, nor is it clear if his project and others similar to it could function without those images. GP also suggested that his project could also somehow help these women.

"I feel bad for the victims of this abuse and I can't say anything that may make them feel better," he said. "My only hope is that technology such as the tech I'm working on, now and in the future, leads to a reduction in harm to others. By making it an economical and technologically inferior choice to commit abuse."

Červenka said that even after three years of deepfakes panic and decades more of nonconsensual porn online, the laws to stop them haven't caught up. Victims could make a legal claim that they've been portrayed in a false light or defamed, especially when content is edited deceptively to make it look consensual. But that's often not enough.

"These laws have been around for a long time, and we are just trying to use them in the current context, because we don't have anything else," Červenka said "The legislature is unable to truly grapple with what people do online, and how to regulate harmful effects of what people do online."

It also becomes harder to go after anyone hosting the content if they're hosting it anonymously, all over the world, where every legal system is different. Even in the U.S., where some states have enacted deepfakes-specific laws, it differs from state to state.

When the content is buried inside a dataset, the problem is that much more difficult.

Is ethical AI porn possible?

The abuses the women in Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn endured happened in the real world, but the videos spread online made it worse. Some Girls Do Porn victims were forced to change their names, move states, drop out of school, and lost their careers or relationships with family and friends. Czech Casting victims have similar stories.

Revenge porn victims—as well as professional and amateur adult performers—spend hours sending takedown requests to websites that host their images. Often, those requests are ignored. And when it comes to datasets used to create more porn, it's hard to know where your images live on, unless you can locate where it's hosted and download a huge set of files, then sort through them to find yourself. Their worst moments are enshrined forever among gigabytes of others.

There have been efforts in recent years to create machine learning datasets that are fully consensual. After the privacy failures of MS-Celeb-1M, a dataset of 10 million photos from 100,000 individuals collected from the internet, ranging from journalists to musicians and activists, there's more awareness than ever toward ethical uses of people's faces. In 2019, for its "Deepfakes Detection Challenge," Facebook launched a dataset consisting of 100,000 videos of paid actors, for researchers to use. One of the sponsors of that challenge was data science community site Kaggle. One of the datasets Generated Porn used is hosted on Kaggle, and appears to be largely stolen, scraped porn content.

If machine learning engineers interested in creating AI porn wanted to start a fully-ethical project, they would do something similar to what Facebook did with its challenge dataset.

"They would get consent from people who want to be nude models, and say this is what we're going to build it for, and everything's on the up and up," Rumman Chowdhury, data scientist and founder of ethical AI firm Parity, told Motherboard. "And maybe even [models] would get royalties, [engineers] would go build their AI, sell it as a porn, and they would actually do pretty well." But doing things the right way costs money, and when you're tinkering with porn as a side project, it's usually money you don't have. r/AIGeneratedPorn's project died because renting server time and running the training was too expensive, according to a post in that subreddit before it went down.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent," Chowdhury said.

"How can a tech that at its core has rape videos be anything but a perpetuation of rape culture?" Červenka said. "I don’t think I would sleep well at night if I were [GP], because he's relying on images of abuse to create a Frankenstein's monster."

‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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pleasethinkindependently · 4 years

Text

A Sincere Request

Dear Tomarrymort fandom,

Before you read the following post, please do keep the following three things in mind:

1) I am neither close to Asa nor am I speaking on his behalf 2) I neither can nor want to judge whether he is guilty or innocent 3) I neither condone doxxing nor child grooming Now, why am I speaking up regardless, especially when I do not want to be involved in any kind of drama? The reason is that I've been the target of a smear campaign not too long ago in which I was wrongfully painted as an emotional abuser in result to me ending a mutually toxic friendship with a so-called 'fandom celebrity' and which was extremely damaging to my mental health.

Due to these personal experiences, I have noticed some patterns that have been greatly worrying me, and while I – again – do not wish to prove the innocence of a person I barely know, I would like to ask any reader of this post to listen to both sides and consider as many factors as possible before assuming any kind of stance on this issue.

What has been eerily similar to my own treatment when my reputation was being systematically destroyed is that my harassers refused to engage in any kind of dialogue with me before making the aforementioned claims about me. Instead, they collectively blocked me and convinced the admins of any fandom events to ban me from participating. If they saw me talking to an up-until-then neutral person, they immediately approached said person, which resulted in them blocking me without even listening to my side. It was very obvious that they did not simply want me gone from their personal corner (which would have been perfectly valid as this particular feeling was mutual), they wanted to bully me into leaving the entire fandom.

In Asa's case, the same thing happened: Those accusing him did so without giving him the chance to defend himself, and, rather than leaving him alone after getting him to leave their 'personal corner' (aka CoS), there have been further public accusations followed by an attempt to exclude him from the WIP Big Bang as well. What is especially concerning in his case is that nobody personally wronged by Asa has been directly involved in these accusations. Instead, it has always been others speaking on their behalf, and in the case of the child grooming accusation, it is uncertain if a victim actually exists.

Another similarity to my own experiences is that everyone close to Asa has been punished for his crime as well by having their username revealed and being included in the call-out post. Popular fandom members have explicitly stated that they don't want to have anything to do with anyone still on good terms with Asa, which puts a lot of pressure on less popular creators in particular: If simply talking to Asa or being on his side means that they'll be blacklisted by association, they have to sacrifice their reputation and the small support they've been receiving simply because they do not want to accuse Asa of something without being aware of all details. Even if it turns out that Asa is, in fact, guilty of what he's been accused of, this leads to a major logical flaw, namely the wrong belief that being friends or on good terms with someone means that one condones everything they do and/or that one is guilty of the same things. The only actions any adult is responsible for are their own, and to claim otherwise is bullying. Regardless, it's not uncommon for a person to scold their friends for doing what they believe to be wrong in private, hence there is something very questionable about treating Asa's friends or good acquaintances as accomplices for that reason too.

Lastly, I would like to say that, while I personally wouldn't have discussed sexual topics with a minor, there's a difference between doing so and 'child grooming'. What we need to consider is that the age of consent differs from country to country, meaning that the age of consent in the US does not reflect any universal truth or morals and that the debate surrounding the question of when a minor is mature enough to discuss and/or engage in certain activities is still on-going. With that in mind, let us ask the following questions in regard to whether actual 'child grooming' has taken place: 1) Did Asa engage in sexual roleplays with any minors 2) Did Asa encourage minors to meet up with him, show him any revealing pictures, and share any details they did not (want to) share on their own volition or did the minor(s) seek him out? Again, I don't know the answer, so this is for those knowing more than I do to judge.

On AO3 and many other sites hosting adult content, all a minor has to do if they want to immerse themselves in sexual content is to click a single button to confirm that they are 18 without having to provide any kind of proof, so the people running those sites themselves don't face any legal problems. If they truly cared about preventing minors from accessing that content, they would have implemented additional measures such as making them enter their passport ID in order to unlock said adult content, which is actually what a smaller community I used to be a member of did. For that reason, I would like to ask anyone reading this whether they condemn the actions of sites like AO3 and co just the same, and whether they aren't just accusing Asa of child grooming because they want to 'justify' their dislike (or hatred) of him.

I will not end this post with a request to defend Asa or believe in his innocence as I myself don't know enough about him or his server to form an educated opinion. However, I would like to remind this fandom of how dangerous wrongful accusations are and ask you to question what you read and think independently before taking either side.

In my case, the smear campaign that had been run against me resulted in people, my ex-friend in particular, believing that they had a freepass to do to me whatever they wanted to. This included writing literal hatefics about my rarepairs in which they killed the character they associated with me as a nice public 'inside joke'. I do not believe I have to elaborate on why this was detrimental to my mental health.

Again, why am I saying this? Naturally, this means that, if I see anything similar happening to Asa (aka people publicly ridiculing him or his ideas in a way unrelated to this drama), I, as well as any other neutral observers will know that none of these accusations are truly about justice.

---

For the sake of my own mental health, I would prefer to remain semi-anonymous, and not get involved further. However, if my credibility is being doubted, I will reveal my identity to a few select people I trust, so they can confirm that I’m not speaking on anyone’s behalf.

#Tomarry #Harrymort #Tomarrymort #tw: child grooming #this post can be linked to on other sites

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