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onrainynights · 4 years

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why you can't compare buddie to destiel (from someone who ships both)

this is kind of addressing the recent negativity in the buddie tag, but it's also a collection of my thoughts and reasoning for being buddie-positive despite my experiences with destiel and spn in general. the text of 911 is not really discussed at all, and this is relatively spoiler-free, so if you're thinking of watching 911 I encourage you to read it. if you haven't seen both shows it probably won't make perfect sense, but I wrote this with spn fans who haven't seen 911 in mind, since that's most of my followers (and also seems to be where much of the negativity was coming from) pretty long post under the cut to save your dash

I just want to prepare y'all for the fact that buddie could be the slow burn will they/won't they mlm romance we've been waiting for practically forever.

at this point it's not fair to call it queerbait because where their relationship is now fits the characters and their development. this is not like destiel, where there were many moments over the years that could've ended with them getting together and it would've made sense with the story. buddie right now is in this sweet, wholesome pre-relationship kind of place, which on its own is a compelling dynamic and so fun and good to see. a resolution of it right now would feel out of character—they both still have some development to do before that would feel natural. and so, I don't think we can really call it queerbaiting unless the characters get to that point and there is still no resolution.

also I'd like to point out the overall positivity from the cast when it comes to buddie. both Eddie's and Buck's actors have said (I'm paraphrasing cast statements in this post unless they are in quotations) positive things about the pairing, and Buck's actor has said that he likes the interpretation of Buck as queer, and he would be happy if the writers took his character in that direction. also Eddie's actor with "that's what they all say" when buddie was referred to as a "bromance". Jennifer Love Hewitt, who plays Buck's sister (another main character), is very supportive of buddie, saying she's "rooting for it", that it would be "amazing", she doesn't "see how it couldn't happen one day". this was in response to hearing that a fan insists Buck and Eddie will be a couple. She flat-out said "I think so, too." She jokes about buddie with Buck's and Eddie's actors all the time. Also, my favorite bit from the video of her saying all this, "Let's manifest it together!"

It's safe to say this is a VERY different environment to spn. I don't think I've ever seen a cast this positive about a show's main non-canon queer ship before. NEVER. I think it's safe to say that if/when buddie is canonized, the cast will be just as excited as the fans—at least JLH will be! Add into the fact that the show's PR seems to be leaning into bi buck and buddie right now, it's a VERY different vibe than spn had, definitely. There's no gaslighting of the fans here, at least not that I've seen. also, although 911 has a large casual viewership, I think it's safe to say the GA would not be upset by buddie—there are only 3 serious, long-term romantic relationships involving main characters in this show, and one of them is a lesbian marriage with two children. And yes, the characters are shown being lesbians, it's not just a stated fact; the audience is privy to their relationship (and their interactions with their adorable kids). I think it's safe to say that buddie would go over well with the fans, even the casual viewers (of which there are many). buddie doesn't seem to be a huge divider in fandom like destiel is, either. reactions generally seem to be either "I ship it" or "I don't care either way."

Also I'd like to point out that while yes, it's possible that buddie is only bait (which would be disappointing), there's a reason queerbaiting works. people WANT to be queerbaited, because it's nearly indistinguishable from a slow burn will they/won't they queer romance. queerbaiting allows fans to make theories, create fan content (including fic), and keeps them engaged with the dynamic and the show. fans who are vulnerable to queerbaiting want a slow burn will they/won't they queer romance, which is currently an almost completely untapped market. spn could've tapped it, but despite the huge fandom they did not. there are SO MANY people outside of spn fandom who want a slow burn mlm romance, one that keeps the audience guessing, one that's will they/won't they, one that is not guaranteed, and that is why queerbaiting works so well. the audience doesn't just want the payoff, they also want the build-up. the longer the build-up, the higher the payoff, and the suspense of the build-up is gone if you know from the start that the payoff is definitely coming. that's part of why malec from shadowhunters didn't fully tap this market—there was no question of if, only the question of when (which wasn't really a question either, given there was an episode in season 1 literally titled "malec" when they got together.) the characters were always queer, the show being an adaptation of a book series where they were in a relationship and eventually had children together.

this was why November 5th was such a big deal—fans were so far past the will they/won't they aspect of destiel, firmly believing that destiel would always end as a "won't they" and not a "will they" that when cas confessed his romantic love for dean, destiel trended on Twitter over the US election. you all know that story, but maybe not everyone reading this knows that after Nov. 5 there was a case of hundreds if not thousands of spn fans experiencing love sickness because of the confession scene. the payoff of making destiel fully canon (and reciprocated, in English) would've been huge. fans would've been throwing their money at the c/w.

which leads me to the possibility (this is not at all me saying that I think this happened or even is likely, just that it's one possibility that /could/ have happened) that buddie started as bait, that the writers never intended for them to be a couple, but saw fan reactions to buddie during season 2 and started to lean into it in season 3 (and 4 so far, but it just started so I don't want to make any generalized statements about it) possibly still as bait or maybe not deciding yet if they'll go anywhere with it. and then maybe they saw destiel trending on November 5th, realized just how BIG the market for a slow burn will they/won't they mlm romance is, and said "hey, we already have the foundations for one of those. why not go for it and draw in all those viewers who clearly want one so badly?"

if buddie goes canon, because the cast and PR have been so positive about it, unlike spn, and because of the text of the show itself, the show's creatives could VERY EASILY claim that they were never baiting, that it was all an intentional slow burn will they/won't they romance from the beginning, and most people would believe them; there isn't really any evidence to the contrary, although I am sure there would be at least a few fans convinced it started as queerbaiting, and there might not be any evidence to refute that, either.

the point is that 911 is currently sitting on a gold mine. if they play their cards right, and execute buddie well, they will monopolize this market that old straight white men serving as network executives have failed so far to really tap into. they queerbait without the payoff, which gives the show a reputation among those in the market who haven't seen it, guaranteeing they will never watch it. shows in this vein: sherlock (huge reputation for queerbaiting and a finale fans didn't like) and spn (huge reputation for queerbaiting and a finale fans didn't like). spn got so, so close with cas's confession but then continued to gaslight its fans, and PR did not lean into destiel AT ALL. if 911 did buddie? the PR team would be all over it. it would be a moneymaker, big time, and Fox knows it. if buddie, or even just bi buck, went canon, tumblr would be all over it. viewership for the show, which is already impressive, would skyrocket. 911 would monopolize this market, because fans wary of queerbaiting would watch it with the knowledge that the payoff is there, and there really wouldn't be a competitor until other shows saw the success of buddie and followed suit with their own pairings, and given the fact that the market specifically wants /slow burn/ queer romances, that might take a couple years. that puts 911 in a really good position, where suddenly the fandom of the show, not just the GA, is very large and likely very dedicated to the show. the success of canon buddie might just change the landscape of TV in the coming years, showing execs that while queerbaiting does work, actually going through with it is really where the money is. 911 would not just monopolize the market for a while; it would pioneer it.

if buddie never goes canon, I would probably be a bit disappointed at the wasted potential, but unless the characters get to that point where canon buddie seems like the most logical outcome and they /don't/ go for it, I won't be truly upset because I don't think it's fair to claim its queerbaiting until then. I can't tell you how likely it is that buddie will be canon at some point, but it seems FAR more likely than destiel /ever/ did, and we ended up getting cas's confession in the end. I have hope, despite being hurt so badly by spn. 911 is a genuinely great show with some fantastic writing, and they don't leave chekov's gun unfired, unlike spn.

really, it comes down to this: if Jennifer Love Hewitt is allowed to clown for buddie, then so am I, and I'll enjoy this show—which is amazing even without canon buddie—while I apply my clown makeup.

#9-1-1 #spn #buddie #tagging as #destiel #so anyone with that tag blacklisted can avoid this post #unfortunately I have seen w/ncest shippers in the buddie tag so that's just a precaution so I don't get attacked #posts for puck #I might add more to this later who knows but I think this is a pretty good collection of my thoughts #buddie positivity #911natural

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bao3bei4 · 4 years

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i have basically covered the material in this post several times on my twitter. but this is, in my opinion, the only s*xy t*mes with w*ngxian take you need.

(cw transphobia, transphobic slurs, antiblack racism, mentions of csa and bestiality in fiction)

edit 6/10/21: hi! i’m realizing people are still reading this! this was written in response to aja romano’s vox article on the fic that was published in late february of this year. i had been frustrated with how their article seemed to miss the point in many ways, because they never talked about the substance of the fic. which, i mean, fair. i wouldn’t want to read a 1million word fic either.

but i already had, so i thought i’d write about some things that i believed needed to be part of the conversation. namely, that its author wasn’t a harmless troll, but a person i genuinely disliked who i believed should be deplatformed.

i think virtual1979 is a bad person.

i think a lot of people mainly know about sexy times the phenomenon more than they do sexy times the fic itself. i have the dubious honor of being one of the few people who has actually read large portions of the million word fic, and that’s why i wanted to write this meanspirited hit piece.

the fic is down right now and the author’s notes and comments have both been deleted, which is why i cannot provide screenshots. however, these are all quotes i have saved from when the fic was online, and i’m happy to talk with anyone if you feel any of these quotes are mischaracterizations of the fic.

i also want to be clear this is not a “callout post” and i’m not trying to “cancel” them or whatever. i am just explaining why i don’t like them, why i don’t feel bad they’re being harassed, and why i do not find them sympathetic at all, and perhaps why you should also adopt these stances.

let’s start with transphobia.

sexy times with wangxian is transphobic. this much is apparent from the tags. virtual1979 tagged the following: F*tanari, d*ckgirl, Sh*male. they use this language in the chapters that include a character with both a vagina and a penis.

they refer to this character (wei wuxian) with the pronouns “he-she.” the following excerpt is a fair representation of how this wei wuxian is referred to in the chapters where wei wuxian has a vagina and a penis.

[Lan Zhan] would never be turned on by a female, and he would actually be turned off by a drag queen - but this… this Wei Ying, it’s Wei Ying, and he-she looks [...]

i know these words are common in porn categories, but they are also slurs. virtual1979 also uses hermaphrodite to refer to this set of anatomy, which is not strictly a slur, but definitely a stigmatizing choice of language.

they have repeatedly made clear they are not open to criticism. they have also since removed the comment section. making an intersex character for the express purpose of using transmisogynistic language towards them in your million word porn fic isn’t annoying the way their tags are, it’s actively fucked up.

fanfiction has a transphobia problem, and if we’re talking about sexy times with wangxian in any capacity, we must be clear: sexy times with wangxian is part of that problem too.

secondly, virtual1979 is also complicit in ao3’s racism problem.

i think the way they write about chinese characters and settings is annoying and racist, but they are a malaysian chinese person, so i do have some sympathy for them. i am committed to having some patience for people who are annoying if they themselves are working through the prejudice they have faced.

they’ve commented as much:

Not gonna lie, this fic has been a steep learning curve for me despite my roots being Chinese as well, but I have absolutely zero knowledge in some of these aspects!

and i’m happy on some level they can get in touch with their roots. who among us has not been cringe and diaspora. any criticisms i have of their portrayal of chinese people will stay private and be made to other people of color.

i’m going to be clear here i don’t think the actual comment they made makes them super evil or anything. but this essay IS clearly in response to That Article, which did mention racism in fandom. so.

i think we have all seen the infamous karen comment they made, in which they compared people who criticized their tagging with “Karens,” equating antiblack state violence to... mean comments on ao3? and “SJWs,” which, eye roll. no ageism but you’re 41 why the hell are you complaining about sjws

anyway. i am deeply frustrated by the co-option of the word karen. a stand-in for a particular type of racist violence white women specifically can and do inflict has become fused with that reddit-type mommy issue “can i speak to the manager” internecine white resentment.

so their trivialization of antiblack racism is another reason i don’t like them. again i KNOW it’s petty to point this out here, but this to me shows that virtual is afflicted with the same kind of fandom brainrot that aja is, where everything comes back to that same sort of self-centered bullshit.

sorry for that jab. julian told me that aja thought that cql was about callout culture and all i could think was “wow! just like virtual thinking that--” because i also have spent too much time on twitter this week.

this is just like. part of this ongoing pattern i’ve noticed with virtual, where they’re aware enough of real problems to acknowledge they exist (police violence, accessibility issues caused by their tagging) but are determined to double down on their minor relative persecution as king, shittily drawing parallels between like... real problems and fandom problems. equating the two or allowing the second to take priority over the former is like... par for the course for this type of person!

third, this is just another clarification on more parallels between ao3 discourse and sexy times that went completely unremarked on by That Article.

i would rather DIE than get into discourse. but why did they write this sentence:

Lan Zhan’s rational mind finally broke with a tsunami of pedophilic lusts [...]

by the way that is the start of a 430 word sentence. and yes this fic does contain hundreds of thousands of words of aged down wei wuxian. make of that what you will.

also why would you make wei wuxian teach baby chickens how to sexually pleasure him. do you hate these characters. what’s going on. i think mxtx should be able to sue virtual for that one.

there’s a very obvious connection between mainstream ao3 discourse and sexy times that went completely unremarked on in That Article. sexy times contains multitudes and some of those multitudes are bestiality and explicit childfucking.

this is not unrelated to fannish culture, they are not unfamiliar with fannish norms, blah blah blah. this is just normal fandom. they’re not subverting shit, they’re just a normal fan who unlike 99% of fanfiction writers on twitter, spends more time writing than posting. this has taken their fannish tendencies to cartoonish heights.

finally, they don’t care about mdzs or wangxian. they’re literally just horny and spiteful that’s it. this isn’t a question of like... “ohh they were a good faith participant in fandom until they went joker mode” and the REAL villain is society/ao3. like no they wanted to write shitty porn, and when they found out they were annoying people, they decided to double down because they could be the main character of the mdzs ao3 tag every time they found a spare hour to write.

here are some select receipts on that topic:

they do not care about canon:

MDZS has quite a complicated and expansive plot and history, and enough content that one can choose to tune out certain parts and still get to the end of the story in one piece. Also, because of its source, some fans may not fully realize the nuances, cultural aspects (ooh, cultural appropriation is another triggering topic) or the full breadth and depth of the source material, such as a person like me, who is half-baked in terms of knowing what the canon universe is all about. So I end up playing with characters and settings technically borrowed from the story, and make them do things that would otherwise run counter to the original source material - and that draws quite some flak from those opinionated people I mentioned just now. It's part of what makes the fandom toxic. It's like they're the self-appointed guardians of the source material and they act like they own the rights to question such questionble fanworks, and dare I say, try to take down those that cross certain lines too.

they are just horny:

After that giddines of extra drunken Lan Wang Ji scenes at the beginning, I'm blessed with Lan Wang Ji (Wang Yibo's, actually) fuzzy nips! Bless Bless Bless, and Amen! muahs the nips on the screen

anyway they did get nuked over wishing covid on people.

so yeah. i want to be really clear. this is my thesis: i do not feel bad for them. you should not either. i do not like them. you should not either. that’s ALL!!!!

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iraprince · 5 years

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Do you have any tips for getting an audience of tumblr or Twitter. Sometimes I just get frustrated when a drawing I spent 6 hours on gets 3 notes or 2 likes and a retweet.

i think it’s really hard to have one size fits all advice for something like this — the internet is so vast, i only really know how to navigate my own specific niche of it, and different artists will always appeal to different audiences, so stuff that worked for me might not work for you. BUT i can try my best — i just can’t guarantee any of this is replicable bc especially with the new age of incomprehensible algorithms i just never know what’s going on at any given time

first off, a big disclaimer for transparency: a lot of my Big follower gains have been from my Hashtag Relatable mental health comics getting tons of notes. i do NOT!!!!! recommend making mental health content to try to get popular!!! i think doing so will put fucking worms in your brain!!! it will poison you and your brain will dribble out your ear holes like soup. i think that it is already complicated enough to navigate all the weirdness of like... making vulnerable stuff like that available for consumption, and doing it in Hopes of going viral and getting lots of followers can imo literally only end poorly. hhhhhowever, i would feel really weird if i like... glossed over the fact that i know that’s where a lot of my followers have come from, or acted like that didn’t happen, so. i just have to like, mention it. my takeaway here is if you’re going to make mental health content FOR YOURSELF because you WANT to, brace yourself for it to potentially circulate, and be ready to feel really weird about it, but i do not recommend it as like... a way to purposefully grow an audience.

ANYWAY. with that nagging out of the way. actual advice

1. fanart, but only of stuff you really actually like. it is literally just a fact that it’s easier for people to feel invested in and care about characters from stuff they’re already invested in than original independent content. it’s not wrong to court that! but i think u should only pour energy into fanart of stuff u actually like — not bc chasing after whatever the current BNHA-type thing is rn is “selling out,” who gives a shit, but bc the end goal is to have an audience who WANTS to see what YOU want to make. you want people who care about your specific set of aesthetics and interests, not ppl who will unfollow en masse the second you fall off trend. (if you DO tend to really like what’s super popular, there’s nothing wrong with that! that’s lucky for you, genuinely.)

2. self promo all the time. this one can be hard bc it feels embarrassing at first. you feel like you’re spamming people or being annoying or self centered. but listen: people follow literally hundreds of accounts. you remember every time you’ve boosted your drawing; most of the ppl who follow you probably didn’t even see it. and if they see it twice or three times among the literally hundreds and thousands of posts anyone sees per day that is not a big deal. stuff gets lost! timelines and dashboards move fast! i cannot count the number of times i’ve seen something cool and thought “oh i’ll check that out” and then five minutes later i’ve forgotten bc of information overload. you have to constantly remind people that you exist and that you make things and i promise you you’re not being as annoying as you think you are. (i know you guys don’t see this in practice from me much on tumblr; that is bc i don’t really like it here and i don’t understand the vibes. i never shut the fuck up on twitter)

3. follow and engage with your peers, not just people with 10k+ followers who have already “made it” or whatever. this is not advice about growing an audience so much as advice for not feeling super shitty while you’re trying to grow your audience. i’m not saying that people with tons of followers/bustling online shops/enamel pin empires are like a completely different category of person of whatever, that’s not my point; clout is not direct deposit and just bc someone is popular doesn’t mean they’re coasting by without worries; etc etc. but my point is that i used to only follow very popular, established artists who were, in my mind, “out of my league,” and i spent all my time beating myself up for not being them or being consumed with jealousy and resentment. but... spending more time with artists who are kind of at the same ssstage of figuring things out as i was, as much as any individual journeys can ever be “the same,” was much more encouraging and inspiring and energizing, and helped me reset my concept of what “success” means for independent creatives into something more healthy. don’t wear yourself out chasing after people who seem to be moving way faster than you, especially if it’s making you feel like shit! find some people who are walking at a pace you can relate to, take interest in their stuff, talk and form connections. you’ll feel better.

4. just draw the stuff you want to even if you don’t think it has audience appeal. literally just draw exactly what makes you happy. this sounds like i’m trying to pull some corny Just Be Yourself! Believe In Your Art! shit and i mean yeah i guess but i also mean that literally from experience there was a significant surge in interest + appreciation of my work when i went apeshit and just decided to do the most self indulgent shit possible no matter how cliche or tacky or cringe or whatever it was. people respond to sincerity and passion, i really believe that. people can tell when you’re having fun and they like it. who doesn’t wanna be around someone who’s always having fun

that’s about all the stuff that i think could be considered like.... more or less universal. i dunno!!! just keep at it. the internet is a nightmare i don’t really know how it works

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alexzalben · 4 years

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Do you honestly think that the Riverdale writers are behaving respectfully towards their fans? I don't care about the ships, I am an adult, I watch shows for fun, but I've just been on socials and there is a grown man mocking and laughing at young girls. As a woman, I am really worried. Shouldn't they just avoid socials, if it's so bad?Teens might not be right, but do they deserve to be mistreated? Where do we draw the line? I am a long time Decider reader, really interested in your opinion here

First of all, thank you so much for reading, I appreciate it (as does the rest of the staff, I’m sure)!

Second of all, I don’t necessarily want to direct any specific comments about comments since I did not write them nor do I know the specific context behind them; but I do want to talk from my own experience for a moment here to hopefully give a little perspective.

So, I’ve been on the internet a long time. I was directing/writing/acting in viral videos that got millions of views on YouTube before we had the term “viral video.” I’ve been on Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and whatever else for a long while. I’ve posted hundreds of podcasts, and performed thousands of live shows, and written thousands of articles. Mostly, people have been nice, whether in person or online. But I’ve also had, conservatively, hundreds of people threaten to kill me, tell me to kill myself, threaten my family, call me disgusting names, etc, etc. I’m not alone in this experience, and as a white man I have it infinitely easier than anyone else who doesn’t fit into those categories. I’m lucky, I guess, in that, thanks to a fluke of my birth people have only tried to hack my account and dox me a bunch of times, instead of every day incessantly.

This is all to say you would think I’d be used to this, and mostly I have taught myself over time to take a breath, block the account, and move on. Mostly. But sometimes... You don’t. Because you’re tired. Or you’re having an awful day. Or your boss yelled at you and you think you need to lash out at someone else in turn. Or the comment just rubs you the wrong way. Or you’re drunk. Or it’s a little too hot in your house. Or you think you’re being funny and it comes out wrong. Or, I dunknow, you’re just not thinking.

Does it make anything better? No. The biggest lesson I’ve learned in my life is that unless someone really, really deserves it, responding to anger with calm listening will always yield better results, because they’re not expecting it. They’re looking for a fight. That’s in person, though, and the internet is a different beast. It’s also just, as mentioned above, not always your reaction. Sometimes you can’t help yourself because you’re human.

I’d also venture based on my own experience that right now that is happening a lot more. Pretty much every human on Earth except for the total sociopaths are scared for their lives every single second of every day. That wears on you, and makes every emotion and reaction heightened.

This is a long way of saying that as much as possible, even when people lash out, I’ve tried to take the extra second on top of my usual second before reacting, because what we’re going through right now is catastrophically insane. Again, am I always successful? No. Did I wake up in a bad mood this very morning because I had horrible nightmares, yell at my kids for literally no reason, realize what I was doing, and then let them watch movies and eat popcorn all day because I felt awful in response? Yeah, man, that’s just where we’re at.

And that’s a long way of saying: is yelling at someone right? Is a grown man sniping at a kid good or correct? No. Can we always help ourselves? No, particularly not right now. Is this an excuse? No way! Even now, we need to own our actions. But is it an explanation? I think so. We’re all raw nerves, so if you see something that seems out of character, or more extreme than normal... Walk away, I think. Come back later. See if it’s the same. It probably won’t be. If it isn’t, understand that we never know what people are going through, even though we’re all going through the same thing. It’s just the same thing, in entirely different ways, on different schedules. And if we all take that extra second on top of the extra second before we engage, maybe it’ll get a little better. Probably not, because there are external forces at work we can’t control here. But maybe?

Anyway. Hope that all makes sense. If not, thanks for reading through my blather for a while, I appreciate it.

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miximax-hell · 4 years

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Happy Goku Day, everyone!!

I checked and, miraculously, I still have followers on this blog. In fact, I’ve gained some since the last time I posted, for some reason! I’m not going to question it, though. Just... bless. But, hey, long time no see! As usual!

This time, I’m going back to my roots. The first drawings I posted on this blog were meant to show my love towards original Raimon, and it’s never a bad time to remind you all that I still adore these kids. Especially now that my friend @dust-monsters-under-my-bed has reminded me of them. Go check her art, btw! She’s not very active on Tumblr, but you can find her art on Twitter right here: https://twitter.com/rachelmonart

Anyway, she’s watching Inazuma Eleven for the first time and she’s made me think again about how much love these kids deserve, BECAUSE THEY SURE GOT NONE FROM HINO. DAMN YOU, HINO. So, today, let’s talk about the one and only IE character whose feet are classified as mass destruction weapons, who decided to borrow power from someone who will make you all question me, my logic and my tastes: Yamhan (or, as he is known in the west, Tiencha), THE FUSION OF YAMCHA AND TENSHINHAN FROM DRAGON BALL.

Introducing ShoYamHan! More on him under the cut.

So, first of all, how have you all been? I suppose many of you, like myself, are being told to stay at home to fight this situation. I salute all of you who do your best to stay safe and not help spread anything. It’s a very necessary fight, even if it can be boring at times. Many of us have friends or relatives fighting on the frontline, though (unless you yourself are the doctor or nurse friend!), and we hopefully know that staying at home is a small price to pay.

As for me, I got a job in December and lost it last month, so... yeah. It’s not been great. Still, something I’ve been working hard on for a while should be released soon and that’s so exciting! MY NAME WILL FINALLY BE ON SOMETHING’S CREDITS AND I CAN’T WAIT FOR IT TO BE UP.

But, anyway, back to business!

Rachel suggested I talk about the reasons behind this particular miximax, and considering it makes for a perfect parallel with my first posts, where I talked about the reasons behind Max’s and Kageno’s miximaxes, I’m all up for it! But, this time, I will have to do something new: explain WHO THE HECK YAMHAN IS. So let’s start with a picture of this handsome devil.

As most of you hopefully know, this project is about miximaxing Inazuma characters with video game characters. No anime, movies or anything else. Only and exclusively video games. Dragon Ball has probably spawned all those things, but it started as a manga, so you’d be right to think it most definitely does not qualify for this project. And, indeed, Dragon Ball doesn't. What DOES qualify, however, are Dragon Ball characters exclusive, or first introduced, in a video game. And that’s exactly the case we’re dealing with here!

Growing up, I loved Dragon Ball games. Even before I watched the show properly, in fact! I would go to my friend’s house, who was a fan of the show, and we'd play the Dragon Ball Budokai games nonstop with absolutely zero regrets. Those were some great times. And once I came to know the source material, the game that blew my mind the most was Dragon Ball Budokai 2. Was it the best one? Not necessarily. Is it my favourite? Not by a long shot. Still, it was the most creative! Most games follow the story of DBZ, which, obviously, is always the same. But Budokai 2 wasn’t afraid to do new things. Its story mode resembled a tabletop game and it was more than happy to deviate from the source material in some really fun ways; most notably, with exclusive fusions.

Budokai 2 introduced us all to Yamhan, the fusion of Yamcha and Tenshinhan, two long forgotten characters in the series, as they (and especially poor Yamcha) didn’t do anything especially relevant past... well, past the original Dragon Ball. As a champion of the unloved, that blew my mind. There were other fun things in Budokai 2, but what fascinated me and stayed in my thoughts for years to come was Yamhan. It was just such a cool concept. Two underdogs who had fallen into obscurity fusing to create a much greater warrior!

Of course, Yamhan isn’t the only videogame exclusive characters in Dragon Ball. He isn’t the first, nor the last. Yamhan isn’t the strongest, nor the weakest. But I haven’t played FighterZ nor Fusions (yet), nor pretty much any game that wasn’t on PS2 or GBA. And even if I had, I doubt Android 21 or any of the HUNDREDS of combinations available in Fusions would captivate me and my imagination as much as Yamhan did back in the day. Yamhan was a fusion, which is something that has always fascinated me to begin with. I MEAN, THIS ENTIRE BLOG IS ABOUT FUSING CHARACTERS, SO I THINK IT’S PRETTY OBVIOUS LMAO But he wasn’t just one among hundreds. He was this very specific, never-seen-before, cool as heck and usable fusion. Like, wow. That was wild for me. Sign me up, man.

But, you know, I try not to let that sway me too much. Of course, I wouldn’t likely pick a character I hate for a miximax, but, still, my preferences aren’t everything. And choosing Yamhan begs a question that I have already alluded to: if Yamhan isn’t the strongest game-exclusive DB character out there, then, why him? Well, the answer to that is related to the biggest problem posed by the sheer concept of miximaxing with a Dragon Ball character:

Power escalation.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Goku is, pretty much, the strongest character that has ever played the lead in any manga, and one of the strongest fictional characters ever, period. By the end of the Dragon Ball Super anime, he has EXCEEDED THE POWER OF MANY LITERAL GODS AND IS (or has been) A CANDIDATE TO BECOME ONE. You may prefer One Piece, or Naruto, or anything else, but few things reach the astronomical, reality-bending scope of Dragon Ball. Not to say DB is the best series--I’m just saying that it’s so out of control at this point (and I love it). But, of course, the stronger Goku is, the stronger the villains need to be, and Goku ends up becoming EVEN stronger than said villains. Rinse and repeat dozens of times until you can make an entire universe disappear by raising your hand.

Now, imagine applying that out-of-this-world power escalation to a context where the power balance isn’t so outrageous. For example, Inazuma Eleven.

Goku wriggling in his sleep is more powerful than Zeus, and an accidental sneeze would smash all of Ixal Fleet to smithereens. Do you see what this would do to the balance? It would ruin it completely, as anyone who miximaxed with Goku would be immediately a one-person army able to defeat ANY opponent--and if the opponent were to be EVEN GREATER than Goku, well, the rest simply wouldn’t stand a chance. Ever. Remember: the point of this project isn’t to create perfect and unbeatable players, and I’m not trying to prioritize anyone or make them noticeably stronger than anyone else just because I happen to like X more than Y. That completely ruins the tension and the fun (and my attempts to create justice in this unfair universe). The point is to come up with a balanced team full of players with strong points, but with flaws, too, that complement each other when they play together against stronger enemies.

So, if we go with Dragon Ball, and I love Dragon Ball WAY too much to not include it in this project in some way, we have to be careful and avoid overdoing it. Balance is key. And now that you know why I didn’t just choose the fusion between Beerus and Whis or something crazy like that, I’ll move on to explain what makes Yamhan a very interesting option. I SWEAR THERE ARE SOME ACTUAL REASONS.

First of all, the very concept. You know, Yamcha and Tenshinhan fused to created Yamhan, and now, Shourin is fusing with a fusion. That’s just... hecking cool. I won’t lie--my preferences towards Yamhan didn’t tip the scales towards making this happen, but my preferences towards FUSIONCEPTION totally did. XD But there’s more, thankfully.

From the very beginning, I knew I wanted a fighting game character to miximax with Shourin because it fits his theme best. I’m not big on fighting games, though, so it was quite tough. Especially because just any fighting game wouldn’t do it. Shourin is a martial artist. As I mentioned at the very beginning of this post, his feet are his weapons. His entire body is a weapon, really. If I were to suddenly miximax him with some character who wields a sword or an axe, for example, it would be a complete disservice to Shourin. Original Raimon members don’t have much going on for themselves, and I’m going to cut or ignore the ONE thing that makes one of them special? Not in a zillion years. Shourin needs to fight with his body. That, of course, cuts many characters already: pretty much the entire roster of Soul Calibur, many members of Mortal Kombat, many from games like Skullgirls (which I still want to try to represent here in the future, because @lumaga worked on it and it makes me happy just because of that), etc. For a very long time, I considered someone like Ryu, from Street Fighter, but then it hit me: I have never played Street Fighter and I don’t want to include him just because I know what a Hadouken is. It’d be... cheap. And fake. Thankfully, as I also mentioned earlier, I played LOTS of Budokai back in the day and I am an actual fan, so I don’t have to pretend to know what the heck I’m talking about. XD And, thankfully, most of the characters in DB games fight with their bare fists and legs, so they perfectly fit my needs. Yamhan is, of course, no exception.

Now comes my favourite reason to choose Yamhan and not, well, literally any other DB game-exclusive character. And that reason is style.

Remember that power escalation thing I mentioned earlier? Well, it’s epic, but it comes with a big disadvantage: power ends up becoming much more important than skill. Early Dragon Ball was very focused on fighting styles. There was an ongoing feud between the Turtle School and the Crane School, who taught different martial arts to fight in different ways, and there was a big plot involving which one was superior. It wasn’t just about who was strongest, but about who fought better. With time, that disappeared, though. Even though battles became flashier, aerial and more spectacular, they were much more indistinct. Sure, there were gimmicks like “heh, I have a tail and I will sometimes hit you with it,” or “I will try to hit your face with the palm of my hand instead of my fist for some unspecified reason,” but that isn’t... much. You just see very fast people avoiding equally as fast punches to the face. And Goku, the main character, only shows some style when he adopts a fighting pose BEFORE fighting. Once the punches start flying, it’s all a race to see who can hit the other the hardest in the gut to make them spit blood. Cool nonetheless, but still.

Ironically, though, it’s two of the least relevant characters who never really lost those styles that made them unique when they were first introduced to the series. And those are, of course, Yamcha and Tenshinhan.

Yamcha joins the Turtle School and learns techniques as classic as the Kamehameha, but he had his own style way before that, based on attacking and tearing enemies apart like a wolf would. This is best represented by his signature move, the Rougafuufuuken or Wolf Fang Fist. He never drops this style, but instead builds up on it through his training to make it even fiercer.

Tenshinhan has different things going for himself. First of all, he is a hybrid between a human being and a civilization known as the Three-Eyed People, which grants him powers such as growing extra arms from his back or dividing in 4. Not just moving so fast that it looks like there’s four of him, but ACTUALLY dividing into 4 separate bodies. In terms of skills, he was a Crane School student, but when he realised the wrong of his master’s doings, he decided to start training and developing on his own. Basically, a path that mirrors Yamcha’s, but both lead to unique fighting styles unlike anyone else’s in this universe. And, most importantly, none of them depend on appendixes that are always there, like the aforementioned tail, so they totally work for us here!

Shourin is a proper martial artist. He wouldn’t want to make himself crazy strong as much as he would like to refine his technique and learn new moves and tricks. Martial arts are about discipline, self-control, skill and protection. He would take a cool-ass combo based on a wolf’s moves over earth-shattering strength any day of the week, hence why the fact that these two have so many techniques to offer is so appealing.

Finally, and probably least, is the design idea that immediately came to my mind when I thought of a miximax between Shourin and Yamhan. Historically, I have had to work with characters like Fudou, who are usually mostly bald and they miximax with someone with hair, thus making for some very... difficult things to figure out. But the idea of miximaxing Shourin, who is mostly bald, with Yamhan, who is ALSO mostly bald, was just golden and too good to ignore. And the fact that Yamhan has three eyes GIVES ME AN EXCUSE TO ADD A THIRD CROSS-SHAPED EYE ON SHOURIN’S FOREHEAD. IF A MIXIMAX BETWEEN BALD PEOPLE WAS GOLDEN, THIS IS OUTRIGHT PLATINUM.

Shourin would've probably looked a lot less like a joke if he had had hair covering his entire head or if I had at least given him proper eyes... but that would no longer be the Shourin I love. Not to mention that it’s very likely that Shourin willingly shaves his head to begin with (even if the ponytail ain’t doing him any favours--but that’s just Inazuma logic, so let’s not look too much into it), just like Tenshinhan or Krillin do, so he would probably be happier to keep that, uh, advantage. Relative advantage, but still.

As a side note, though, we can’t forget the balance. When Yamcha and Tenshinhan fuse, they undoubtedly become the strongest human being in the DB universe, overcoming the one who is usually strongest: Krillin. A fusion is always greater than its parts individually, and Yamcha and Tenshinhan aren’t so far away from Krillin to begin with, so that’s not even a question. Regardless, they still don’t have that overwhelming and surreal strength from other characters, so we still don’t get into absolutely OP territory. Yamhan is strong enough to provide Shourin with a power that can make a real difference without completely putting him above everyone else.

Sadly, Yamhan doesn’t really have a backstory, as he’s a game-exclusive character that, honestly, was probably only there for a laugh. That means there is no deep connection between them. We can, however, make obvious connections between Shourin, an aspiring martial artist whose dream, as stated in IE2, was to study at Manyuuji (Kogure’s school) for their focus on martial arts, and is now trying to become stronger to protect what he loves, and two skilled warriors who have been training nonstop under different masters and on their own for basically their entire lives to keep becoming stronger and more skilled in order to defend what’s precious to them and, simply, to be the best version of themselves they can be. Upon seeing such dedicated warriors and artists, Shourin would undoubtedly want to learn from them and, if necessary, borrow their strength too.

Or he might just fanboy and ask for their autographs, honestly. I sure as heck want Yamcha’s. And his baseball card.

#Shourin #Shourinji Ayumu #Inazuma Eleven #Inazuma Eleven Go #Inazuma Eleven Ares #Inazuma Eleven Ares no Tenbin #Inazuma Eleven Orion #Inazuma Eleven Orion no Kokuin #miximax #mixi max #original Raimon #settei #reasons behind the miximax #info

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ukulelekatie · 5 years

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The Sappy CarmillaCon Appreciation Post You’ve All Been Waiting For

It’s been a week since CarmillaCon, so now that I’ve had some time to relfect, it’s time to share my recap of the convention. Buckle up, creampuffs—this is gonna get long and emotional.

Wow, where do I even begin with this? Perhaps at the beginning would be ideal. I remember, over a year ago, when CarmillaCon was just a hypothetical. A simple “We need a Carmilla con.” Watching it unfold over time was such a journey, and it’s incredible to look back on that moment and know how things turned out.

Last weekend was a weekend of firsts for me. As a convention newbie, all my previous knowledge of how conventions worked was all learned through secondhand accounts of other cons. It was also my first time planning an entire trip and traveling by myself. And let me tell you, I was nervous. But my trip to Toronto, especially CarmillaCon, turned out to be such an overwhelmingly positive experience. And from the people I’ve spoken to, that sounds like a common theme. Everyone involved in the planning process should be very proud of their achievements.

And now is the part where I give some shoutouts to the people who made CarmillaCon the spectacular time it was.

Natasha Negovanlis. I don’t know anyone who puts as much love and care into getting to know their fans as much as Natasha does. And she remembers so many details about each of us! I’m always impressed by that. She truly makes everyone feel special and loved, whether she’s meeting you for the millionth time or the first.

Elise Bauman. I’ve heard dozens of people talk about how easy it is to interact with Elise, but getting to experience it for myself was an entirely different level. Her meet & greet felt like chatting with a long-time friend. She’s so genuine, quirky, and downright hilarious.

Kaitlyn Alexander was just as excited to meet their fans as we were to meet them, and that is so beautiful. I also really admire them for working through social anxiety and talking openly about it, because it was nice to know that I wasn’t alone in feeling anxious. They deserve all the good things.

Annie Briggs is absolutely SAVAGE. She goes from talking profoundly and professionally to dropping the most absurd and crass quips. Quite literally the embodiment of the “hi sir nice to meet you”/“your daughter calls me daddy too” meme.

Nicole Stamp is an incredibly sweet person, and I admire her so much for her friendliness and ability to make everyone around her feel appreciated. We ran into her in passing a few times, and even when she was in a hurry to get somewhere, she still stopped and said hi.

Matt O’Connor is a real sweetheart, and during my autograph we talked about his trip to Boston last year. I love being able to connect with the actors over personal details like that! Also, his Carmilla impression in the cast panel was hysterical!

Sharon Belle’s ability to just be goofy is so precious! I would totally watch a spin-off of Danny solving petty crimes and returning lost library books.

Aaron Chartrand seems so nice and thoughtful, and an all around cool guy. I wish I had interacted with him more during the con!

The Carmilla Creators. Jordan, Ellen, Steph, and Melanie (and Spencer, in spirit) are legends, y’all. Everything they said in the Creators Panel was super empowering, and I left feeling inspired to create and tell my original stories to the world. And of course, getting to chat about fandom and fanfiction with Steph and Ellen at the Fanfic Meetup was wonderful! The thing that makes Carmilla so unique is that its creators are privy to the world of fandom, having participated in it themselves, which allows them to really know their audience and tell us the stories we want and need.

The Moderators: Dana, Belinda, and Angie made the panels so entertaining and so unique! They are an integral part of this fandom, and I loved getting to witness their shenanigans in person.

The CarmillaCon Staff and Volunteers were just lovely! I applaud them for how smoothly everything ran, and for how much thought the organizers put into the logistics. I swear they thought of everything! Writing down your names on sticky notes before autographs so the guests can spell your name correctly. Ensuring that the convention was accessible. Making sure none of the panels coflicted with autos, photos, and meet & greets. Placing the vendor tables right outside the panel room to get us as much exposure as possible. It’s one thing to listen to feedback from your own convention’s attendees after the matter, but it’s another to listen to the greater fandom community’s experiences with other cons and be proactive. Any time I had a question or issue leading up to and during the con, I was assisted quickly and compassionately. Everyone was also extremely generous! Several staff members gave out extra autographs and photos to attendees throughout the event, which I loved.

The Vendors—I greatly enjoyed spending time with them! This was my first ever convention both as a fan AND as an artist, so I really appreciated learning from them and being able to support each other. I’d also like to give a shoutout to @learntodefygravity for becoming my assistant and running my table when I was participating in other parts of the con.

Everyone who stopped by my table! Whether you were there to get something or just to chat, you really made my weekend. I’m still so full of feels from all the sweet things everyone said about me and my art last week. Sometimes it’s difficult to take myself seriously—I often feel like I’m not a “real” artist because I draw primarily fanart, and for such a tiny community of people at that. But my CarmillaCon experience proved to me that there is an audience for my art, and I want to thank each and every one of you for supporting me over the past 4+ years. And yes, there will be more art in the future! I’m working on setting up an Etsy store as well as researching how to print my own lenticular bookmarks since the ones I brought were so popular! I’ll keep you all updated.

All the friends I spent time with. Some of you I’ve spoken to online every day for the past year. Others, I’ve interacted with occasionally on twitter or discord. A few of you I had never spoken to directly until the con. No matter what category you fell under, it was a pleasure to get to spend time with you, and I miss you all so much. Why do you have to live so far away from me? Why isn’t teleporting a thing yet?! (What I wouldn’t give for another minty group hug right about now.)

And lastly, thank you to everyone. Despite how much I fangirl about it online, I’m not one to talk openly about Carmilla and how much it means to me outside of the internet. I’m afraid of being judged for loving it too much. But this past weekend I got to meet several hundred people who are just as passionate as I am about the little webseries that could, and I’m so grateful for that opportunity. I’m not alone, and I never was. This fandom has helped me step out of my comfort zone in so many ways. I may be outgoing and outspoken online, but take me our from behind a screen and I’m very shy and self conscious. Just two years ago, taking public transportation alone in my own city seemed scary to me, but last week I had the courage to travel on my own and experience new things. I thought I would be overwhelmed and anxious all through CarmillaCon, but the second I found my people, I felt comforted and energized. I’ve grown so much over the years, and I owe a lot of that progress to the fandom and the encouragement I’ve received. You’ve all been by my side and helped me grow up and grow into myself. Here’s to Carmilla, and here’s to the creampuffs!

#carmilla #carmillacon #katie goes to carmillacon #don’t look at me #i’ll post photos later

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afanoftheglassscientists · 5 years

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The Glass Scientists Art-Style Changes

Hey yeah sorry but I saw someone complain about how the webcomic’s art style is jarring in the later chapters and that the noses are bad because they’re big and I’m back in full salt mode WHO WANTS SOME TEA!?

@glass-scientists your art-style has only gotten more beautiful as the webcomic continues and you work extremely hard on the comic by yourself and I am amazed you kept working on this for more than four years now while in a career and I hope you’ll be able to do so for the foreseeable future. When I comment on how your art changed please know that I’m not doing it to critique you. Okay you don’t have to read more of this I just wanted to be the 156th person to let you know you’re doing great.

ONE - The noses have always been prominent on the characters’ art design and having a big noses does not automatically make it look ugly. Admittedly there are artists out there who draw very ugly noses for very ugly reasons, but Sabrina Cotugno is not and never has been one of those types of artists. Yes, Jekyll’s nose is bigger, but is not the end-all, be-all take from his design changes.

Here’s him from Ch.1 Pg. 15.

And here’s him from Ch.7 Pg. 22

(And no, I do not know why the latter two picture are bigger.)

As you can see, the nose in the earlier chapters looks smaller, but Jekyll’s face is also a lot more...soft? Like think of ceramic pieces. You start out with soft clay and you mold it into the shape you want (but don’t forget to wedge don’t want it to explode in the oven) but then after the clay firms up a little you’re ready to carve it and give it a more pronounced form. That’s what happened in the later chapters: Jekyll’s nose, the shape of his jawline, his sideburns, hair and even his eyebrows has become sharper and more distinct. His nose isn’t just an attachment like a Mister Potato Head, its a part of him. To give him a smaller nose would mean changing his whole character profile.

TWO - Like Clay, Art Changes. Admittedly I was taken aback by the change in the comic’s art-style as well, but that will happen to literally any long-form manga or comic. Unless you’ve been doing comics for literal decades your art is going to change, because you’re going to change, and what you want from your art and the characters you create are going to change. Look at Bluechair by Shen on WEBTOON: while his artstyle has solidified these past few years his earlier comics are unrecognizable, because he’s been working on his Bluechairs comic for five years, often updating two or three times a week, and is currently on Episode 536 of Bluechairs, but technically he currently has 706 of them under the Bluechairs page. His comics are like the Sunday Newspaper kind of comics, so I’m not asking you to read his stuff starting from the beginning (in fact please don’t try to read it all at once: his early stuff is pretty good but let me remind you he has SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIX COMICS OF STUFF) but maybe read a couple of them from the beginning and then read some of his latest ones.

So yeah, its not unexpected from comics to change in style, either slowly due to how the artists gains a more experienced hand or by an intentional shift in art direction. Sabrina was in the latter camp, due to the fact that she felt the earlier character designs was too much like a Disney Princess Line-Up, which she mentioned in a page description that I cannot find but I know was real.

Honestly I really do like the more recent pages. I disagree that they’re less vibrant, because I think removing the high glossy sheen made the characters even more distinct from each other. Before the shift in artstyle I felt like everyone was getting the same brand of hair gel. Hot take coming, but the character who most benefits from this shift is Rachel, who’s been looking gorgeous these last few chapters.

THREE - Sabrina Cotugno has been working this story, these characters and the art of this webcomic mainly by herself, while still working a job as a cartoon director for multiple shows and is currently working on a project for Disney. She does not have a lot of time on her hands to fix mistakes and asking her to change things or give her “Advice” on her art is...I won’t say unwanted because that’s up to her as to whether or not she’d use that language, but I will say she probably doesn’t need your advice on how to draw art when she has already worked in professional spaces as a storyboard artist AND as a director.

Plus I’m going to be upfront here, and this is going to sound harsh: Do not fucking nitpick and tear apart content made independently unless warranted by offensive language or imagery, because not only is it unhelpful it is just plain mean. Yes, Sabrina has worked on shows before, but The Glass Scientists is not made by a group of people working together, with producers and press and editors to back them up. This is entirely her work. She is spending her own free time making this. This webcomic is hours, days, weeks, years in the making, in the wake of hot days, sickness, travelling, other deadlines and dying plants.

And to turn around and say “Oh the way you do the art now isn’t as good?” Fuck off with that. I’m not Sabrina, so I get to be mean here - You are allowed to admit you dislike these changes, but sending the artist messages directly telling them of your dislikes is an absolute garbage thing to do. Especially when you yourself are not an artist.

Like Sergeant Brokenshire has a beard in one panel but loses it in the next few pages. Cue the Cinema Sins ding noise I guess. Okay, that happens sometimes, she doesn’t have an editor to correct. Am I going to directly send her messages letting her know she did her webcomic wrong? Fuck no. She probably has been sent hundreds of “helpful” messages about it already, and guess what? She doesn’t have the time to correct every mistake because she has a job.

Of course if Sabrina or any independent artist does something horrifically offensive or even just something that makes you uncomfortable you are absolutely allowed to air your grievances. But so far Sabrina has been good so I’ve got nothing to complain about, and the asks she gets that do have issues with the webcomic she answers with grace.

So basically this wandered completely off from the nose discussion and into the ethics of fandoms for independently made webcomics, but anyway long story short.

The Glass Scientists is not yours and its not mine. It belongs to Sabrina Cotugno, and its hers to change how she sees fit. Get over that and enjoy the webcomic as it is and you’ll have a much better experience.

Sorry to sound preachy there. I’m not trying to act like the Fandom Police and I’m not trying to fight Sabrina’s battles for her. I just see a lot of bad fucking behavior toward other independent artists and I don’t want to see it here. I have been that anon who “critiques” or gives “helpful” advice to artists who had far more experience than me, so its not like I’m pretending to be above it all here. I’ve buried many a blogs because of my shameful past.

Most of this Fandom has been wonderful. Let’s keep it that way while it lasts.

Anyway that espresso really did a number on me. I’m about to crash and I’m getting the awful sense of deja-vu here. Sorry for being so salty on Fandom lately, I won’t do it again unless I see some real trouble. This has accidentally become a Midnight Post, so go to bed!

...Oh wait one more thing: PLEASE DON’T REPOST FULL PAGES OF THE WEBCOMIC!!! Access to the official page is not hard and despite a few hiccups (which is not Sabrina’s fault but the webpage itself) we have been able to see all of the webcomic. There is no need to repost the whole page and on Sabrina’s FAQ she specifically asked people not do this. If you want to read each new page and don’t want to refresh the website twenty time on Monday morning you can always follow her twitter or her blog “arythusa” where she posts a link to each new page after it uploads. In fact starting tomorrow I’ll be sure to reblog these posts to make sure you have a link available to click.

Okay now good night.

#tgs #the glass scientists

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donnerpartyofone · 6 years

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eh.

What a time this is. I hardly know how to feel about it. Ironically, I think this is happening to me because a few years ago, Tumblr flagged my blog as explicit. I didn’t do anything about it because, while it was annoying and inaccurate, it didn’t make any difference to me. I didn’t even really think about the consequences of it. Now I suspect that Tumblr is using that explicit flag (among other insanities) to easily identify blogs to be shadow banned. I might have gotten pinched some other way eventually--perhaps by the same mechanism that deleted every video I posted of my gecko, and then sent me scolding emails about distributing obscenity--but now I find myself thinking, “First they came for me, and I did not speak out, because I just, like, didn’t really give a shit!”

I’m happy to see so many of my pals on Instagram already, and a little annoyed by the feeling that I have to learn to like Twitter. I’m skeptical of the alternative platforms people are talking about, like Pillowfort, probably just because they sound cute and I wasn’t too attracted to the cuteness of Ello. But maybe it would be fun to load one of those places up with all of the content we’re all frantically exporting from Tumblr? It could be cool to see everybody’s old school content that’s been lost to the fog of memory.

While I’m waiting for my blog to finish backing up, and steeling myself for the possibility that whatever it finally spits out will be missing tons of posts anyway, I’m thinking about what this all means to me. If I had the ability to port my entire blog over to another platform (I haven’t decided whether I’m desperate enough to actually pay for Wordpress, which offers that option), then it would be pretty simple--I wouldn’t have to see any of what I’ve done these last eight-ish years, but I could still ~have~ it. I started using Tumblr in my late 20s, which was a pretty dark time for me. The new way of expressing myself that I found here, and all the amazing friends I made, were a big help to me when I was in an intensely abusive relationship, barely managing an untreated mental illness that I didn’t understand yet, and still struggling to “find myself” or something. The positive impact of my Tumblr experience on my survival, my taste, my sense of humor, all kinds of shit, is inestimable. But at the same time, do I really want to see the person I was again? I don’t love the idea of losing everything I’ve done all these years, but if I had to save it all individually, looking directly at each bad joke and pithy thought and embarrassingly overworked prose and familiarly stylized image, would I? Mightn’t it be better to just cover my eyes and plug my ears, and pretend I don’t notice that it’s all sliding off the edge of a cliff into the void?

Like, I don’t know if I would have done a fraction of the post-collegiate writing that I've done if it weren’t for Tumblr. I probably turned out a couple hundred pages of memoir and film analysis and ranting and (truly valuable) self-reflexion that are at least occasionally interesting, or at the *very* least, funny. I co-ran a blog devoted to getting people to draw even when they didn’t think they could, or didn’t feel motivated, but just wanted someone to give them a reason. I mean, maybe I would have been driven to this work without Tumblr, but the truth is that Tumblr has inspired me every day. My shrink asked me what I’m always trying to get out of this platform, and I didn’t really know how to answer that question, except to say that when I work up a sweat writing some long crazy thing here, I feel enormously satisfied and relieved in some way when I post it, even if I know for a fact that only a couple of my most devoted friends will even notice it.

I changed a lot while I was here. Not just because I was literally growing up, late bloomer that I am, but being able to see this record of what I was doing, and simultaneously being exposed to what others were up to, really helped me evolve. I went from learning to enjoy my own vanity, to being able to put away my fear of looking ugly, and from showing off the best art I'd ever made, to feeling free to make bad art as long as I was still making something. As an ASD person with high social anxiety, I don’t do well at parties, but Tumblr gave me this beautiful opportunity to talk to all kinds of different people, about all kinds of things, and those people often asked me questions about myself that I had never even considered before. Of course this place can be an insulting mess, but also, people have been really, really incredibly kind to me, for no apparent reason other than that they wanted to. A lot of them are people I probably never would have met for any other reason; people I really fucking treasure.

I’m trying to look at this as an opportunity, in some ways. Like, I don’t think I really like the way that I write, but I sure like to do it! I’d been thinking for a while, should I have made more of a push, when I was younger, to publish? To “put myself out there” and “make a career out of it”? I still think, not really, but it’s hard to say, because the instant gratification of posting to Tumblr made me pretty uncurious about the potential benefits of going out into the world and seeking my proverbial fortune, entering into the competition of daily life, clawing my way toward some more recognizable achievement. Lately, I began to imagine printing a zine of my film writing--which would give me a change to rework a lot of that early tortured bullshit--and maybe including some drawings. I could probably even meet new people through such a thing, professional contacts maybe. (By “professional” I hardly mean anything smarter than like, Fangoria or something of that order, but that would be a big deal for me probably) But now that Tumblr is making itself increasingly frustrating to use in even the most innocent way, and now that I might have to move as much as I can over to a new platform, that could be an interesting chance to review what I’ve done right and wrong over the years, to say “I don’t want to do it this way anymore/I want to do it this way from now on.” I never even cared that much about improving before. I tend to think of competition as being an outlet for the chronically insecure, people who need to compare themselves to others in order to feel like there’s any meaning to their lives. It’s a vestigial impulse, I really believe that commercial and athletic and sexual competition just compensates for the obsolescence of survival in the wilderness...but uh anyway, maybe after sequestering myself in the semi-private masturbatorium that is Tumblr all these years, I could stand to be thrown out into the street to find my fortune?

So I don’t really know what to say now. I’m not quitting just yet, but I’m also not fighting my shadow ban. It’s just so stupid, and there’s so obviously no saving this place. I’m sticking around for now, but I’m going to start crossposting with a dang old blogspot: https://donner-partyofone.blogspot.com and I’ll make it clear when I’m starting to seriously add content over there. Hopefully some folks will find it interesting, and I hope those folks will also tell me if they take their business somewhere outside Tumblr. See you in the funny papers.

#tumblr purge #tumblrpurge

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odinsblog · 7 years

Note

Do you agree with Jimmy Carter?

[re: this post]

YES. Jimmy Carter specifically said he doesn’t believe that Russia “stole” the election and Russia isn’t why Hillary lost, but let’s unpack that a little:

First of all, let’s be really clear here: we are talking about targeted posts on social media. Showing anti-Clinton ads on Facebook ≠ “being hacked.” If that were the case, then you’re being “hacked” every single time you read any post that’s critical of Hillary Clinton. So I think that terminology is intentionally hyperbolic, if not intentionally misleading. Did Russia hack into emails and databases? Even though the FBI and CIA still haven’t physically examined the DNC computer systems, the answer is probably YES. Did Russia attempt to influence the outcome of the U.S. elections? Yes. Absolutely. Did they flip votes? No, there is no evidence that happened and until then, all we’re talking about is Facebook and Twitter ads and social media bots saying, “Don’t vote for Hillary,” which (surprise) people can and did ignore. Clinton won the popular vote by what, 3 million votes? We can and should prevent Russia from interfering in our elections—that is hugely important—but for right now, Russia did not “steal” our election, and no, they are not the reason Clinton lost. Sorry. (I don’t want to take up a ton of space, so I’ll come back to Russia’s interference under the “Read More” page break.)

Second, and this is important: there are two different questions people are conflating - Did Russia “steal” the election and cost Hillary the election? NO. Did Donald Trump try to collude with Russia and possibly commit treason? YES. Two completely different things.

Third: Russia spent somewhere between $100,000 - $600,000 on Facebook and Twitter ads, and had hundreds of fake accounts on social media. I dO believe that advertising (propaganda) works - but it does have its limits, and only works to a degree, and only with certain things. For example, I happen to love Pizza Hut pizza (please don’t judge me) and hate Papa Johns. Pizza Hut could stop running ads all together and Pappa Johns could run a million commercials a day for an entire year, but there’s no way in hell I’m ever going to buy a pizza from Papa John’s. It’s just not gonna happen. Same with Pepsi. They run ads literally 24/7/365, and never once have I said to myself, “You know what? I think I want a Pepsi instead of Coke.” Because I’ve tried them both, and I already have a preference.

Beyonce’ or Taylor Swift? Nicki Minaj or Miley Cyrus? Cats or dogs? If you had to vote for one of them, does anyone really believe that FB ads, no matter how well produced, could change your mind on which you like better, or who you vote for? NO. Because most people already have a favorite, and they aren’t going to change their minds just because of social media. Especially not with polar opposites. Confirmation bias will only make people become more entrenched with opinions they already hold, but it’s never going to change someone’s mind—especially not in politics, and not with known quantities that are extreme opposites—if they have even a slight preference. And guess what? Most people already have a favorite, or are leaning in one direction or the other. Think of it like this: those targeted ads can only draw out what’s already there, but they cannot put a competing preference where one already exists. It’s kind of like the trope about hypnosis - ads aren’t going to make you do something that you aren’t already predisposed to do (like vote for Trump).

Look, Hillary used a David Brock SuperPAC and spent $1 million dollars to troll Sanders supporters (money that could have been better spent elsewhere, iMho), and if money spent on ads were the deciding factor, then Clinton would have easily won, because her campaign spent at least ten times more than Russia on ads, so that should have done the trick, right?

When there’s a choice involved, especially between two opposite things we already have even a little knowledge of, or have personal feelings on, then slick advertising isn’t always going to make people change their minds. And both Clinton and Trump were, more or less, known quantities. Both candidates have very long, well known histories, and long before the 2016 election rolled around, people on both sides pretty much already knew who and what they were voting for.

Take me for example. Contrary to what my mom has told me for every day of my life, I suspect that I am not super super special. That is, I am no smarter or dumber than the next guy, okay? I’m a diehard Bernie supporter who has absolutely no love for Hillary or the Clintons. In fact, I had planned on leaving that space blank, and not voting for anyone for president. But I’m registered to vote in a swing state and I was taken aback (are black men allowed to be taken aback?) by the incredible amount of responsibility I suddenly felt when I was actually standing there in the ballot booth. I was literally shook. So guess what? I ended up surprising myself and voted for Hillary Clinton. But….why didn’t all those fancy Facebook ads & bots work on me, or my family & friends, who were also Sanders supporters? BECAUSE WE’RE BLACK, NOT CRAZY. All the slick ads and propaganda on earth were never going to get me to change my mind, or somehow trick me into voting for Trump, no matter how much I dislike the Clintons.

If you love Trump and hate Clinton (or love Clinton, hate Trump), then ads are not going to change your mind. Oh, and those mythical “undecided voters” already have a preference between Democrats vs Republicans.

So that begs the question: When dO ads work? I mean, when do targeted ads change someone’s mind on a choice between two alternatives? When it’s seen as a small inconsequential choice, or when the choices are not very different, or WHEN YOU DO NOT *ALREADY* HAVE A PREFERENCE, ESPECIALLY BETWEEN POLAR OPPOSITES. But once we do form a preference, we are very very slow to change them.

Even when I first heard all of the “Russia ~hacked~ the election” nonsense, at first I thought, “Well okay that’s dumb, but maybe the FB ads impacted voter turnout and made some people decide to sit this election out?” And then I remembered two things: 1. Voter turnout is always abysmally low in America, and 2. I recalled sitting with my friends and several dozen strangers at a local bar when we all officially learned it was going to be Hillary vs. Trump, and let me tell you, the look on everyone’s faces told you how apathetic people were already feeling about a choice between those two. You could hear a collective “UGH” from almost everyone there. There were one or two isolated cheers in a bar that was mostly stunned into silence, but other than that, people were not jazzed. I mean, yes, it was a definitely a good thing that it looked like we were going to have our first woman POTUS, and I think you could see that reflected in the crowd, but even that feeling seemed to be dulled by who that woman would be.

I flew home to vote, and I was the ride for several relatives, and I went to three different polling places, in three different cities on Election Day. Nowhere did I see KGB agents holding guns to anyone’s head, forcing them to vote one way or the other.

And I know this may come as a shock to some, but third party voters (and “protest” votes) have been a part of every single U.S. election since we’ve been having elections. Claiming that third party voters caused Hillary to lose the election (because Russia influenced them and “hacked” the election) is a case of sour grapes, and completely ignores the ever-present reality of third party voters. In other words, you may as well argue that Hillary would have won if nobody else was running against her, because that argument sounds equally foolish.

FB ads did not change anyone’s mind on who they were voting for (at least not in significant numbers), but…they may have made it less likely that people who already hated Clinton and loved Trump were going to change their minds. If you already thought Clinton was bad, anti-Hillary FB ads only confirmed that for you. And if you thought Trump was great, then paid pro-Trump FB ads confirmed that too. Confirmation bias. No different than what Fox News has been doing for the past 25 years. We need to be more worried about Republicans stealing elections than Russia.

When dO ads work? I mean, when do targeted ads change someone’s mind on a choice between two alternatives? When it’s seen as a small inconsequential choice, or when the choices are not very different, or WHEN YOU DO NOT *ALREADY* HAVE A PREFERENCE. But once we do form a preference, we are very very slow to change them.

Bottom line: You are never ever, ever going to see a story where a diehard Hillary fan, or even a lukewarm Hillary fan, changed their mind and voted for Trump because of what they saw on social media. Hell, EYE didn’t like Clinton and I voted for her. Because people already had an inkling of who they were going to vote for. They already had a preference; they were either going to vote for a Republican, or a Democrat, or a third party candidate if they disliked both Clinton and Trump badly enough.

Yes, Russia absolutely positively dOES need to be stopped from going into our archaic voting machines (just as Republicans do too), but as of this moment, there is no evidence that votes were flipped from Clinton to Trump—unlike how there IS evidence that Republicans have flipped votes and tampered with voting machines in the past. Voters didn’t need any nudging. They were going to vote for who they wanted anyway.

So when I say I agree with Jimmy Carter, that’s what EYE mean.

Sorry for re-litigating this, but I think people are getting carried away with this whole, “Hillary would have won if not for Russia” narrative. It’s annoying and it’s stopping us from looking at the root causes for why Democrats lost to the most beatable candidate in recent history.

(SN: If you can actually “steal” a U.S. election for only $600k, then America really ain’t shit)

#anon #donald trump #politics #hillary clinton #ask #answered #russia #facebook #facebook ads #sorry for being so long winded but soemtimes idk how to do short answers

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

Text

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon

This story was originally published on mssv.net by Adrian Hon (@adrianhon)

The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. Last week, it was 5G cell towers, this week it’s Wayfair; who knows what next week will bring? But QAnon’s followers always seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done my research.”

I’d heard that line before. In early 2001, the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, A.I., had just begun. YouTube wouldn’t launch for another four years, so you had to be eagle-eyed to spot the unusual credit next to Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, and Frances O’Connor: Jeanine Salla, the movie’s “Sentient Machine Therapist.”

Close-up of the A.I. movie poster

Soon after, Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) posted a tip from a reader:

“Type her name in the Google.com search engine, and see what sites pop up…pretty cool stuff! Keep up the good work, Harry!! –ClaviusBase”

(Yes, in 2001 Google was so new you had to spell out its web address.)

The Google results began with Jeanine Salla’s homepage but led to a whole network of fictional sites. Some were futuristic versions of police websites or lifestyle magazines; others were inscrutable online stores and hacked blogs. A couple were in German and Japanese. In all, over twenty sites and phone numbers were listed.

By the end of the day, the websites racked up 25 million hits, all from a single AICN article suggesting readers ‘do their research’. It later emerged they were part of one of the first-ever alternate reality games (ARG), The Beast, developed by Microsoft to promote Spielberg’s movie.

The way I’ve described it here, The Beast sounds like enormous fun. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a doorway into 2142 filled with websites and phone numbers and puzzles, with runaway robots who need your help and even live events around the world? But consider how much work it required to understand the story and it begins to sound less like “watching TV” fun and more like “painstaking research” fun. Along with tracking dozens of websites that updated in real time, you had to solve lute tablature puzzles, decode base 64 messages, reconstruct 3D models of island chains that spelt out messages, and gather clues from newspaper and TV adverts across the US.

This purposeful yet bewildering complexity is the complete opposite of what many associate with conventional popular entertainment, where every bump in your road to enjoyment has been smoothed away in the pursuit of instant engagement and maximal profit. But there’s always been another kind of entertainment that appeals to different people at different times, one that rewards active discovery, the drawing of connections between clues, the delicious sensation of a hunch that pays off after hours or days of work. Puzzle books, murder mysteries, adventure games, escape rooms, even scientific research—they all aim for the same spot.

What was new in The Beast and the ARGs that followed it was less the specific puzzles and stories they incorporated, but the sheer scale of the worlds they realised—so vast and fast-moving that no individual could hope to comprehend them. Instead, players were forced to cooperate, sharing discoveries and solutions, exchanging ideas, and creating resources for others to follow. I’d know: I wrote a novel-length walkthrough of The Beast when I was meant to be studying for my degree at Cambridge.

QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.

In other words, maybe QAnon is… fun?

ARGs never made it big. They came too early and It’s hard to charge for a game that you stumble into through a Google search. But maybe their purposely-fragmented, internet-native, community-based form of storytelling and puzzle-solving was just biding its time…

This blog post expands on the ideas in my Twitter thread about QAnon and ARGs, and incorporates many of the valuable replies. Please note, however, that I’m not a QAnon expert and I’m not a scholar of conspiracy theories. I’m not even the first to compare QAnon to LARPs and ARGs.

But my experience as lead designer of Perplex City, one of the world’s most popular and longest-running ARGs, gives me a special perspective on QAnon’s game-like nature. My background as a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist also gives me insight into what motivates people.

Today, I run Six to Start, best known for Zombies, Run!, an audio-based augmented reality game with half a million active players, and I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification.

It’s Like We Did It On Purpose

Perplex City “Ascendancy Point” Story Arc

When I was designing Perplex City, I loved sketching out new story arcs. I’d create intricate chains of information and clues for players to uncover, colour-coding for different websites and characters. There was a knack to having enough parallel strands of investigation going on so that players didn’t feel railroaded, but not so many that they were overwhelmed. It was a particular pleasure to have seemingly unconnected arcs intersect after weeks or months.

Merely half of the “Q-web“

No-one would mistake the clean lines of my flowcharts for the snarl of links that makes up a QAnon theory, but the principles are similar: one discovery leading to the next. Of course, these two flowcharts are very different beasts. The QAnon one is an imaginary, retrospective description of supposedly-connected data, while mine is a prescriptive network of events I would design.

Except that’s not quite true. In reality, Perplex City players didn’t always solve our puzzles as quickly as we intended them to, or they became convinced their incorrect solution was correct, or embarrassingly, our puzzles were broken and had no solution at all. In those cases we had to rewrite the story on the fly.

When this happens in most media, you just hold up your hands and say you made a mistake. In video games, you can issue an online update and hope no-one’s the wiser. But in ARGs, a public correction would shatter the uniquely-prolonged collective suspension of disbelief in the story. This was thought to be so integral to the appeal of ARGs, it was termed TINAG, or “This is Not a Game.”

So when we messed up in Perplex City, we tried mightily to avoid editing websites, a sure sign this was, in fact, a game. Instead, we’d fix it by adding new storylines and writing through the problem (it helped to have a crack team of writers and designers, including Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Dan Hon, Jey Biddulph, Fi Silk, Eric Harshbarger, and many many others).

We had a saying when these diversions worked out especially well: “It’s like we did it on purpose.”

Every ARG designer can tell a similar war story. Here’s Josh Fialkov, writer for the Lonelygirl15 ARG/show:

“Our fans/viewers would build elaborate (and pretty neat) theories and stories around the stories we’d already put together and then we’d merge them into our narrative, which would then engage them more. The one I think about the most is we were shooting something on location and we’re run and gunning. We fucked up and our local set PA ended up in the background of a long selfie shot. We had no idea. It was 100% a screw up. The fans became convinced the character was in danger. And then later when that character revealed herself as part of the evil conspiracy — that footage was part of the audiences proof that she was working with the bad guys all along — “THATS why he was in the background!” They literally found a mistake – made it a story point. And used it as evidence of their own foresight into the ending — despite it being, again, us totally being exhausted and sloppy. And at the time hundreds of thousands of people were participating and contributing to a fictional universe and creating strands upon strands.”

Conspiracy theories and cults evince the same insouciance when confronted with inconsistencies or falsified predictions; they can always explain away errors with new stories and theories. What’s special about QAnon and ARGs is that these errors can be fixed almost instantly, before doubt or ridicule can set in. And what’s really special about QAnon is how it’s absorbed all other conspiracy theories to become a kind of ur-conspiracy theory such that seems pointless to call out inconsistencies. In any case, who would you even be calling out when so many QAnon theories come from followers rather than “Q”?

Yet the line between creator and player in ARGs has also long been blurry. That tip from “ClaviusBase” to AICN that catapulted The Beast to massive mainstream coverage? The designers more or less admitted it came from them. Indeed, there’s a grand tradition of ARG “puppetmasters” (an actual term used by devotees) sneaking out from “behind the curtain” (ditto) to create “sockpuppet accounts” in community forums to seed clues, provide solutions, and generally chivvy players along the paths they so carefully designed.

As an ARG designer, I used to take a hard line against this kind of cheating but in the years since, I’ve mellowed somewhat, mostly because it can make the game more fun, and ultimately, because everyone expects it these days. That’s not the case with QAnon.

Yes, anyone who uses 4chan and 8chan understands that anonymity is baked into the system such that posters frequently create entire threads where they argue against themselves in the guise of anonymous users who are impossible to distinguish or trace back to a single individual – but do the more casual QAnon followers know that?

Local Fame

A Beautiful Mind

Pop culture’s conspiracy theorist sits in a dark basement stringing together photos and newspaper clippings on their "crazy wall." On the few occasions this leads to useful results, it’s an unenviable pursuit. Anyone choosing such an existence tends to be shunned by society.

But this ignores one gaping fact: piecing together theories is really satisfying. Writing my walkthrough for The Beast was rewarding and meaningful, appreciated by an enthusiastic community in a way that my molecular biology essays most certainly were not. Online communities have long been dismissed as inferior in every way to “real” friendships, an attenuated version that’s better than nothing, but not something that anyone should choose. Yet ARGs and QAnon (and games and fandom and so many other things) demonstrate there’s an immediacy and scale and relevance to online communities that can be more potent and rewarding than a neighbourhood bake sale. This won’t be news to most of you, but I think it’s still news to decision-makers in traditional media and politics.

Good ARGs are deliberately designed with puzzles and challenges that require unusual talents—I designed one puzzle that required a good understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—with problems so large that they require crowdsourcing to solve, such that all players feel like welcome and valued contributors.

Needless to say, that feeling is missing from many people’s lives:

“ARGs are generally a showcase for special talent that often goes unrecognized elsewhere. I have met so many wildly talented people with weird knowledge through them.”

If you’re first to solve a puzzle or make a connection, you can attain local fame in ARG communities, as Dan Hon, COO at Mind Candy (makers of the Perplex City ARG), notes. The vast online communities for TV shows like Lost and Westworld, with their purposefully convoluted mystery box plots, also reward those who guess twists early, or produce helpful explainer videos. Yes, the reward is “just” internet points in the form of Reddit upvotes, but the feeling of being appreciated is very real. It’s no coincidence that Lost and Westworld both used ARGs to promote their shows.

Wherever you have depth in storytelling or content or mechanics, you’ll find the same kind of online communities. Games like Bloodborne, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Animal Crossing, Eve Online, and Elite Dangerous, they all share the same race for discovery. These discoveries eventually become processed into explainer videos and Reddit posts that are more accessible for wider audiences.

The same has happened with modern ARGs, where explainer videos have become so compelling they rack up more views than the ARGs have players (not unlike Twitch). Michael Andersen, owner of the Alternate Reality Gaming Network news site, is a fan of this trend, but wonders about its downside—with reference to conspiracy theorists:

“[W]hen you’re reading (or watching) a summary of an ARG? All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together. Living it, though? Sheer chaos. Wild conjectures and theories flying left and right, with circumstantial evidence and speculation ruling the day. Things exist in a fugue state of being simultaneously true-and-not-true, and it’s only the accumulation of evidence that resolves it. And acquiring a “knack” for sifting through theories to surface what’s believable is an extremely valuable skill—both for actively playing ARGs, and for life in general.And sometimes, I worry that when people consume these neatly packaged theories that show all the pieces coming together, they miss out on all those false starts and coincidences that help develop critical thinking skills. …because yes, conspiracy theories try and offer up those same neat packages that attempt to explain the seemingly unexplained. And it’s pretty damn important to learn how groups can be led astray in search of those neatly wrapped packages.”

“SPEC”

I’m a big fan of the SCP Foundation, a creative writing website set within a shared universe not unlike The X-Files. Its top-rated stories rank among the best science fiction and horror I’ve read. A few years ago, I wrote my own (very silly) story, SCP-3993, where New York’s ubiquitous LinkNYC internet kiosks are cover for a mysterious reality-altering invasion.

CITYBRIDGE/NYC

Like the rest of SCP, this was all in good fun, but I recently discovered LinkNYC is tangled up in QAnon conspiracy theories. To be fair, you can say the same thing about pretty much every modern technology, but it’s not surprising their monolith-like presence caught conspiracy theorists’ attention as it did mine.

It’s not unreasonable to be creeped out by LinkNYC. In 2016, the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote to the mayor about “the vast amount of private information retained by the LinkNYC system and the lack of robust language in the privacy policy protecting users against unwarranted government surveillance.” Two years later, kiosks along Third Avenue in Midtown mysteriously blasted out a slowed-down version of the Mister Softee theme song. So there’s at least some cause for speculation. The problem is when speculation hardens into reality.

Not long after the AICN post, The Beast’s players set up a Yahoo Group mailing list called Cloudmakers, named after a boat in the story. As the number of posts rose to dozens and then hundreds per day, it became obvious to list moderators (including me) that some form of organisation was in order. One rule we established was that posts should include a prefix in their subject so members could easily distinguish website updates from puzzle solutions.

My favourite prefix was “SPEC,” a catch-all for any kind of unfounded speculation, most of which was fun nonsense but some of which ended up being true. There were no limits on what or how much you could post, but you always had to use the prefix so people could ignore it. Other moderated communities have similar guidelines, with rationalists using their typically long-winded “epistemic status” metadata.

Absent this kind of moderation, speculation ends up overwhelming communities since it’s far easier and more fun to bullshit than do actual research. And if speculation is repeated enough times, if it’s finessed enough, it can harden into accepted fact, leading to devastating and even fatal consequences.

I’ve personally been the subject of this process thanks to my work in ARGs—not just once, but twice.

The first occasion was fairly innocent. One of our more famous Perplex City puzzles, Billion to One, was a photo of a man. That’s it. The challenge was to find him. Obviously, we were riffing on the whole “six degrees of separation” concept. Some thought it’d be easy, but I was less convinced. Sure enough, fourteen years on, the puzzle is still unsolved, but not for lack of trying. Every so often, the internet rediscovers the puzzle amid a flurry of YouTube videos and podcasts; I can tell whenever this happens because people start DMing me on Twitter and Instagram.

This literally came a few days ago

A clue in the puzzle is the man’s name, Satoshi. It is not a rare name, and it happens to be same as the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. So of course people think Perplex City’s Satoshi created bitcoin. Not a lot of people, to be fair, but enough that I get DMs about it every week. But it’s all pretty innocent, like I said.

More concerning is my presumed connection to Cicada 3301, a mysterious group that recruited codebreakers through very difficult online puzzles. Back in 2011, my company developed a pseudo-ARG for the BBC Two factual series, The Code, all about mathematics. This involved planting clues into the show itself, along with online educational games and a treasure hunt.

To illustrate the concept of prime numbers, The Code explored the gestation period of cicadas. We had no hand in the writing of the show; we got the script and developed our ARG around it. But this was enough to create a brand new conspiracy theory, featuring yours truly:

My bit starts around 20 minutes in:

Interviewer: Why [did you make a puzzle about] cicadas?

Me: Cicadas are known for having a gestation period which is linked to prime numbers. Prime numbers are at the heart of nature and the heart of mathematics.

Interviewer: That puzzle comes out in June 2011.

Me: Yeah.

Interviewer: Six months later, Cicada 3301 makes its international debut.

Me: It's a big coincidence.

Interviewer: There are some people who have brought up the fact that whoever's behind Cicada 3301 would have to be a very accomplished game maker.

Me: Sure.

Interviewer: You would be a candidate to be that person.

Me: That's true, I mean, Cicada 3301 has a lot in common with the games we've made. I think that one big difference (chuckles) is that normally when we make alternate reality games, we do it for money. And it's not so clear to understand where the funding for Cicada 3301 is coming from.

Clearly this was all just in fun – I knew it and the interviewer knew it. That’s why I agreed to take part. But does everyone watching this understand that? There’s no “SPEC” tag on the video. At least a few commenters are taking it seriously:

I am the “ARG guy” in question

I’m not worried, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a touch concerned that Cicada 3301 now lies squarely in the QAnon vortex and in the “Q-web“:

Here’s a good interview with the creator of the “Q-web”

My defence that the cicada puzzle in The Code was “a big coincidence” (albeit delivered with an unfortunate shit-eating grin) didn’t hold water. In the conspiracy theorest mindset, no such thing exists:

“According to Michael Barkun, emeritus professor of political science at Syracuse University, three core principles characterize most conspiracy theories. Firstly, the belief that nothing happens by accident or coincidence. Secondly, that nothing is as it seems: The “appearance of innocence” is to be suspected. Finally, the belief that everything is connected through a hidden pattern.”

These are helpful beliefs when playing an ARG or watching a TV show designed with twists and turns. It’s fun to speculate and to join seemingly disparate ideas, especially when the creators encourage and reward this behaviour. It’s less helpful when conspiracy theorists “yes, and…” each other into shooting up a pizza parlour or burning down 5G cell towers.

Because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of “SPEC” tags. In their absence, YouTube has added annotated QAnon videos with links to its Wikipedia article, and Twitter has banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, among other actions. Supposedly, Facebook is planning to do the same.

These are useful steps but will not stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums. It’s not something we can reasonably hope for, and I don’t think there’s any technological solution (e.g. browser extensions) either. The only way to stop people from mistaking speculation from fact is for them to want to stop.

Cryptic

It’s always nice to have a few mysteries for players to speculate on in an ARG, if only because it helps them pass the time while the poor puppetmasters scramble to sate their insatiable demand for more website updates and puzzles. A good mystery can keep a community guessing for, as Lost did with its numbers or Game of Thrones with Jon Snow’s parentage. But these mysteries always have to be balanced against specifics, lest the whole story dissolve into a puddle of mush; for as much we derided Lost for the underwhelming conclusion to its mysteries, no-one would’ve watched in the first place if the episode-to-episode storytelling wasn’t so strong.

The downside of being too mysterious in Perplex City is that cryptic messages often led players on wild goose chases such that they completely ignored entire story arcs in favour of pursuing their own theories. This was bad for us because we had a pretty strict timetable that we needed our story to play out on, pinned against the release of our physical puzzle cards that funded the entire enterprise. If players took too long to find the $200,000 treasure at the conclusion of the story, we might run out of money.

QAnon can favour cryptic messages because, as far as I know, they don’t have a specific timeline or goal in mind, let alone a production budget or paid staff. Not only is there no harm in followers misinterpreting messages, but it’s a strength: followers can occupy themselves with their own spin-off theories far better than “Q” can. Dan Hon notes:

“For every ARG I’ve been involved in and ones my friends have been involved in, communities always consume/complete/burn through content faster than you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game. This content generation/consumption/playing asymmetry is, I think, just a fact. But QAnon “solved” it by being able to co-opt all content that already exists and … encourages and allows you to create new content that counts and is fair play in-the-game.”

But even QAnon needs some specificity, hence their frequent references to actual people, places, events, and so on.

A brief aside on designing very hard puzzles

It was useful to be cryptic when I needed to control the speed at which players solved especially consequential puzzles, like the one revealing where our $200,000 treasure was buried. For story and marketing purposes, we wanted players to be able to find it as soon as they had access to all 256 puzzle cards, which we released in three waves. We also wanted players to feel like they were making progress before they had all the cards and we didn’t want them to find the location the minute they had the last card.

My answer was to represent the location as the solution to multiple cryptic puzzles. One puzzle referred to the Jurassic strata in the UK, which I split across the background of 14 cards. Another began with a microdot revealing which order to arrange triple letters I’d hidden on a bunch of cards. By performing mod arithmetic on the letter/number values, you would arrive at 1, 2, 3 or 4, corresponding to the four DNA nucleotides. If you understood the triplets as codons for amino acids, they became letters. These letters led you to the phrase “Duke of Burgundy”, the name of a butterfly whose location, when combined with the Jurassic strata, would help you narrow down the location of the treasure.

The nice thing about this convoluted sequence is that we could provide additional online clues to help the players community when they got stuck. The point being, you can’t make an easy puzzle harder, but you can make a hard puzzle easier.

Beyond ARGs

It can feel crass to compare ARGs to a conspiracy theory that’s caused so much harm. But this reveals the crucial difference between them: in QAnon, the stakes so high, any action is justified. If you truly believe an online store or a pizza parlour is engaging in child trafficking and the authorities are complicit, extreme behaviour is justified.

Gabriel Roth, editorial director for audio at Slate, extends this idea:

“What QAnon has that ARGs didn’t have is the claim of factual truth; in that sense it reminds me of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoir wave of the 90s and early 00s. If you have a story based on real life, but you want to make it more interesting, the correct thing to do is change the names of the people and make it as interesting as you like and call it fiction. The insight of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoirists (I’m thinking of James Frey and Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris) was that you could call it nonfiction and readers would like it much better because it would have the claim of actual factual truth, wowee!! And it worked! How much more engaging and addictive is an immersive, participatory ARG when it adds that unique frisson you can only get with the claim of factual truth? And bear in mind that ARG-scale stories aren’t about mere personal experiences—they operate on a world-historical scale.”

ARGs’ playfulness with the truth and their sometimes-imperceptible winking of This Is Not A Game (accusations Lonelygirl15 was a hoax) is only the most modern incarnation of epistolary storytelling. In that context, immersive and realistic stories have long elicited extreme reactions, like the panic incited by Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds (often exaggerated, to be fair).

We don’t have to wonder what happens when an ARG community meets a matter of life and death. Not long after The Beast concluded, the 9/11 attacks happened. A small number of posters in the Cloudmakers mailing list suggested the community use its skills to “solve” the question of who was behind the attack.

The brief but intense discussion that ensued has become a cautionary tale of ARG communities getting carried away and being unable to distinguish fiction from reality. In reality, the community and the moderators quickly shut down the idea as being impractical, insensitive, and very dangerous. “Cloudmakers tried to solve 9/11” is a great story, but it’s completely false.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for the poster child for online sleuthing gone wrong, the r/findbostonbombers subreddit. There’s a parallel between the essentially unmoderated, anonymous theorists of r/findbostonbombers and those in QAnon: neither feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes:

“There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on. The feeling that all information is available online, that reality and truth must be captured/in evidence somewhere”

There’s truth in that feeling. There is a vast amount of information online, and sometimes it is possible to solve “mysteries”, which makes it hard to criticise people for trying, especially when it comes to stopping perceived injustices. But it’s the sheer volume of information online that makes it so easy and so tempting and so fun to draw spurious connections.

That joy of solving and connecting and sharing and communication can do great things, and it can do awful things. As Josh Fialkov, writer for Lonelygirl15, says:

That brain power negatively focused on what [conspiracy theorists] perceive as life and death (but is actually crassly manipulated paranoia) scares the living shit out of me.

What ARGs Can Teach Us

Can we make “good ARGs”? Could ARGs inoculate people against conspiracy theories like QAnon?

The short answer is: No. When it comes to games that are educational and fun, you usually have to pick one, not both—and I say that as someone who thinks he’s done a decent job at making “serious games” over the years. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it’s really hard, and I doubt any such ARG would get played by the right audience anyway.

The long answer: I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification. Come back in a year or two.

For now, here’s a medium-sized answer. No ARG can heal the deep mistrust and fear and economic and spiritual malaise that underlies QAnon and other dangerous conspiracy theories, any more than a book or a movie can solve racism. There are hints at ARG-like things that could work, though—not in directly combatting QAnon’s appeal, but in channeling people’s energy and zeal of community-based problem-solving toward better causes.

Take The COVID Tracking Project, an attempt to compile the most complete data available about COVID-19 in the U.S. Every day, volunteers collect the latest numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every state and territory. In the absence of reliable governmental figures, it’s become one of the best sources not just in the U.S., but in the world.

It’s also incredibly transparent. You can drill down into the raw data volunteers have collected on Google Sheets, view every line of code written on Github, and ask them questions on Slack. Errors and ambiguities in the data are quickly disclosed and explained rather than hidden or ignored. There’s something game-like in the daily quest to collect the best-quality data and to continually expand and improve the metrics being tracked. And like in the best ARGs, volunteers of all backgrounds and skills are welcomed. It’s one of the most impressive and well-organising reporting projects I’ve ever seen; “crowdsourcing” doesn’t even come close to describing its scale.

If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like Bellingcat, an an open-source intelligence group that discovered how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly-available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade in Kursk, Russia. The Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.

Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of trust. Today, people don��t trust authorities because authorities have repeatedly shown themselves to be unworthy of trust – misreporting or manipulating COVID-19 testing figures, delaying the publication of government investigations, burning records of past atrocities, and deploying unmarked federal forces. Perhaps authorities were just as untrustworthy twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, but today we rightly expect more.

Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, believes it’s that lack of trust that leads people to QAnon:

“Q’s [followers] … are starving for information. Their willingness to chase bread crumbs is a symptom of ignorance and powerlessness. There may be something to their belief that the machinery of the state is inaccessible to the people. It’s hard to blame them for resorting to fantasy and esotericism, after all, when accurate information about the government’s current activities is so easily concealed and so woefully incomplete.”

So the goal cannot be to simply restore trust in existing authorities. Rather, I think it’s to restore faith in truth and knowledge itself. The COVID Tracking Project and Bellingcat help reveal truth by crowdsourcing information. They show their work via hypertext and open data, creating a structure upon which higher-level analysis and journalism can be built. And if they can’t find the truth, they’re willing to say so.

QAnon seems just as open. Everything is online. Every discussion, every idea, every theory is all joined together in a warped edifice where speculation becomes fact and fact leads to action. It’s thrilling to discover, and as you find new terms to Google and new threads to pull upon, you can feel just like a real researcher. And you can never get bored. There’s always new information to make sense of, always a new puzzle to solve, always a new enemy to take down.

QAnon fills the void of information that states have created—not with facts, but with fantasy. If we don’t want QAnon to fill that void, someone else has to. Government institutions can’t be relied upon to do this sustainably, given how underfunded and politicised they’ve become in recent years. Traditional journalism has also struggled against its own challenges of opacity and lack of resources. So maybe that someone is… us.

ARGs teach us that the search for knowledge and truth can be immensely rewarding, not in spite of their deliberately-fractured stories and near-impossible puzzles, but because of them. They teach us that communities can self-organise and self-moderate to take on immense challenges in a responsible way. And they teach us that people are ready and willing to volunteer to work if they’re welcomed, no matter their talent.

It’s hard to create these communities. They rely on software and tools that aren’t always free or easy to use. They need volunteers who have spare time to give and moderators who can be supported, financially and emotionally, through the struggles that always come. These communities already exist. They just need more help.

Despite the growing shadow of QAnon, I’m hopeful for the future. The beauty of ARGs and ARG-like communities isn’t their power to discover truth. It’s how they make the process of discovery so deeply rewarding.

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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angeltriestoblog · 4 years

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I watched a couple of movies! (Part 2)

Back again with the second bunch of my latest quarantine companions! My last post wasn't that long ago, but I’ve already gone through an additional 21 and thanks to the extension of the lockdown and the abrupt cancellation of the rest of my sophomore year in college, I predict that this number will only increase exponentially. I obviously have to start looking for a sustainable way of reviewing the media I consume (probably will try dumping mini-reviews on Letterboxd instead), but until then, here is today’s little catalog: divided into four neat categories so there’s a little bit of everything for everyone.

Dead Poets Society (1989, dir. Peter Weir) ★★★★½

John Keating is the teacher we secretly deserved yet never had, which is probably what's behind the fervent loyalty audiences have had for this movie since its release around three decades ago. His methods of teaching are admittedly unorthodox, but they effectively instill in fictional students and real-life audiences the core message: to seize the day and be extraordinary. I definitely would have appreciated more of Williams, though: I noticed later on that he was used mostly as a plot device, as the focus started to shift to the impact his words had on the group of young boys under his tutelage. But, thankfully they are endearing and lovable in their own little ways (special mention goes to ambitious Neil, played by Robert Sean Leonard; and Ethan Hawke as timid Todd), which is why the last half-hour remains one of the heaviest in recent memory.

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993, dir. Chris Columbus) ★★★★

When Daniel Hillard’s (Robin Williams) wife splits up with him and takes their kids, he disguises himself as an English nanny called Mrs. Doubtfire and applies as their housekeeper to be with them. Not exactly the most realistic and practical approach to an issue as serious as divorce, but it succeeds by banking on heartfelt humor to strike a chord in products of broken families. When you take his several antics, punchlines, and vocal impersonations aside, he is simply a father willing to do anything for his children. Williams was destined to be the lead for this: his comedic timing, sheer versatility, and natural ability to bring joy remain unparalleled. Such a shame I didn't get to grow up with this guy, but maybe this saved me a lot of heartbreak.

Catch Me If You Can (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg) ★★★★★

A con man successfully cashes in millions of dollars worth of checks as a Pan Am pilot, doctor, and lawyer, whilst evading the FBI agent who’s hot on his heels. And this is all before he turns 19 years old--what a total underachiever. The best part? It’s a true story. I find it hard to believe that this clever cat-and-mouse story lasted more than two hours: it's easy to lose track of time thanks to its dynamic and snappy screenplay, coupled with the chemistry of its brilliant lead actors (no less than Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks). But beneath the complex and technical aspects of his scams that have high entertainment and educational value lie touching moments that may be admittedly easy to miss. At the end of the day, these escapades were nothing but some twisted coping mechanism of Frank Abagnale, Jr.’s to deal with the divorce of his parents. *blows nose into handkerchief* Wow, I seriously didn't think something could be so fast and fun, yet so depressing either!

Good Will Hunting (1997, dir. Gus Van Sant) ★★★★★

Academy Award-winning writers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck may look like they share a solitary brain cell in total (a prime example would be this footage of their acceptance speech), but it was the power that radiated from that which brought us this instant favorite of mine. This engrossing story revolves around a janitor at MIT, with a genius-level IQ but a troubled and traumatic past. A scuffle with a police officer leads him to Sean, his therapist (and platonic soulmate) who breaks down his dangerous defense mechanisms and self-destructive patterns, helps him tackle his inner demons, and ultimately transforms his life. There is a lot to adore about this film that’s equal parts wit and heart, but my favorite has to be the razor-sharp and realistic dialogue between Damon and Williams. Smoothly transitioning from topic to topic—genuine friendship, abusive relationships, and everything in between—it gives us the opportunity to monitor Will’s growth while carefully examining these aspects of our own lives. With every word said, the audience is reminded once again of any person's innate capacity to change for the better as long as someone else believes in them.

Lost in Translation (2003, dir. Sofia Coppola) ★★★

Film Twitter and the Letterboxd community both made this out to be an outstanding piece of modern cinema, so I went in with very high expectations only to be sorely disappointed and unable to understand the hype behind it. This revolves around two lonely people who find solace in each other and the unfamiliar and unpredictable territory they're in, a storyline brimming with potential that just fell flat to me. I normally appreciate the beauty in silent and ambient scenes, but the ones that made up a huge bulk of this feature didn’t have substance—it was similar to watching mashed-up clips from some random travel vlog. I did find the choice of location fitting though, I am now a hundred percent convinced I should travel to Japan once this pandemic is over. And Scarlett Johansson is incredibly talented for her age: her ability to channel and characterize emotions that a 17-year-old may not even be able to comprehend is above par, which is the main reason why this gets a passing rating from me.

Forrest Gump (1994, dir. Robert Zemeckis) ★★★★★

What I would give to run into a chocolate-eating, Nike Cortez-wearing Forrest Gump at a bus stop, and hear him tell me these fantastic stories himself! This heartwarming tale shows the manner in which he weaved himself into significant historical narratives (literally and figuratively, thanks to the power of deepfake) and injects timeless lessons along the way. Tom Hanks is undoubtedly brilliant as the titular role, and as we see the world according to this feeble-minded and well-meaning man, we come to admire his values, appreciate his efforts, and forgive his occasional shortcomings. In this fast-paced and overly complicated world that we struggle to navigate, this can serve as a necessary breather, a reminder of the simple joys that the world has to offer.

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012, dir. Lee Toland Krieger) ★★★★

I think this is the first time I’ve witnessed a breakup end rather amicably on the big screen: there's no screamfest that concludes with a cold slap to the face and a dramatic walkout, or a courtroom confrontation that unearths past transgressions, et cetera. Instead, the leads are forced to confront the fact that the friendship they have forged years before that eventually blossomed into something more will never be the same again. Even if they want to so, so bad. I guess that’s why this is so heartbreaking, and thus the perfect companion for any person in the process of finding themselves after the demise of a long-term relationship. Celeste (Rashida Jones) meanders through the process with an extreme lack of finesse—which is the most realistic way to do so—that heavily accentuates her several fatal flaws. But, she manages to finish strong, emerging as a self-reflective and action-driven version of who she was in the beginning. I definitely wanted additional exposure for Jesse (Andy Samberg), though, who was not only surprisingly tender and sensitive in contrast to the Jake Peralta we know and love (and want to pick on), but also an unexpected perfect onscreen match for Jones.

A Star is Born (2018, dir. Bradley Cooper) ★★★★

The third remake of the 1937 movie starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, this edition of A Star is Born strays far from the paths traversed by its predecessors (and this I am aware of, from that film analysis video binge I did recently). It’s the first to give Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper), the has-been with a raging alcohol and drug problem, extensive back story that draws audiences closer to him. But, this character arc comes at the expense of Ally's, the talented singer that he propels to fame, played by Lady Gaga. It was a shame she wasn’t fleshed out as much as she should have been, given that Gaga was a natural, her vulnerability a far cry from her outrageous onstage persona. But, then again, expectations must be kept realistic: it would’ve been impossible to cram that into the specified duration. Nevertheless, I thoroughly appreciated it: though rehashed several times, a romance done this way keeps its key components while catering to the preferences of this generation. The soundtrack is outstanding, and the climax—though somewhat expected—finds new ways to reduce us to a puddle of tears, particularly as the last song number start to roll.

Fall in Love At First Kiss (2019, dir. Frankie Chen) ★★½

Our Times has been a favorite of mine for years, so I couldn't believe that I missed this work from the same director which starred the same male lead during its initial release. Turns out it didn’t make much of a difference whether I watched it or not. The storyline was silly, but forgivably so: in a school where students are segregated based on intelligence, a stupid girl is smitten by the smartest boy in school and gets rejected as soon as she confesses. Consequently, hell breaks loose after they are forced to live together for reasons you have to see to believe. I remember enjoying the first half, squirming in my seat because of Jiang Zhishu (Darren Wang) every chance I'd get. I can’t pinpoint where exactly it started going wrong, but I remember realizing that it is possible for something to drag along, yet also move so fast: to bore me with excessive detail in a single scene, then cut to the next so fast it loses a sense of continuity. In addition to that, the female lead (Jelly Lin) was so unbearable in terms of her acting style and character development (or lack thereof). She seemed to think that constantly complaining in her shrill voice and thrashing her limbs was a fitting substitute for dialogue, thus making it difficult to want her to get her happily ever after. Also, I’ve had pretty intense crushes in the past few years but what she has for Zhishu is bordering more on an unhealthy obsession—I have trouble believing he reacted so calmly to the shrine that she built for him (which included life-size pillows with his face on it).

The Object of My Affection (1998, dir. Nicolas Hytner) ★★½

I was very confused as to why I had never heard of a chick flick that starred two of my favorite actors from the 90s, but now I understand why it didn't take off. (Phoebe would probably share my sentiments. What's her best friend doing with her husband anyway? And why is he attracted to men?) Nina (Jennifer Aniston) is hopelessly in love with her gay best friend George (Paul Rudd), so much so that she decides she wants to raise her unborn child with him instead of with her overbearing and borderline manipulative boyfriend (John Pankow). Though it wasn't a complete disaster given that she didn't successfully convert him, Nina was far too demanding, constantly overstepping her boundaries, and feeding her delusions. Maybe it could afford a modern retelling since I know our generation could tackle the concepts of platonic soulmates and LGBTQ+ relationships in a way that is simultaneously vibrant and sensitive.

How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days (2003, dir. Donald Petrie) ★★★★★

Once I had tried my luck in a number of different genres, I decided to reward myself with a return to the cheesy, corny, and conventional chick flicks I am familiar with—and I’m glad that I picked this one! Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) is a magazine columnist with her biggest scoop yet: an article on how to lose a guy in 10 days. To test this idea out, she tries it out on Ben Barry (Matthew McConaughey), who’s on a mission to make a girl fall for him within that duration as well. Their conflicting agendas lead to disastrously hilarious results as they realize that they’re both *gasp* catching feelings for each other! I enjoyed this very much despite the predictability, although I’m honestly unable to judge it based on any criteria other than what I felt which was pure and utter, slamming-the-table, throwing-my-stuffed-toy-across-the-room “kilig”.

Just My Luck (2006, dir. Donald Petrie) ★½

I didn’t expect this to be on the forgettable side of the romcom spectrum, when it had Chris Pine as the leading man and Brit-pop band McFly lending their music to most of the scenes (the sole redeeming factor I found). But, I guess it’s Lindsay Lohan’s character and her surprising lack of chemistry with the equally attractive and talented person opposite her that killed it for me. Here, she plays Ashley, the luckiest girl in the world who gets everything her way and is thus as snobbish and stuck-up as you’d expect her to be. A chance encounter brings her to Jake, who is the human equivalent of a black cat standing in front of a broken mirror, and swaps their fate. She is then left to deal with poorly contrived misfortunes with effects that are bordering on slapstick comedy: she gets doused in mud, mildly electrocuted, and soaked in bubbles shortly after blowing up a washing machine and I get that they’re probably supposed to be funny, but all I’m seeing is a live-action version of the Looney Tunes show.

Eighth Grade (2018, dir. Bo Burnham) ★★★★★

Entering our awkward preteen years has always come with a certain and specific kind of mortification, but I reckon it’s become increasingly difficult in the age of the Internet. It’s become easier to find fault in oneself for the pettiest of reasons: why isn’t my crush accepting my friend request? Why do I look like a monster in my #wokeuplikethis selfies? Why is no one viewing my YouTube videos even if I work hard on them? Eighth Grade encapsulates this difficult period in the lives of Gen Z kids with the use of experiences and references which are so specific to this generation: I may have gotten whiplash more times than I would care to admit. Elsie Fisher shines in her painfully relatable performance as Kayla: you can sense her desperation for social acceptance. She just wants to be worth noticing and remembering, is that so bad! Although his role is often overshadowed, I also felt for her dad (Josh Hamilton), who tries to hide the struggle of looking out for a daughter who's growing in ways he simply can't understand.

Boyhood (2014, dir. Richard Linklater) ★★★

This ambitious effort by the director of my favorite film trilogy observes the growth and development of a typical American boy named Mason. No fancy plot devices or major conflicts are in sight, but by using the keeping the cast members fixed during the 12 years it took to put this project together instead of swapping them out for older counterparts, audiences are expected to form an emotional connection with them because they were given an intimate and prolonged look into their lives. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for me. Yes, I did watch him grow up before my eyes, but I barely know who he is. These mundane snippets of his life haphazardly stitched together, without any indication of how much time has elapsed since the previous scene, made it hard to keep up with the pace and look at the viewing experience as anything but a chore. I honestly am puzzled as to why I endured 165 minutes (I’m kidding, it was for Ethan Hawke) worth of footage, and sadly it wasn’t even worth it.

Brooklyn (2015, dir. John Crowley) ★★★★

This drama about the migration of an Irish girl to New York to seek better opportunities delves into the concept of what home truly is, as Eilis is left to choose between two men from two different countries. Divided into three segments revolving around pivotal events in the protagonist’s life, it sensitively tackles the experiences and issues familiar to any immigrant, remains true to the period it is set in, and engaging to audience members of all ages. Most in the historical genre are incapable of doing all three, so that's definitely no mean feat! And I’m not biased because Saoirse Ronan plays the starring role, although her compelling performance renders it impossible for anyone who claims to have a beating heart to finish this without puffy eyes and a heavy chest.

Happy Old Year (2019, dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit) ★★★★

I thought Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying couldn’t top her role in Bad Genius, but she just had to come along and star in this personal take on new beginnings. Here, she plays Jean, a girl in the process of decluttering her house so she can transform it into an office space. While sifting through her possessions, she finds certain things belonging to people from her past, that remind her of broken relationships and question her philosophies on forgiveness and letting go. Her performance may be understated compared to the cunning and reckless Lynn she has become popular for, but I see this mastery of restraint as indication of her growth as an actress. The film is relatively simple in its execution, staying true to its central theme of minimalism. By stripping the structure down to the bare essentials of actor and dialogue, the audience can focus on the poignancy ingrained in the most mundane part of our everyday routines.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016, dir. Kelly Fremon Craig) ★★★★

It's actually true that a coming-of-age movie has been written based on every definitive moment a teenage girl experiences, they weren’t lying. The Edge of Seventeen could serve as part of Eighth Grade's cinematic universe, but instead we’re dealing with another reflection of who we were (or maybe still are). Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) is a teen constantly teetering between arrogant self-assurance and sheer hopelessness. When she loses her best friend to her worst nemesis, she suddenly has to learn to navigate the ups and downs of adolescence and deal with her mental illness on her own. Besides focusing on the several firsts that we often encounter during this stage in our lives, the film accurately portrays our angsty and self-deprecating nature without resorting to mockery, therefore calling us out on this reflex we have of beating ourselves up and giving those around us permission to do so during such a critical part of our lives. I swore I was actually going to try not to cry here, but I guess Nadine's tearful monologue left me with no choice. (I'll leave it below so you can suffer with me.)

You know, ever since we were little, I would get this feeling like, like I’m floating outside of my body, looking down at myself… and I hate what I see: how I’m acting, the way I sound, and I don’t know how to change it. And I’m so scared that the feeling is never gonna go away.

The Kingmaker (2019, dir. Lauren Greenfield) ★★★★

This documentary is a fitting introduction for anyone who isn't familiar with the ill-gotten wealth and abuses the Marcoses have lying underneath their glossy veneer of opulence as well as the consequences of their actions that we suffer from to this day. Greenfield’s juxtaposition of this family’s fabricated stories and the testimonies of victims and first-hand witnesses was a smart move, as we observe the lengths they often go to, to revise the course of history. By spotting the parallels in their narrative and that of Rodrigo Duterte, the next strongman the voting population would unfortunately elect as their leader, we are also given a glimpse into the selective amnesia of the Filipino people that keeps these people in power. The danger lies in the fact that being an outsider herself, Greenfield leaves plenty of room for interpretation: there is no clear-cut statement of what was right and wrong among the several interweaving statements we heard. I was able to determine which was which is due to the fact that I already had prior knowledge, but where does that leave those who don't?

By the way, if you’re wondering why this has been grouped under this category, it’s because I remembered from Grade 6 science class that anger is one way to trigger adrenaline in the body.

Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan) ★★★★★

Perfect always felt like a lazy way to describe what is supposed to be of superior quality. If you want to sing praises about anything that good, you're gonna have to do a better job than that to convince anyone that it's worth their time: was it inventive and bold or cerebral or emotional? Well, I'm afraid I have to bend this rule for Inception for the sake of brevity, because if I leave myself to ramble on about everything this did right, I would surely run out of adjectives. This sci-fi-heist-psychological thriller is in a league of its own, with its intricate plot and layered method of storytelling further amplified by stellar cast performances, masterful editing and special effects, and a thundering musical score that keeps audiences on edge for the entirety of its run. These elements come together to create a production that resonates and lingers with viewers long after the credits have rolled, partly thanks to that highly disputed final scene. (If my opinion is worth anything here, I believed that it stopped. Iykyk.)

The Lobster (2015, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) ★★★★½

In this dystopian society, single people are required to check into a hotel in the hopes of finding a suitable partner within 45 days. If they fail to do so, they are sentenced to live the rest of their lives as an animal of their choice. It’s an absurd plot, far removed from reality, executed in a bleak and dry fashion. Yet, it manages to mirror and even satirize the world of modern relationships rather profoundly, particularly the societal pressure to couple up and find our ideal match instantly, or face harsh judgment. I doubt I've watched anything this dark in my life, but I found the unpredictable twists and turns, the deadpan humor, the sheer strangeness of it all very amusing and recommend it to anybody who wants to learn a thing or two about how blind love can be.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001, dir. Steven Soderbergh) ★★★★

I admit I was as pissed as Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) following his discovery that the reason why Danny Ocean (George Clooney) was keen on carrying out an elaborate heist of the three biggest casinos in Las Vegas was to win his wife (Julia Roberts) back. But, along the way, I was reeled in by the airtight pacing of the multiple scams that were a part of the scheme and the natural banter that takes place among the members of the ensemble. Also, it’s quite impossible to be annoyed at something that starred so many big names during the peak of their careers. (I have a soft spot for Matt Damon, thanks a lot Good Will Hunting.) Although I already knew what was going to happen, it was a joyride to see everything unfold. Based on the ending (and the copies of Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen that my dad owned as a kid), I can tell that it’s far from over and I’m surely looking forward to what happens next.

So, that’s it for today’s round-up! Hope something caught your interest: I’d be happy to send 123m*vies links for any of those that aren’t available on Netflix. Feel free to hit me up too: I'm honestly up for thought-provoking discussions and straight-up keyboard smashing. Wishing you love and light always, and don’t forget to wash your hands, check your privilege and pray for our frontliners!

#recs #angeltriestoblog #life dump #movies #movies to watch during quarantine #my eyes are irreparably strained #quarantingz

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zacfaq · 8 years

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PLEASE DON’T SEND ME “PASS IT ON” MESSAGES !! as sweet as some of they are they can be really annoying. i don’t check my PMs here! if you need to get ahold of me either send me an ask, or email me.

apparently necessary reminder: google exists! i’m not a know-it-all source, honestly i shouldn’t even be your second plan after google unless it’s a question specifically based on me or something relating to me

i try to avoid fandom drama as much as possible and keep a generally positive space, so please don’t come and ask me about stuff like that. thanks.

if you want to commission me please send an email to [email protected]. do not email me through this address if your intentions are purely social and not work related

-what do you use to record and edit your speedpaints?

i use OBS to record, and edit in sony vegas

-what do you use to draw?

huion gt-191 and clip studio paint

-what are your pen settings?

just the default settings. all my custom stuff/things i’ve downloaded from CSP assets are just things i think look neat but probably never end up using.

-a blog called papersans is claiming to be you! are they a thief?

that’s literally me, i use it to archive my art so i can find stuff easier without having to hunt through my tag. also available for people who just want to see my art n not my other posts

-when is your birthday?

february 6th!

-what is your sexuality?

gay. i like men.

-how long does it take you to draw?

idk like. awhile? sometimes 45 minutes sometimes four hours sometimes a week.

-can i draw you/your ocs?

of course! pls show me after it would make me very happy !!!!!

-favourite band/singer/musician?

i don’t know a damn thing about myself here’s a spotify playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Zk5o5g7nMnGt0vrJVEcDq?si=7cd248a0b64046ee

-will you do art for cheap/free?

nah. art is currently the only job/income i have, if ur interested in commissioning me you can either find my prices on like, any of my pages, but if not ur more than welcome to email me @ [email protected] and i can give you prices there !! -(venting or something involving abuse, suicidal thoughts, self harm, bullying, eating disorders, or other similar things in real life situations. even in fiction i’m iffy.)

i hate to sound rude or not be of help, but please don’t send these messages to me. they send me into horrible anxiety for several personal reasons. if you’re having such negative thoughts i implore you to speak to someone you trust without an anonymous mask, or do your best to seek help from a professional. i have my own things to worry about and as much as i’d like to help, i simply can’t.

-(asking for advice that isn’t related to art)

i would love to help but i’m not an ~all knowing source~. i can’t give you tips for school. i can’t give you tips for life. not only will i probably not know a solution for you but there’s likely a chance i’m in just as bad a situation as you/going through the same problem, as silent as i am about my personal life. also don’t use ‘asking for advice’ as an excuse to vent about things or to send me a paragraph describing in depth something listed above/that’s potentially triggering. thank you.

even if you’re looking fr art tips i’m not a great source i’m still learning, ur best bet is looking for already existing sources and reading through those bc i don’t preach the word of Art God. i’m also awful at explaining things

-why didn’t you answer my ask?

Main reason is i’m just really really bad at socializing, so it’s not anything on u. i’m almost always low on energy and when i do talk to people it wears me out really quick. i’m also just. not gr8 at talking in general so if i can’t think of a reply i tend to just leave things n then end up forgetting about them

-how do you draw [blank]?

honestly my art style is such a fucked up thing that’s so personalized to my own use i can’t do or make tutorials. the best i can do is direct you to my youtube.

-can we do an art trade?

sorry, i’ll have to say no. i’m not necessarily busy but i get stressed very easily, so i try to keep my art to either personal stuff or work ! if you would like art from me, please considering commissioning me! mutuals and friends may be the exceptions here if they catch me at a good time or we make plans well ahead to do smth when we’re both free to work on stuff

-can we be friends?

please don’t ask this. i’m awful enough at socialization as is and i just don’t fit well with most personality types. not to mention this is just overall a bad question. it backs the person being asked into a corner where they either have to say “yes” and end up in a friendship that actually isn’t working out and is maybe only good for one side bc they’re getting any and all of the benefits, and if they say “no” they look like a total dick bag and come across as an ass. don’t ask this question. it’s not how socializing works. it’s not how friendships work. thanks. -can you tag [blank]? unfortunately i’ve been a real bad place in terms of memory so i can’t tag tons and tons of things. i try and tag more general/basic things but i’m sorry i’ll have to pass on specifics. if i post or reblog things that trigger u or harm you it might be best to unfollow for ur own safety!! very sorry

if it’s specific words you’d like tagged please consider blacklisting the word itself.

-how tall are you?

i’m 5'11".

-can you promo me?

i’d rather not, doesn’t sit well with me. if you have a commission post you want me to reblog i’m happy to! but i won’t just do text based handouts, y’know? not a fan of being used for visibility for no reason, and chances are if i do it for one person it’ll happen with hundreds of others and i don’t want my blog to turn into a free advertisement zone that just floods peoples’ feeds with promotions.

-you reblogged something from someone extremely problematic/unsafe

thank you for letting me know! tell me what it is they did, even better offer proof on it. i’ll likely delete the post and blacklist their url to hopefully prevent their name popping up on my blog in the future. i won’t publish these asks mostly to avoid discourse or in the event false information is provided. sorta just safety precaution i guess

-you’ve done something bad

again, thank you for letting me know! if i post or say something questionable please feel free to message me and i’ll try my best to address the issue and adjust accordingly. i’m aiming to grow as a person so critique is welcome, both on me and my artwork. don’t just come up and call me an asshole or a prick or something, actually point out the errors and explain why they’re wrong so i can better understand and it doesn’t just turn into a defensive round of who’s worse, because i tend to be a very defensive person.

-i think someone is stealing/reposting your art!

thank you very much for telling me! don’t message them right off the bat, come to me first and i will deal with it. i’ve dealt with this shit tons of times and it’s tiring as fuck but i’d rather repeat the same stupid civil message over and over again than start a giant calamity over something and end up with someone getting hurt. if you do get involved please stay polite about it don’t throw insults just a simple “hey this art was done by princeofmints/tv-headache/zachary jack/dirtypip/(etc my other account names) and he doesn’t want his art reposted, please take this down or add proper credit.”

-can i use your art as an icon?

sure man. only on places like instagram, tumblr, or twitter though, and proper credit in an easy to see place must be given. if a piece of art is of my ocs or especially vent art though never use it for icons. thank you.

-can i repost your art?

the answer is “no” but i know you’re going to do it anyways. easy to see credit is mandatory. if you see somebody reposting my art please let me know and i’ll talk to them. if you want to use my art in things like image edits, i don’t allow that. want to use my art in a video? if it’s something like an AMV sure fine just credit me and inform me beforehand, if it’s something like a cringe/comparison video. no. i don’t want any association with work like that whatsoever. you may not use my artwork for fanfic covers.

-can i colour/finish one of your sketches?

no. even if you don’t intend on posting it.

-what is [insert some form of media/fandom]

https://www.google.ca/

-why do you have an entirely separate blog for your FAQ? you know you can make blog pages, right?

i’m well aware of that and originally my faq WAS set up on a blog page, but unfortunately many folks proved to be either lazy or just couldn’t figure out how to get to a blog page on mobile so i had to set it up this way for accessibility purposes.

-tons of your videos are gone, what happened to them? will they come back? can you repost them?

i set old videos on private for my own sake, i don’t like having my old content available bc it just looks old and stale and i don’t like it. there’s nothing deep about it, i just don’t want people interacting with my old stuff. as deep is it gets is i just deleted videos related to fandoms i’m sick of bc the association is fuckin annoying. these videos will not come back into public. i do keep them posted for my own reflection sake, but that’s it. don’t ask me to bring them back. don’t whine about me not putting shit back out just bc ur a little sad n gonna cry. guilting people is gross, reevaluate yourself.

if you want a song from an old video, just ask me! I’ll happily let you know what the music is in case u liked ‘em and can’t remember the titles or artists. i’ve also got a playlist full of the music i listen to so u can comb through there n see if the songs u want are there

#prince peeps

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