#i resent this hellsite

[no6secretsanta]

Happy belated Secret Santa 2023 to kerminty from @i-resent-this-hellsite! I'm sorry it took me so long and I'm already drawing you something else too.

[florbelles]

CELEMINA GREINATUS + having a normal one [six/∞]

[reallygroovyninja]

[gunsatthaphan]

✌🏻✨ ~ 2023 wrap-up ~ ✨✌🏻

another year gone, another post no one asked for djkghdf

I normally don't talk about personal stuff on here but like in the previous year I wanted do a little recap and give shoutouts to some lovely people 🧡

It hasn't been an easy year for me, I started a new job which has been stressful and annihilated my work-life balance which resulted in me being sick a lot & just being stressed for most of the year lol. I barely found time to maintain this blog which may not seem like it on the outside since I somehow managed to frequently post but it's been difficult. I know I don't have to be online 24/7 but the fear of slipping into irrelevancy due to lack of content remains. I didn't have much time to watch bls & asian shows in general which I still consider my safe space and escapism so I'm resentful that I didn't get to fully take in and enjoy the things I'm passionate about and make content about them like I did in the previous years. That being said thank god for all the weekend shows that I did manage to watch and fully focus on like Only Friends and now Cooking Crush and Cherry Magic. Those have been life savers lol and also thank god for all the talented creators who gave us tons of content; I will mention some of them below.

But aside from my personal schedule and despite not watching a lot of stuff, I still tried to keep an eye on what's going on in the BL world for my monthly breakdowns, which I still enjoy making and I will likely continue them in 2024. I also came to the conclusion that 2023 ended up being another rendition of quantity > quality in the BL-verse so not much has changed lol - not that I expected it to. We got a wild and extended mix of different genres and subgenres this year which was nice to see. We saw companies & actors experimenting a lot (with varying results), we got new ships, new fandoms and new enemies, as well as a variety of comebacks and retirements. My watchlist this year was limited to Thai BLs and my blog mostly consisted of gmmtv related content and like I said, if I had had more time I probably would have explored more different shows - but I eventually resorted to what's familiar. I guess I needed an anchor in midst of all my personal chaos lol.

But despite my short list, there were a few gems that I enjoyed. The big ones like Only Friends, Moonlight Chicken, Be My Favorite, etc., and the small, less popular ones like Be Mine Superstar, Mission Fan Possible and a few more. I enjoyed talking to friends & making content about them in the limited timeframes I had. My opinions mostly matched those of the general public but unfortunately there were a few disappointments that were bathing in a success that I could not wrap my head around - Dangerous Romance and A Boss and a Babe being at the top of that list, followed by La Pluie and also a few of the lakorns I watched. But anyway.

Anyone who knows me knows my blog has been 83% FirstKhao this year lmao, they're my favorite people in this industry and watching them act, interact & making content about them has been one of my highlights. I'm excited to see what 2024 brings for them and even if it's not a series, I'm looking forward to seeing what else they will be up to 🥺 🐈‍⬛ 🐈

I'm going into 2024 with mixed feelings but above all I hope I will get the chance to expand my watchlist a little. I will post a personal top10 of the shows I watched this year shortly; until then I want to talk a bit about some lovely people this year - I’m not good with words lmao but thank you for being you and making this hellsite a better place 🥹 lol.

@leonpob - bestie!!! 🧡 our BL opinions have drifted apart this year lmao but who's to say friendships are solely based on mutual opinions. You're the best, stay the way you are and here's to another year of sharing thoughts and hopefully finding more shows to watch together (no matter if trash or not lol) 😉😘  @mayalunas - ahhhh I loved talking to you sooo so much this year, we agree on so many things that I'm convinced we share the same BL braincells lmao. You're one of my favorite people on this website, thank you for being such a good listener and a positive & supportive person to talk to 🥺 I hope you have the best 2024!!! ily!!! 🧡 @khunvegas - GURL idk where you went this year or if you still exist sdjkds but just know I haven't forgotten about you and I miss our talks 🥺 come back pls thank. @my-wandering-rabbit - I love our random out-of-context talks once a month lmao, I appreciate you and I hope we will continue our ritual of me watching shows and you asking me questions without watching them kjsdhg @bl-recs-and-reviews - Bestie!!! I love our catch-ups on Discord, you were one of the first people I ever talked to like 4 years ago? crazy. look at us. I still love you, you're the sweetest and I love talking to you 🧡🥺 @dreamedofyou - ahh I absolutely love your blog!!! I noticed you a lot in my notifications this year so I wanted to say thank you so much for interacting with my unhinged content (mostly FK related lmao) - We haven't talked a ton but I think of you as a very nice person and I hope we can talk more next year 🥹🫶🏻

and then of course some more shoutouts go out to all the wonderful and talented creators out there; I will never be able to tag all of you so sorry in advance but here are a few that I appreciate, some of which have also mentioned me in their wrap-up posts so thank you for that!!!

@taeminie @seatawinan @loveisactivated @forcebook @jimmysea @guzhu-furen @daymork @itsallaboutbl @seatawinans @blneobin @blmpfff @wanderlust-in-my-soul @pranpat @milkpansa @raypakorn @ahxu-laowen @forcebookish @forcebookcorner @morkofday @chinzillas @seajimmy @dimpledpran @i-got-the-feels @bengiyo @benkaaoi @25shadesoffebruary @moonkhao @smittenskitten @respectthepetty @earthfluuke @pharawee @khaotunq @khaotunqs @pranink @gabrielokun @piningintrovert @zhaozi @markpakin @firstkanaphans @firstforkhao @khaotungsfirst @wen-kexing-apologist @firstkpp @firstmix @bunnakit @khaothanawat @alienwlw @ffirstkhao (I can't tag the last 4 for some reason..)

have the best 2024!!!

🧡🧡🧡

[deoidesign]

okay so ages ago on the Bird Hellsite I saw someone make a coat entirely out of worm on a strings so now we have that incredibly cursed mental image right. My question to you is who in the TTA cast would be most likely to wear that thing and why is it Steve?

Oh, I met someone who did that a few years ago! Might have been the same person tbh.

I think a number of the minor characters would happily wear it, but the one most likely to make it would be Ash from the ghost hunting arc. Steve would wear it too, but Adam could make it work.

I had a grudge for years against worm on a string though... It was 2014. Flying across the country with my art class for the final judging of a competition. New York City, baby. Every day was constant activity; always going to a different event, a different activity, a different project...

And the stage was set: A small budget for the ILNY tourist store, two exhausted teenagers, and a misleading ad. The sound was off, and without captions we were left to assume... And we believed if the worms got wet, they would squirm. It made sense why they were $20 with technology like that.

Me and my best friend bought the worm on a string. We named him... Hal. It was all we talked about that day, the anticipation of getting back to the hotel.

Finally we get to our room. I was more excited about this than about being in the top 5 for a contest with a $50,000 prize. We opened the package, deterred by none of the signs, confirmation bias in full force... What's this string? Oh, it must be so they don't squirm away and get lost!

Fools.

Two fools standing over the bathroom sink, Hal in ones hands, and the other turning on the faucet. Nothing. A gentle shake of the lifeless soggy body. Still nothing.

And then the dawning realization: The worm was never gonna squirm around. We were duped.

How could we let that go... For years, I didn't.

I've since developed a fondness. It was never Hal's fault. We were exhausted, not thinking straight, and we blamed him for our own failure. I can only try to make amends... But I truly believe Hal never held resentment in his fuzzy blue heart.

Anyways we got second place and then the next year we won but that's less important.

[tavina-writes]

This is entirely copied from my reblog of this post, but I just thought I'd put this in a post of my own for safekeeping on this hellsite or I'd literally never find the translation of Xingnv's Lament I did for this reblog ever again but. Anyway!

Whenever I think about the fact that like, people claim historical people grieved less about child and infant mortality I want to start biting because here's the translation of the Cao Zhi's poem on losing a daughter (yes the Cao Zhi of the infamous bean poem/Seven Step Quatrain fame) written sometime in the 200s AD: 行女哀辞

序：行女生于季秋，而终于首夏。三年之中，二子频丧。 伊上帝之降命，何修短之难哉；或华发以终年，或怀妊而逢灾。 感前哀之未阕，复新殃之重来！方朝华而晚敷，比晨露而先晞。 感逝者之不追，情忽忽而失度。天盖高而无阶，怀此恨其谁诉！

Xingnv's Lament

Preface: My youngest daughter, Xingnv, was born in late autumn and died in early summer of the following year. In just three years, two beloved daughters died one after another. The heavens grant precious life to people, yet why is the length of that life so hard to guess Some people are fortunate to live to old age, others die young in the womb I have yet to finish grieving for Jinhu*, yet I have to see Xingnv** buried in dust This poor child falls like the hibiscus, life drying like the morning dew I thought of that young life that could never return, and lose my normal composure Resenting that the heavens have no stairs for me to climb, to pour out the sorrows of my heart

*Jinhu is the first child that he mentioned

**Xingnv is the daughter he dedicated this poem to

Like! DESPITE what people will tell you people often grieved their children, yes, even daughters which, historical fiction SO often say that fathers hated having Girl Children or whatever. We only know Cao Jinhu and Cao Xingnv's names because their father wrote them down. And grieved their absence.

"Resenting that the heavens have no stairs for me to climb" is SO bleak and so utterly fucking devastating.

[ariadne-mouse]

I really appreciate what tumblr is trying to do with Communities but truly the way they roll out most new features is SO clunky and hostile (in a user acceptance sense). Like the Communities option has been in the sidebar menu for ages but still only has "create new" as an option so you can't browse from there, but you also can't move or hide it if you're not in any communities. It's in the very space-limited menu on mobile too, but same issue - it's not a hub, it's a place where communities that you make or join will be listed, and therefore useless and frustrating if you don't have any. Search function for communities is improving but there is still no place to actually browse, it's just hit or miss searching for things you might be interested in. And now there is the "Suggested Communities" block in the drop down of the search bar on desktop, which also cannot be changed (either to hide or an "I'm not interested" feature) pushing the followed tags which I actually use further down the menu. Look tumblr I know I have "mouse" in my user handle but I do not actually want to join a community just because it has "mouse" in the header name, and there is no way for me to get this out of my suggested communities, and so I just slowly, incrementally resent the feature as it continues to minutely clog up useful functions without providing benefit or a meaningful entry point. I love this hellsite (affectionate) but sometimes it can be very hellsite (derogatory).

[painfullymeta]

Warning: I'm Gonna Be Earnest Now

I am deep in my feels right at the moment so I am actually making a post of my own on this, the deep in my feels hellsite.

I am late GenX.  (Not quite what gets called Xennial IMO but definitely in what gets called the Oregon Trail (Micro)Generation.)  And for all you young whippersnappers, you have to understand "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” ( - L. P. Hartley)

I am old enough to remember when AIDS was named GRID.  ("Gay-related immune deficiency.”)  I am old enough to remember ACT-UP, the Reagans’ abandonment, “If I die of AIDS just leave me on the steps of the FDA”, all those things that tired older people on tumblr try to remind people of when the TERFs come around to tell us to stop saying “queer” as if Queer Nation was a goddamn hallucination I had when I was a kid.

On the last day of high school, after the last exam, when none of us would have to ever see each other again if we so chose – that was the day that one of my friends, someone I had eaten lunch near every day since partway through freshman year, said to me “I have something to tell you.  I’m gay.”  And then he followed it up with “Is that okay?”

I hugged him.  He broke my goddamn heart and I hugged him.  "Is that okay," he asked me. Is it okay to be who I am, near you.

I was in college before I met someone who identified herself as a lesbian — and I went to a women’s college until I lost my shit and dropped out, and I expect that if I hadn’t done that I might have gone longer.

(Of course at the same time as I was clueless and not meaningfully connected with any sort of queer culture I somehow wound up with a friendgroup who, if we got bored and couldn’t come up with anything else to do, would watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show together.  This is what we did instead of going to Homecoming.)

By 2000, I was vaguely aware of trans things existing, and in fact met my first trans person while at Brighton Pride that year, though we didn’t really speak (I was there as the guest of some people in his extended social group) and I was vaguely confused and too awkward to try to do more than ‘observe and try not to fuck this up’.  I met a nonbinary person for the first time around then as well, and zie was the only one I knew of for nearly a decade.

By the mid-oughts I was with it enough to ask someone what pronouns she wanted me to use for her before sharing something about her on a message board.

(I am also old enough to have spent time on multiple message boards.  I’m old enough to resent the internet going through the world wide web instead of email and usenet actually.)

Sometime in the early oughts I guess I was at the subcommittee hearing in the Boston State House that was discussing, among other things, whether we might consider possibly condescending to allow same-sex couples to marry.  I was even going to testify!  (Please be impressed with my early twenties autistic ass I was terrified.)  There was a guy there - a senator on the committee - who was asking every person who came up if they were going to force his church to marry the gays.  Catholic, y’know, this being Massachusetts.  I revised my speech in my head to note that if we weren’t forcing the Catholic churches to marry divorcees yet he didn’t need to worry about it.

(Then my nose decided to haemhorrage all over my entire life and I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding so rather than testify while looking like an entire murder victim I went home.)

I was in my thirties when pregnancy-induced dysphoria made me start seriously thinking about my own sense of gender.

I was in my forties before I bought a binder.

I am from another fucking planet.  (The past is a foreign country.)

I know kids - multiple kids - who knew enough to identify as lesbians at an age younger than I think I knew that word.  (And I am one of those humans of freakish and unreasonable vocabulary and always have been.)

I crack jokes with one of my kids about the Queer Kids Stairs at their school, because that’s where the GSA kids hang out together after activities get out.  (While GSAs were around while I was a kid, they started in Massachusetts according to Wikipedia and that is not where I was when I was a kid, and to my best recollection I didn’t hear about them existing at all until I was an adult.)

I live in a world where my social circles include queer people of my generation, of older generations, of younger generations, and oh my gods, I look at the kids and my heart tries to explode.

My oldest knows more than one trans kid.  More than one *affirmed* trans kid.  (And we’ve talked a bit about the social dynamics that might make it more likely for the trans boys to be out than the trans girls, even now.)

And I’m writing this because of one of those trans boys, who is in the Coming of Age group at our church, and who is, apparently, in his credo, citing that thing I’ve seen on the tumblrs more than once, about how being trans means being a participant in the holy, divine process of creation, coming into being as himself.

And guys?

I’m not from the same planet as that kid.

Because I’m in my forties and I don’t even know what I’m creating.  And I’m terrified.

And here’s this kid coming out there with that as a core statement of belief that he’s prepared to stand up in front of, as the phrase goes ‘God and everyone’, to claim.

(I need to remember to talk to him about how in my Craft tradition there’s a canonically transmasc god.)

I know I’ve got at least two teenagers reading me and I just.  Y’all got this.  I know it’s hard and the world is scary and it’s fucking coming for us all but you are amazing and I am so full of inarticulate alexithymic feelings about all of you. The ones I know and the ones I don't.

We've come a long way from "Is that okay?" and you heal my broken heart.

[assortedseaglass]

It’s my birthday! To celebrate, I’m giving gifts to some of my favourite people on my favourite hellsite. There’s been a fair amount of hate, despondency and general sad vibes here lately, so let’s combat that!

@arcielee

I mean, honestly, where do I begin?

Something special happened the first moment you comment on a fic of mine. I went down a complete rabbit hole of reading, and while all of your work is incredibly special to me, Silver Coins and Peace Beneath the City are always on my favourites list.

Your writing is utterly spellbinding. You have a knack for understanding characters that I truly admire (and slightly resent hehe). The way you put them in situations that always feel true to character and canon, while making them entirely unique is a real gift.

And your prose! Good Lord, it's exceptional. The fluidity and ease of your sentences makes all your writing a joy to read. It's clear that you are a natural born writer, and that so much love and thought has gone into your craft. The way you use language to reflect the content and context of a piece of work is second-to-none, and if people want a clear example of this then please read Her Salvation, His Damnation. A story about seduction, lust, guilt, death, and the writing is seductive, sexy and heart wrenching. I felt pulled towards this amazing woman, as Osferth did. Just spectacular.

Aside from your incomparable writing, you are an incredible friend. You always have the time to listen to me. Whether I'm exceedingly thirsty heheh, cannot find the motivation to write, need to work out some issues or just want to chat, there's no-one I'd rather do it with than you. 💗

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for inspiring me, helping me be better and always being there. This isn't enough to say how wonderful you are, and how much you are a part of the whole fandom experience for me, but thank you, thank you, thank you.

H x

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hurling another enrichment pumpkin at you : any thoughts on how Secrets handles its sociopolitical themes? I haven't had the chance to check the podcast out personally so far but from what I've seen on tumblr it seems to take a much less vague approach to those themes than even Unburied did, and considering how multiple people mentioned that the podcast seems a bit rushed, do you think that affected the handling of this too?

one of the things I did really like was removing any ambiguity as to whether or not we're supposed to interpret this version of the Riddler as a Muslim Indian man, and I think it's fair to assume that by extension that this cements Bruce and Barbara as Black and Latina, respectively. I don't think any of those were really controversial opinions, especially per the fandom I see on our glorious hellsite, but the conformation is cool!

I think exploring the way that Eddie's status as a brown man would contribute to his sense of disenfranchisement and resentment for Society is interesting for sure. it's also used to enable some like... COMPELLING bastard behavior that's very specific to him as a man of color, namely misleading the GCPD to arrest some entirely unrelated Indian man that they can't tell apart from Eddie, and the bit where he's having his little tantrum re: his sister's social climbing and insinuates that she probably has a white husband/boyfriend, which is a thing Asian women are FREQUENTLY attacked for in Asian incel communities. interesting move, I applaud.

I was less impressed by how the series handled its humanization of criminals and incarcerated individuals, which I wrote about a lot on this post about the depiction of Azrael. idk, I like that the rogues look out for each other and we get to see the horrors of realizing that you're so dehumanized by society that your vicious murder becomes a meme, that's a perspective on Gotham's rogues that I feel we don't get a lot! but the series seemed to waffle pretty hard on its own stance on this, Batman seems to be operating a pretty different wavelength than he was at the end of Unburied (he's soooo much more of a cop), and I also genuinely don't know what to do with the reveal that this version of King Tut was running a sex cult, especially since literally the only person who criticized him for that was. you know. also responsible for several brutal murders.

at risk of harping on this too much it feels very strange that a series would be so invested in the humanity of villains and then also have an actual antagonist who's as one note as Azrael is made out to be and gets offed with so little fanfare. the series' other big issue seems to be coming down hard on the side of "we hate violent Christian fundamentalists, they're Bad" and like. yeah, I agree, and that obviously ties in very closely with exploring racism and Islamaphobia that the Riddler has grown up experiencing, but as I said in the other post it's also uuuuuh very weird to make Jean-Paul the narrative scapegoat for far right fundie Christians when, in the comics, that's not his bag at all. he's a dangerous and careless Batman, sure, but he's also very much a victim of the Order of St. Dumas, and it feels like both a sloppy use of the character and a WILDLY missed opportunity to explore the church as a corrupt system akin to Strange's medical abuses in Arkham and everything about the GCPD. idk, it feels like Secrets in the Dark just really jettisoned much more interesting potential stories building on Unburied's themes in favor of a much more black and white narrative.

tl;dr I cannot believe that Secrets in the Dark has forced me to point to David S. Goyer as a comparative paragon of nuance and taste!!! what!!!

[missingexaltation]

Just an FYI for anyone following me for steddie reasons....I'm done. No more from me.

I loved this pairing when it was fairly equal, but at heart I'm more of an Eddie fan than a Steve one (I relate to him more, that's all), but the steddie tag on Tumblr has become a kind of 'Eddie fucks up and hurts Steve and has to prove himself' space, which really annoys me.

Steve's not a perfect character, he's flawed and fucked up too, but not on this hellsite. Every ficlet in the steddie tag is 'Eddie did something wrong and Steve shouldn't forgive him but will because he's A Good Guy, Eddie makes up for What He Did and they live happily until Eddie fucks up again'.

Or worse, actually, sometimes it's 'Eddie is the third wheel in his own relationship and should be grateful that Steve loves him because Eddie keeps fucking up...but it's ok because Steve's true love is Robin and doesn't need Eddie anyway'.

Honestly, look out for it in each fic posted on here and it's pretty likely that you'll see it. It's mostly pro stobin and lukewarm to steddie, which is weird in a ship tag.

It's kind of making me resent Steve and Robin's characters, so I'm noping out while I'm ahead. They're portrayed as pretty OOC most of the time, not anything like the characters I liked in the actual show.

So this is my last steddie related post, feel free to unfollow, I don't mind! I'm going back to my gaming roots (if you haven't noticed already lmao).

Love you all! Xxxxxx

[sarah-dipitous]

Hellsite Nostalgia Tour 2023 Day 82

Jump the Shark

"Jump the Shark"

Plot Description: A 19 year old boy named Adam calls Sam and Dean looking for John Winchester; the boy claims to be his son.

Would I Survive the First Five Minutes??: If there's one thing I've learned in nearly four full seasons, don't fuck a Winchester. You're gonna die. So, I think I'm good.

This week's run of episodes has been buck wild. I mean, we got backstory, pure angst, astral projection, one of the BEST and most DRAMA FILLED episodes I've seen, alternate universe, meeting god, and now secret family member. I feel like I'm just WATCHING ao3. There's one thing missing (this being Supernatural and all), but I'M not missing it.

Oh they got the back window of the impala fixed. Dean's having the ROUGHEST of mornings. He didn't look this rough CRAWLING OUT OF THE GRAVE.

I LOVE how skeptical Dean is. You really can't be too careful. At the same time, everything being presented as evidence that Adam is telling the truth, and Dean's just dismissing it as coincidence...you've never done that before, babe. The daddy issues are so fucking strong in this one. I should know, I specialize in characters with daddy issues

NO I'M NOT FUCKING CRYING. I'm not crying because Adam got the dad who took him to BASEBALL GAMES. They might not have been close while Adam was growing up, but the moment John knew about Adam's existence, he dropped EVERYTHING (*cough his other sons but really mostly Dean because Sam was in college doing his own thing cough*) to go meet him. It might not have been the perfect parent-child relationship and it was probably still fairly distant, but it's a hell of a lot more than Dean got. (Did Horikoshi watch Supernatural before writing MHA? Did he see this and go "I could do a family drama like this") John made it to Adam's birthdays but Dean had to steal Christmas presents so Sam would have something to open...I'M GONNA FUCKING SCREAM AND THEN BEAT JOHN WITH A BAT IN HELL. ALISTAIR WON'T HAVE TIME TO TORTURE ME, I'D HOP OFF THAT RACK TO KICK THE SHIT OUT OF JOHN WINCHESTER IM-FUCKING-MEDIATELY.

God, Dean, petty is a good look on you, I swear. Adam's just finding out that a whole lot of movie and mythological monsters and creatures are real, and your only comment is that Godzilla is just a movie.

GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD, sorry, I'm having so many big feelings about Dean today. He's so furious at John. He's so disgusted that Adam had the relationship with John that Dean had for a short time, til he was four, and it was ripped away from him. That was the relationship HE wanted, that HE deserved to have, and he did EVERYTHING TO HOPEFULLY MAKE HIS DAD PROUD OF HIM, followed in EVERY SINGLE FOOT STEP. BUT JOHN NEVER WAS. JOHN ONLY EVER SAW DEAN'S MISTAKES. IT'S HOW DEAN KNEW AZAZEL WAS POSSESSING JOHN BECAUSE HE FORGAVE DEAN'S MISTAKE AND DIDN'T MAKE IT A BIG DEAL. BUT DEAN'S STILL DOING IT by protecting Adam. By saying "Dad didn't want our lives for Adam, and I'm going to keep it that way." Aren't you tired of being nice, Dean? Don't you just wanna go apeshit?

(It's going to take me so long to get through this episode if I keep stopping to make Dean/Touya parallels.)

What the fuck is this monster??

Oh, Sammy, you're more like your old man than you want to admit. You find out you have a little brother and it's IMMEDIATELY "let's train him to be a hunter, he needs to be ready for anything that might come after him." You would hardly believe this is the same Sam who wanted to walk away from this life, who did for a while and went to college and law school, who resented John for making their lives like this.

Oh, but at the same time...at the same time he thinks he's just being like Dean was for him. Doing what he can to look out for him, offering praise when he does something well...his insistence that Adam join in is very John but his approach to teaching Adam is all Dean

Sam. No. John did not do right by you boys. I can't believe you're saying this...Ugggghhhhhh, Sam wants to drag Adam down into the hell that is their lives because his chance at that got ruined. But Dean wants to give Adam the chance that got taken from Sam.

Y'all are both jealous of him...stop lying to yourselves.

Oh shit. Oh fuck. WHAT??? HOW LONG HAS ADAM NOT BEEN ADAM??? Oh...it was the whole time...cool.

So, what term DO you prefer, ma'am?

Did...did ya get that out of your system for another couple seasons, Dean? First Baby took a beating after John died, now you beat in the head of the ghoul who pretended to be the little brother you didn't know you had...What's to come near the end of season six? (Aside from my favorite Cas-centric episode)

THAT'S WHAT I SAID, DEAN!!!!! "you know why you and dad butted heads so much? you're practically the same person" and "you're more like him than I'll ever be" (derogatory)

"Been On My Mind...": No. 8...???

[pouryourselfacupoffuckrightoff]

I want this. I want it so bad but I think we will need to burn down the world around the wealthy, have the pitchforks at their very throats before they’ll give up the ability to show up the other guy. To win. To have the newest best one of one super car. To have a bigger yacht you never go on.

They will have to think they’re literally on the menu for dinner tonight before they’ll give up a cent. And even then we might have to eat a few before other ones get what’s happening properly.

Look at the handwringing (on this hellsite and others) about how the majority of people were openly celebrating the deaths by misadventure of those billionaires in the submersible OceanGate bullshit. The majority of people are not just willing to joke about these stupid deaths but were actively delighting in the memes of it all.

The laboring class the world over looked at these billionaires and laughed. We would laugh at Richard Branson if his stupid almost-a-space-ship-but-not-quite thing crashed and burned him up in it. We would laugh our broke asses off if Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk actually entered a ring and fought. I’d spend dollars I should save on that pay per view and call it self care.

The anger and resentment are seething among everyone who isn’t rich. I hope we don’t need the pitchforks to get real change. I do. But I think there will be blood on the streets before it’s over. Maybe capping capitalism at 999 million could do it? I just don’t think the billionaires will give up a red cent unless it’s pried out of their cold dead hands.

Source

Interesting to call this “confiscating” when it’s just making the rich pay their fair share, especially considering all the stolen wealth from the bottom 99% and historic tax evasion.

[moonlight-emo]

Stigmus: The Strangeness

So... This is my first post, I don't know how this hellsite works but I'm gonna try anyways.

I'll format these posts a bit weird, the title is basically the name of the setting this is from followed by the thing about that world I'm trying to explain since my blog is going to be mostly about the worldbuilding I've done.

I'll start with an old setting I don't use anymore, mostly because I lost all of it to a dumb mistake.

The Strangeness was a weird phenomenon that took place in Stigmus where information would randomly disappear. Not only from books and the walls of ruins but also from people's minds which meant that everyone lived in fear of suddenly forgetting their loved ones or other things that meant a lot to them.

This obviously shaped a lot of the culture in the world for example most people saw being a historian as a lost cause, since the information you spent your whole life gathering could someday be completely erased from existance. Your entire life's work, gone in an instance to a whim of fate. Despite this, many still pursued history believing it was worth it, if history was erased so be it but they would gather as much of it as they could and teach it to the world.

The origin of The Strangeness was... Well, strange (Please forgive me) it all began with a king who had taken his crown really early in life with the death of his father. He didn't really know how to lead a country and so his counselors, the eleven archmages of the Regnum, basically leaving him to be an extremely powerful idiot who wasn't really good at much. But he eventually fell in love and had a beautiful daughter, though this was at the expense of his lover who died at childbirth despite all the resources and magic at his disposal. He promised the man he loved (I... I don't think I need to clarify this, but it was a trans man... That's why he could birth) that he would take care of his daughter even if it meant destroying the world for her. To his dismay when his daughter was barely thirteen years old she fell ill to a terrible disease nothing could cure, there was no medicine, potion nor healing magic that could deal with such terrible ailment that had the girl bedridden for years. Eventually, desperate, the king started investigating old myths and legends until he found something that, if real, could work: The legend of the Wish Stone.

You see, despite being a DnD setting, there isn't such a thing as a wish spell in Stigmus; there aren't genies or similar creatures. The idea of something altering reality to such degree is ridiculous to the people of this world. But through a lot of research and resources the king eventually found his way to a continent lost to time where the stone waited to be rediscovered in some ancient ruins. The king made his wish holding the stone and with tears on his eyes "Cure my little girl, whatever it takes" and the stone granted his wish. Though the king's research never told the him that within the stone resided a guardian; a guardian who had grown bitter and resentful a creature simply named "Wish" who, for every wish made with the stone, got a wish for themselves. And so, with the king's wish, the guardian's plan was set in motion and the first step was to plunge the world into chaos, to make sure it could not organize against the plan.

The wish of the guardian was simple; to make the world be just as the king thought it was. Most countries became mere shadows of what they actually were and the information of the world, having to go all through a normal man's head, sometimes got lost and sometimes simply forgotten as his brain couldn't manage it. With all this happening, the king fell ill himself, bedridden as his mind couldn't really process what was happening to it.

Maybe I'll tell Wish's story sometime, it's a doozy.

[ktempestbradford]

I'm gonna answer this in good faith even though I'm not certain you asked it in good faith.

I'll preface this by saying that I have recently come to feel that Internet users in the West do need to get into the mindset of paying for more Internet things we've traditionally gotten for free. Because the free wasn't ever truly free. And the way stuff is now, if we want to keep the Nice Things we love (like this hellsite, for instance), we need to contribute to the sustainability of it. But that contribution cannot be tricked out of us or forcibly taken from us at gunpoint.

I'll explain under the cut, but the TL;DR is this:

If the only way a company can get a user to pay them for a service/product is by trickery or other shady business practices, then the company's lack of sustainability is not on the user, it's on the company's choice to engage in shadiness and they deserve to go out of business. Because there are other options available to them.

So, a company wants people to use their product or service. Cool. Sometimes they offer said product/service (henceforth known as The Thing) totally for free at the beginning. Sometimes they offer a free tier in addition to a paid tier or tiers.

With the first scenario, they are likely hoping to be able to make money by either:

selling some kind of data they harvest from their free users to someone else

inserting ads

Option 1 is not great and is more likely the closer we get to present day. Option 2 is less not great, but is at least transparent to the user. Either way, they made the choice to offer The Thing free and gave users the expectation of free and also the expectation of a certain set of features for free.

Down the road, the company discovers one of three things. They can't sustain the business; they can't grow the business; or they made the horrible mistake of taking VC money or having shareholders and those entities want consistent growth in profits so they can have more money. They then have two options:

add paid tiers to The Thing along with free

take away free completely and have users pay

As long as the company is not trapped in the toxic relationship of VCs/shareholders, both of these options can be fine. If you go with 1, you make long time users happy by not forcing them to suddenly pay, yet also make the paid tier/s attractive enough that users who really value The Thing will pay up for extra features or whatnot.

Going with 2 can be dangerous because it could backfire. Users might shove The Thing off a virtual cliff and walk away. But not before getting on Reddit and trashing the company.

I have seen this done well, though! When companies are transparent and honest about why they need to make this move and ask existing or longtime users to understand the situation, many will! I have. You can also gain some grace by allowing anyone who was signed up for free to remain there and only make new users pay.

Sad thing is, a lot of companies who try to do the free + paid or free for existing users + paid for new start plucking features out of free. This also happens with companies that start out with free + paid tiers. Usually the feature plucking starts slowly, though I've seen it happen over the course of a few months or, in the case of IFTTT, within days. (That's actually an excellent lesson in How Not To Transition From Totally Free to Paid Tiers; IFTTT really shit the bed on that one.) They do this to nudge free users to the paid tiers through frustration and pain.

Do you see the problem? Through frustration and pain. Those aren't feelings most companies would want their users to associate with them. If you do get users to switch to paid that way, they resent you for it, and they start looking for alternatives.

Now we've come to the crux of it. User feelings about The Thing and the company that offers it. If you make users feel negatively about how you're handing the offering of The Thing, it's hard to retain them. This is basic businesses and marketing 101. You don't want them to feel frustration at dealing with the company or The Thing. In truth, you want to alleviate their frustration WITH The Thing. Instead of leaning into that, they lean into Dark Patterns, as OP called it, aka trickery.

Let us not forget that the trickery exists because the actual offerings are not engaging enough to get people to pay. Instead of addressing that problem (or even seeing it as a problem), companies resort to dishonest tactics for a 1% increase in revenue driven by people who don't even use the product and are therefore unaffected by it.

This is not good business practice.

With the example of JetPack for WordPress (and the other WordPress.com things OP talked about), the company does still offer free but they would rather no one take advantage of it. Instead of making the paid options more compelling, they keep making the link for free tinier and harder to find. Yet they're still offering free. If free is so terrible for them financially, why even offer it? Why not just take it away?

I can tell you one answer for JetPack, and I bet it's the same answer for many of the other things OP mentioned: The majority of people wouldn't use it at all.

Unless you're a business, and more of a medium-sized one or larger at that, you do not need any of the stuff JetPack wants you to pay for. Many businesses run their websites on WordPress and they do need those services (though JetPack isn't the only game in town for those services and they know it). Someone running a personal blog or a small business or an indie creative? Not so much. Yet those are the people JetPack is trying to trick into paying.

The other answer for JetPack specifically is that WordPress installations are safer with it and their spam solution installed. On WordPress.com, where the company is hosting people's blogs, Automattic makes it so those blogs have a base amount of protection because it's both good for the brand and also is good for them tech-wise. Extending that to self-hosted WordPress is also good for the brand. It gives blogs a base level of safety, which means fewer people being mad about things going wrong. It also allows for a certain about of data collection (oh look, we're back to that), which they either use or sell.

WordPress pushes self-hosted blog owners to download and install JetPack and one of the words they include in the description of it is Free. If free is offered and advertised but the free option is real hard to find, then you're engaging in shadiness. And then I don't care about the sustainability of your business.

This is not an outlier. Many companies that make The Thing know they wouldn't have as many users if there wasn't a free option, and many use either gentle or shady practices to move users on up to paying. Guess which kinds of practices make for users who have positive feelings towards the company? And if you have competitors, good luck retaining highly pissed off people. (Again I point to IFTTT.)

Because of the way the Internet evolved you're always going to have people who expect free and won't pay for things and whatever. You're also going to have plenty of people or companies who will pay for good services/products that work well and benefit them. Instead of concentrating on that bit, or getting out of the toxic mindset that a successful company is a company that has a profit line that goes up exponentially forever, companies push and push and push dark patterns and trickery and making part of the product worse to somehow magically get a user of the product to give up their money to make it "better."

In the end, this will not be sustainable. You cannot sustain a business on gritted teeth users.

Thus, the question you asked that prompted this very long essay is based on a faulty, un-nuanced premise. How can The Thing continue if it's free forever? If it:

Has a revenue stream that isn't based on users directly paying.

Has a way for users to pay for some parts and also a free tier for those who want the basic parts.

Is backed by company that cares about making a good product that users love, not only profits and growth for growth's sake.

If The Thing is honestly unsustainable with a free or partially free userbase, then the company should:

Be honest and transparent about that and take a user-friendly approach to transitioning to paid or free + paid.

Make The Thing amazing through improvements (even better by encouraging user feedback and actually listening to them).

Take a good, hard look at sustainable growth options that won't require infusions of truckloads of cash from people who will push the company into toxic growth strategies that only benefit profit-sharers and not the people who use The Thing.

This is how you go from a fun cute hobby that nerds do in their spare time into something that benefits the nerds who made it and the nerds who use it.

And if you weren't expecting a detailed, well-informed answer to your question simply because I'm here on tumblr dot com reblogging Star Wars memes and Anson Mount thirst posts, let this be a lesson to you.

As the ancient African proverb says: Don't start none, won't be none.

[afor-abyss]

During the holidays I read "Morella" by Edgar Allan Poe and I can't stop thinking about it. I have some thoughts to vomit into the hellsite.

"Morella" is a short story about a man that muses about a woman he befriended. She was bright, well-read and hauntingly intriguing, and he liked her well enough so they wed. They would discuss hours and hours about various themes and about philosophical theories. The themes Morella liked the most were about identity and immortality. At some point, the narrator begins to loathe his wife for the same reasons he once liked her, and she is aware! Morella becomes sick and withers away, and the narrator - maybe out of sympathy, maybe out of pure hate - wishes for her death to come soon.

A fateful day Morella calls him to her deathbed and proclaims she will die today. However, she shall live in the skin of another and the love he didn't have for her, he will acquire after her departure. As she dies, Morella gives birth to a daughter.

And it's here that I want to start my crazy rambles! While I know the original purpose of the story is to ponder about what happens to the soul after death and that by the end the reader realizes the daughter is Morella reborn... I want to touch a few things that spoke to me. Because when Morella dies, the last words are almost a curse. She tells the man : " “It is a day of days,” (...) “a day of all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth and life- ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!” (..) “I am dying, yet shall I live.” "

The daughters of heaven and death, as if women are more spiritual, women are out of this world and Morella gained knowledge during her life to know that she will live on in spirit. Her personhood, or womanhood I supposed, will not be lost in death. And the narrator can not understand (“Morella! how knowest thou this?”) because he's a son of earth and life. He simply can not understand.

But in death, she shall have her revenge: " “I repeat I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection- ah, how little!- which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live- thy child and mine, Morella’s. (...)". The man hated his wife and wished upon her death because he thought he would put an end to their connection. However, as she dies, Morella gives birth to a daughter, a reminiscence of the mother and someone he will love. He will love her so much but she'll also be a source of pain. Because the daughter is the extension of Morella and therefore his reckoning.

He began hating his wife because the themes she liked frightened him, her striking macabre nature was too daunting... and so she gave him a daughter. A daughter who he could not hate but she would daunt him all the same.

And it just... I know it was not the point of the tale but it reminded me of men doing/speaking/thinking the most despicable things of women during their youth. Then they marry one and they think they love! But old habits die hard, and it's not easy to let go of generational build up of hatred. A daughter then comes into the world and they know other men, because they know themselves.

She is an extent of all the women they did dirty but now they can not hold hate towards her. And so, they suffer, they resent and they can do nothing but watch the world taking the daughter apart. Until they revert back into the mother and die. AND IT'S SO UGH