#inside source

[friendlycursedspaceotter]

Since I have seen news about the encampments posted around Tumblr, I am about to bring you insider information. I am risking my anonymity, partially my safety, and potentially my reputation to bring you journalism.

How do you know I will do this? Well, allow me to introduce myself (well, as much as you can when you're not writing under your legal name on a website whose best privacy feature is its terrible search function). I have a very close relative in a higher-up position at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I will not name them, use their gendered pronouns, state their position, state their exact relationship to me, or do anything that could reveal their identity, as that will also compromise mine. For the sake of this "leak," we will call them O. I ask you, for both of us, do not speculate on O's true identity. If you know who O is, do not tell anyone, in the notes or otherwise, and do not DM me with their name. Do not attempt to find O's social media (they are not active on it as of late), DM them hate comments, or find their relatives and use that against both of us. I am fairly close with O, and while you Tumblrinas might find it hard to suspend your disbelief over this, ask yourself this: if I wasn't related to or knew O, would I be trying to protect them this much?

If you want other sources, sorry. This is a primary-ish source. I wish I could send you more, but I was not in the room where this was decided. If I was in the room where it happened, you *might* have more details. However, I'm pretty sure that members of the UW-Milwaukee encampment are on more social media than me and they can probably back this up to some degree.

Well, with that concluded, let's get on to the news.

Yesterday, I heard O discuss, with the rest of my family, a meeting among UW-Milwaukee higher-ups about the recent encampment. Since that action is technically illegal in the state of Wisconsin (however, I am pretty sure the First Amendment right to peaceful assembly supersedes that), the committee was deciding what to do with them.

Their response for now: Leave them alone. As long as the students are not causing trouble, there is no reason (as of now) to prosecute them. They can exist, surrounding the library. While it looks like it could fizzle out, I doubt it will.

Why am I telling you this? To try and prove that what is happening at Columbia and other places is intentional. To prove that the administration does have the power to call off the guards. They had the power to do nothing (which, while not an ideal solution, is better than students dying). They had to power to settle. And yet, dead students are better than dissenting ones.

O, in the discussion, said that nothing's changed in 3 months. They are wrong. Students have died. The encampments are not just in solidarity with Palestine, but also in solidarity with Columbia students. They are not fair-weather protesters. Things have just reached a tipping point, and it could not be ignored.

I'm Kit at friendlycursedspaceotter. Reporting live-ish from Wisconsin, this is the TBC (Tumblr Broadcasting Collective).

🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉

[googlyeyesonmagiccards]

Outside evidence

[mayorwhisper]

🤦‍♀️😂😂😂

[almostlookedhuman]

[oornithologistt]

vultures amirite?

og image below the cut

[incorrectbatfam]

Riddler: Ah, yes. I’ve been expecting you.

Bruce: What? How’s that possible?

Riddler: By staring at that door continuously for hours. Something was bound to happen.

[everlastingrandom]

what they don’t tell you about working in news is that the years start coming and they don’t stop coming. But the years are actually every five minutes

[incorrect-losers]

The losers: *Falling from a great height, screaming*

Eddie: HOOOOOLD MEEEEEE! No, seriously, hold me!

The losers: *Grab onto Eddie*

Eddie: *Pulls string on fanny pack revealing-*

Mike: YOU HAVE A PARACHUTE?

Eddie: I think the real question is why don't any of you?

[vulpinesaint]

Venom + Kissing Death by MOTHICA

[ktkat99]

Tim- I've always wanted to be a spy! As a kid, I even had my own secret identity: whenever we were in public, my parents would tell people I was someone else's kid.

Jason-...

Bruce-...

Damian-...

Steph-...

Dick- Tim's repressed childhood trauma aside, let's continue with the meeting...

[incorrect-tmnt2012-quotes]

Mikey: Ah, yes. I've been expecting you.

Leo: What? How's that possible?

Mikey: By staring at that door continuously for hours. Something was bound to happen.

[creative-clawmarks]

An Invitation

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KO-FI

COMMISSIONS

[teenwolfpackincorrectcaptions]

Peter: Wow! You are one resourceful, terrifying little person. Stiles: Hey, that’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me.

[ao-xingyume1987]

"It's like a dream. It felt too good to be true that it drives me crazy"

( x )

[liv45no]

Harry, meeting Fred and George for the first time: you’re... twins.

Fred: what?!

George: no!

Fred: really?!

George: mum should’ve told us!

Fred: I feel cheated!

George: duped!

Fred: hoodwinked!

[divorcedfiddleford]

You made a post saying “it has been zero days since our last alex hirsch hates ford so much bullshit” and i know it was mostly hyperbole, but you have some really good takes that I would love to be elaborated on in terms of how ford is written

it really wasn't hyperbolic. over the years he's just really shown a lot of hatred towards this one character.

content warning: discussion of abuse

i want to start with this clip from the commentary which i think of as a microcosm for how the writers and especially alex think about ford.

transcript:

rob renzetti: i mean he [mcgucket] should've basically knocked ford out, and... and destroyed the... you know, tied him up, and, destroyed... and... alex hirsch, speaking over him: yeah he should've beat ford with a wrench and taken this thing apart piece by piece! he's the one who understood how to built [sic] it, but...

... so that seems like a pretty violent course of action. shall we unpack that?

ford is a character who's pretty explicitly written as a victim of abuse, and who now has c-ptsd as a direct result of the abuse he experienced. alex hirsch believes that ford deserved everything bad that happened to him, that it's ford's own fault, and that he also deserved worse things to happen to him. this is why, given every narrative chance, alex hirsch has piled more suffering onto ford's plate. the biggest example of this i can think of is in the journal, when he wrote that fiddleford was actively erasing ford's memory (despite this being a massive timeline contradiction which i still refuse to accept). because god forbid ford even have one remotely healthy relationship with somebody. that would be too good for him. ford was manipulated and lied to by bill, but alex repeatedly compares him to icarus, a teenager whose demise was the result of his own ignorance. this comparison is still so fucking offensive to me. the sun did not lie to icarus, did not guarantee icarus all of the happiness and success and sense of belonging which he had been denied all his life, did not actively shut out the voices of those around him who would try to help him.

alex in general has a very strange relationship with abuse. he seems to get really upset when people read his characters as victims of abuse. the strongest instance of this is actually not with ford, it's with pacifica - especially in the nwmm episode commentary. the episode says "pacifica's parents have conditioned her to respond to a bell" and alex says people got "the wrong idea" about it. like. dude. what the fuck. you wrote abuse. even if you didn't mean to, that's what you wrote. you can't say people got "the wrong idea" just because you didn't think about the subtext of what you were writing. anyway, back to ford: i believe this extends to him as well. alex wanted to write a character who's a foil to stan and who was a selfish unlikable victim of his own arrogance. however that's not what he wrote. he somehow seemingly accidentally wrote a really compelling and relatable awesome autistic guy who had to fight for every good thing he he ever had in his life only for it to be taken from him every single time. but alex can't let go of seeing ford as just "the opposite of stan". when he talks about "how someone as smart as ford could fall for bill's tricks", he refuses to realize he wrote a situation in which a man was being psychologically manipulated and tortured.

it goes back further, too. people repeatedly theorized that filbrick was... not a very good father, to say the least. on top of the very explicit and canon fact that he threw one of his children out on the street (seriously, there is no defense for this), people pointed out that stan would flinch at filbrick, that ford seemed upset by things filbrick said but dared not talk back, that filbrick was mad at stan not for hurting his brother, but for "costing the family potential millions". but alex can't have people seeing ford as sympathetic. ford can't have it bad like stan did. ford had to have everything and he lost it all because he sucks so much. so he wrote the graphic novel story where ford is filbrick's favorite child and filbrick also is not even a bad parent you guys he's just stoic. ignore the whole thing in dreamscaperers where stan perpetuates the abuse that filbrick did to him. ignore the fact that ford was shouting at stan and then completely shut up as soon as filbrick entered the room and did not say another word for the rest of the night. ignore all that because i just made up this story where he cries at a present from stan. filbrick loved his boys for sure you guys!!!

i'm not even touching on how alex repeatedly villainizes traits commonly associated with mental illness and neurodivergence. ford's hypervigilance becomes arrogance. his passion for knowledge means he's a know-it-all. his difficulty socializing and making friends means he's a misanthrope. his lingering resentment for the way he was raised means he hates his brother and is the worst human being to ever have lived. i could go on, go even further into how the finale reaffirms this, but i feel weird talking about this too much.