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sysmedsaresexist · 3 months

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🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

This is Mod Quill, but this is on behalf of a mutual friend of mine and Mod Dude's. Someone we care about a lot, and someone I'm not even going to fucking name here, because I am so fucking done with my friend suffering. Besides. You're going to know who it is if you have a lick of syscourse knowledge. I just hope they know what this might bring. If you're reading this, hon -- maybe just... delete your blogs and get out of syscourse. Make something new for yourself. Trust me, I've done that plenty of times.

Anyways.

@sophieinwonderland

Let's have a chat. Okay? I mean this completely, 1000 percent genuinely. I want to talk to you. WE want to talk to you. And we want to understand what the hell is going on with you.

Context: A friend of ours is in the hospital. This friend is in the hospital... likely because of you. Well, somewhat -- I'm not here to convince you that you, personally, are at fault for someone else's actions. You did not personally give them whatever implement of choice they used to nearly off themselves. But you have got to see that what you're doing -- what you've done for a very, very long time, causes people a lot of harm. And you have acknowledged it. Repeatedly.

You know that you do. You know you're hurting people. And you've shown constantly on your blog that you're okay with that.

This isn't the first time someone has been hospitalized after you took grievance with their tumblr blog. This is the second time someone has notably been hospitalized after interactions with you, and far from the last time someone's harmed themselves over you. I should know -- I'm a user who tried so desperately not to self harm, but you are the person who brought me to that point, many moons ago in a fit of hell and despair.

Don't worry, I'm all good -- it was barely anything. But it still stings emotionally, to this day.

The user in question who's currently hospitalized is not, and has not been stable, for a very long time. They're someone I hold dear, but I think we can all admit that people with DID sometimes struggle greatly with making really dumb choices. They've made a lot. This isn't the first time they've been in the hospital.

But Dude made a promise to them when it seemed like things were going to hell this time around, something to try and encourage things to go the right way.

Your named was tossed out too. Because of course it was. Like it or not, Sophie, you are 100% the biggest syscourser on Tumblr. You post the most and have the most followers. You are syscourse. And Dude's promise was to take syscourse down.

... But I don't think anyone in this situation really understands what that means.

Sophie, you are a person. Not a blog. Not a stance. Not a slogan, or a preacher, or whatever conspiracy you're trying to lean into next to explain away the angry actions you've shown more and more lately, to somehow explain why it's okay to say the things you've been saying, even when it sometimes, just maybe, seems like... you just don't want to.

As people may know, a (from my perspective, horrifically written, incredibly inaccurate, and only harmful) callout post for Sophie was recently posted to syscourse. What people don't know is that I, Mod Quill, was approached to help write it. Mod Dude was involved in the callout post as well, though to what extent I don't know.

I flat out refused to work on it. And that's because I knew exactly what would happen. I knew my friend would be hurt, or maybe even hospitalized over this. I knew that syscourse -- that Sophie -- would drive someone over the edge again. I knew that the document -- filled with inaccuracies and vaguities and nothingburgers to the max -- would be easy for Sophie to pick apart, easy to dismantle, and it would all start with debunking so much of the very real pain and suffering my friend has gone through.

And yeah.

I was right. Go figure. Maybe I should've done more, my brain inevitably says, I need to help everyone, I should've fought harder to prevent this... Dumbass brain.

Sigh.

Dude edit/addition: I knew the doc was coming, and while I won't say that I was supportive of it going out (I made the owner sit on it for several weeks), I made no effort to stop it. Having made my own callouts on sophie (and Quill, you have, too), I understood the need, and the positives and negatives. I knew Sophie could handle it. I was approached to read and check it, as my posts had been used in it. I even offered to help add to it, though... I ended up being completely unable to. I still can't actually remember anything in the doc. I'm doubting if I actually read it because it seems I retained nothing from it. This likely stems from the fact that I have been in contact with Sophie for several weeks now, getting to know her. I'm so incredibly conflicted on this topic that I chose to stay out of it publicly from start to finish, without comment or publicity. For the first time since I started my blog, I'm not feuding with anyone, I'm having such amazing conversations with people, I feel like I'm making more of a difference than ever before. Certain people have left me alone as I stayed under the drama radar.

I'm so tired of being angry...

My thoughts on the doc and sophie are complicated. I'm sorry to anyone that was hurt through my uncertainty. Instead of helping with the doc, we talked about life, experiences, medicalization, and I was... so happy. I don't think that I really thought beyond... "I wish I had spoken to some of these people sooner."

It's important to note that I don't blame the doc or author for any of this.

Syscourse, as a whole, does not address any sort of recovery, or help, or even just acknowledgement of the issues we are facing, as human beings, as systems, as people on this earth. It is just slinging words at each other with varying degrees of value. And I'll be the first to admit that I have relished that battleground. I have loved the feeling that I might be able to throw the right words or the right punches and get someone to either change, or deactivate. I've also wrestled with those feelings, tried to explain them away, mirroring what I see on Sophie's blog constantly.

But as more and more time goes on and I grow up and I see the damage that's done to me and my friends, I have grown to absolutely despise this place. I try my best to spread what joy I can. I also know it's really not enough.

Sophie, I have sent you, if I had to hazard a guess, at least 10 anons this past year, all of them variations on themes. Either positivity, begging you to take a break, or explaining to you in excruciating detail how I know you are hurting people, and why that hurts so badly. And... each and every single one of those have been met with dismissal. With that godforsaken shrug emoji that convinced me for years that you just... did not care, at all, about other people.

And this isn't just you. I know I'm coming at you, but that's because you are the biggest source of Syscourse Grief(tm) for this particular friend. But lord knows people get enemies here, that's just par for the course. So, this goes for everyone.

Learn to fucking care about each other, for fucks sakes.

God, this really is a ramble. I thank everyone who's bearing with me.

For syscourse in general: Stop. Just... stop. For those who are considering it, just stop for a bit, and witness. Watch. See what happens. Because the ones who are obstinate -- primarily the overly aggressive anti-endos and pro-endos -- will fling their vitriol at each other. It will just get worse and worse, and you can witness syscourse eat itself alive.

For my friend in the hospital: I've already given you some advice, but genuinely, I really, really hope you take care of yourself. I pray that, when you get back, you maybe set syscourse aside. At most, discord is there, and that seems to at least be tamer. But you are young. You have so much future ahead, and coming from someone who is (unfortunately seen as) an older system, I can promise you that it gets beter.

For Dude: GO TAKE A FUCKING BREAK. You are recently retraumatized, recently through a severe surgery, and you are out here promising shit like "I'll burn syscourse to the ground for you"??? Play a fun game and pay attention to your fucking partners, take a fucking break and take care of yourself. Syscourse will wait for you. People will come and people will go, and it doesn't fucking matter. Your life is what matters and I'm so fucking scared watching you obsess over this one, small aspect of it. I'm so relieved you went to that fun pokemon blog. You aren't alone, you are so loved, and don't let this toxic ass place make you forget that.

And Sophie.

I'm going to give Dude a link to send to you. You don't have to take it if you don't want to. You don't even need to acknowledge this if you don't want to. But I'm swinging the door open and offering the olive branch. I know you don't use Discord much, but for gods sake, it's better than Tumblr DMs, and we both know how Tumblr is a mess.

I really hope you'll take me up on it.

And for everyone else.

Wait till you see what happens next.

Edit from Mod Quill: Well, what's next is evidently a need for clarification and yet another callout post. Hello, callout-post author. Thank you for your clarifications. Notably, I attempted to keep your URL out of this, for those who didn't know.

Anyways, for the fullest disclosure and context: I was approached by Mod Dude, who asked if I wanted to participate in "Sophie Drama, Anonymously." I agreed, though I'll admit I was hesitant due to my particular issues with that user. I was then added to a group chat involving an enormous callout post. Notably, it should be mentioned, callout posts are a major trigger of ours that we are still working on overcoming.

I clicked the document and saw it was a mess of grammar mistakes, poor formatting, and impossible for me to read without trembling. But given that I already have an intense distaste for the user who posted it, I wasn't about to tell them more personal details about myself, and I did not want to communicate with them any further due to my own fear of the instability of all those involved. I told them I disliked the callout post due to harassment that it would cause, that I feel Sophie is a person, and that they had better have contacted the user who was hurt -- who is once again revealed in the callout, unfortunately.

I tried to laugh it off and move on, and take care of my mental health. That's what I was lamenting above; the fact that I didn't say more. I felt bad that I didn't allow myself to damage my mental health further to craft a callout post -- something I have tried desperately to avoid since the one I made the mistake of writing years ago about the very user you wrote this callout post about -- and something I get roped into constantly.

I privately read the rest of the document after it had been posted in full, as I still have access to it and it is a publicly posted document. It was filled with things that I found to be either nothing important in particular (things that have already been discussed numerous times) or things that would just be inflammatory (i.e. the OAS sections). I talked with a friend on Discord about the document, to which we both agreed it was bad.

To the OP of the document: I didn't say any of this at the time because, as I said, I felt uneasy and could not be in that group chat. I explicitly said I would not be touching "it" (the group chat). I was taking care of my mental health.

I refused to work on it because, based on my past experiences and triggers, which I do not owe you and still alluded to anyways in my conversations with you, I knew it would end poorly. I tried my best to sway you in the moment, but I was not able to do so because of my own mental health.

So, yes, to clarify: My grievances with the document were not made known to the one who posted it, whom I never mentioned in the original post. I do not condemn the poster of the document. I was simply making my feelings about callout posts known. What is above is not a condemnation of the callout writer, nor a comment on them at all. I genuinely did not want the point of this post to be lost due to callout-post drama.

So let me reiterate the important part of all of this.

This post was about the state of syscourse and how people do not approach syscourse in a good way. It is constantly slinging hate at people, which is never justified.

Learn to fucking care about each other, for fucks sakes.

---

Mod dude, here...

I want to add something to this, but I don't know what. I mean, Quill said it all, quite well.

Hurt people... Hurt other people.

I've made the attempt, over the last year or so, to actually talk to some of the bigger names in syscourse, the ones usually active in the tags, endos and antis alike.

It reinforced that... we're all just fucking people, trying to get by.

Antis, have you even tried to empathize with the community you attack so quickly and cruelly? Imagine if people said those things to you or about CDD systems. Have you, personally, witnessed the things you claim are happening? Because I've been here a lot longer, and it seems you're making shit up. Consider that you should stop parroting everything you hear and stick to what you're actually seeing with your own eyes.

Endos, please don't forget that these are severely traumatized individuals that have probably never even been to therapy yet. If you're not yet, maybe you should get into therapy-- it doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong, but everyone could use someone to talk to, and seeing what it's like could be really beneficial to understanding the other side and getting an unbiased view of your own behavior and beliefs.

These are real fucking people that are ending up in the hospital.

Quill, the rest of my mods, and I are real fucking people behind these screens.

Sophie is a real person. They just got a new dish washer that they saw on Circ's blog, I missed it, but she linked it to me, and now I'm looking at it. She's going to let me know how it works.

And you know what? This little countertop dishwasher feels a hell of a lot more real and important than anything in syscourse.

As Quill mentioned, I just went through a major surgery. I'm learning that...

I'll probably never be able to walk properly again. My life is forever changed, and I'm really struggling.

My cat just... passed. Feel free to go like that post, it would mean a lot to me.

None of you know that. The people who leaked my main and smeared my wonderful name don't know that.

Sophie didn't know that the last time we fought each other.

My friend didn't know that when I promised him I would bring syscourse down.

Maybe bringing it down isn't the answer.

Maybe just reminding you all that we're all people behind the screen is enough.

Fucking TALK to each other.

Make an attempt to learn and understand.

Talk about things that actually matter.

Grow the FUCK up.

Reblog to share a hug, because that's more worthwhile.

And most importantly.

Please keep our friend in mind while they're in the hospital.

Syscourse community, endos and antis, this is one of our own. A person you've likely interacted with before, that you've seen around.

We exist in this small bubble, all together. Whether we like it or not.

#syscourse #anti endo #sophiecourse #Mod Quill #pro endo #syspunk grow up

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mariacallous · 2 years

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The literally unprecedented indictment against Donald Trump marks an outright dangerous—and politically fraught—moment for the United States and serves as a reminder of the unparalleled level of criminality and conspiracy that surrounded the 2016 election.

It’s easy to look back at the 2016 election as though its outcome was inevitable—that Hillary Clinton was too weak of a candidate, one whose years of high-priced speeches had made her lose touch with the working-class voters of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; that “but her emails” and Jim Comey’s repeated, inappropriate, and misguided meddling in the election turned the tide. But the new indictment of Trump is an important historical corrective, a moment that makes clear how the US, as a country, must reckon with the fact that Trump’s surprise victory was aided by not one but two separate criminal conspiracies.

In the 2016 race’s final push, in an election that came down to incredibly narrow victories in just three states—10,704 voters in Michigan, 46,765 in Pennsylvania, and 22,177 in Wisconsin—and where Trump lost the overall popular vote by some 3 million votes, he was helped along by a massive and wide-ranging official Russian government operation. That effort was funded in part by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is now behind the brutal combat of his Wagner Group mercenary army in Ukraine, which targeted US social media companies and activists on the ground. According to the US Department of Justice’s exhaustive report, in the second arm of the Russian operation, the military intelligence service GRU hacked top Democratic officials, leaked their emails, and shifted the national narrative around Clinton and other Democrats. (Not to mention that this gave rise to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and, arguably, QAnon.)

Then there was the separate criminal conspiracy that was the subject of today’s new indictment in New York: the plot in the final weeks of the 2016 election by Trump’s campaign, Trump family fixer Michael Cohen, and the National Enquirer to pay hush money to bury stories of two of the candidate’s affairs, including infamously one with porn star Stormy Daniels.

While it may seem like news of such an affair would have ended up being a nothingburger amid the campaign’s final weeks, it’s worth remembering the specific context that Cohen and the Trump orbit faced in those finals hours of the campaign. They were performing a fraught and knife’s-edge balancing act to hold onto support from conservatives and evangelicals in the wake of the devastating Access Hollywood tape, a moment where vice presidential nominee Mike Pence seriously considered throwing in the towel himself. The follow-on of more non-family-values-friendly stories might well have begun an unrecoverable spiral. (It’s also worth remembering the still-suspicious interplay of these two threads: how, on a single Friday in October 2016, US intelligence leaders announced publicly for the first time that Russia was behind the election meddling, the Washington Post scooped the existence of the lewd Access Hollywood tape, and then, hours later, Wikileaks began dumping a fresh set of stolen emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.)

The new criminal case related to that second Stormy Daniels conspiracy, brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, also is a reminder of the historic mistake by the US Justice Department to not pursue its own charges against Trump in the same matter. This was a mind-boggling abdication of responsibility given that the Justice Department—in the midst of Donald Trump’s own presidency, no less!—prosecuted Cohen for the same conspiracy, naming Trump in the charges against Cohen as “Individual 1” and, according to a new book by Elie Honig, outlined in a draft indictment Trump’s personal direction and involvement in the case.

According to the book by Honig, himself a former prosecutor, the Southern District of New York ultimately decided to drop any case against Trump after the president left office in January 2021 because, in part, they figured that bigger, more serious investigations were ahead stemming from the January 6 insurrection, which “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison.” It was then, and stands now, a serious miscalculation, one that will currently contribute to the democratically untenable “Ford Principle” that presidents stand outside the law both while in office and after.

Of course, it’s here that we come to what a fraught moment, politically and for American democracy, the historically novel indictment of a former president presents for us in the weeks and months ahead: The true test for Donald Trump and our country is not this particular case but whatever might come next. The New York charges might be the start of multiple criminal cases that would burden Trump even as he begins his phoenix-like presidential reelection bid.

There are signs that Georgia’s Fulton County district attorney is weighing “imminent” charges against Trump, potentially as part of a larger conspiracy, for his well-documented efforts to overturn the state’s election results in 2020. Meanwhile, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is zeroing in on potential charges surrounding Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection and related election-meddling schemes, as well as Trump’s attempts to purloin and retain classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after his presidency. Just in recent days, in the classified documents case, a federal judge ruled that there was evidence of a crime that would allow Smith to pierce normal attorney-client privilege and force one of Trump’s lawyers to testify amid evidence that the lawyer participated in that potential crime.

The specter of these indictments has made Trump fire up his always-overheated rhetoric, threatening “death and destruction” if he’s indicted, posting a photo of Bragg and Trump holding a baseball bat, and generally sashaying around the country like a mafioso saying, “Nice country you have here, shame if something happened to it.” His opening campaign rally last weekend came in Waco, Texas, amid the 30th anniversary of a 51-day federal siege of a religious cult after the largest shoot-out in US law enforcement history—one that left four ATF agents dead and, following the horrific fiery end of the siege, more than 80 members of the Branch Davidian sect dead too. The event helped inspire the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City just two days later by a white supremacist, far-right extremist.

It’s hard not to read Trump’s rally as anything less than a call to arms for his supporters amid the government’s moves against him.

For now, though, the country will wait—and wonder whether the next shoe to drop is more criminal charges or the beginnings of more Trump-inspired violence.

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xxthedragonrebornxx · 3 months

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y'know, given the whole attitude around otherkin outside of tumblr, i feel a bit obligated to say my piece on this.

i support otherkin. i may not understand the concept too well, but i am well aware that history is filled with people closing themselves off to ideas because they were radical or against the grain, so i am happy to confusedly wave my otherkin moots on as i frantically try to read a guide to it in-between conversations. once we tackle trans rights, i would love to start on genetic modification for otherkin! it sounds like a fun challenge.

what gets me about it is how hateful people seem to be for... no clear reason? it mean yeah, it seems weird, but so is the concept of a lawn, and people get really defensive about those. does it not take energy to hate? it has to, right? it just seems so pointlessly cruel to bully people who are largely minding their own business.

im just kinda tired by it. maybe im more tired by hatred in general, but it just seems like such a nothingburger of a thing to be mad about.

#otherkin #trans #therian #im confusing but i choose to be open minded!

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cerastes · 2 years

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I think something Engage didn’t quite nail is unit distribution... You start with a lot of not very good, not very entertaining units with supports that amount to “hello, this is my hat, I see your hat as well, we should converse about this”, if I had to read another Celine support that amounted to “I like tea”, I would have buried my arms into the dirt and howled to the moon in agony-fueled screams that translate to “WHO GIVE A SHIT” in wolf language, sharing with them a nugget from Descartes own repertoire.

But, thing is, bunch of chapters in, you actually start getting units that aren’t only effective to use in gameplay and don’t have me clutching prayer beads so they don’t get instantly annihilated come the enemy turn, because I can trust them to not explode in the Enemy Phase (this is a very Player Phase oriented game, and I appreciate it), they also have supports that I want to actually read, like anything regarding Pandreo or Panette, or how much of a weirdo the dancer guy is, or actual funny narcissist Goldmary, or Princess “I am holding to the last straws of my nerves with bloodied, splintered fingers” Ivy, the last of which betrayed every expectation I had to how she was going to be and instead feels fresh.

I think... The early game is by far the weakest part of Engage, so it’s a bit hard to break into. Mind you, the map design is great throughout, but you open the game with so many nothingburger units, narratively and gameplaywise, that yeah, the first impression can easily be a bit negative.

*Mind you, I’ve not played in Normal, I’ve only been playing Hard and up, but just going by how not hard Hard is, I imagine half of this post may seem to not matter for Normal difficulty, given it’s likely a cakewalk, but even then, if someone is playing on Normal, they likely care more about the narrative than the gameplay, and, well, again, the game opens up pretty weak that way in the early game as well, so same problem, different bridge.

**This is wholly a me thing, but given I love axe units, I resent the fact that they are so so very sparingly given to you, with your starting option being “the game won’t shut up about my muscles but all I get is Build and not Strength” Boucheron and “Are You Really Gonna Use The Jagen”... Old dude, forgot his name. Anna is a magic unit, and if you promote Diamant to his unique Hero class, his stats are thoroughly sword stats until you get a few level ups and he can actually swing axes without missing and getting exploded, and Jade is a good tank but her killing power is low, having more of a support combat role, so your first real axe unit is Panette, who admittedly is insanely good, but god damn, you have to wait.

***Despite these thoughts, it’s only fair that I say that I am enjoying the game nonetheless and having fun with it.

#fire emblem engage

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burdened-boy · 4 months

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i may write/post something smutty relatively soon; i have to trim it and make sure it's not cringe and all of that. this might be a nothingburger though, it might be something that i want to keep in my drafts. seems like you guys like hotter stuff, so who knows!

#ooc

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mystigaron · 7 months

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Thank you for bringing attention to the Ludeo thing. I really appreciate your posts on the subject. I understand being apprehensive about what they’re going to do, but I don’t see how their responses today have been that reprehensible? I’ll eat my words if they continue with the partnership, but seeing as this has (apparently) been a collab in the making for over a year it makes sense that they’d need a little time to cancel it properly and therefore can’t make any solid promises. Honestly I think what they’re doing (at this moment in time, my opinion may change depending on what they do) is better than making empty promises and then having to retract them later. I’m disappointed in their lack of research too but I’m unaware of why so many seem to be so pessimistic. Has Videocult done anything of this caliber in the past to make people think they would continue with this?

OH NO when i was saying their responses were just kind of ... nothingburger i didn't mean that they were downright malicious or reprehensible they just kind of felt. well like nothing. like pretty much just saying "hey we know you guys are mad but this has been a year and a half in the making and it's probably going to get put in the game anyway so turn it off if you don't like it. tough" and the akupara person's response was literally just. "hey we hear you. we're talking. bye" like ??? Okay

all that aside i don't know if videocult or akupara have done anything weird before but they haven't to my knowledge. i'm just upset at what they've been doing today but hopefully they end up rectifying this at some point soon

#from the meat beast's maw

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vvatchword · 10 months

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I'm tired of writing this already because my Dr. Lamb is either the most boring, unemotive, or noble person imaginable. This is the whole reason I have been avoiding her section. The reason: Dr. Lamb is, and has always been, a huge nothingburger. In-game, she's just That Way. She doesn't BECOME That Way, she just is, and it's arguable she has always been so. There's even an audio diary that suggests she has had designs on Rapture since time immemorial (lol wat).

This is because BioShock 2 is a fucked-up attempt at a Christian gnostic allegory and Dr. Sofia Lamb is a stand-in for the Aeon Sophia. It's awful for a lot of reasons that I'll get into someday--not the least reason for which is that THE LITERAL AEON SOPHIA IS IN THE FUCKING GAME. The allegory cannot fucking work if you just stick the actual fucking Aeon Sophia alongside your allegorical symbol for the Aeon Sophia. Then it's not an allegory, is it? That said, 2K Marin probably made this game without sleeping or regular human contact so they can be forgiven for a lot.

Anyway, I decided to start her as an Objectivist and a human being, if an extremely autistic and traumatized one, and move her left.

What makes a person decide to be an Objectivist and isolate oneself on the bottom of the ocean is equally present in certain individuals and movements on the left: it's a deep insecurity and a sense of powerlessness because one can't control what other people do. So if you can't control other people, you CAN try to minimize their impact on you and just straight-up leave. It's the completely futile effort to control as many environmental factors as possible to make the least surprising world possible.

Where this impulse heads into toxic territory is when these kinds of people get really frustrated and just try to apply force. "ALL Y'ALL BETTER JOIN THE CLUB OR I'M GETTING THE BAT"

So... where do I exhibit this toxic behavior in Lamb? And why doesn't it feel natural to me? I've actually given her more emotive states than she has in-game. She's more reserved, to be sure, but she still fucking feels things and is motivated by those feelings, even if she lies to herself about it. Moreover, one cannot be reserved 100% of the time. One will and can snap, and sometimes those kinds of people snap in nasty ways because they're keeping most of their stress inside and hidden.

I suppose I should make her a little more toxic from the beginning. I've actually made her extremely sensible. I try to give most of my characters laudable traits, even if they're pure fuckers--issues they're right about or ways they're competent and skilled. I may have made her TOO competent and sensible. She may be too boring for fiction, idk. There's a reason nobody in fandom likes to write about her. We all know somebody just like her irl and we try to escape them as quickly as possible; we don't want to actually write about their judgy holier-than-thou asses for any length of time.

I'm very frustrated about this and I'm not sure how to fix it. It feels like a systemic issue, like a flaw or behavior that should be present from the beginning. I should probably try and make her more controlling from the beginning, but that'll take some rewriting and editing... guhhhhhh. Not during NaNo.

I might brainstorm some weird shit that I could make her do to fuck up the story a bit and see what seems natural and sticks.

I mean, if you have an idea, or have read a story with Lamb in it that you think is particularly good, hit me up ok

#bioshock #bioshock 2 #sofia lamb #fanfiction #writing #vvatchword

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mouseratz · 1 year

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it's also very funny to me that reed & sue are said to be engaged in issue one but it's kind of implied that the engagement is taken off after the first submariner fiasco, as they are never referred to as fiances again (by the issues I'm reading, like fifteen issues later, so), even though they also still seem to be together at times, and others it's just not mentioned? it's very complicated. grey area. also submariner is a character that appears a Lot in this series and I still can't help but think he looks really gay on account of 1. being mostly naked and 2. looking a hell of a lot like Spock. if you look like Spock you're gay I'm sorry you should be so honored to be compared to him though. (although the character may predate him? I'm not clear on the dates but I think he does. but as a 2023 reader.....). they seem to really like him when so far he is giving me nothing. he's always like aaaah I'm conflicted I hate humanity for justified reasons but I think sue is pretty and I don't want her to die!! and then nothing else. my favorite part of him is that sometimes he's a good excuse for an octopus or giant squid to show up and that's awesome . otherwise. idk. he's whatever he's nothingburger

of the recurring side characters Alicia is the coolest though. I love that she's not exactly precisely superpowered but ends up helping them anyway because she has a supernaturally good intuition (and at first her relationship w the thing seems like a very on the nose message because she's blind; she's the only woman who would ever love him because she can't see his ugliness. then, it's pretty clearly said he's literally like a rock man so it makes sense she can Tell The Difference and is actually more into that/openly prefers Ben as the thing than him as a regular guy. which is so funny.....it's still very on the nose 'character needs romantic love to accept themselves' which isn't my favorite but Alicia herself i like) . that's neat of her. I thought she would just disappear as a weird one off for the puppet master thing but. yeah I enjoy her I think she should show up more

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seeminglyseph · 1 year

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I’ve been sick today and yesterday and I don’t know where the days met, everything’s a little fuzzy, but somehow I’m watching a video about Ken Penders’ Sonic the Hedgehog and I really do feel like. I wish someone would cover it from the POV of someone who read the comics like…. Before the lawsuits and the memes. Like everything feels like “so I heard about these crazy comics and looked them up, this is crazy!” But like.

I know I wasn’t the only kid reading these fucking comics. There were other people who read these books and liked these characters, and cared about the plot lines maybe because they were 10 and didn’t know how storytelling was supposed to work. It’s one thing to be 35 and go “wow that’s fucking stupid” and another thing to be a literal small child, the target audience for Sonic the Hedgehog and be like “oh, shit, this series is cool!” Like yeah of course I didn’t know what Lemon SunDrop poisoning was as a literal 9 year old, but I remember reading a comic about the Chaotix solving a Noir style murder mystery so many times the pages fell apart.

That’s almost part of the Penders betrayal, like… yeah as a child I really enjoyed some of this stuff, and now it’s gone and trashed because he literally pulled the Sonic OC “my original character do not steal” on everything he ever contributed to a medium that is by its nature collaborative.

I grew up with a hyphenated name, this may seem like a nothingburger concept to have a problem with, but it’s also a situation where a lot of people decide either that they know better than you what your name is and will correct you, or they will simply ignore any information you give them about your name and just kinda call you whatever part of the hyphenate they like best. Julie-Su was a character whose name was not at all like mine, but also had the hyphenate that made my name so complicated. It feels stupid, but she was like my favourite character as a little kid, this obscure comic character no one knew about. But it’s all messed up now.

Maybe I should try and write an essay one day…

Edit: it should be noted like… I don’t like Penders, I don’t know a lot about his politics but it’s mostly iffy or bad what I do know. And a lot of the comics did go off the rails hard. I enjoyed the comics as a child, in part because as a child I could buy Sonic comics at the 7-11, and that meant I could actually buy Sonic comics. The world was different in the 90s man. I didn’t have information about creators, I read a comic book and then ran around creating an imaginary adventure about being a freedom fighter animal person. Like. I didn’t have the internet at all period at the time. I didn’t have a computer.

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bisluthq · 20 days

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I’m going to call you out a bit on something… When we first heard about Harry and Olivia, they had only been seen going out to dinner, and you agreed that it was possible something was going on between them. You said it might be nothing, but you also said that them together would make sense.

But your response to this whole Joe and Lorene thing has been so different, when the facts were the same: they were seen having dinner together (I’m talking about your reaction before the festival in Spain). With Joe and Lorene you keep saying there’s no way they’re together, and I don’t really believe they’re together either. But the fact that you keep repeating it a million times in any response to any ask about them, makes me thing you just don’t want it to be true.

It comes off like you want Harry and Olivia to be a thing but you don’t want Joe with Lorene

ehhh maybe it’s a bit that because Tayruss widows annoy me quite a lot personally so I’d love for him to be with someone new lol and Swifties will harass any girl Joe’s actually with so I don’t necessarily want him to go public with anyone lol (and his weird Widowy stans will too). I’ll grant u that.

however, joe was spotted with Lorene once in Jan and never since (but evidently they’ve hung out since as she now follows his normie besties). The Jan thing didn’t per se sound like a date. Harry’s and Olivia’s did in the context of it being two spottings in one night - at dinner and getting dessert after - and observers saying it looked datey 🤷🏻‍♀️ (could still, even after Spain, be nothing tho lol but could be something - as could Joe and Lorene but there’s no actual eyewitness accounts beyond one spotting, not specifically at dinner, 9 months ago?)

Which brings me to my next point lol which is if Lorene and Joe have been dating for around 9 months (possible) that’s not a nothingburger at all (whereas Harry and Olivia going for dinner and even him going to her gig could absolutely be lol) but nothing really suggests enough to imply Lorene x Joe are in a relationship for 9 months lol. They didn’t even go to their friend’s play on the same night right which like if they WERE dating for months would mean they’re trying to keep it super secret which then makes it a bit weird that she’d risk following two of his rando friends (since Joe knows people stalk his normie friends). So I don’t know that they’re not dating/hooking up but nothing really suggests they are and certainly not for 9 months (which isn’t long but again isn’t a nothingburger at that stage?) Also Lorene was still dating Max Minghella in Jan so she would’ve had to dump him to be with Joe which is obviously possible (or she just started up with Joe quickly after breaking up with Max) so it can’t have been nine months reallllly. Ergo the spotting would have little to do with the current situation lol.

Olivia x Harry also nothing suggests they’re DATING lol but they had a romantic seeming hangout and then he did go see her show and hang out with her again and stuff pretty soon after so that seems like dateyness (which may go nowhere).

they’re not really the same situations lol.

But I acknowledge that any confirmed Joe relationship will be annoying lol to me personally because I’ll have annoying anons about weird people harassing her (I’ve had that even now tho no one seems to be harassing Lorene that I can personally find) and Olivia and Harry (Harry and anyone cool) would annoy Tayruss widows who in turn annoy me 😂😂🤷🏻‍♀️💀💀🤷🏻‍♀️

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anchanted-one · 11 months

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DragonBall Rant

I just want to vent about all of my DragonBall thoughts.

1. Transformations lost their shine years ago. SS1 was a game changer, SS2 told us to always think bigger, and SS3 underscored that point. But then it's Supersaiyan God, Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan, Super Saiyan Blue, Ultra Instinct... it became a raw numbers game. I stopped watching at Battle of Gods because I hated the premise for Revival of F, but damn, does hearing about the nonstop transform barrage make me angry.

2. Frieza. "I'm going to train x months. That'll be enough for me to become stronger." Hated that. Hated how he knows exactly how long it'll take, and how he's basically right.

3. Goku's treatment. Goku seems to have lost a lot of his battle smarts amd early lessons. When I heard of Ultra Instinct, the first thing I thought about was his initial training under Mr Popo. Amd I'm not the only one. Then he makes fun of vegeta for meditating, though he should know exactly what that's worth. He's also obnoxious, and his willingness to risk other people's lives for a good fight is just bullshit.

4. Piccolo's treatment. I get that he's not the main character, but he absorbed Nail and Kami. That should've had a much bigger impact on the series than it did, but was worth nothing. By the Buu saga, he's lumped in with Krillin before Babidi and Dabura even know the saiyans can go super. We may as well have let him permanently die and after Cell shoots him through the chest.

5. DragonBall peaked in the Red Ribbon Army saga. It was a lot of fun and wits until then, but afterwards started to shift towards raw power struggles. DragonBall Z peaked at the Frieza saga, and the Androids and Cell sagas were tolerable but fun. The Cell Games saga was cool, but the way Cell returned after Goku's sacrifice, cheapened his noble courage. And the Kamehameha duel that followed was cheap. I guess it did allow the Cell Games to end on a high note, but the storytelling felt like it was studio driven (i.e. money) rather than plot or character. Buu saga gave us three most excellent battles: Vegeta vs Goku, Vegeta vs Buu, and Goku vs Buu, but it was all over the place. The hyping up of Goten led nowhere.The Fusion dance... was a nothingburger. The Z Sword... was a sauceless, cheeseless pizza. The fight was decided by a spirit bomb, something that came out of nowhere and erased all the setup from before.

So, in summary.

Franchises shouldn't be revived for the 💲💲💲. They should allowed to be retired when their time has passed.

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soul-dwelling · 1 year

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It's weird that even if she was his first atempt, Mana seemed to be a more dynamic, dimmensional and active in the story charachter than either Patty or Iris/Amaterasu. Patty seemed to get the wackyness dialed up so much that she was more of a cartoon than someone one can take serious and in fireforce it seemed like splitting the charachter into two resulted in two nothingburgers - one "nice one" and one crazy evil one - both shallow as Elon Musks conscience

LOL, is this because of stuff I wrote on this blog and on wikis about Mana, Patty, and Iris looking the same? (And Mana and Patty having the same cowboy hat in artwork?)

I do think Patty is a bit one-dimensional--which is probably why she’s my favorite character to write in any RP or fiction. She is the perfect character to have say just about anything. You need a funny line? She can deliver it. You need a serious moment to land? She is the least expected to give it, so when she does deliver it, you take it seriously. It’s why having her as a cartoon works for me.

But that also means I then find Mana to actually be less dynamic and dimensional.

I mean, she does take part in the action--but still a bit less than the others. We have her moping about not having a friend. We don’t get to finally see her confront her family. She’s knocked out in a fight she had no way to compete in. She’s dressed up and dumped down a sewer--to save her, so that means she needed a rescue. And she gets only one major fight left in the series before the finale--a good fight to be sure, given how she wrecks Agai’s robot, minus the “Tool gets a nosebleed due to Mana falling onto him.”

But she doesn’t feel like she gets her full potential. Patty gets to be saved by Liz from poverty--but she also is a beast in the fight against the desert train. Iris may be underdeveloped--but her meditations on what her faith means are compelling.

Mana? Mana feels like she is here to have that confrontation with her family, to show she can make friends with goofballs like Shotaro and Yohei and Tool and whoever else she would meet on her journey, to rub it in her family’s face and show she is strong because she has gone toe to toe alongside her friends…and B Ichi just didn’t do more with the story to give her that moment.

It feels like an incomplete story, whereas Patty and Iris, however much I didn’t like aspects of the manga they come from, got to have stories that teased out just enough of their overall personality that I can imagine writing them.

But writing Mana? That is something I’m not sure how to do, because she feels underdeveloped unless you can write her into a fight sequence or finally have her face off against her family…and then what? How does she regard Shotaro? What is so compelling about their friendship to make it stand out more? Same with her regard with Tool. She’s kind of flirty with Yohei, which is gross.

As for the dynamic of Iris and Amaterasu…yeah, that collapsed. It’s boring.

It reduces Iris to just a doppel, the embodiment of what people think their god Amaterasu is, minimizing agency for Iris. And once we have a chance to give Iris that agency, she’s stuffed in the fridge so that Ohkubo can give Shinra a motivation he already has and doesn’t need enhanced. We needed that moment of Iris, upon hearing she is just a doppel, reassert her own humanity, whether on her own, by her memories of what Shinra said, by what she imagines her sisters would say--or, as bad as it would be, having someone else give her the pep talk. But really, I wish it was Iris coming to this conclusion on her own, not needing Shinra to shout that she is valid regardless where she came from. (Then again, maybe Shinra shouting it would make their romantic relationship actually mean something instead of coming across as a last-minute reveal as part of the stupid harem plot.)

Amaterasu needed more development. Give me a story that shows her first reactions to Jonah trapping her. Give me a short story showing how her mind breaks. Give me her Dabi from My Hero Academia story, of someone whose fall into villainy is not entirely self-motivated but the desperate response of someone who can’t find another escape.

#patty thompson #mana hinoki #long post #b ichi

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mariacallous · 1 year

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It’s scariant season—again.

A new offshoot of Omicron, BA.2.86—nicknamed Pirola—has popped up in Israel, the US, South Africa, and the UK after it was first recorded in Denmark in late July. Pirola initially set off alarm bells because it was spotted in four countries at the same time—and because, having majorly curtailed our viral surveillance systems, we don’t know how long it’s been making the rounds. Plus, the sheer number of mutations it has was reason enough to be spooked—BA.2.86 boasts more than 30 new mutations, compared to the most recently dominant variant, XBB.1.5.

“The only other time we’ve seen such a large genetic shift was the initial transition from Delta to Omicron, which led to the most hospitalizations and the most deaths of any surge in the pandemic,” says Dan Barouch, head of the vaccine research division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. As a result, scientists across the world are scrambling to figure out whether BA.2.86 is indeed something to worry about.

Early studies suggest that Pirola isn’t much better at evading immunity than previous variants, despite all of its mutations. The protection offered by vaccines should hold up, and if you’ve been naturally exposed to the XBB variant, you should be better equipped to fight off this new variant.

Why is Pirola not very good at evading immunity, despite having undergone so many mutations? It’s likely that it evolved from BA.2, an older, more familiar form of Sars-CoV-2 that’s no longer circulating today, meaning that Pirola is less resistant to neutralization than more recent variants, such as XBB.1.5. But it’s possible that the variant may continue to evolve and change, Barouch warns, so staying vigilant will be key.

Determing whether it will take off and become the dominant form of the virus in circulation will require a “wait-and-see” approach, Barouch adds. “However, it does not appear to be spreading at the same pace as, say, the original BA.1 or BA.5,” he says, referring to two of the Omicron variants that spread particularly quickly.

Anna Bershteyn, an assistant professor and colead of the Covid modeling team at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, agrees: so far, so reassuring. “As far as we know, it doesn’t seem likely that this is going to be one of these huge waves of hospitalizations and deaths, the kind that have overwhelmed the health system in prior epidemic waves.”

In the UK, a care home in the east of England was invaded by the variant: 33 residents caught Covid, with 28 definitely infected with BA.2.86—suggesting that it’s pretty easily transmitted. But only two hospitalizations have been reported, which hints that Pirola doesn’t cause more severe disease than existing variants.

In certain parts of the world, its appearance has sparked action in the form of hastened booster programs. In the UK, the booster kick-off was rescheduled from October to within the next few weeks. In the US, the latest round of boosters is expected to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration very soon (although who should get one remains a source of debate). The findings of a recent preprint suggest that Moderna’s XBB.1.5 booster seems to work well against the BA.2.86 variant.

But while BA.2.86 may not yet be spreading rampantly, a Covid wave is indeed unfurling, with cases once again rising. In the US, hospitalizations are up, although they’re still nowhere near the sky-high levels they were at this time last year. Cases are also mushrooming in the UK and in Europe.

For now, BA.2.86’s spread is shaping up to be nothing like the Omicron wave that rocketed across the world at the end of 2021—the last time we saw such a big raft of Covid mutations appear. As one scientist put it, Pirola may be a “real nothingburger.”

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