#jobean rambles

[stormfang-gnash]

Letting yall know i just saw endgame, and am liable to reblog avengers related posts. I am tagging them as "Endgame Spoilers" so block that tag if you care!

[stormfang-gnash]

in what world would buying like two packs of cigarettes, not even smoking them, and then pouring coke on them be described as a "hack"?????

[stormfang-gnash]

Community is honestly great

It's cost efficient enough that you can pay your way on your own if you can't get any grants, the environment is chill and welcoming, the staff are invested in your success and are more than willing to work with you, there's a lot of resources to help students mentally, legally, and to transfer or get internships, it's local enough that you don't have to move usually, and the classes are smaller for more interpersonality between professor and students. I had a printmaking class that that was literally 5 people and we had a near equal staff/student ratio and it was one of my favorite classes. I've met good people, students and professors, in community college, and I don't regret not going into debt just for a degree.

Young'uns debating where to go after high school, do *not* disscount community college! If you can't get a free ride to a 4 year or something, check out what community colleges are nearby. Especially if you live in a state like Illinois, where all credits you take at a community college are guaranteed to transfer to a 4 year in state. Look into all your options before you settle on a school

the fact that community colleges are seen as less valid and for “stupid” people is a result of classism and in this essay I will-

[stormfang-gnash]

These are all okay/good songs but, not to be a music genre purist or anything, legit none of them are rock lol, theyre all alternative or a variation of it. Genres are stupid and hard to define neatly, but I can safely say there is like 0 crossover into what people would consider Rock Music. There's more crossover into Pop on this list than Rock

I understand this is like. Most played songs and all of these were radio hits but,,,, a lot of these also aren't even the best work from these groups

Panic! dropped 3 albums this decade and there's a lot of good material in all 3, even off of Pray for the Wicked.

The Lumineers have Ophelia which is straight up a Bop

TOP has Nico and the Niners from their newest album, and like the entirety of Vessel

Walk the Moon's biggest hit was Shut Up and Dance, but the rest of the album fuckin vibes alright, and IIRC, Anna Sun was 2011 and is also valid to include bc its a Vibe

Imagine Dragons is in here 3 times and not one of the entries is Cool Out, which is a Straight Up Vibe

Tldr this list is WRONG 😤

[stormfang-gnash]

A new game every year is unsustainable fot ANY franchise. It kills both game quality, due to crunch and just general same-game fatigue of developers, and also kills consumer interest by oversaturating its own market.

Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed are both games that used to have an annual release, and both of them went down the shitter after a while, and only just relatively recently bounced back again. Pokémon will, and already has in a way, gone down that path, but it has a chance to bounce back before it gets to be too awful.

X/Y's development was undercut by the rush to get Sun/Moon out the door, making X/Y the first and only gen not to get a third game/sequel since the series started. X/Y is also regarded as one of the weakest in terms of story and post game, and could have *very* easily been bolstered with a Z like D/P was with Pt. SwSh's development was rushed for the sake of rushing to get a new game out.

If TPCI REALLY wants a new game out annually, they should go back to making Mystery Dungeons and more games like Collesium, but outsource development to a different company. That way GF has enough time to make a new game, but they can still have a game out every year.

SwSh wouldn't have gotten all this backlash if it had another year in the oven. Most folks who have the game say its fun, and it's clear there was an attempt to go bigger, but what we got pales in comparison to what we could have had if it had more time. Hell, even if they had the time to patch SwSh into the game they were shooting for initially, it would be better[ie, the whole dex, improved visuals, expanding on the wild area and adding post game, etc]. But odds are, they're already starting development for the next game, so they can't really think about SwSh outside of making sequels/a third game.

🙄

[stormfang-gnash]

This is basic elementary school level stuff, like I learned this in 3rd grade. If you disrupt any level of the food chain, shit gets wack. Every level of the food chain is equally important. Break a link, you wreck the chain.

If you don't want wolves attacking your livestock, we need to stop deforestation. Where your farm is used to be these wolves' home. Same with bears that wander into towns and rummage through garbage, coyotes attacking pets. Your home or farm is encroaching upon their territory. You can't really blame them when they're hungry and go for an easy target.

(And also, doesn't the gov't pay you if you lose like a sheep or something to a wolf??? To deter wolfhunting but ensure farmers don't go broke???)

Predators are necessary to maintaining the balance and it sickens me that so many people don't realize that. [This is also true of insects and arachnids, btw. I hate spiders as much as the next arachnophobe but they have a place in the ecosystem as insect-eaters, and instects are food for many other small critters, like toads, frogs, birds, lizards, etc.] It is not humanity's job to dictate what should and shouldn't go extinct.

So one of my tweets kinda blew up. :v

[stormfang-gnash]

On top of that, compare the original films palette to the remake. Even though I haven't seen the original in a few years, I know for a fact it had colors that stand out and pop- think of the I Just Can't Wait To Be King sequence, for example; it involved a lot of other animals, many of which have their colors exaggerated, and it's one of the more colorful sequences, even though the whole film uses palette super well.

The remake's palette is basically just grey and brown because theyre limited to a hyperrealistic style, and it makes everything look so drab and boring; each scene we saw in the trailer had very similar palettes of brown and grey (the minimal color there is has a brown/grey filter over it as well), even the cheerful scenes like the Hakuna Matata sequence, and also all of the character designs are reduced to just being lions.

I know the film is about primarily talking lions, but you can clearly tell Simba (adult), Mufasa, and Scar apart by their design- same goes for the 3 main hyenas in the original, but now they all look the same. Scar has no real characterization any more, nor Mufasa (I can't speak to adult simba because he isnt shown much). Honestly, when looking for gifs, I wasnt sure which lions were from the Lion King and which were like Aslan from Narnia. All the classics are easily distinguighable by style even when theyre all about talking animals, but because of the hyperrealism, now its hard to differentiate without context.

Tldr stop making hyperrealistic live action demakes of everything because you will never be able to capture the charm of the original animation while still being photorealistic- especially when the film is about animals.

You know the main problem with the “live action” Lion King? Why it looks so lifeless?

The hyper realistic style is actually limiting the animators, rather than freeing them. The style makes it much harder to have memorable character designs and good expressions. Real lions don’t need to do things like emote in a way that humans can understand – but characters in a film do. The original movie was more cartoony not due to animation limitations of the time, but because that style genuinely serves the story better.

To show you what I mean, compare these two shots of Simba, from right after Scar says “run away and never return.”

Here is a clear reaction, with a strong beat for us to connect with before the character makes a decision. Even without any dialogue, even without any context, you can understand the emotion there just by the expression and the mannerisms. Is it realistic? No! He’s bright yellow and has eyebrows. But do we empathize with him? Yes!

Meanwhile, here is… a lion. Turning and running. No expression, no beats, no character moments, nothing. He actually can’t express himself because the animators are locked into the realistic style. If they tried to animate a strong expression as warranted for the scene, it would look terrible. Is it realistic? Hell yeah! Look at those textures! Look at that fur! But do we empathize with him? …nah. Not really.

To conclude: when you’re retelling Hamlet with a bunch of animated lions, cartoonish-ness is your friend, not your enemy.

[stormfang-gnash]

Ok real talk this actually happened to me

I stayed after class to talk to my biology professor at the start of the semester (i had a question about something or the other). We started talking about normal things, and he told me he was a Scorpio, and like. I don't believe in astrology much and no offense to Scorps, but 2 of the shittiest people I know are Scorps (born 1 day apart no less), so I'm always apprehensive of Scorps to say the least. So him saying that was like a small little WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO in my head, but I was like "ok, well, people aren't bound to be their signs" and didnt think much of it.

And guess what? He was an asshole toooooo~! He gave us an open book online midterm with short answer questions that he expected the computer to grade?? and when everyone failed it, we told him "its the short answer questions because if you do the math, the total points minus what the short answers are worth yields a 60%(which is what p much everyone was getting, between 50% and 65%) and theres no way the whole class fucking failed an open book exam." he didnt listen to us and decided that it was our fault because we all "cheated???" On an open book open note exam???? That he told us we could collab on at the start of the sem?? And also got mad that some people took it to the department chair (who is also fucking garbage lol)? Then for the final he completely shut down the Brightspace site with all the study guides and notes on it and when confronted he insisted it wasnt his fault and to talk to IT. But then literally the day after the exam the site was open. I told some classmates after finals about him being a Scorp and they were like "wow that explains *a lot*" Literally no one liked him. I literally should have listened to the signs.

do u ever think back on old conversations with people and think “oh! foreshadowing. that was real life foreshadowing.”

[stormfang-gnash]

On god, i was getting major league depressed again like summer of last year and I cleaned up around my room on a whim and found my old DS Lite with Pokemon Platinum in it and like it didn't save my life or anything but by the nine, it really helped. I had something to actually do, and then I bought Heartgold, my first and favorite pkm game, which had been Action Replayed previously by the former owner. Literally a gift from the divines, cause I have 30 master balls (mostly in case I get like. Shinies or smth) and a bunch of other items. Even if it wasn't AR'ed and full of cheated items, Pokerus Pokemon, and Legends I didn't have yet, HG would still have been worth it because it's the pinnacle of perfection tbh. I am a fierce Heartgold Stan (Soulsilver's good too, but Ho-Oh says Gay Pride(I actually named a Ho-Oh Gay Pride cause its the Rainbow Pokemkn and prepubescent me thought it was funny and adult me thinks its just a Big Mood tbh))

Replaying through Pokemon games cleared my skin and watered my crops, especially when it came to filling the dex. I'm a few nosehairs away from a fully completed dex (minus some legends/mythicals, obv) and its been my dream since 2011 to finish the dex so I'm gonna like. Cry when I do it lol. In addition, I've realized that my love of Pokemon is enormous and I'm going to start doing competitive battling when Gen 8 hits. I already have some Pokemon ready to train for it.

I'm also deadass 100% gonna get a Ho-Oh tattoo someday, already got the design worked out. I will forever Stan Pokemon and I'm sorry I fell out with you for ~4 years, it won't happen again.

No offence but Pokemon has been nothing but a positive force in my life and I will love Pokemon forever

[stormfang-gnash]

I know good and damned well you won't read this because you never answer the issues that are exposed by this community but lemme be real with you, Staff.

This is a bullshit move.

I am not a huge adult content consumer. If it comes up on my dash, cool I guess. Maybe I'll like it if it's something cute and intimate for a ship I like, but I don't seek it out as much. So this doesn't affect me in the slightest. This does affect the writers and artists that are just producing harmless content of consenting adults participating in adult activities. Tumblr is a huge monolith of fandom and adult content on the web, while also still having circles that cater to other niches. I can't think of another site like it, except maybe Pillowfort but I don't have access to it. Non-fans can use it not only to share their niche interests, like photography, old war planes, or cars, but also to browse for pornographic content and also partake in kink. Fans often use it to express their creativity in the form of art, writing, in-depth analysis, music, etc for their fandoms. Some of these works, in fact probably a majority, are about couples/poly relationships, and many possess sexual content because that is a normal part of relationships for most. This also affects the kink community and marks one less safe space for them to share their content and discuss their interest and how to be safe, etc. I'm sure sex workers are thrown under the bus as well if they exist on this site. Are adult bloggers entitled to this platform? Of course not. All I'm saying is this ban on NSFW content is like amputating a leg when all you needed was to clean the wound and get some stitches. It completely bypasses the actual problem at hand and demonizes something that never in and of itself was a problem. The pedophiles and porn bots were the gash in the skin, and NSFW was the whole leg. The only reason the wound festered to the point you felt the need to amputate was because you did fuckall about it the like half a year or more people complained to you about this problem. The community never stopped tagging you and messaging you and reporting blogs to you in relation to these issues and yet nothing was done. You made it clear when you initially mass deleted the nsfw tag and disabled the adult content filter that you've had the ability to take care of this all along and only decided to do it because money was on the line. So no, you don't love Tumblr and community, you love the revenue you get from it.

You can say you have a zero tolerance policy for child porn all you want to, the truth of is in your actions; you never lifted a finger to actually delete pedophiles and bots/spam blogs en masse, to corral the "MAP community" or do literally anything about the porn bots that invaded the notes of any post with more than 1k notes until your livelihood was threatened directly. And your response is to talk about how much you care about a community you never listen to and then completely delete an entire and important facet of this website rather than actually putting in the effort it takes to moderate the site like every other platform does. No other social media platform has the problems that Tumblr does because they know how to build a stable and functional website!!!! Even fucking YouTube, which also gets a lot of flak, regulates its content better than you do.

You can make the argument of kids being exposed to content too young, but frankly speaking (hot take incoming) I think Tumblr is one of the best platforms for minors to explore their sexuality and gender. Should they actively participate? Absolutely not, that's highly illegal and dangerous territory. BUT I'd rather teens learn about themselves and their interests here than PornHub - Tumblr content tends to promote safety and education about different adult things, ie how to engage in safe BDSM, that other places may not. Even if one blog doesn't talk about it, another related blog might. (It also allows teens a much safer consumption of porn (let's face it, almost all non-ace teens browse even if it isn't legal) because they can look at or read relatively tame smut of their ships rather than some weird shit on PornHub.) The only other place I could think of that might be more positive about these kinds of things might be Reddit or Furaffinity, but this is speculation. And when in doubt, let the community sort out blogs that could pose threats to minors. DDLG blog trying to groom a minor or some shit? Let users report this blog and then review and decide how best to move forward. Obviously there's a lot of grey here, but as an adult who has been here since I was 14, I learned quite a few sex positive good things on this site. Maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but I digress.

(Also I gotta just. Call you out on this one, chief. "Female-presenting nipple????" Really???? That's a fat L.)

No one is suggesting it's an easy thing to do and I could understand if the ban was temporary to give you time to work on an algorithm (that should have already been in place years ago) to sort out spam accounts and nefarious users. That would be acceptable, it takes time. But this is just garbage. This screams "we're too lazy to actually fix the real problem, so we're gonna get rid of everything related to said problem even remotely."

I love this community, despite Staff being so incompetent that this site has some major glitch or freakout pretty much annually. It may be obnoxious and quirky and sometimes downright unbelievable in its opinions, but there's no mainstream platform like this one. For all it's radfems, hot takes, "cringe," and other weird shit that happens on this hellsite, it really is a unique space that I have come to enjoy even though I talk shit about it all the damned time. I really hope you reconsider this decision because I do not believe it is the right one. Not because I am particularly affected, but because many of your users will be. And by extension, you'll probably lose more than a few bloggers. Not enough to put you under, but enough that it will be noticeable.

A better, more positive Tumblr

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio CEO

[stormfang-gnash]

Tumblr is also like the best place for long form content and long form discussion that can involve a large number of people and be easy to follow. [Quote tweets are succinct on screen, but a bit more to navigate through than just scrolling through a tumblr chain]

Facebook limits you to friends/friends of friends because of privacy issues. I dont want my name and face plastered all over the everywhere, and certainly not if I'm making a post rambling about some video game lore for half a page. Twitter can be private (in the sense it doesn't have to use your real name), but it's often linked to Facebook, and it doesn't really allow for in depth discussion due to character limits, and also the culture isn't really one of blathery discussion there. Instagram is picture based, so good luck going apeshit over the latest episode of Good Omens or whatever.

But tumblr? You can shut out the lights, scramble your voice, and shout into the void, and a series of equally faceless scrambled voices will holler back. You can talk about whatever weirdness you want in great detail without worry of your grandma seeing it, or an employer finding it after a quick google search. The anonymity is nice here, and while it has been used for hostile and toxic reasons, it's usually just used to be a dumbass on main or talk about fan theories.

Like

No other website really is like tumblr, which I came to realize after the porn ban in December, and the only other ones that have anonymity like this are reddit and 4chan, but... those are typically much worse.

Instagram is too... self absorbed? Like its too fashion/beauty vlogger, too highlights-of-my-day/faked posts for me to really get deep into. Twitter is too short format to hold my interest, and Facebook is just boring posts from people you hardly know anymore and reposts from other sites. Same with Reddit, just mix in some bigotry. Every other site (except reddit/4chan) requires you to have a persona, a brand you're trying to promote. You can't just be "sans-undertail-420-69", you have to be a real tangible someone, it seems. Tumblr is just chucklefucks being chucklefucks that don't even read each others usernames until we hit a post where the username is part of the joke, or a post from one-time-i-dreamt.

Where else can I go on the internet that has an entire community dedicated to unprofessional taxidermy, will teach me about weird obscure things but also stuff like afterbirths and how to save myself in the event I fall through ice, but also see shit like "hewwo? Misto obama?"??? Fucking nowhere. And it's incredible we exist with our own weird culture, and subsequently even weirder subcultures.

If tumblr dies, there isn't anywhere we can go, because this site genuinely is just a 2000s forum with some modern social media features tacked on, and nowhere else will ever be anything like it. I thought i could adapt to twitter, because it's "just tumblr with a character limit" (what i told myself when I first started twitter), but it really is so much different than tumblr. Even the tumblr spinoffs like pillowfort or waterfall won't be able to recapture the magic of tumblr - so much of tumblr culture is born directly from the mismanagement of this hellsite, and finding ways to circumvent or rollback updates we had thrust upon us.

Actual things that may have made tumblr money and bigger in the long run:

-allowing big blogs to monetise a la YouTube, which incentivises them using your platform as well as entices new people to use your platform.

-this would attract real advertisers and real user-brand partnerships to come to the site and thus making more advertising money

-better policing and getting rid of the nazis and cp

-a site hosted and funded annual con(s)(no not dash con, but like a real con paid for by this site not some diy event in bumblefuck usa) that fosters the community and unity of the fandoms that thrived so heavily on here for so long

-site funded contests like art contests or music contests which again, incentivises people to use the site

Because let’s be real, we all joke about tumblr being worthless(which on a philosophical level, it is) but tumblr has actually, dare I say it, been one of the biggest influences on modern internet culture. Where would a website like buzzfeed be without tumblr culture? Where would countless popular facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts be without stolen tumblr content? Who the fuck would still be watching supernatural????

I always say this as someone who’s been using this site since 2012, tumblr has always had intrinsic value, but the poor management of the site, poor user experience really did a number on it lmao, I mean fuck tumblr but also, don’t sleep on tumblr

Feel free to add more or add your thots

[stormfang-gnash]

BAN RESELLING!!

If you bought a ticket and you genuinely can't go, there should be an X month grace period you have to wait to be able to sell them, and you can't sell for more than 150% of the ticket price. Enough to get your money back from the purchase, but not enough to be scalping people. I'm fucking sick and tired of looking at show prices and finding all the seats bought up by resellers and sold at higher prices. It's ridiculous and blocks real human people from getting those tickets because bots get them instead, for the sole purpose of scalping fans.

How much MCR in particular is to blame, versus their manager or their label, or ticketmaster themselves? We'll have to see. I won't prematurely fling them under the bus, nor will I claim innocence on their part. It's entirely possible they used the dynamic pricing, but weren't anticipating it to get to be this bad. I would be more okay with dynamic pricing if it operated in a fair range, like you can't markup prices more than like... 300% let's say. Still greedy, but not as exorbant as fucking this shit.

Idc who you are, if you’re a fan or not. Ticketmaster allowing this range of resell is complete BS.

[stormfang-gnash]

I have a few problems with this tweet

500 due to medical errors [even if that number wasn't erroneous] is just. Going to happen, dude. It sucks, but doctors are humans, and human error exists. The only thing we can really do is give medical workers more time to rest and less 12 hour shifts to minimize the number of errors, but beyond that, that's kinda out of our control.

We've already done all we can to stave off the flu. We have vaccines and medicines to help with that. There isn't much more we can do to bring that number down.

Suicide is a huge issue, yes, but it isn't like no one is talking about it. Folks with mental health issues never stop talking about how much better our mental health care system could be. But even if it isn't perfect, we have a system. There are outlets for people with suicidal thoughts to contact. And in a way, the high suicide rates could be lowered with more gun reform, since that's one less fairly easy alternative for them to use. And furthermore, better mental health care would also help bring down gun violence. The two work in tandem a bit.

There is nothing more we can do about traffic collisions. That is again due to user end error, and we already have tickets, fines, and jail time to attempt to make the roads safe, but there will always be collisions.

Homicide via handgun is again something we might be able to fix with gun reform. We need to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable, out of the hands of folks with histories of violence, out of the hands of felons, etc. Sensible gun laws might lower our rates of gun related deaths by a decent margin.

I hate that this tweet implies we can't focus our attention on a few things at once. Like yes, it's undeniable that we focus heavily on mass shootings, but it's because it's a big fucking problem (and don't even be contrarian and tell me it isn't) and no one seems to want to do anything about it. There's not much more we can do to fix 3 of those points, 1 point is being talked about excessively, and 2 points correlate with gun control. So I think it's fair to talk a lot about gun control.

Gun control laws should have been put in place after Sandy Hook, [honestly it should have been after Columbine, but Sandy Hook was literal children being murdered for fucking nothing] but we care more about our stupid second amendment than human life. We've let this wound fester too far to just outright ban guns, and there are folks that need them for hunting animals, especially for farmers and folks living in rural areas - can't stop wolves attacking your herd with a knife. But we need to make this shit sensible. No high capacity magazine weapons, no weapons with high rates of fire, no gun shows and their stupid loopholes, no buying guns in a state that isn't your own, full background and mental health checks, mandatory 6-9 week class for anyone looking to get their FOID card [plus a test every time you seek to renew it], registry for every single gun someone owns (like cars), etc. We need to do something about gun violence in general, not just the mass shootings. It's clear that whatever we're doing is just not working right now, so we have to change something to start looking for improvements.

Go OFF, mr mouth.

[stormfang-gnash]

Idk how old this is (i didn't see your reply come up in my notes at all), but have an honest reply anyway. Note, I understand you're giving an explaination and don't necessarily agree with the behavior of the organizer, these are just my thoughts on the subject at large.

I know some of it is just for teh lulz, but my issue is people deadass believe in contrarian movements like ALM, Straight Pride, White History Month, etc. It's hard to distinguish who's just joking and who genuinely believes in these things. It's a similar issue to people who make really edgy jokes online. You can say you aren't bigoted all you want, but when you make bigoted jokes, you will begin to draw the attention of true bigots who think you're one of them. And all it does is muddy the waters of who is and isn't a bigot to someone on the outside.

These jokey contrarian events are literally no different. There are people who wholeheartedly believe in straight pride, who wholeheartedly believe "well the gays are doing it, why can't we?" It's easy to say "it's all just a joke", but it isn't in its entirety. Maybe on the end of the creator, but I do not doubt for a second some straight people took it seriously.

And tbh people who make contrarian movements like that just to rile people up and try to make it into a gotcha moment are absolutely asanine and miss a lot of the nuance that makes up a given issue. It isn't effective satire, at least not from what I can understand. It would be better and more recognizable as satire if he made this movement to point out a bunch of flaws inherent to the LGBT movement, ie how we eat our own, something about our infinitismal amount of labels, how we go against God's will, whatever. This just makes him look like a tool, imo. Like it's funny to him to completely minimize the issues of real movements and then when the real movements get reasonably upset because they don't know his movement is ~satire~, he thinks he's used their own logic against them, when he... hasn't. Simply making a contrarian movement for the sole purpose of being contrarian and rustling feathers isn't satire. It reminds me of this infamous comic. It isn't exactly one-to-one, but making contrarian movements to use as a gotcha momement minimizes the concerns of groups in a similar fashion.

[Image descriprion: A one-panel comic by Matt Bors. One peasant on the left, carrying a bundle of sticks on his back and frowning, says, "We should improve society somewhat." A second man appears popping out of a well on the right and says with a large grin, "Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent." End ID]

how do you feel about the whole straight pride thing?

You know when you were a little kid, and it’s your birthday but your sibling gets upset because they didn’t get any presents??

[stormfang-gnash]

MTX doesn't deserve an entire ban, because that'd kill a lot of free-to-play/multiplayer games and eliminate DLC. Just make it less fucking predatory and it should be able to exist just fine

No loot boxes, or at least make them earnable only through normal play, like as a reward for levelling up you get a box with a random gift in it. But that should not be the sole way you have to earn rewards/skins/etc

No weird pay to win bullshit, all items in the storefront should be purely cosmetic (ie, skins)

No gating off what should be base-game content to DLC (example: sims 4 not including stuff like university, seasons, and pets in base game to nickle and dime players into spending more)

No MTX in $60 non-multiplayer games period (but some MTX is allowed in multiplayer titles- they have to make enough to keep the servers up and $60 is just not enough to recuperate their losses from making the game and to cover the cost of server upkeep, even if they do sell a bunch)

Anything available in the store to purchase for real money (except obv DLC) should be earnable through playing the game normally. BUT the process to do so shouldn't be overly grindy. It should be just enough that it's possible to earn genuinely but enough to get some players to just buy it outright for ease of mind. There's a balance there that needs to be struck

And ffs, parents, PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR CHILDRENS' HABITS!!! It's important now more than ever to know what your kids are doing online, regardless of if that's in a game or on Youtube/social media! They are kids and the internet is a dangerous place for them to be. Teach your kids about the internet and how to game and browse safely and don't just give them free reign to do whatever. Do not just blindly give your children V-bucks or whatever currency there is, make sure you know what they're playing and whether that content is actually acceptible for their age level (eg, 10 y/os playing CoD or GTA)

Ban loot boxes ban loot boxes ban loot boxes