#posts that read like they were made in 2015

[skyblueartt]

Was playin Fnaf 3 with my brother and the puppet’s jumpscare is actually pretty spooky, not even gonna lie. Love it

[iheardyourprayer]

Still think abt how at every turn despite how many times brainwashing is a problem in the mcu marvel refuses to do anything interesting with it and instead makes it all a chemical a virus a switch to be turned off, when they could have brainwashing where the victim fully believes in the cause and has to deal with rheir actions when they understand what theyve chosen to do with what they thought was right after being influenced by violence and torture and propaganda. The fandom has always been 8 steps ahead of them on that

[walks-the-ages]

OP deactivated, and some of the links were broken/marked unsafe by Firefox, so here's a new compilation post of Leslie Feinburg's (She/her, ze/hir) novels and essays on being transgender:

Stone Butch Blues official free source directly from Author's website:

Stone Butch Blues, backup on the webarchive:

Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come, on the web archive:

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, on the web archive:

Lavender and Red, PDF essay collection:

Drag King Dreams, on the web archive:

(Also, if anyone ever tells you that the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues ""ends up with a man""........ they're transmisogynistic jackass TERFs who are straight up lying)

Please also check out your local public libraries for these books and see if they carry them, to help support public libraries! If you have a library card already you can checkout Libby and Overdrive to see if your public library carries it as an ebook that you can checkout :)

EDIT: another not included on the orignal masterpost-- Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or blue !

annnnnd in light of the web archive losing it's court case, here's a backup of both PDFs and generated epubs a friend made:

5/26/2023: hello! I am adding on yet another book of queer history, this time the autobiography of Karl Baer, a Jewish, intersex trans man who was born in 1884! Please signal boost this version, and remember to check the notes whenever this crosses your dash for any new updates :)

6/24/2023:

Two links to share!

Someone made an Epub version of Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years, which you can find Here , as a more accessible version than a pdf of a scanned book if you're like me and need larger text size for reading--

And from another post I reblogged earlier today, I discovered the existence of "TransSisters: the Journal of Transsexual Feminism", which has 10 issues from 1993-1995, and includes multiple interviews with Leslie Feinburg and other queer feminists / activists of the 90s!

Here's a link to all 10 issues of TransSisters, plus a 1996 "look back at" by one of the writers after the journal ended, you can find all 10 issues on the Internet Archive Here !

------

8/28/2023:

"Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out", can be found on the web archive Here, for the 25th Anniversary Edition from 2015,

and also Here, for the original 1991 version.

Each of the above can be borrowed for one hour at a time as long as a copy is available :D

This is a living post that receives sporadic updates on the original, if you are seeing this on your dash, click Here to see the latest version of the post to make sure you're reblogging the most up to date one :)

------------

October, 25th 2023:

"I began to dawdle over breakfast during shift changes, asking both waitresses questions. After weeks of inquiries, they invited me to a demonstration, outside Kleinhan's Music Hall, protesting the Israeli war against Egypt and Syria. I was particularly interested in that protest. The state of Israel had been declared shortly before my birth. In Hebrew school I was taught "Palestine was a land without people, for a people without a land." That phrase haunted me as a child. I pictured ears with no one in them, and movies projected on screens in empty theaters. When I checked a map of that region of the Middle East in my school geography textbook, it was labeled Palestine, not Israel. Yet when I asked my grandmother who the Palestinians were, she told me there were no such people. The puzzle had been solved for me in my adolescence. I developed a strong friendship with a Lebanese teenager, who explained to me that the Palestinian people had been driven off their land by Zionist settlers, like the Native peoples in the United States. I studied and thought a great deal about all she told me. From that point on I staunchly opposed Zionist ideology and the occupation of Palestine. So I wanted to go to the protest. However, I feared the demonstration, no matter how justified, would be tainted by anti-Semitism. But I was so angered by the actions of the Israeli government and military, that I went to the event to check it out for myself. That evening, I arrived at Kleinhan's before the protest began. Cops in uniforms and plainclothes surrounded the music hall. I waited impatiently for the protesters to arrive. Suddenly, all the media swarmed down the street. I ran after them. Coming over the hill was a long column of people moving toward Kleinhan's. The woman who led the march and spoke to reporters proudly told them she was Jewish! Others held signs and banners aloft that read: "Arab Land for Arab People!" and "Smash Anti-Semitism!" Now those were two slogans I could get behind! I wanted to know who these people were and where they had been all my life! Hours later I followed the group back to their headquarters. Orange banners tacked up on the walls expressed solidarity with the Attica prisoners and the Vietnamese. One banner particularly haunted me. It read: Stop the War Against Black America, which made me realize that it wasn't just distant wars that needed opposing. Yet although I worked with two members of this organization, I felt nervous that night. These people were communists, Marxists! Yet I found it easy to get into discussions with them. I met waitresses, factory workers, secretaries, and truck drivers. And I decided they were some of the most principled people I had ever met..." Transgender Warriors (1996) Leslie Feinberg

[inchidentally]

Sorry new landoscar fan here, I kept seeing the notion that Oscar was Lando’s fan for years, but I can’t seem to find any info about that?

ofc babe ! I store a lot of it in this tag but I think a little roundup post is probably due - heads up this is not in chrono order bc a lot of it is referenced from recent content:

2015 and Oscar making the big move to the UK to join Ricky Flynn and his fanboying of Lando begins

tiktok compilation of Oscar revealing his chronic Lando content consumption well before they were teammates

compilation from twitter of Oscar's decided bias toward not only liking Lando content but also searching his tag and finding posts that sometimes had barely a few likes (and this was just going back to 2017)

Oscar knowing when Lando's maiden podium was (and Lando calling him a nerd)

the 2020 hornet tweets because Oscar watched the stream of Lando battling 2 hornets in his house x x

2021 Oscar citing Lando's social media inspiring him to use humor as a way to open up to the public more (added landoscar angst here bc the hate and abuse he received after alpinegate seriously made him clam up and between that and him being fairly in awe of Lando, meant that Lando himself didn't rly get to know Oscar's humor until fairly late 2023 - like, no one should underestimate how Oscar entered F1 properly and got to know one of his favorite drivers all while being universally despised and painted as a villain/cold/evil - how much could have been different if one team had simply kept their mouths shut until verifying that tweet first esp when Oscar was already a shared reserve driver w McLaren anyway !!!!)

the beloved Oscar and Max F at Renault Academy lore

this post I made is a mess but the anecdotes he can only know from Lando's or Max's streams streams or Quadrant videos: Lando making stickers and selling them at school; Lando's snoring lore could be because of the thin shared walls but also Max has def brought it up before; he definitely already knew the story of Lando falling from a window trying to break into his own house; and the fact that we got Max reacting to Oscar referencing Max's outrage at Lando forgetting his birthday

it's a bit too scattered to compile but trust and believe Oscar has been a carlando girlie from day one - def the bromance but idk I feel like he's read a fic or twenty

watching Lando's career when asked about his idols coming up

and backing that up, him in 2019 saying the same thing

EDIT: his mum Nicole saying he would choose Lando as his ideal teammate going into F1 because the expectations of him wouldn't be too high since everyone knows how good Lando is

pulling out the it's Friday theeeen Lando meme

being so addicted to Lando content by 2020 that he actually fanboyed about the LN4 admin interacting w him

EDIT: he then followed it up by creating a sort of ship name for himself and Lando ???

and ofc K's beloved Oscar primer has a lot of context about all of this more fleshed out!

I think that's everything but if anyone notices I've forgotten anything lmk !!

[xamag-draws]

BBR thoughts 2024

Since I mentioned that I finally dusted off an old project of mine and was ruminating on how I'd remake it, I thought I'd elaborate a little, now that I've solidified some concepts. For funsies

This is gonna be a bit of a long and unfocused one, but I don't share my personal thoughts here often, especially the stuff about my projects I always marinate in. And for once it's something that people have existing context for, so hey why not

So for anyone who hasn't been following me for a gajillion years, The Black Brick Road of OZ was a webcomic that I posted around 2013-2015, back when I was in highschool going on college (which is kinda crazy to think about). It was sort of a darker twist on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, although I definitely leaned a lot more into dark humor more than anything in those first few chapters

I don't think it's available to read anywhere anymore, and I know people have been asking me about it. So here's the full proper archive of BBR, as full as it can be with deceased Flash

I totally used it as an excuse to shamelessly and self-indulgently experiment. It had interactive pages and GIFs and was wayyy too overproduced for what I could handle or what was necessary, but I did have great fun making it while it lasted

Unfortunately, that excess and the fact that I've changed too much as a person by the time I was in college is what ultimately killed it. The direction I wanted to go in was practically unrecognizable from the original idea started back in 2011, so there were many old hold-ups that I felt ruined it

At the time I kinda wished I could start/rewrite it all over, but considering that I pretty much had the entire script done at that point, it felt like a pointless sisyphean task. So I just put it on a shelf and didn't look back for about 8 years, because I didn't know what else to do

Now to be fair, the nature of my art has always been iterative and cyclical; when I feel like my creative juices have run dry I prefer to leave a project to marinate and move on to something else; cycle through other old things and bring in new skills and perspectives into the mix when I'm ready again. Not very productive, but it is what makes me happy to work on my OCs; I'm doomed to hit a wall with them eventually and I need some time to be able to find a new direction

So that said, I'm glad that BBR was left to marinate for that long. I don't think I was prepared, emotionally or intellectually, to tackle it again until now. The Wizard of Oz book (and the entire series of them, really) has always been near and dear to my heart, but there's a lot of context around it that I'm only unpacking now that I'm older

I think I always inherently feel negatively about the stuff I've made in the past, like its faults always jump out to me more than the positives, especially the more time passes. I've never liked that, and I do really appreciate the kind things people have to say about BBR to this day. The fact that it still can be recognized and remembered is very sweet

When I left it, I already found it "kinda cringe", and that feeling only deepened with years. When I took my first look back at it, asking the question "how would I rewrite it now?", at first I took a very cynical approach, as in "everything would have to be torn down"

But the more I sat on it, the more I found that I still see some merit and charm in the ideas I was putting out; I just didn't know how to execute them at the time (not to pretend that I know what I'm doing now, but I certainly know more at least). Turns out a lot of my old concepts could be changed substantially with just a few small tweaks. So I'd say that's a nicer way to think about my previous work

If you haven't seen yet, I posted a first draft of my new designs for some of the characters (the main group, the Goods and the Wickeds). Definitely subject to change, but more or less how I see them now

I'm just playing with these concepts; by no means would I attempt to remake BBR right this moment. Call it a pipe dream among my other ones. But just for fun, this is the direction I'd like to take:

Nowadays I'd probably make it a visual novel, with more emphasis on the visual part than the novel because I'm no English prose writer by any means. It'd still let me play a little with the interactivity while helping cut some corners on the drawing part (only some, I imagine I'd go hog wild anyway)

I've always intended for some events inspired by the sequel books to take place in BBR's past. Stuff like Jinjur's revolt or Ozma's rule preceeds the main events here. So I think it would be fun to follow the past of a few key characters alongside the main story. One chapter focusing on the present quest to see the Wizard, then one focusing on the past events (that are maybe reflective thematically); rinse and repeat

I'm also sticking a little closer to the original text in some regards. Not everything that I enjoy from the books would be translated here, it's still just a very loose fantasy on the material; but I'd like to be closer in spirit at least

I like mature, wise and powerful Glinda, I like kind and vulnerable Tin Man, I like the Wizard being a pathetic yet loveable liar, so I'm sprinkling in more of that for example

I'd like to keep some whimsy, but make it more grounded and a bit more serious to be coherent in tone. I think the original TWWOOZ book was a more realistic fantasy in some ways, even for the standards of the time; I like its simple but vivid tactile descriptions and details like bringing attention that Dorothy needed to eat and sleep

I find it funny that Baum specifically was averse to making his books scary or unpleasant, finding that unnecessary for telling a compelling kids story, but they still can get pretty dark and disturbing, at least for our modern sensibilities. Let's just say that I intend to use the Evoldo and Chopfyt storylines for my purposes. In that way, I feel like a "darker" Wizard of Oz retelling can still mostly be tonally in line with the original and balance it with enough heart and occasional humor

I slowly grew to appreciate the quaint old-timey quality of the original series, as well. The first book is both timeless and very much a product of the 1900s. Originally I tried to give it a little modern or at least anachronistic spin, but it was moreso because it's what I knew best, so these days I'd rather intentionally lean into the time period. Still not fully historically accurate by any means, but at least directly acknowledging the influence

The events of the story span across 40 years of these characters' lives, so I'm drawing inspiration from the entire so-called La Belle Epoque: the time period around 1880s-1920s. Basically I'm cooking, and my soup is old Victorian fashion morphing into Edwardian fashion and slowly inching towards flappers

Some new Dolly outfits

Lots of crazy things, political changes and innovations were happening at the turn of the century, which I think is noted and reflected by Baum in the books as well; the character of Tik-Tok might not blow any minds now, but he was one of the first robot characters in literature at that point; and don't even get me started on Jinjur, etc. Plenty of really interesting stuff one could lightly ponder in an Oz adaptation these days

Aesthetically, art nouveau has always been a big artistic influence for me, and it'd definitely be its time to shine here. John R. Neill's illustrations of the Oz books often keep me company as well. Nouveau architecture in particular fits that fairytale whimsy extremely well imo

I'd allow myself a little bit of art deco here and there, but ultimately its intimidating geometrical splendor is an antithetical to the flowery nature of nouveau and I associate it with a completely different era. Definitely fitting some characters like my Wicked Witch of the West, but shouldn't be overused

One of my main problems with the original BBR was that eventually I lost track of what it was even about; and the original ending felt too mean and unfulfilling to be worth it. Now I'd like to stick to the theme of home and family as my main theme, but in a different, more bittersweet way than in the book

An interesting connection I made is that a lot of my aforementioned older key characters (the Witches, Jinjur, the Nome King, etc) all came from the same reformatory as kids, that's how they know each other. In my recent research I learned that in those reformatories it was usually frowned upon to release the children back to the families, which were seen as the original corrupting influence regardless of the circumstance. The reformatory did everything in its power to cut that connection and make itself the only family those wayward kids were supposed to know and love. That's an unexpected tie into the theme of home that I'd like to explore as well

So yeah that's the current state of it. I have a bunch of outfit concepts I'm slowly cooking, although I'm now sure whether I'd post them... But I do miss these funny guys, and I'm glad some people still do as well :)

[sev-wildfang]

2015 - 2024

it has been a while since ive felt the courage or need to post something like this. i worked very hard to scrub all pre-2016 photographs of me off the internet in fact, something i realize was not in the spirit of the person who inspired me at all.

for the sake of brevity im not going to post the entirety of my transition. some two or odd years into it i was fully immersed in the feminine persona i was trying to become but still filled with a yearning that seemed to be incurable.

it was a chance encounter on this website that changed my course forever. i saw a transition timeline by a user who has since deleted their blog, detailing year by year their journey to become a kind of trans woman i didnt even know could exist at that point: a trans-feminine butch.

the clarity of their vision intrigued me. it opened a door where previously i only saw an insurmountable wall. this was something one could want to become. this was not a failure state. this was a lighthouse.

"you measure yourself by stricter standards than you do cis women", my then therapist said, "you allow yourself to play with masculinity in your art. in your art you seem to be able to separate it from male-ness. do you think you might want that in real life?"

immediately after that conversation, i looked at the timeline post again. i decided to get a haircut - a variation of the same short undercut that has become my go-to since. i slowly phased out the dresses that had carried my thru the hardest times of my budding transition. most of them i gifted to other trans women who had more of a need for them.

i set to work on my self once more with new purpose and i found first joy, then peace in the never-ending process of becoming. like every terminally online dyke in 2020 i read Stone Butch Blues, read The Locked Tomb, read Hot Allostatic Load, buzzed my hair off twice, got way too many tattoos to count, found community and friendship in my local queer scene as well as among butches online, and learned that i have the capability to love more than one person. and i love all of the people i used to be and no longer am; the problem child, the teenage romantic, the spiteful young man, the girl wrestling with herself, the baby butch still worried about keeping her tokens of femininity about her, the idiot who tought working night shifts was a good idea, and the clown who said this would be short post just some paragraphs ago.

the user who made that post was a lighthouse that went out as soon as i made it to shore, if you forgive the sentimentality. i am not half the butch they were (and maybe still are?) but maybe that's enough to be worth something to someone. it is something to me.

[jakei95]

[Post in English] Something Nyx and I want to publicly address, regarding the recent allegations in the Glitchtale Crew's Discord Server and it's moderators. I really apologize for the upcoming wall of text. These are our Twitter threads I have pasted them here, in case you don't have access to said platform. I have also added some additional notes to provide more context. All details under the line:

NyxTheShield: (Transcription from his official twitter thread) I read some mean comments lately and I just wanna be super clear: I havent been related to Glitchtale since at least 2022. I never considered myself part of the community and went through some much shit while doing stuff for it that my mental health was completely destroyed.

For people who thought I was an admin of the server, that was just in paper. I was constantly de-admin'd, demodded and kicked from the server through the years for simple stuff like asking the rest of the mod team to not say slurs or standing up against the Midnight Crew. I personally left the server for a long while because I really did not want to be around some of the people there. All of this happened years ago (from 2016~ to around 2020). On the early years, my full income came from Youtube/Glitchtale. I was a broke college student and my economic stability depended on it. Despite this, and making literally hundred of tracks and hours of music for the series, most of the income came from my own ad revenue. I was paid less than 2000 USD for all of the work. Essentially, I was paid in exposure.

This wouldn't have been an issue for me if at least I got to keep my artistic vision with the series. That didn't hold true for long.

From the second season and onwards, and in multiple instances, I would score the entire OST for the episode, watch the episode when it released, and then find out a completely new section of the episode (usually a battle scene) with music from somebody else This was completely demotivating to me because I wasn't being paid, the tracks would not fit the rest of the OST at all, and most of the income I made from the battle scenes. I had to work for weeks trying to compose music for glorified powerpoint presentations (Basically everything that's not a battle scene on the series was just still frames of characters barely moving) and do all the heavy lifting and I wasn't even let known about the guest tracks.

This added to the feeling of having absolutely no power within the community. I don't know if this was intentional or not (I don't wanna presume malice), but all of these things together contributed to me distancing myself from the community.

Honestly, there is A LOT more shit that went down these early years that are extremely traumatic to me that I would prefer to not talk about unless completely necessary, but I feel this is a good amount of context for what I wanna talk about next.

As you might be aware, extremely serious (and true) allegations were made against Camila and his partner, Veir, which was accused of grooming minors from 2015 to 2021 There are really good videos out there explaining the entire timeline of what transpired, but I specifically wanna talk about 2020.

(Jakei's note: Links to said videos are here: [1] [2] [3])

In that year, a public document was made by my head mod CrystalFlame alongside 2 other mods in the GT server, that exposed Veir and their actions. This document went mostly unnoticed. Even more, Crystal went through a lot of abuse for coming forward about their abuse and was almost ostracized from the UT AU community because of this.

Because of this, I was asked directly by one of the victims (and also representing the other victims) to please not speak up (Citing that they just wanted to move on and didn't want to involve themselves with more problems and expose themselves)

All the info was kept very vague from me, including the people who were involved, the extent of the stuff that went down, etc But I knew enough to know it was serious. I followed their request and didn't speak up publicly about this, but I banned Veir from my server, warned all of my mods and people close to me in those circles about Veir, and constantly tried to get Camila to please adress the situation. Despite this, she did not listen and we all know how stuff went down later in 2022, where the allegations came back again with full force. This time around I wasnt asked to stay silent so I spread the word around and confronted the entire mod team. I was shortly banned after that.

I needed to address this because this thing has been eating me alive for years. I was intentionally kept in the dark about a lot of context and nuance that would have completely changed my mind about speaking up or not about what happened in 2020.

Everything is easier in retrospective, and with the knowledge I now have about the situation I know for a fact that I would have spoken up about all that happened. But being asked directly to not speak up by the victims was something that goes against what I am Sorry for the long rant, but I really needed to get this off my chest. I am tired of having to deal with this kind of stuff. As a content creator/public figure I am trying my hardest to keep the communities I am active in as safe as possible.

I feel I could have done more for the Glitchtale community regarding the grooming situation, but all of the years of abuse that I endured really fucked up my judgement. I am not very good at dealing with people and I always trust the people close to help me for this kind of stuff

Sadly, in this case, those same people who were close to me were also the victims, so they couldnt have known or had a way to help me out, I should have helped them instead. Most if not all of what was described in this thread is backed up by screenshots, chat logs, and direct testimony from the people who were involved during this time.

I don't want to direct hate to anyone or start a witchhunt, I am doing this purely to decompress a bit and try to vent some of the trauma I experienced all these years.

============================================

Jakei: (Transcription from my official twitter thread) I would also like to share my experiences about my relationship with the Glitchtale Creator, Camila Cuevas. Publicly, we appeared as close friends, but in reality, that friendship was based on bullying and mistreatment, and this affected my mental health deeply.

Years have passed, and the memories still cause me pain. I decided to remain silent, but after the revelations of grooming cases in her community, I realized I wasn’t being too sensitive. The time has come to speak up about my experiences.

During the early years of Underverse, I was dealing with a serious depressive episode. Simultaneous internal and external pressures as an independent artist amplified my mental strain. Meeting Camila felt like finding a genuine friend who shared my passion for the fandom and understood the struggles of being a content creator amidst toxicity. At my lowest, I became compliant to doing things that I didn’t want to, just to keep people around me happy. For Camila, this meant allowing her to belittle my work and make me the butt of her jokes.

Only our veteran followers may remember the 'roasting games' between us on Tumblr (consisting of mutual insults), a spectacle where she'd always win. However, it was a game she privately forced me to "play" and I ended up accepting, despite the discomfort it caused me. These 'games' would give her a cool and strong image in the fandom while painting me as the dumb, 'cringe-worthy' friend. In essence, I became her personal punching bag, unknowingly reinforcing his reputation.

Camila's favorite term to demean my series 'Underverse' was “Cancerverse”. It felt like a constant contest where she'd always position herself as the superior writer and animator simply because my story and animation techniques didn't fit her standards. Years of being subjected to her ridicule left my self-esteem in ruins. I was okay with the negative feedback by some fans, but when my 'friend' publicly disrespected my art, it made me question my abilities as an artist.

I can't deny there were times when she gave me advice to deal with hate or hurtful comments. However, her damaging comments and treatment outweighed those moments of support.

My depressive state worsened around July 2017, where I had accepted people pushing me to do things I wasn’t comfortable with, while being part of Camila's demeaning games, just to appease her ego. I was introduced to Nyx during this time, he offered his music for my series, and eventually we started dating. We met in person in Chile, where I also met Camila. I hoped our friendship would strengthen but everything felt the same. Before I moved to Chile with Nyx, Camila reached out to me in dms, attempting to turn me against him because he opposed the use of slurs in the GT server. She claimed Nyx was being 'brainwashed' by his American friends belonging to the black and LGBTQ+ communities. She made fun of my dating choices, suggesting I was entering a toxic relationship, while showing off her relationship with her then-boyfriend (later exposed as a pedophile). She even quoted her own mother assuring me that Nyx would 'get back to normal', and if it didn’t happen, she would let me live in her house, almost like if she was telling me that Nyx would hurt me or make me feel miserable.

It only took Nyx 3 months to realize that the GT server was going in the wrong way. I initially felt compelled to defend Camila due to my inferiority complex, but soon realized Nyx was right. (Jakei's note: Not only Nyx was right, a lot of people that called her out over the years were right, yet they were not listened to at the time)

Even then, I found it difficult to distance myself from Camila due to the false sense of obligation I felt towards her. My fear of her making fun of my work kept me from interacting with others in the short period of time I stayed in her Discord server. I was afraid that she and her echo chamber would talk behind my back, something that I found out was happening in private chats until recent years.

Rebuilding my self-esteem wasn't an easy task. I began noticing the red flags – Camila's lack of respect not only for me but Nyx also, the emotional manipulation Nyx was suffering from Veir (something he used to do all the time with his other victims), her attempts to 'roast' me in front of her family and fans in the Underverse/Glitchtale meetings, and her constant criticism of my artstyle not being compatible to hers in the few collabs we made.

All these 'small' instances, dismissed as insignificant by many, caused me immense pain while treating my depression. I felt it was too late to express how I felt, as I feared being labeled as attention-seeking or oversensitive by her and her fanbase. Ironically, the moment she talked about her traumas after being bullied in the past, her feelings were the only ones that mattered any time she was involved in a problematic situation in the fandom and deserved to be the only to get pats in the back.

I never expected a sincere apology, as I was convinced she didn't remember or didn't care about the hurt she caused. I tried to maintain a facade of good terms with her, both publicly and privately. Eventually, I distanced myself from her, unfriending her and banning her from my own server even if she didn't interact there. I started focusing on my own work and the people who appreciated it. Despite this, the aftermath of the bullying continued to affect me.

Everything fell into place when the grooming accusations against her former boyfriend and server mods came to light. It was a shocking revelation, but it validated all my doubts and fears about her. The purpose of sharing my experiences is not to stir up drama, but to address the concerns of those worried about my association with Camila. I want to make it clear that I will never tolerate such behavior. Although the things I did for her in the past cannot be erased, I hope Camila at least deletes the animation remake I did for her and all the collabs that boosted her views for free, though I'm not optimistic about it happening.

As I've matured, my hope is that she and her crew learn from their mistakes, start behaving like adults, and take responsibility for their actions in their future projects and with their new followers. But I'm skeptical about any real change, especially if their server continues to exist. The best course of action for me was to cut all ties with Camila and Glitchtale.

NyxTheShield (now my husband) and I have endured too much from our treatment by Camila. We no longer want to be associated with her or Glitchtale. It's a chapter of our lives that we wish to close. It's time for us to focus on recovering our mental health, as remaining silent is only prolonging our pain. We have been working to improve our mental and physical health over the past few years and this is a crucial part of our healing process.

[sovietpostcards]

Russian State Library

The biggest library in Russia and one of the biggest in the world. It was designed in late 1920s, soon after the birth of the new Soviet state, and fully finished in the 1950s. In includes 4 buildings and one 19-floor book repository. There are several reading halls, a cafe, and a whole bunch of book-filled nooks and crannies.

I'm writing this post sitting in the library's biggest reading hall - Reading Hall No. 3. It was opened in 1957 and still retains most of the original furniture and design (only there are now individual power sockets in every desk). Most of the tables are occupied by people with books and laptops. It's very quiet.

The book depository is a huge building that rises high above everything else in this historical area. It had 10 floors originally, each 5m high, but later it was divided into 19 smaller floors. We visited one of the floors. I was impressed to see that the windows are made out of Falconnier glass blocks (made specially for the library in Gus Khrustalny).

There are two automated delivery systems in the library: one delivers readers' orders into the depository (pneumatic tubes) and the other delivers books back to the reader (monorail). We had a chance to see both of them in action, very impressive! They also kept a bit of the old book delivery system that worked from 1953 until 2015. I saw it on pictures before, and it was great to see the granny in real life. :) There are a lot of "grannies" in the library, from the green lamps to rotary phones to wall clocks. The pneumatic tube system has been in place since 1975. People whose job is to preserve books are very likely to preserve everything else.

I loved this anecdote. In one of the reading halls, there's a big painting of Lenin (pictured below). Apparently it was put in place in mid-1950s to cover the bas-relief that was there originally. On the bas-relief there are Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. After Stalin's death in 1953 and debunking the cult of personality, images of him were quickly removed from everywhere. The library, being true preservers of history, kept theirs but covered it up. It just shows what kind of people librarians are. :)

Although the library is working on running a full digital catalogue of all their 48 million items, if you want access to older editions you'll probably need to use the old paper card catalogue. The room gave me major nostalgy - I remember using this kind of catalogue in my local library when I was a kid. The sound of pulling out a narrow box, then the little built-in table, going through the cards one by one, writing down what you need on library cards. It was a whole process! Of course, the local library's catalogue was WAY smaller.

A few more shots of interiors. Although the building itself was designed in 1920s (during the era of avantgarde and art deco), the interiors were mostly done in 1950s when the main design style was neo classicism.

I enjoyed this tour immensely, so much so that I had to go back and get a library card so I can see more of it, sit in every reading hall and drink a cup of tea in the marble hall cafeteria. Also, the idea of 48 million books at the tip of my fingers makes me giddy. Thank you to my followers for the monetary support and making this real for me: K. T., H. W., T. B., m., @depetium, @transarkadydzyubin, S. R.

[mollbabyy]

celebrating palestinian science

in the face of israels' targetting of scholars, scientists and intellectuals...

saw a tumblr post by @/anarchistfrogposting that got me heavythinking about the relevance of language and culture in chemistry and science, it's unfortunate english has been accepted as its' lingua franca and most other input is lost to the globalization of this change. formulae and structure are essential and in a subject so specific, the average chemist will need to memorize hundreds of chemistry-specific words, and it becomes a barrier past entry when direct translating gets murky. deconstructing the history of science will always lead to political waters as the politicization of science and populist anti-intellectualism ethos rooted itself since the beginning of the study and these implicit biases result in a lack of consensus amongst borders.

before wwi the geographical spread of language in science was much more diverse, a lot of french and german researchers were common in research publishing, but after the allies established new scientific institutions that excluded germans and the isolationist decades that followed suit, foreign-language education was reductionist and excised globally as a result of elitism, being a language considered spoken only 'by the educated'. english-language proficiency is undeniably a prerequisite when an inexaggerated count of 99% of natural science papers are published in english, starting since 2015. this is a /heavily/ debated and discoursed topic and is terribly intimidating to sink your teeth into because of globalization of english and the complexity of modern language but getting over this hurdle will blossom a culturally rich rabbit hole to go down and it is all super interesting. there is so much great palestinian scientific practices, not as in western scientists work imagined in palestinian hands, but palestinian-born theories and practices. i think it's really integral, to always, but especially during times like these to uplift the people of palestine and their beauty just as much as funnel hatred toward their oppressors and murderers.

==

[image ID: a lineup of various glass pots and vases, ranging in color and size, placed in front of a plain background. end]

this is a specific sort of glass called 'hebron glass' which is an extremely renowned palestinian practice and passed down traditionally through multiple families and businesses. dating back as far as the 100~s in BCE, their technique of glassblowing was far ahead of their time and not used commonly anywhere else until much further in BCE. the /exact/ practice of hebron glass is kept a family secret amongst palestinian businesses, but a metal tool called 'kammasha' is used to blow the glass. a palestinian artisan talks about the process in more length here, i would recommend doing extended reading directly from palestine:

the colors are so vibrant and beautiful, i am endlessly impressed by how elegant these pieces have been made since the middle ages. these pieces and techniques have inspired a lot of famous modern day forms of glassblowing and glass artistry, most notably the venetian glass of venice.

i include this under science as much as it is art because it often goes unseen how much temperature and calculation goes into this craft. its highly skilled and intense work to bend over the hot flames and handle the glass in such a vulnerable state that could easily shatter. the material is more than 1800F and the palestinian kammasha is very carefully timed.

==

[image ID: an online video call meeting titled 'School on Synchrotron Light Sources and their Applications' at the top. end]

what you're looking at right now is the SESAME initiative run by the international centre for theoretical physics. a famous alumnus of this school was sufyan tayeh, a palestinian scientist. he was a prominent researcher and mentor and advocate for international understanding through science, introducing: SESAME, an alternative vision for the future of peaceful coexistence and cooperation and offered a meeting point around the globe to speak the common language of science, making communication possible. sufyan tayeh was an inspiration and bridge builder for all of these young students and an entry point for future scientists. he was a winner of multiple awards for his contributions to science and was appointed chair man for UNESCO (united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization) and head of physical, astrophysical and space sciences in palestine. he was regarded as a leading researched in science and applied mathematics globally, and tragically was killed in the current genocide. this is one case of many, many palestinian researchers. the impact of their contributions are insurmountable and irreplaceable.

==

[image ID: a list documenting the 45 palestinian scholars killed by israel since october 7th: Sufian Tayeh, Mohammad Eid Shubair, Omar Ferwana, Taysir Ibrahim, Ibrahim Hamed, Naeim Baroud, Azou Afana, Mohammad Bakhit, Mahmoud Abu Daf, Salem Abu Mukhda, Mohammad Abu Asaad, Osama Al-Muzayni, Refaat Al-Areer, Wael Al-Zard, Ismail Abu Saada, Khaled Al-Ramlawi, Mohammad Al-Najjar, Saeed Al-Dahshan, Raed Qudura, Mohammad Abu Zour, Yousseff Jameh Salameh, Nidaa Afana, Moumen Shweidah, Saeed Al-Zabdeh, Saqid Nasaar, Ahmed Abu Saada, Mohammad Jameel Al-Zaaneen, Ismail Al-Ghamari, Razq Ali Arouq, Walid Al-Amoudi, Abdullah Al-Amoudi, Hassan Al-Radi, Mohammand Abu Amara, Mohammad Al-Louh, Khaled Al-Najjar, Sharif Al-Asli, Mohammad Hassouneh, Yassar Hdeib Ridwan, Jihad Al-Baz, Hazem Al-Jamali, Nasser Al-Yafaoui, and Jihad Al-Masri. end]

==

the fabric gauze was also invented in palestine. if you've ever stepped foot in a labratory, you will know what this is lol. used in surgery and in chemical labs for multiple functions: separating liquids and gases, strain acids from bases, filter substances at extreme temperatures, prevent contamination, and to treat water. it is also used to diffuse heat and help protect glassware, seriously, these guys influence in glassware was HUGE. i think glass would still be sand without palestinian input.

i've set this post just up as a basis summary of the sciences, i would love to give an add-on going more indepth into the scientific process of some examples i gave and also in the history of palestinian scholars listed above.. when i get the time! but i hope this was an apt introduction! may good things come in 2024. feel free to recommend things i should check out or correct. OH OH also there is a lot of palestinian sci-fi.. 'divine intervention' and 'the second war of the dog' are both good, iirc they won the international prize for arabic fiction. just random things i found while looking up things for this post haha but they're good

[astronicht]

I was DMing a friend yesterday about how the lotr films (imo) do a great job of making Gondor look vaguely Carolingian — I was kind of holding it up as a positive example of intuiting and extrapolating on what Tolkien might have meant when doing adaptations — but said I wasn’t personally sure whether Tolkien was pulling from the Carolingian Empire or maybe the very shaky papacy further south or Visigoths or something. Or all of it!

Anyway then I settled in for my evening pop-nonfiction read, and got to find out why I’m always mixing up the Merovingians and Carolingians, a thing I will never do again. Bc yes they were two ruling families, but one was originally the fucking… stewards. I mean mayors. Haha.

(From The Private Lives of the Saints, Janina Ramirez, 2015. pp. 346-7)

Several points:

- I KNOW I made a post back in Rohan about how it’s very nice and wholesome that Tolkien wrote a fix-it for the brutal sack of the Saxons (Rohan*) by the big post-Roman southern kingdom but I didn’t know how thoroughly he did that. He really said what if Carolingians Gondor and Saxons et al Rohan bonded together to fight evil 💗 instead 💗

- So I don’t actually think Tolkien goes 1:1 with characters and historical figures, but I’m weeping at the idea that Boromir was a sort of Charlemagne but stuck in an AU where Charlemagne touches a magic ring and dies (despite being cool ☹️)

- Alternatively, it was actually Charlemagne’s dad who made a deal with the pope (NO idea on this one lmao good luck everyone) and seized power. Which would make Boromir something of a… potential.. Pippin figure.

Like he’s not, it’s not 1:1! But each Tolkien character does sometimes feel like an avatar of 3-5 medieval characters in a flashing and beautiful and strange palimpsest, while still utterly being themselves and not a symbol etc. it just so happens that you could, I guess? Make this argument for Boromir if you really really wanted to. Or Faramir! Charlemagne really tried to be both brothers, actually, which is— oh it’s fascinating again. Damn.

- Final incredibly important question: Wh at constellation was on Aragorn’s sword. I need to know the constellation on Aragorn’s sword immediately.

*I sound increasingly insane the further I get in these books but as… as established in previous posts there’s no English Channel in Tolkien’s world so Rohan is sort of the Saxons, Doggerland, and the Angles, Jutes, etc (English kingdoms), running up to Wales (the hill people + where Aragon goes on a Wild Hunt). God it’s so ancient aliens sounding but I cannot disavow any of this at this point.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Traditionally, the image of a figleaf was used by artists to cover the body parts (think Adam and Eve) that they were not supposed to show in their paintings. As I use the term, a figleaf is a communicative device that provides just a bit of cover for something that one isn’t supposed to show in public – like racism. To see how this works, let’s first take a closer look at Trump’s call for a Muslim ban. Here is a statement, cast in the third person, that he read aloud in December 2015: Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. The anti-Muslim message is loud and clear, and not hidden at all. But the end of the statement is the bit that I want to focus on: ‘until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on’. For some people, this phrase provided reassurance that Trump isn’t racist – because a real racist would want to ban Muslims period, not just while we figure out what’s going on. This is a figleaf: it provides just enough cover for the racism that isn’t acceptable to show in public. One reason that figleaves like this work is that many white people accept what the sociolinguist Jane Hill called ‘the folk theory of racism’. This view sets a very high bar for what counts as racist: a racist has to consciously believe in the biological inferiority of people of colour, and intend to be racist. Somebody like this would want to ban Muslims forever, not just temporarily. Similarly, they wouldn’t suggest that ‘some’ Mexican immigrants are good people, as Trump did. Nor would they have a Black friend, or declare themself to be non-racist, this line of thinking goes. A view such as this one makes it very easy for utterances to serve as figleaves for racism. These figleaves allow a voter to continue supporting a candidate who has made a comment that might have worried them. They don’t need to become fully convinced that the candidate is non-racist; it’s enough in many cases to be uncertain about whether the utterance indicates racism. When I examined discussions among Trump supporters online, I found people who worried about Trump’s views on Mexicans being reassured by those who pointed out that he also said some of them are good. ‘I didn’t hear him say anything racist against any race,’ one person posted. ‘What I did hear him say is, “Illegal Mexicans bring drugs, crime, and are rapists, but I’m sure some are good people.” Seriously, whats racist about that?’ Another Tweeted: ‘Trump is not racist … Trump is not against all mexicans just the illegals.’ Another classic form of figleaf involves reporting the words of others, either specifically (‘John Smith says…’) or in a vague, handwavy way (‘Lots of people are saying…’) This is a great way to avoid responsibility for what one is inserting into the discourse. We see this technique in the British politician Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, in which he described a constituent (a ‘quite ordinary working man’) as saying: ‘In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ Reports like these help to normalise the sentiments expressed, while distancing the speaker from them. Figleaves are not for everyone. Some people don’t need them: fully committed racists are happy with blatantly racist comments, no figleaves required. Many people won’t be convinced by them: antiracist activists, for example, will see right through the attempted reassurance. For others, though, they provide just what is needed – a licence to go on supporting the person they feel drawn to.

[obvi-the-best-soph]

Just a little bit in love.

alexia putellas masterlist: here

genre: pure fluff warnings: none

word count: 688

summary: you're a social media admin for barcelona femeni, and engaged to alexia putelllas. you sit with mapi at lunch, mapi making the grave mistake of asking how you and alexia were doing.

When you first came to work for FC Barcelona in 2015, you were under the impression you would be filming and helping run pre and post game press conferences for the men’s team, however, when you showed up on your first day, an iPhone was thrust into your hands and you were sent out to where the pitch where the Femeni team was training. That was when you first met eyes with Alexia Putellas, long story short, very quickly after that training session ended, Alexia asked you out to dinner, and now, nearly 10 years later, you’re engaged and happier than ever. 

At the moment, Alexia is sick, practically her least favourite thing in the world as it means she has to miss training and interviews and practically put her whole life on hold. You hate her being sick too, because she gets a bit huffy and tense and refuses to try and sleep it off, instead still attempting to do all the things she does at full health, even the time when she should probably of been hospitalised with an awful case of Covid during the pandemic a few years back, she still took Nala out for a walk everyday and made lunch for you both every. Single. Day. 

But there was another reason you hated her being sick, because now, you had no one to sit with during lunch. So you decided to just sit alone, until a ridiculously-cheerful-for-a-Monday Mapi ungracefully plonked herself down into the seat in front of you, grinning. 

“Hola chica. How’s your day been?” she asked, starting on her avocado.

“Yeah alright thanks, kinda missing Ale. It’s boring when you aren’t just filming your fiancee and posting videos of her on Instagram all day,” you reply with a teasing smile, beginning to eat your own lunch.

“Oh yeah, it sucks, her not being here. I had no one to annoy in the locker rooms this morning. How are you guys going anyway? I think her and Ingrid are trying to organise another double date." She rolls her eyes slightly, but is still smiling, earning herself a firm poke in the bicep from the now slightly annoyed and huffy Norwegian sitting next to her. 

The second Mapi asks how you and Alexia are doing, your eyes light up more than they have all day, one of your favourite things to do was to gush over how amazing and sweet she is. 

“Well,” you start, and Mapi already looks like she’s regretting asking. 

“She takes me out for dinners and she holds she door, and she pulls out my chair and she holds my hand,

And she *always* calls me 'pretty' or 'beautiful,' not 'sexy' or 'hot'. She never forces me into anything I don't want to do. She sends me good morning and good night texts everyday. She writes me little cards listing all her favourite things about me, just because she felt like it.

She kisses me so gently it's like she's not even there, she'll carry me to bed if I fall asleep on the couch while we watch a movie. She tries to teach me football skills even though she knows I’m terrible at it. 

And she slow-dances with me in the living room after a few glasses of wine while it rains....

She learnt how to cook my favourite dinner. She carries my heels and gives me her jacket when we walk home from restaurants. She gets all flustered and refuses to look any time I wear anything low-cut…

She reads to me until I fall asleep-” Your little love rant is cut off by Mapi’s childish fake-gagging sounds. 

You laugh huffily and playfully shove her shoulder, “Oh shush María, you were the one who asked.” 

“Yes, and I regret my decisions. You two are so mushy, it’s gross. I hate to say it, but I think you might be just a little bit in love.” She retorts with a teasing grin. 

“Just a little bit.” You agree, smiling as you get up to put your plate in the dirty dishes pile and get back out onto the pitches.

[pennyblossom-meta]

L Lawliet: a deep dive into the expanded universe pt.01

EDIT (07/04/2024): Added some imgs.

Apologies for being so late to give this a follow up to @maevearcher's meta which can be found here and here. As usual, she’s made excellent points and I'll try to answer the ones which caught my eye.

Since this post ended up gaining a life of its own and becoming a bit too long, I’m splitting it in 2 or 3 parts. The core of the content for part 01 starts after under the button to Read More.

Here we talk about L's humanity.

I'll start with a disclaimer of my own: while I consider the manga as the base for the story, I'm very much open to the expanded DN universe as a complementary study of the characters and their motivations — sometimes even filling in the blanks for some of the background mysteries, such as the dynamics of Wammy's House and how L's successors view him.

To further clarify: by canon I mean the manga and any works by Tsugumi Ohba as the base material. I think @maevearcher and I are more or less in agreement on that, from what she mentioned in her own posts. As she said, the written word is indeed the baseline truth.

The expansion of the DN universe also has its own very special set of problems; for example, in many ways, L:CtW (L: Change the WorLd) commits the sin of overindulgence by throwing in considerations that, arguably, go against canon. Besides the ending where L lives for a final 23 days and Watari dies, the portrayal of Near in the movie (though in the novel he's also walking a fine line between becoming partially and very much OOC) is also a point of contention. I confess that I really wasn't fond of the way they portrayed Misa as a potential crush of L given canon insights on his opinion about Light whether in the role of Kira or as a person (pg.64 of Vol 13: How to Read, henceforth referred to as V13:HTR), but aligning L to become more humane and forgiving was at least interesting.

The same happens with the live action movies, the 2015 series, and the musical. At least the game Spiraling Trap isn't clashing with canon elements — that I could tell. The main plot is separate from the events of DN and the dating sim is a little slice of heaven into L's thoughts and emotions which I dearly love.

However, while L:CtW does indeed overindulge, the novel AN:LABB (Another Note: LA BB Murder Cases) gives us a singular glimpse into L through the eyes of Mello while keeping the events mostly accurate to the main plot, even with its slight deviations. It's certainly an optional perspective to the core of DN, but one that I always found very insightful. In V13:HTR, Obha mentions how he would’ve liked that there were more novels about L and how he solved previous cases, in a similar fashion to how Nisio Isin approaches AN:LABB. Here’s what Ohba says in pg.61 of V13:HTR:

(...) I didn’t think up much for [L’s] past. For him to be in such an influential position, he must have solved an amazing amount of cases, but I have no idea what kind of cases they were or how he solved them. But I would love for NISIOISIN, who wrote the Death Note novel, to write more stories about that (...)

This means that, to some extent, even the original author, Ohba, accepts AN:LABB as close to canon — or rather, as canon as it can get given the creative liberties allowed to a third party writer. To that point, Nisio Isin took L’s capoeira demonstration during the Yotsuba arc and made it a whole thing in the novel, with L taking inspiration from Naomi Misora’s skills. However, given the importance of that event, in the main story, L takes a while to even remember Misora so we can infer that either the stress of the case is getting to him OR learning capoeira and subsequently Misora’s role in it didn’t leave that much of an imprint on him because true canon didn’t really put that much emphasis into it. Either way, it’s an extrapolation that works. The technicalities can be overlooked given how ambiguous the scene is, as there is more than room to deduce a different past.

At the same time, I am an apologist that there are shared characteristics to L throughout the different mediums. My own interpretation of L's character has the manga as a baseline, but the expanded universe has taught me that there are sides to him that might not be so easy to perceive in dialogue bubbles or illustrations alone. Little things like L's addictive personality or the way he represses feelings are visible in the manga but caught beautifully in the novels, for example.

Going from the written word into the screen also represents a loss of the purity achievable only within the narrative in-book, where you can extrapolate and reach your own conclusions without being subject to the bias of sound and movement — though manga aggregates the visual to words and with it an altogether different dimension of meaning. That's one of the many things I enjoy about elements of fiction introduced through books; the stillness of the images and the narrative are more complex. Every time the baseline gets adapted, it loses something or that something shifts to fit into the perception of others. It ceases being pure and its essence is fundamentally shattered. Like the concept of a musical score on paper that gets played by an orchestra, there will never be an adaptation as good as the source material because it breaks the illusion.

While I can certainly extrapolate and accept the loss, I find that the written word from the novels, the tone of a VA's voice and the body movements in a live action still complement the manga well, despite narrative clashes.

About L’s humanity

Recently I've been re-watching the anime and it's incredible how Alessandro Juliani's understanding of the character resulted in such a well-rounded voice for L. I actually prefer the EN version to the JP because of the voice acting. It's superbly brilliant, even if L becomes less listless. He's certainly still aloof, but his aggressiveness is portrayed more vividly; in contrast, L in the manga feels a bit more dangerous and scary to me due to the range of expressions that the anime didn't manage to add in due to time and budget constraints. If anything L tones down how dangerous he can be. He does this on purpose so that he can trick and trip his adversary, as can be seen during his earlier interactions with Light. At times, L makes a mockery of himself, apparently placing himself in the position of a more demure individual while sharply observing the world around him and forming conclusions.

As to @maevearcher ‘s first point:

(...) An image of this lonely autistic genius, locked inside the confines of his ways, waiting for the right person to come along and save him from the banes of his solitary existence…until he meets Light and realises there’s someone out there who he can relate to, for understanding and stuff. I personally don’t buy too much into that.

The depth to which L relates to Light can be overestimated, but not without reason. Theirs is mostly an adversarial relationship with varying deviations throughout the expanded universe, but if we solely consider the manga then we get this comment from Ohba regarding whether L has any friends on pg.64 of V13: HTR:

Nope. And when he says that Light is his first friend that’s a big lie. He never considers him a friend. He probably secretly thinks really negative things about him.

During the Yotsuba arc, L is at a disadvantage. Light has turned the tables, tricked him into what Beyond Birthday could not do and thus gained a solid position into rendering L almost powerless to charge him. To elaborate on the latter point: BB wanted to create the perfect, unsolvable crime to humiliate L, making him lose, and thus “spend the rest of his life trembling in fear of B’s shadow” (pg.163, AA:LABB); L would know who the guilty party was but wouldn’t be able to prove it or bring that person to justice. As such, L would not be able to solve the mystery. At the end of the novel BB fails due to Misora’s quick thinking and that’s that. However, Light has several advantages that BB lacked, starting with his own social position, charm and the impeccable reputation of a model student and the prized son of a police chief who helps solve cases every now and then.

We can argue that, what truly happens in manga canon, is L and Light showing how much they respect each other for their detective skills, forming a sort of strange kinship within the cat and mouse game, especially when Light loses his memories of the Death Note. The game thrills them and they enjoy pushing each other’s buttons. No one else has ever challenged them like this. That being said, the first time they meet up for coffee after the tennis match, L is observing Light like a hawk, keeps testing him for a reaction and seems somewhat irritated at how much Light talks. I would venture a guess that L doesn’t actually like Light that much, even when he loses his memories. He might even find Light a nuisance when he waves the flag of morality — though this is a common problem L is confronted with when dealing with the Task Force, in particular Chief Yagami and Aizawa. This also places him at another gruesome disadvantage, as he’s surrounded by people who openly dislike and criticise his methods. The Task Force is also extremely wary of the way L pursues Light and think he’s being stubborn without proof to substantiate his reasoning. Ironically, it’s Aizawa, one of L’s most critical subordinates, who initiates Light’s downfall years later once he starts to consider L’s suspicions in light of Near and Mello’s tactics. 

Both L and Light respect the game, no matter where it takes them. I would further make an educated guess that Light even preyed on L’s vulnerabilities during the Yotsuba arc, predicting how L might fall into depression for failing at the game. Light was more than capable of understanding that L’s competitive and childish side would make him a sore loser, especially given that he had already “lost” the first round of battles just by showing his face. Even if there is a sliver of friendship between both during Light’s months of amnesia, it’s dead and buried the moment he becomes Kira again. 

My conclusion here would be that, while what happened with Light was extreme, it was also somewhat similar to Beyond Birthday’s eternal enmity towards L: the challenge, the need to humiliate and take down the greatest detective, one of the most brilliant minds to ever walk the Earth. There are some notable quotes from AA:LABB that reference what it is to be L, surrounded by future challengers and individuals who both look up to L and want to prove they’re better than him:

Pg.69

By simple arithmetic, L's ability in 2002 was the equivalent of five ordinary investigative bureaus, and seven intelligence agencies (and by the time he faced off against Kira, those numbers had leapt upward several more notches). This is easy to think of as a reason to respect and admire someone, but let me say this as clearly as possible: that much ability in one human is extremely dangerous. Modern danger management techniques rely heavily on diffusing the risk, but his very existence was the exact opposite. In other words, if someone was planning to commit a crime, they could greatly increase their chances of getting away with it by simply killing L before they began. That was why L hid his identity Not because he was shy or because he never left the house. To ensure his own safety For a detective of L's ability, self-preservation and the preservation of world peace were one and the same, and it would not be correct to describe his actions as cowardly or self-centered.

Pg. 117

L was the goal of everyone in Wammy's House. Everyone of us wanted to surpass him. To step over him. To step on him. M did, N did, and B did. M as a challenger, N as a successor. B as a criminal.

Pg. 160:

B approached Naomi Misora, calling himself Rue Ryuzaki. Rue Ryuzaki - L.L.  For anyone from Wammy's House, there could be no higher goal than identifying yourself with that letter - and Beyond Birthday seized this case as his chance.

One of the biggest problems with these quotes is that they paint a very complicated — and, ultimately, suffocating — picture of what it is like to be L. Ohba himself mentions Watari’s predisposition towards collecting geniuses from all over the world and what Wammy’s House has turned into, under the snippet for Watari’s character (pg.60 V13:HTR):

He’s a guy who cultivates detectives for fun. That’s kind of terrible, isn’t it?

Everyone profits from L. Watari becomes richer than ever. Wammy's House becomes breeding ground for geniuses who end up dreaming of a life where they enjoy constant thrill and challenge. However, in order to do so, the dream cannot be complete until the successor crushes the original; until M, N, B and A defeat L. At least one of L’s successors couldn’t handle the pressure and committed suicide. B, known as Backup, runs away from the orphanage and goes on a murder rampage. Having never met L in person, he deduces several personality quirks that the “original” demonstrates, going as far as exacerbating them in order to be creepy and repulsive. Mello, who boasts of having met L in person and being privy to stories about how he defeated several other detectives (then taking their aliases as a trophy) both fervently admires L and wants to step on him. 

Step on him. That’s quite the turn of phrase. It does sound scary, doesn’t it? To be surrounded by people who would take the opportunity to pull you down, no matter how much they admire you. They want to be you, to prove that they’re better than you. It’s game and ego. Life and death. Winner and loser. 

And that’s perhaps the most blatant summary in approved canon of what it is like to be L that we’ll ever get. We can, of course, argue that Watari cares about L. He’s not only his handler, but also the one who brought him into Wammy’s House. It’s fairly clear that he nurtured (and even enabled) some of L’s most distressing character traits, though I wouldn’t necessarily say it was with a purely utilitarian agenda. It’s perfectly acceptable to extrapolate how Watari might’ve wanted to keep L, a child of great intellectual genius, happy by allowing him to be challenged and properly educated. In fact, AN:LABB (pg. 145-46) even gives us L’s perspective on the kindness that justice can achieve, which is confirmed within the expanded universe to be similar to Watari’s teachings as L confronts Kujo in L:CtW. 

"I have nothing to do with him," L said. "To be completely accurate, I do not even know B. He is simply someone I am aware of. But none of this affects my judgment. Certainly I was interested in this case, and began to investigate it because I knew who the killer was. But that did not alter the way I investigated it, or the manner in which my investigation proceeded. Naomi Misora, I cannot overlook evil. I cannot forgive it. It does not matter if I know the person who commits evil or not. I am only interested in justice." "Only... in justice... " Misora gasped. "Then ... nothing else matters?" "I wouldn't say that, but it is not a priority." “You won't forgive any evil, no matter what the evil is?" "I wouldn't say that, but it is not a priority." "'But..." Like a thirteen-year-old victim. "There are people who justice cannot save." Like a thirteen-year-old criminal. “And there are people who evil can save." "There are. But even so," L said, his tone not changing at all. As if gently admonishing Naomi Misora. “Justice has more power than anything else." "Power? By power ... you mean strength?" "No. I mean kindness." He said it so easily. Misora almost dropped the phone. L The century's greatest detective, L. The detective of justice, L. Who solved every case, no matter how difficult... " ...I misunderstood you, L." "Did you? Well, I'm glad we cleared that up."

I would, once again, venture another educated guess that, while Watari’s primary reasons for starting a program of successors to L was noble, it ultimately backfired on an individual level. Society wise, the letters, as L calls them in L:CtW, are a force for good. They solve crimes, help law forces around the world to keep peace. Some of them even become scientists like Dr Kujo — though she becomes the main antagonist in the spin-off novel. However, the pressure this kind of lifestyle fostered creates a group of individuals who are highly competitive and manipulative. Some, like A, can’t handle it. Even L has his own troubles, being called a reclusive sociopath, possibly by the police forces who treat him as a utility rather than a person. He’s someone they admire and resent, who is tolerated given how effective he is at cracking down cases. 

This passage from L:CtW paints a grim picture of the way L suppresses his own feelings as he breaks down for not being able to prevent Maki from being kidnapped (pg. 150-51):

"Light...it hurts. My heart--" It was a hurt that L Lawliet had suppressed, that he had to suppress in order to continue his existence as the peerless Detective L. How had the world's top detective been described in regard to facets of his personality rather than his ability as a detective? He had been called a kinky detective who relished bizarre murders, a human computer capable only of measuring mass murders in terms of cold numbers, a reclusive sociopath. What L thought of such estimations of his personality only L could know. But no one could truly understand L. How L did not and could not forget the faces of thousands of victims. Who could comprehend the man who had lived his life, and had to live confronting all the lives that ended prematurely, the tears of grief-stricken survivors, the devaluing of life as a daily reality. How was it possible to measure the pain of such a man? Was it a strain so heavy that L's back curved under all its weight? Was it an agony so terribly to leave the indelible dark circles around his eyes? Was it a feeling so bitter that every bite he took needed to be coated in sugar? The chronically rounded shoulders, the inevitable dark circles, the eccentric tastes--L suppressed the pain of being a champion of justice, but the evidence of the pain was moulded into his very body.”

Even within the clear disparity from the official canon, this passage slaps. It humanises L further, making the detective become a person and not just a machine who is content with his lifestyle. I know there’s a tendency for those who prefer the manga to see L as someone who is unabashedly himself and perfectly alright with the life he lives. I would argue that the Kira case was not only the most difficult challenge L ever faced, but also a series of moments where he had to be at his best — and at his worst. He had to do everything within his power to solve the case, not only because of his pride but because of what he considers to be his sense of justice. Saying with such confidence ‘I am justice’ is a rather cheesy and childish thing to say out loud, though I read it as both what started as a child’s stubbornness and what L became, as he positioned himself as a barrier to prevent crimes. 

L suppresses himself, represses his emotions; he tries to control them, as Fu Takashi says in an interview, he is “dependent on games or battles of the mind”. Perhaps this is a consequence of the foundations of his personality. Despite L’s innate stubbornness, it could be argued that this is as much his fault as it is Watari’s, who didn’t nurture L’s social skills as he should have when he was a child. By not having an outlet outside of his hobby, L is trapped in a prison of his own making. Superficially, L is a “smart guy who hates losing”, but what about the rest? What about the things that make him human, the connections with others? In the same interview, it is mentioned how L feels lonely and needs affection. But what affection can you get when you isolate yourself from the world and keep everyone at arm’s length? He’s not a machine. Even machines become obsolete with time, and need outside help to keep functioning.

As for the latter point, if everyone around L is trying to step on him, humiliate him and surpass him, then it’s only natural that his emotional defences would be up. Aside from Watari, whose loyalty he can count on, he’s alone. L has no one else. And everyone around him will have a dangerous, significant probability to betray him.

Next in part 02: About romance, having someone close and intimate, the meaning of the Monster speech.

Tagging @rinneroraito and @sharkiethrts who might be interested in this meta.

[toxic3mmy]

Star Struck

prompt: you get a message from alex on tumblr

hai lovely peeps <3

this is gonna be a short little book type thing with a few more chapters to come

i hope you guys enjoy!

ps- ill try my best to update this series at least once a week!!!

you mindlessly scrolled through tumblr. yes it wasn’t 2015 anymore but you still used the app religiously. you had a good number of followers, too.

you posted about all the emo and alternative music you were into and not to mention the youtubers who you loved.

your number one favorite youtuber was alexis quackity. you related to him in many different ways. he made you laugh on days you weren’t doing too well. he meant a lot to you, even if you didn’t know him personally and it was all most likely just an internet personality.

still, you found yourself talking about his latest let’s talk streams or even his random tweets. you loved having a community of online mutuals that felt the same way about quackity.

____

halfway across the country, alexis sat cross-legged on the floor of his cluttered apartment, surrounded by a sea of empty takeout boxes and energy drink cans. his eyes were glued to the computer screen, the glow from the monitor reflecting off his square-rimmed glasses. his mouse hand hovered over the keyboard, poised to respond to the endless stream of comments that flooded his youtube channel. his thumbs danced across his phone, scrolling through the notifications that seemed to never end.

it had been a wild ride for alexis since he started streaming games and posting videos under the moniker 'Quackity'. the fame had come quickly, and with it, the adoration of millions of fans around the globe.

sometimes alex would take the time and look through his community of devoted fans. he would use throwaway accounts to simply be unknown for once and just see what there was out there.

his fans were so unbelievably talented. many of them were amazing artists making portraits of him or even writing songs for him. some were even exceptional writers and the fanfiction stories he’d come across were actually pretty good.

amidst the digital chaos, one fan seemed to stand out from the rest. y/n, with her username 'Y/NIsNotHere', had caught his attention with her thoughtful comments and unyielding support. He clicked on her tumblr profile, and there it was: a fan account dedicated solely to him.

her profile was a shrine to his digital persona, filled with meticulously edited gifs, screenshots from his streams, and heartfelt notes about how his content had changed her life. Alexis felt a strange mix of flattery and curiosity. he hovered over the 'send message' button, his heart racing with excitement.

what did she look like? what was her voice like? would she be as amazing as she seemed? with a deep breath, he typed out a simple hello.

granted, he was using a secret throwaway tumblr account so he didn’t expect for an immediate response. and yet, the response still came rather quickly.

Y/Nisnothere: hi! whats up?

emoboy666_: nothing much, just surfin da web. so you’re a fan of quackity?

Y/Nisnothere: yeah im definitely a huge fan. there’s just something about him you know? he’s different, he makes me feel okay

alexis’ cheeks heated up after reading the compliment. he smiled softly as he continued to message you

emoboy666_: i totally get you! it’s nice to be distracted from things

Y/Nisnothere: for sure! so tell me about yourself

emoboy666_: well, im in my early 20s.. im mexican, i love video games and art….. oh and you can just call me A

Y/Nisnothere: well im 21, im also mexican, im also really into all things artsy and nerdy and well, emo lol, and you can just call me y/n :3

emoboy666_: i’m glad we have some things in common! your blog is really cool btw, it’s like a hidden gem amongst the cyber world

Y/Nisnothere: aw thanks! that’s really sweet of you to say <3

emoboy666_: no prob (: so, what are you doing right now?

Y/Nisnothere: oh not much, trying to do homework but getting distracted by tumblr and twitter lol. and u?

emoboy666_: oh same here, what do you study?

Y/Nisnothere: i’m studying art

emoboy666_: that’s awesome! maybe you should show me some of your work sometime

Y/Nisnothere: yeah! id love to (:

emoboy666: me too (:

Y/Nisnothere: (: <3

the two of you continued to message each other practically all night. you were happy to have made a new online friend and alexis was happy to get to know one of his fans.

neither of you truly knew who was on the other end of the phone but you still really enjoyed talking to one another. it was refreshing for the two of you.

you fell asleep with thoughts of your new friend, A

[toaarcan]

I need the anti-voting crowd to understand that not voting isn't going to cause the Democrats to take a long, hard, look in the mirror and suddenly decide that they need to swing left to appeal to more leftists.

When these centre-left parties lose, they get more centrist. They try to broaden their appeal and make themselves as appealing to as many people as possible.

The example I'll point to is my local centre-left party, Labour, who are currently poised on the brink of one of the largest victories they've ever had. By the time you read this, it may have already happened, election day is today.

Labour have been drifting rightwards on several fronts for a while now. One of the biggest examples of this was the 1997 elections. After repeatedly failing to defeat Margaret Thatcher and then subsequently losing once to John Major, Tony Blair became the new leader of the party, and reinvented it as New Labour, adopting a much more neoliberal economic approach and promptly got a historic victory.

Now there are a lot of reasons why Blair won as hard as he did, and I don't have time to break them all down, but at the end of the day, their adoption of neoliberal economic policies worked out enormously for them. Not only did Blair romp to victory, he maintained most of his popularity afterwards, reigning for an entire decade before finally stepping down in 2007.

Labour is also a handy demonstrator of why they don't lean leftwards after a defeat, because they actually did try that and it failed spectacularly.

After Ed "Wrong Milliband, wrong Ed" Milliband's dismal performance in the 2015 election, Labour actually decided to try and lean leftwards again, and selected Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.

Unfortunately, Corbyn was useless. Many a Brit will accuse him of not even actually wanting to be Prime Minister, instead just wanting to sit opposite an actual PM and oppose them. They're probably right.

The 2017 snap election, called by Theresa May, should've been an open goal. May was embattled largely by her own party, many of whom were strongly opposed to her attempt at a moderate Brexit deal. She was an unelected PM, chosen by internal party mechanisms after David "Bae of Pigs" Cameron fucked off post-Brexit disaster. The massive, and ever-growing pro-EU voting block were entirely unrepresented. The Liberal Democrats, normally a bit of a thorn in Labour's side in terms of hoovering up more left-wing votes, were still trying to recover from the massive hit in popularity they took after the disasterous Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Blood in the water for any left-wing party worth its salt.

Yeah so Corbyn fucked it up and lost. While May only ended up weakening her position, losing 13 seats and dropping below a majority, the Tories still got their largest vote share since the 80s and held onto power for grim death.

Corbyn stuck around, still didn't get any better, and promptly lost the 2019 election in a landslide. To this guy.

People didn't vote for Corbyn. In the media, he was pilloried as a communist and an antisemite (and he did such a terrible job of fighting that second one that to this day I still have no idea whether it was true or just a smear campaign), and his determination to take the high road only made him look weak and avoidant to the public. His policies got little attention and his campaigning was likely deliberately weak, shooting for the role of opposition rather than government.

It also didn't help that the people for whom Labour wasn't Left Wing Enough still didn't turn out. They still voted Green or didn't vote at all.

To the party itself, though, the message was clear. They'd gone leftward, and it had backfired spectacularly.

Corbyn promptly fucked off at long last and was replaced by Starmer, who is, as expected, another milquetoast neoliberal in most regards. And now, with the polls open for the 2024 election, and Starmer projected to win by such a massive margin that the term "Supermajority" has been thrown around like it's an inevitability, Labour has been engaging in what's been called a "purge" of its leftmost members, with most of Corbyn's base, including Corbyn himself, being barred from running as Labour candidates and instead having to run as independents.

Now, that might horrify you as a leftist, but to them, it's a course-correction. Corbyn and co. represent an era of failure for the party, where a leftward lean cost them two elections.

To swing back around to American politics, if the Democrats lose because of voter apathy, they aren't going to take it as a sign that they need to appeal to the left. They're going to take it as a sign that their appeal wasn't broad enough and they need more outreach to right-wingers.

They already lost in part due to voter apathy in 2016, they didn't move left to compensate. They found the Most Neoliberal Average Establishment Guy they could, rallied behind him, and it partially paid off for them. They at least won.

You want a more leftist Democrat party? Not voting isn't going to get you that. In fact, it will most likely have the exact opposite effect.

[the-girl-lost-in-fandoms]

DEBUNK OF TIT FORSHADOWING

hello! i promised a recap and debrief of all the times dip and pip teased what happens in the terrible influence show, so here it goes, brace yourself 'cause it's gonna be a long one

GENERAL REMARKS

so i started with the videos posted during the summer, since they were rehearsing the show during that time. i might go further back if this post does well (they said they've been writing for six/seven months and they were already teasing during dan's birthday stream). anyway, there were some recurring hints that i'm gonna get out of the way now:

a LOT of emphasis on the fact that it's been nearly 15 years of dan and phil (cough cough, reminds me of phil's infamous inconsistant line about their anniversary coming up in octodecember, cough cough)

a lot of ancient lore being introduced by 'the year was 2009/2011/2015', which is generally reminiscent of the recap at the beginning of the show, and most are the actual years featured in that segment of the show

they acknowledged 'we are ph-', which they also use in the show i.e. the phouse, the phortgage, the pheal, the phitchen, etc.

they are SO aware of the moms/dads/straight boyfriends that we have forced dan and phil onto, they kept asking us to bring them and they acknowledge them several time in the show

DNP GOING AWAY Q&A (1st Sep.)

strong emphasis on the haitus (reminiscent of phil's dramatic haitus microphone moments)

say they might adress the japhan wedding conspiracy (which they do!)

the nude colored briefs (are for sister daniel)

at 2:45, phil says 'gay' and the rainbow light and sound effect happen just like in the show

dan mentions red flags (might be far fetched but reminded me of the green flags/red flags of lawyer!dan and doctor!phil)

phil says cunt (like in the show)

'no but seriously imagine it'

phil broke a rib during repetition of 'some kind of stunt event' (during the boxing/wrestling match)

they spent $300 on silicon for 'full body character transformation onesie' for 'a perfectly unsexual moment of the show' (read: phil wears fake abs while pretending not to have sex with dan on stage)

Dan: 'you're not a 365 party girl? terrible influence when you're bumping that?' (charli xcx is on the preshow playlist and it teases the terrible song)

reveal of the 'dan and phil made me gay' T-shirt, teasing of the sweatshirt and black tour T-shirt

DATE NIGHT WITH DNP (25th Aug.)

dan sings muder on the dancefloor (which is on the preshow playlist)

dan going 'ohmygod they SHARE CLOTHES' (one of the conspiracies addressed in the show)

WRITING PHAN FICTION ABOUT OURSELVES (19th Aug.)

it's a fill-in-the-blanks game, as they do multiples times in the show (okay, not really foreshadowing as they've done this in all of their shows, but i think it was a way to introduce this to the newer audience maybe)

MrBeast mention

DNP REACT TO TATINOF (16th Aug.)

phil: 'fall out boy! my chemical romance! the shipping had started!' (basically all the ingredients of the no seriously imagine it post)

'if we asked people to confess stuff now it would be so much worse' 'the tone might be different' & 'and if you come to our show, there might be a different tone' (so... confess your sins to sister daniel, need i say more)

#spon (which is now #ad in the terrible song)

'i went to see dan and phil and all i got was this lousy plate' (EXCUSE ME DAN??? he was basically spoiling the merch two weeks in advance) (this is the moment that inspired me this post btw)

dan 'professional hater' howell is now the one starting the song in tit

'imagine that but 2025. we're old. we're gay. phil can say fuck' (and indeed, he says fuck)

DNP PLAY DRESS TO IMPRESS (11th Aug.)

they wear the matching 'precious baby angel' t-shirts (same phrase used to describe phil in the show)

DNP DRESS EACH OTHER (14th July)

Phil: 'like two Kens playing with Kens' (i bet pj was crafting the little rooms and the little dolls at this point)

they both have mesh shirts as the main show outfits

'how booty are the shorts, dan?' 'i'm not gonna bend over in these things'.... except for the photocards that feature your ass in those shorts!

the two first look (emo!phil and beach!dan), the white cowboy hat, phil's blue and purple bomber jacket are all featured in the photocards sold at the show

DNP MASSIVE MUKBANG 2 (5th July)

'we've been doing this since 2009 and 2006 *excerpt from phil's first videoblog*' (that's literally the opening of the show)

'we reclaim what Dan and Phil is in 2024'

'we’re gonna look at what YouTube is like in 2024, how do we fit in, we’re gonna be taking shots at people'

'we’re gonna spill some things that would have sent you into cardiac arrest seven years ago' (2024-7=2017. so basically any of the conspiracies they adress from that time, like the tour bus, vegas, etc.)

'we’re gonna go full theater kids' (oooh teasing the musical number already)

'what do people want? Series mystery hunting, lifestyle cooking, real life, get a dog, domestic' (that's basically all the things they try on stage)