#straight to the gulag!

[deathbirby]

(lambert anon) It was racist because I guess liking a white character over a poc was inherently racist. Nevermind that I liked Lambert more mainly because he was a dad or self destructive in the extremely Faerghan way. According to the person I should have thrown away my preferences and made the 50000th post/work of Claude being the super best because its not like we don't have enough content for him. It didn't help that Hopes Claude was insufferable to me so they were one of those that acted like disliking the version who purposely tried to start a war to his benefit was somehow the same as hating him on the whole.

I still find the whole thing stupid because just boiling a character down to their race is always a disservice and it just made me bitter towards Claude and the people who just let that behavior breed in their circles.

That's definitely one of the worst things to come out of the discourse. You end up feeling bitter or hating characters because of the negative experiences you had with their stans.

[realpontchartrain]

So the three of us just had the official talk about all moving in together when Robbie and I finally buy a house, in front of James no less lmao

[queenlucythevaliant]

🪆

I would love a good dark poem.

--Rain on Main

Okay, this is maybe my favorite really bleak Russian poem. It's called "In the Bottomless Pit," but there's this tinge of hope in it that just makes the whole thing work so well. Anyway, I hope you appreciate:

In the Bottomless Pit In memory of Alexander Blok and Nikolay Gumilyov Day by day more brutal and more savage, deathly horror holds the night in thrall. Putrid winds extinguish lives like candles. No more strength to scream, to help, to call. Dark the destiny of Russian writers and inscrutable the roads they trod: Pushkin stood before a dueling pistol, Dostoevsky faced the firing squad. I shall draw my lot and know my fortune, bitter Russia, fierce infanticide. I may slip on blood outside the dungeon, or I may perish wretchedly inside; but your Golgotha I never will abandon, and your graves shall never be denied. Whether slain by hunger or by hatred-- I shall choose no other lot instead: if we die, then let us die together and arise like Lazarus from the dead.

--Maximilian Voloshin

[treesah]

The average homebuyer in Northern Virginia has no fucking taste and I’m suffering for it. It’s landlord specials and greige flips with shoddy workmanship going for $700,000 minimum as far as the eye can see

[nyonyia]

sharing a laundry room has been almost as bad for my former belief in the inherent good of humanity than working retail

[comradecowplant]

another day that ends in y, another day in which ultimate-guitar inflames a new hatred inside of me that i did not know could be there :)

[sillymovietrailer]

Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter

So that subtitle? Yeah, after this one there are six more official films, a "non-canon" crossover (which I'm seriously considering seeking out to find out if it's really that bad compared to the rest), a reboot, and some spin-offs after this. It's as much a "Final Chapter" as when Friday the 13th tried that. I get the sense it happened more because none of Full Moon's other franchises or properties really became the same sort of cash cow as this. This is a continuation of the story of the last film, Sutekh trying to get his mojo magic back... and by continuation, I don't just mean as a sequel, I mean that due to the way it's all set up, it's pretty much the second half of the story. This is something I was alluding to last time; I reckon that when they did the back-to-back filming of IV and V, it was because they weren't sure if this story was going to be two movies or one. I reckon it was all set up so that, if they wanted to, they could either do two separate releases or edit it all into one.

Obviously, they went with two films, and I'm gonna be honest, I get why, double the rentals, but I think they made the wrong choice. This really is just a pointless runaround, an exercise in padding so egregious, even Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who six-parters are looking at it in scorn. There's a lot of retread of having to reactivate Decapitron again, and reiterating stuff to just get this up to an hour and a quarter. This issue gets a lot worse if you are like me and masochistic enough to do a Puppet Master marathon, so you watch IV and this back to back (originally they were released ten months apart), you'll spend a lot of time going "we know!". Oh, and it also creates weird continuity things (par for the course), like Torch turning up, begging the question of where the Hell he was last time. Come to think of it, how come Tunneller is back when he got smooshed in 2? Or is this a prequel to the first two... but it can't be because no Leech Woman and Torch was ma- GAH! I need to give up trying to make sense of these things!

Anyhoo, yeah, this one isn't that good, it doesn't really stand on its own, and it's kind of worse put next to 4. If there was an ultimate cut of the two together as one, lean 90 minuter, it would be far more fun. Oh well. I'm going to skip the next film in the series, 1998's Curse of the Puppet Master, as I haven't seen it and don't have much to say, but I will be tackling the one afterwards, as something about it does make it a title of particular interest to lovers of crap film...

[blingblong55]

Perception- 141 x M!Reader

Based on a request

M!Reader, angst, mentions of blood,

The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced labour camps 

You are a well known member of Task Force 141. Although on field you are known for being the violent and viscous way you fight enemy soldiers, many on base don't really mind calling you names. In a way, you have become the freak of base. Ghost himself fears you at times, mainly because he has see you kill men with your bare hands and act as if it was nothing. He has seen the blood of the enemy dripping from your body and how you act as if it was normal. The team has so much respect for you though, they understand you are there for the mission, that you'd kill if it means to reach the goal.

Nothing really stands in your way when it comes to combat. But before you had become the man you are known as today, you were normal. A man of honour, never wanting to hurt anybody, no matter the circumstances.

----

What changed you, was 12 years ago, you were 2 years into your service when in a mission you were captured. Although the Soviet Union had fallen, Russia still held prisoners in infamous Gulag. You and a few of the other men who were also captured were tortured. Day and night was a living hell. The conditions were always horrible, men dying ever other hour due top weather and physical strength.

One night, you and three other men tried to escape, but because of a guard dog, you all failed. You fought back though, kicking, scratching and punching the guards. When one of the men saw you fight, he knew where they'd send you to next.

"глупый гребаный человек, думает, что может убежать от нас." a soldier spoke, some laughed as the other beat you senseless. They had broken your old self to the point that you just didn't care how you survived. For three hours straight every soldier that wanted to, would go and kick you, punch or even throw rocks at you.

Sometimes at night when you feel your most vulnerable, you feel for the cigar burns they left around your body. At times, you look in the mirror when you are shirtless, the deep scars that were scattered all over your body. Each touch took you back to the three years you were held in.

The winters were unbearable, at times, some of the men that would sustain injuries would die or have body parts be amputated. Others also died from hyperthermia, and somehow you survived the easy deaths.

On the night they sent you to a new part of the camp, they made sure to tattoo a symbol on your chest. A large skull a sword that pierced the top of it. All the prisoners were in cages, it ranged from the smallest of men to the biggest of all. You were well in your early 20's, so your shape was not so bad, even after all the days you spent without eating.

Once they clothed you properly, they threw you and a few other men into the fighting area/stage. Rich people watched from the stands as you all looked at them, you were all new. No one knew what the hell you were thrown in for.

Until you spotted the tools for fighting. And eerie sound came from speakers, the crowd clapped and cheered as soon as the prisoners started to fight each other. You, with some luck held a small dagger, a man much smaller than you sprinted to you, a sword on his hand.

If this was the way of getting out might as well fucking fight, you thought. You quickly dodged the man and soon stood behind him, you slashed his throat and took the sword from him. For hours on end, the smallest and even biggest of men fell to their demise. Blood was soaking the floor beneath you. Only 10 men survived from 50. You being lucky number 3.

And for many nights the routine was the same. Get beaten to sleep, trapped into a cage and wake up early, eat little to nothing and by sundown fight for your life.

In your time of fighting, you learned a few tricks, go for both weak and big. You did things you aren't proud to ever admit. You killed more men than any of the task force ever dared to do.

One night as you slept another prisoner escaped his cage, you woke up to being held by a knife at your throat.

"ты убил моего гребаного брата" the man spoke. (Translation: you killed my fucking brother)

"этот слабый ублюдок на это наткнулся" you answered coldly. (Translation: this weak bastard stumbled upon it)

"Я убью тебя" (Translation: I'll kill you)

"Нет, если я убью тебя первым" and thats when you grabbed the knife from him, stabbing him in the eye and then his throat. Before the guards came, you threw the night far from your cage and pretended to sleep. (Translation: Not if I kill you first)

----

You still have nightmares about it, but they aren't ever too bad. This mission that you were on though was a hard one. You and the rest of your team were captured. Price took the situation under control, trying to make negotiations with the enemy. In your years since being freed from the gulag, you hadn't spoke Russian or even heard it until tonight.

"Говорю тебе, сегодня вечером мы договоримся об этом, а завтра они проснутся мертвыми." the soldier said from the other room. (Translation: I'm telling you, we'll settle this tonight, and tomorrow they'll wake up dead.)

Your blood ran cold. Your breathing started to get out of control, you looked around the room, none of the other men knew what they had said. Gaz was the one who noticed your shift in behaviour, "Mate, whats wrong?" he whispered which caused all the other to look at you.

"I won't die, not by fucking Russians." your hands slowly shaking, you tried to steady your breathing, and thats when you realised you were back in a cage. You knew you were trapped, but it was as if you were young again, fighting every night for a spot to live.

"What does that mean?" Soap asked.

"Nothin'" you answered. You have to escape, you can't live like that anymore. You looked around the room and saw a poster, the same kind that was at every fight. You started to feel dizzy, and thats when Ghost noticed it, you were having a panic attack.

"Price, we have to get him out, now."

One look at Price understood why, Ghost shifted closer to you, he positioned himself in a way that would help him rub your back.

"s'alright mate, I won't let that shit happen twice." Ghost knew about what happened to you years ago, he accidentally found the files Laswell and you worked hard to bury. But not once did he push to know more, at times when you felt comfortable, you would open up, and he'd listen to the stories of those days.

But you couldn't listen, you didn't really understand the words that came out of his mouth when he tried to reassure you. Your hands digging at your skin, trying to feel your skin brought some good.

"Gaz, you untie me, and I'll untie you." Price ordered, soon the two men were up. They untied Soap, who untied Ghost. And he knew you best, so he opted to untie you once the Russians were taken down.

And once your eyes met Price, Ghost and Gaz untied you, Soap holding close as they all comforted you. Your breathing was starting to go back to normal. But still, the memories and the horror that place brought you were no fun.

The constant nights where you wished to just end your life, that maybe I'd be best if you die by your own hands and not by someone else's, especially not in front of the all the wealthy people who would watch the fight as if it was a sport.

The memories will forever stick to you and the regret you carry is who makes you the soldier you are today.

-----

A/N: I wanted this to be longer, but my ideas ran out, sorry

REQUESTS ARE OPEN

Tags: @xweirdo101x

[fullyarmoredbattlesturgeon]

signalis lore spoilers

i think something that too many players simply gloss over is how much of the dialog and found text in signalis is purposely written with an obscuring lens, not because the authors want to be obtuse but because when you live under an authoritarian system you learn to automatically self-censor and end up implying much more often then directly stating things much of the time.

kind of like how everyone sees the doctor's note about Isa being "clumsy and prone to incidents" and don't think twice about that.

you know it's because she's being bullied/abused by her peers, right?

the doctor clearly doesn't care, and Isa knows well enough that in the Nation (and likely Empire) when someone gets hit they *don't talk* about it.

frankly, that's how a lot of bullying/abuse goes down irl too, but instead of just Isa, everyone is experiencing it on some level or another.

think about, say, about the letter written to Ariane's mother, "suggesting" that it would be "best" for Ariane be relocated to the city so she can be raised by a blockwart-monitered civil crèche. there is no directly stated fear, punishment or order in the letter. just a "suggestion", in the same way that Isa was prone to "incidents".

how about the email sent to sector-c's blockwart? even within the power structure, everything is implied. you are only told to do your duty, and that there will be consequences if you falter or fail.

remember how the first floor of Sierpinski's name is censored because the state thought it was too on-the-nose? for those who missed out on the context clues, the word is re-education. Sierpinski is, lacking any other term, a gulag, a work camp. why do you think there's so many soldiers and guns in there? the keycards that only protektors are allowed to use? the uh, "interrogation" chamber?

then there's the Penrose program - it is directly implied in the operator's manual *in the beginning of the game* that these ships aren't built to be able to return, they only have enough fuel to maneuver once launched. it's not like they would just come out and say that it's a suicide mission, but for people who have lived their whole lives surrounded by wording and rhetoric like this, it's obvious.

Ariane knew from the start what she was getting into, that's the tragedy. she knowingly committed a kind of long, slow suicide and accidentally found something worth living for halfway through the process. that's the tragedy, and the final mission update is such a fucking insult because after years and years of dancing around it, they just fucking say it to you straight:

"You are going to die in a glorious demonstration of our power."

yeah.

so don't be confused when something isn't being said aloud in signalis. if it's not being said aloud, you're already supposed to know.

no gods, no masters folks.

[intersexbookclub]

Discussion summary: Left Hand of Darkness

Published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic in science fiction that explores issues of sex/gender in an alien-yet-human society where the aliens are just like us except in how they reproduce. These aliens, the Gethenians, can reproduce as either male or female. They spend most of their lives sexually undifferentiated. Once a month, they go into heat (“kemmer”) and their sexual organs activate as either male or female (it’s essentially random).

Here's a summary of the discussions we had on 2023-08-25 and 2023-09-01 about the book:

HIGH LEVEL REACTONS

Michelle (@scifimagpie): even though it was written by a cis straight perisex woman there is a queerness to the writing that feels true and that she nailed. There is a queerness to the soul of this book that still holds up, that's true and good, and I cannot but love and respect that.

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): this book is such a commentary on 1960s misogyny. Genly is a raging misogynist. It takes a whole prison break and crossing the arctic for Genly to realize a woman or androgyne can be competent 👀

Dimitri: [Having read just the first half of the book] I wonder if it keeps happening, if Genly keeps going "woaaaah" [to the Gethenians’ androgyny] or if he ever acclimates. It's been half the novel my guy

vic: yeah a book where a guy is destroyed by seeing a breast makes me want queer theory

vic: [it also] makes me feel good to see how much has changed [since the 1960s]

THE INTERSEX STUFF

A thing we appreciated about the book was how being intersex is contextual. The main character of the book, Genly Ai, is a human from a planet like Earth, who visits Gethen to open trade and diplomatic relations.

On his home planet, and to Earth sensibilities, Genly is perisex - he is able to reproduce at any time of the month and is consistently male.

But on Gethen, Genly becomes intersex. On Gethen, the norm is that you only manifest (and can reproduce as) a given sex during the monthly kemmer (heat/oestrus) period. 

The Gethenians understand Genly as living in “permanent kemmer”, which is described as a common (intersex) condition, and these people are hyper-sexualized and referred to as Perverts.

At this point it’s worth noting that depiction is not the same as endorsement. Michelle pointed out the book is very empathetic to those in permanent kemmer. LeGuin does not appear to be endorsing the social stigma faced by these people, merely depicting it, and putting a mirror to how our own society treats intersex people.

Throughout the book, Genly is treated as an oddity by the Gethenians. He is hyper sexualized. He undergoes a genital inspection to prove he is who he says he is. 

When Genly is sent to a prison camp and forcibly given HRT, he does not respond “normally” to the hormones, the effects are way worse for him, and the prison camp staff don’t care, and keep administering them even if it’ll kill him. 

Two of us have had the experience of having hyperandrogenism and being forced onto birth control as teenager, and relating to the sluggishness of the drugs that Genly experienced, as well as the sense that gender/sex conformity was more important to authority figures (parents, doctors) than actual health and well-being.

Another scene we discussed the one where Genly is in a prison van en route to the gulag, and a Gethenian enters kemmer and wants to mate with him and he declines. He is given multiple opportunities over the course of the book to try having sex with a Gethenian, and declines every time, and we wondered if he avoided it out of trauma of being hyper-sexualized & hyper-medicalized & having had his genitals inspected.

We discussed the way he described his genital inspection through a trauma lens, and how it interacts with toxic masculinity - in vic’s terms, Genly being "I am a manly man and I have don't trauma"

Those of us who read the short story, Coming of Age in Karhide, noted that once the world was narrated from a Gethenian POV, the people in permanent kemmer were treated far more neutrally, which gave us the impression that Genly as an unreliable narrator was injecting some intersexism along with his misogyny

WHY IT MATTERS TO READ THIS BOOK THROUGH AN INTERSEX LENS

Elizabeth: I’ve encountered critiques of this book from perisex trans folks because to them the book is committing biological essentialism, and dismissing the book as a result. I think they’re missing that this book is as much about (inter)sex as it is about gender. I think they’re too quick to dismiss the book as being outdated or having backwards ideas because they’re not appreciating the intersex themes. 

Elizabeth: The intersex themes aren’t exactly subtle, so it kind of stings that I haven’t seen any intersex analyses of this book, but there are dozens (hundreds?) of perisex trans analyses that all miss the huge intersex elephants in the room.

Also Elizabeth: I’ve seen this book show up in lists of intersex books/characters made by perisex people, and I’ve seen Estraven listed as intersex character, and it gets me upset because Estraven isn’t intersex! Estraven is perisex in the society in which he lives. Genly is the intersex character in this story and people who misunderstand intersex as being able to reproduce as male & female (or having quirky genitals smh) are completely missing that being intersex is socially constructed and based on what is considered typical for a given species.

WHAT THE BOOK DOESN’T HANDLE WELL

The body descriptions. As Dmitri put it: “ Like "his butt jiggled and it reminded  me of women" ew. It was intentional but I had to put the book down. It reminded me of transvestigators and how they take pictures of people in public.” 🤮

Not pushing Genly to reflect on how weird he is about other people’s bodies. We all had issues with how Genly is constantly scrutinizing the bodies of other humans to assess their gender(s) and it’s pretty gross.

vic asked: “how much of this is her reproducing violence without her knowing it? A thing I didn't like was how he always judging and analyzing people's bodies and realizing others treat him that way. And I wish there was more of his discomfort about this, that it made him feel icky.”

Dimitri added: “I really wanted him to have a moment of this too, for him to realize how much it sucks to be treated this way. As a trans person it's so uncomfortable. What are you doing going around doing this to people?”

Using male pronouns as default/ungendered pronouns. Élaina asked why Genly thinks a male pronoun is more appropriate for a transcendent God and pointed out there’s a lot to unpack there.

OTHER POSITIVES ABOUT THE BOOK

Genly’s journey towards respecting women, that he still had a ways to go by the end of the book. vic pointed out how “LeGuin was straight, and she loves men, and is kinda giving them the side-eye [in this book]. Her writing about how Genly is childish makes me really happy. It’s kind of hilarious to watch him bang his head against the wall because he’s so rigid.” 

To which Dmitri added: “I agree with the bit on forgiving men for stuff. I don't know how she [LeGuin] does it but she really lays it all out. She gives you a platter of how men are bad at things, how they make mistakes that are pretty specific to them. She has prepared a buffet of it.”

Autistic Estraven! As Michelle put it: “autistic queer feels about Estraven speaking literally and plainly and Genly not getting it”

The truck chapter. Hits like a pile of bricks. We talked about it as a metaphor for the current pandemic.

The Genly x Estraven slowburn queerplatonic relationship

The conlang! Less is more in how it gets used

MIXED REACTIONS

The Foretelling. For some it felt unnecessary and a bit fetishy. For others it was fun paranormal times.

Pacing. Some liked how the book really forces you to really contemplate as you go. Others struggled with a pace that feels very slow to 2023 readers.

WORKS WE COMPARED THE BOOK TO

Star Trek (the original series) - we wondered if LHOD and Genly Ai were progressive by 1960s standards, and TOS came up as a comparison point. We were all of the impression that TOS was progressive for its time but all of us find it pretty misogynist by our standards. The interest in extra-sensory perception (ESP) is something that was a staple of TOS that feels very strange to contemporary viewers and also cropped up in LHOD

Ancillary Justice - for being a book where characters’ genders are all ambiguous but the POV character is actually normal about how they describe other characters’ bodies.

The Deep - for being another book in a situation where being able to reproduce as male and female is the norm. The Deep was written by an actually intersex author, and doesn’t have the cisperisex gaze of scrutinizing every body for sex. But oddly LHOD actually winds up feeling more like a book about intersex people, because it features a character who is the odd one out in a gonosynic society. In contrast, nobody is intersex in the Deep - everybody matches the norms for their species, which makes the intersex themes in the work much more subtle.

Overall, as vic put it, “there's something to be said about an honest depiction that's not great, especially when there's no alternatives”. For a long time there weren’t many other games in town when it came to this sort of book, and even though some things now feel dated, it’s still a valuable read. We’d love to see more intersex reviews & analyses of the book!

[jdragsky]

no we're forbidden from using apps. if comrade moroyvchenka found out i was posting on tumblr dot com he'd twist my balls straight off and send me to the gulag

[irealekicka45]

Hi, 🌸

I'm FARAH. My family has lost everything in the war in Gaza. We’ve shared our story on GoFundMe, and we would be grateful if you could take a moment to see the pinned post, reblog it, and donate if possible. A $5 will be sufficient & supportive.Here’s the link to our story:

https://gofund.me/0dd287db

Thank you so much for your support.

Best regards, 💚

Farah

how about you take five dollars and go straight to gulag.

[gerardpilled]

British musicians grow up straight cisgender and white middle class in a nice neighborhood with two loving parents and act like they spent the first 18 years of their lives in a Serbian gulag

[luulapants]

Do you feel as though war and genocide soldiers, like nazis or the idf or rsf, etc are all able to be redeemed? Is separating them from society more harmful than allowing them to be in it, alongside the population of people they wish to harm? Can a person that willingly and gleefully murders a child be changed? Is it worth the resources to try, as opposed to using resources for their victims? If therapy is not meant to deconstruct and dismantle white supremacy, can it even tackle their issues effectively? I am asking all /gen btw, I am personally terrified of the fact the once they finish duty, idf soldiers will be back with the general population.

Thanks for the question, anon. There's no straight or short answer, but I invite you to consider the following:

One of the all-time greatest challenges in warfare is soldiers who won't fight - now called the "ratio of fire." Military strategists after WWII studies were told to expect 75-85% of their soldiers to either never fire their weapons or intentionally miss, even when their own lives are in danger. The most effective way to "improve" the ratio is aggressively brainwashing soldiers to believe their enemy is evil and wants to torture, rape, and murder their families. We hear that rhetoric from the IOF all the time.

75 countries mandate military service, including Israel. It's not just to maintain a large army - which doesn't make economic sense when not at war. Young people tend to be progressive. Military service allows governments to impose on young people the nationalist brainwashing they perfected to improve ratio of fire. University professors actually struggle to teach military students in the US because they are so brainwashed to not question and not think independently, which is required in higher education.

In countries like the US that don't mandate military service, we find ways to force it on young folks, especially low-income and people of color. One of the biggest arguments against free college is that no one would join the military. That's also an argument against universal healthcare. Folks go into the military just to get access to basic dental care. Recruiters are allowed to lie to teenagers to get them to enlist. There was a proposal to reduce the US enlistment age to 16 because recruiters were struggling to find young Black men without adult criminal records.

The PTSD diagnosis developed during treatment of US Vietnam veterans. Often, it was not the things that happened to them that haunted them most. Rather, it was the horrific war crimes they themselves committed that made them ill. These were mostly drafted men who lacked the privilege to dodge the draft. They didn't want to be there. They were brainwashed, propagandized, and put in near-constant life-threatening danger. Every so often, one of them snapped and massacred a village of helpless people. Doing horrible harm to others, doctors found, even of your own volition in that moment, caused severe psychological trauma.

We very much do know what happened to Nazi soldiers after WWII. Retributive justice saw 8,000 starve to death in US POW camps. Between 1.5 and 3 million were imprisoned in Russian gulags where they were used as slaves until 1956. About a third died. Those that survived were released back to Germany where they lived traumatized but generally peacefully.

We very much have seen successful large-scale restorative justice work done between oppressed people and their former oppressors in the form of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was a groundbreaking effort, imperfect, and its efficacy is a matter of some debate, but it did produce a functioning, non-apartheid nation, and it did not kill millions in concentration camps.

I try to look at most issues from a systemic standpoint. War, in my mind, is a crime committed by the wealthy and powerful. Its first victims are soldiers, and its next victims are the people those soldiers hurt. Your average soldier has no personal stake in a war, certainly not the way that politicians and oligarchs do. They are indoctrinated and brainwashed until they believe they do.

Many soldiers do work to deprogram themselves after military service. Many don't even know it's something that needs to be done. Undoing brainwashing is difficult but possible, given the right resources and environments. You also can't undo brainwashing while it's still actively occurring, and the brainwashing won't stop until the systems profiting off it are dismantled.

[ezra-fell-and-co]

Aziraphale & Shostakovich

The moment in the record shop when Aziraphale said he was picking up a Shostakovich record I had So Many Thoughts.

The symphony he's listening to is Symphony No.5 in D Minor, Op. 47, composed in 1937 and premiered in Leningrad to a thirty+ minute long standing ovation. Prior to this piece, Dimitri S. spent many nights sleeping in the hallway outside of his apartment so that his family wouldn't see if the government police in charge of enforcing Stalin's brutal rule came for him in the middle of the night. His last pieces had been received harshly by critics and called unpatriotic, which was just about the worst thing a composer living during The Great Terror (1936-1938) could do. Those who were not loyal to the regime and explicitly portrayed it in their art were branded as traitors and sent to gulags or were straight up executed.

The San Francisco Symphony describes the 5th symphony as "the story of a fall from grace and redemption.". Shostakovitch has gone from being a golden example to being eyed as a traitor almost overnight, the 5th Symphony becoming his redemption back into good graces.

So basically Dimitri S. was a man with contrasting ideologies to the powers that be, so to say, who was living under the threat of death, torture, or excommunication from his homeland. Haha, so weird that Aziraphale would want to listen to his music specifically.

(If you've never listened to Symphony No. 5, I highly encourage you to go listen!)

To set the scene-

From The Houston Symphony's 2018 Fighting the Barbarian Artist article on Symph. 5:

"In January 1934, Dmitri Shostakovich scored one of the biggest triumphs of his career with the premiere of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a work official critics hailed as the first great Soviet opera. Based on a nineteenth-century novella by Leskov, it follows the misadventures of Katerina, the illiterate wife of a well-to-do country merchant who is driven to murder in order to be with her handsome but unworthy lover, the laborer Sergei. By turns satirical and tragic, Lady Macbeth explored themes of oppression with a potent combination of sex, violence and some truly beautiful music that played to full houses for two years. Then on January 26, 1936, Stalin went to see it. Two days later, on page 3 of Pravda (“Truth”—the newspaper that continues to serve as the official mouthpiece of the Russian Communist Party to this day), Shostakovich found an anonymous review of Lady Macbeth headlined “Muddle Instead of Music.” One representative quote declared that the opera “tickles the perverted tastes of the bourgeoisie with its fidgety, screaming, neurotic music…”" ...

There is debate about if Stalin himself wrote the review to make a point, or if he just signed off on it being printed. It's also unclear if Shostakovitch was being targeted specifically, or just because of his notoriety to prove that no matter how big a name you are you're not safe if you don't fall in line, or if he was just being used as a pawn in the ongoing power struggles of the day.

Either way, he was very aware that he was in danger. A friend of Stalin's was vanished when he wrote to Stalin in defense of Shostakovitch's work after the fateful review.

The 5th was a result of Dimitri knowing he needed to get back into good graces, so he had to give them something that they wanted. Or at least something that sounded like what they wanted.

Symphony No. 5 is very sneaky in how it subverts the expectations and requirements of Stalin's Russia.

For one, it's form- a symphony is a very structured form and very Western, popularized by Beethoven and co. It's also instrumental, which allowed Shostakovitch to hide a lot of references, subversions, and musical sarcasm/critiques without the untrained critics and government officials being any the wiser.

D minor, the main tonality of the symphony, has been described by various music theorists about what kind of emotional experience it portrays. John Mattheson in 1713 described it as "Serious, Pious, Ruminating. Melancholy, feminine, brooding worries, contemplation of negativity."

However, for our purposes, Aziraphale is listening to the fourth movement, which is also the most political. (More excellent write ups about the entire work can be read here, here, here, and here. There is a PBS documentary about it here.) ((It also shifts to an ironic D Major as one point, which Mattheson describes as "Triumphant, Victorious War-Cries. Screaming hallelujah’s, rejoicing in conquering obstacles. War marches, holiday songs, invitations to join the winning team."))

The fourth movement is bombastic, letting the brass section loose right at the start. The main theme in this section is from an unpublished song that Shostakovitch had written as a setting for a Pushkin poem. The piece as a whole and specifically this movement is a direct critique of Stalin himself.

The poem?

With sleepy brush the barbarian artist The master’s painting blackens; And thoughtlessly his wicked drawing Over it he is daubing. But in years the foreign colors Peal off, an aged layer: The work of genius is ‘gain before us, With former beauty out it comes. Thus my failings vanish too From my wearied soul, And again within it visions rise, Of my early purer days.

Which I think speaks for itself in what kind of mentality Aziraphale might have listening to the symphony.

I'm not sure which recording he listens to, but in the record shop we are shown that it's a record with a blue label on the disk. There are several recordings that have blue labels including the 1972 Moscow Philharmonic with Kiril Kondrashin and the 1989 Scottish National Orchestra with Neeme Jarvi. Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic have a very famous recording as well.

But I think the most likely is the 1962 Vienna Philharmonic with Constantin Silvestri. Why? Well, here's the record:

[piosplayhouse]

Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games

(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)

(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)

Part I. The Backstory

My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.

However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.

The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.

(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)

Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.

However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.

(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)

This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.

(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)

¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.

Part II. The Game

The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.

To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.

Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)

What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.

You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))

Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:

(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)

I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.

In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.

(Image taken from an anonymous friend)

Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.

On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.

As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.

(My original post)³

What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.

² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.

³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.

Part III. The Ban, The Report

I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.

You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.

By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.

Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.

The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".

So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:

"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.

I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.

So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.

Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.

I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.

Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.

The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.

As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.

Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.

Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.

You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.

I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).

Part IV. The Backlash

I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!

After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.

However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).

I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).

I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.

Part V. Conclusions

I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.

However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.

Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.

Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.

It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.