#this theorist should know who they are

[swluminekin]

To the one theorist who bounces theories with me:

Thank you.

Do you know that I haven’t theorized properly in at least years almost 4 at this point? We have a mutual friend - you know who I mean - and they can tell you that a lot of the time I’m still scared. They can tell you my story - I think they already have - but it would be better if it came from me.

There was a time a few years back - the “before times” if you will of the world as we know it now. The ego fires didn’t go out because we were always getting new information, new tastes, new hints. It was early days of the official community server, run by the gladiator himself. The theories channel was always busy but it got to a point where things died down a little. Basically people started pulling at straws to figure things out. I had seen one person mention something, and I tried to voice my own thoughts, agreeing with them. Immediately, I was shut down and told that I was wrong. Didn’t really give a good reason as to why, just shut me down completely.

Not too long after that, in a completely different community in a completely different place, I put out another theory. Once again, I was near immediately shut down, told I was wrong. They at least had some sort of explanation, but for the most part they just shut me down and told me I was wrong.

I was hurt, lost. I felt that if I theorized anything, thought anything, I would be hated, told I was wrong, be berated and yelled at. Just for thinking, for theorizing, for having fun. In my mind, if I couldn’t theorize, then I couldn’t create. If I couldn’t create, that meant I couldn’t do any form of art, which included stories and any sort of drawing.

For months I was hurting, the only person I could turn to being our friend. When I tried to do anything creative or theorist wise, I would always hesitate or stop entirely. It caused me physical pain to even try. There were even times when I would cry because I wanted to return to theorizing, to creating so bad, but I felt that I couldn’t. They listened to me cry and comforted me because I wanted to return to that but was afraid to.

Eventually I found I could draw again. But when I drew, the art felt hollow - at least it did to me. I was excited that I could do art again but it just... never felt right. Even when did “draw this in your own style” stuff, it didn’t feel right.

I don’t even remember what happened, what video caused it, but one day I finally wrote a theory. Specifically, it was the Convergence theory. But I was so scared about what I was talking about and that I would be shut down again that I felt like I had to show my proof, show that I knew what I was talking about. I pointed out specific videos and discussions and Instagram posts. Heck, I even put up the pictures of the discord channel as well as my proof as to the channel’s naming.

Because I was scared.

After I wrote that theory, I was tired. I was so worn down. It was all because I felt like I had to prove myself. Like I had to show the world that I had something solid to back me up. Our friend could tell you that while I was proud of myself, I was exhausted and had one hell of a headache. (To be completely honest, I’m surprised at how well the Convergence theory is still holding up three years later with the I.R.I.S. lore? Like what?)

Ever since, I’ve rarely done theories - maybe having done a couple here and there, but not many. If I theorize, I’ve almost never written them down, I’ve just said them out loud. But I’m able to draw again, and I can write stories again. But I’ve never been able to really feel proud of myself, feel completely happy with anything I’ve done. All because of that fear of failure as an artist, creator, and theorist.

Then you came around. You looked at my theories. You were willing to bounce off of me. Counter me with “... but this... and because of...” rather than just “No and I won’t say why.” You’ve helped me with relearning and accepting my theorist side. The fact that we can bounce theories off of each other has helped me to think about things again. Our friend can tell you this. I still don’t theorize like I used to, but to know that I’ve actually somewhat met people who understand what I’m talking about, who accept me and my theories and thoughts? It helps to ease the process and the want to write them down again.

So I say to you again, thank you.

Your mutual theorist,

“Scarlet”

[random2908]

Frustrating when a VC-funded company gets credit for being the "first" and the "leader," when they had a sub-component demo the same week we had a full-system demo. Like, we are easily 5-10 years ahead of them, it's ridiculous; their approach isn't even yet proven to work. But they get science youtubers talking about them.

Because they're VC-funded, they have a marketing/press department.

And because we're an employee-owned company working off of government contracts, well, most government contracts get slapped with an ITAR label (an old Cold-War-era law saying basically sharing scientific information counts as illegally selling arms/munitions). So if you want to publicize your work, including your company's products, you have to appeal that label. (Universities have specifically negotiated a blanket exemption, so if you spend your whole life in academic science you might never even know about this.)

(My previous employer filed those appeals several times a year in order to do press releases and publish journal articles and apply for patents. I think every single information-release appeal they filed went through, because there's no reason any of this stuff should be labeled as arms--it's literally the same stuff universities are doing. My current employer is afraid to, which I think is wrong-headed; at worst they'll just say no, and anyway, our non-restricted competitors are giving fucking lab tours to youtubers.)

[jonathanssweatercollection]

you still resent nancy and jonathan for getting together???? for “hurting steve’s feelings”??? despite the fact that he verbally supported their relationship like 2 hours after seeing them together. this from a season that released 6 fucking years ago. a season prior to him saying that he was NOT in love with nancy anymore. do you want me to call shawn levy and tell him of your dilemma. bestie do you need to rewatch the source material

[louderfade]

exene talking about the state of the world. the good stuff starts at eight minutes. or you can just read the transcript complete with the usual errors that accompany robot transcribed speech (the irony of which is not lost on me). maybe it's not about transhumanism and living forever (or maybe it is who knows), but there's definitely an agenda of surveillance and control at work which is designed to keep the powerful in power. cash rules everything around me and you will own nothing etc. the future is worse.

[infizero]

i dont think i made this clear in the prev post but WHAT I WAS GETTING AT WAS i think toby specifically wants players to get attached to ralsei and make choices playing into that so that the inevitable reveal of our distinction from kris and their own opinions and feelings and everything hits even harder by sort of slapping you in the face and being like HEY BUDDY. THEY DONT WANT THIS. and also a slap in the face to ralsei too who i again would like to say is parasocial asf with us and needs to go to video game therapy :heart:

[my-balls79]

my mother was ranting at me again, the following is paraphrased: “the fact that you never do anything, can’t manage to do your school work and you can hardly take care of yourself tells me that you are a LAZY person” yes, mother, i am lazy, how could you tell? you do not even know the full extent of it, would you believe that i’m also too lazy to derive pleasure out of anything? would you believe the amount of times i’ve nearly killed myself because i am too damn lazy to be alive? i’m well aware of my laziness. fucking cunt.

[morlock-holmes]

The Conspiratorial Mindset

So, I've always had a bit of an interest in scams and hokum, and what people call "Cults".

One of the common refrains when you talk about religious Cults is, "If you think about it all religions have beliefs that seem odd to outsiders" and this is true, but as I read more about cults I started to think,

"Wait, a lot of these groups aren't united just by having unusual religious or supernatural views; a lot of them also seem to have matching patterns of behaviors that have nothing to do with belief in psychic space aliens"

I'm talking about things like,

Having a leadership structure which is absolute, where the top leaders cannot be disciplined or even openly criticized by lower members;

Exerting tremendous control over the dress and behavior of adherents;

Telling adherents that outsiders are untrustworthy and that contact with outsiders should be strictly limited and heavily monitored by organizational leadership;

The extensive and common use of shunning and reprogramming in response to violation of any of the above rules.

In some groups, failing to adhere to the dress code and spending a lot of time with outsiders is, at worst, the subject of a few little jabs at family gatherings. In other groups, those same behaviors are treated as Defcon one crises and become the central issue of the adherent's relationship with everybody else in the organization until they can be bullied back into doing the organization's bidding.

It was gratifying to learn that other people have noticed these patterns (Some people prefer the term "High Control Group" to "Cult" because it highlights what the actual problem is)

I am starting to notice similar dynamics in what are commonly called "Conspiracy theories".

The thing about conspiracy theories is... Well, conspiracies exist, and sometimes groups of powerful people get together to do something in secret which would get them in big trouble if they were to do it openly.

But I am starting to notice a particular, I don't know, a particular way of conceptualizing the organization and purpose of conspiracies which is unique to some people and which characterizes the kind of conspiracy theorist who takes Alex Jones seriously.

I kind of think of it as a "Witch-Hunting mentality".

For certain people in more primitive times and places, if they, say, slipped off a ladder and hurt themselves, their first thought would be, "That must have happened because a witch cursed me. We need to find and punish the witch who cursed me."

And this isn't just the attribution of malice that characterizes this idea:

One malicious conspiracy that might make you fall off a ladder is a manufacturer who doesn't care about safety ratings. Imagine that the manufacturer is really deliberately malicious here. A subordinate comes to him and says, "Our ladders can't reliably hold the weight of a person and a lot of them will probably break and cause people to fall and hurt themselves." and he says, "I know that but who cares, by the time people figure it out it'll be too late to get their money back."

That's a malicious conspiracy, but, importantly, if Bob buys a faulty ladder and falls off, the conspiracy wasn't trying to hurt Bob; it merely didn't care whether Bob got hurt.

Now, this distinction doesn't take away the malice and hostility towards Bob, but if you go to the ladder manufacturer and say, "Hey boss, Bob bought one of our faulty ladders, but he's really skinny so the ladder didn't break" the manufacturer will go, "Who the fuck is Bob? And good, that's one less angry person."

Whereas imagine Bob's ladder has been cursed to break by a witch. The witch did it because she hates Bob, and wants him to fall, and if she finds out he didn't fall, she'll go, "Curses, I'll have to find some other way to hurt Bob."

Conspiracy theorists, it seems to me, are far more inclined to conceptualize conspiracies as acts of deliberate malice aimed at them rather than acts of negligent malice.

@loving-n0t-heyting posted this article from the New York Post which contains a good example of what I mean:

“I thought I was on the cutting edge of promoting rights for gay people,” Yang said. “But then I started looking deeper into where this was coming from and who was paying for it, and I started to get very disillusioned...

I assume the people paying for it are LGBT advocacy groups? Did you, uh, not know that the people you were working for were paying you to work for them?

“When you really dig down you can see how much of this comes from documents and plans at the United Nations,” Yang said, referring in part to the UN’s “Gender Equality” initiative. “It’s part of a global agenda to restructure society, re-structure our social norms and the economy,” Yang claimed. “They are undermining the sexually dimorphic nature of reality and breaking down the differences between the sexes to break down our identity. They are constructing identities for us and they want us to adopt them.”

Oh, I see.

This is exactly what I mean. LGBT rights efforts make Yang and others feel disoriented, like society is being restructured and that they are being left behind, like they aren't quite in control of social norms and that stable identity categories can't be relied on anymore.

Now, one kind of conservative might look at that and say, "These are bad second order effects of LGBT people trying to assert their lifestyle in public and that's why we should oppose them."

But another kind says, "These changes make me feel unstable. Therefore, the main purpose of the changes is to make me feel unstable. In order to understand these changes, I need to figure out who wants me to feel unstable and what they would gain from making me feel unstable."

The idea that Yang's feeling of instability is simply a side effect of a series of efforts mainly focused on LGBT rights is incomprehensible. Instead, she believes that there is a series of efforts focused mainly on making her feel unstable, with LGBT rights as a kind of side effect to the main goal of making her feel unstable.

This kind of thing is, to me, a big red flag that indicates that we are starting to float away from reasonable conspiracy thinking into crazy town.

I am particularly curious if folks can recommend any writers or researchers who have noticed this dynamic.

[menlove]

honestly i think a HUGE part of the issue is that most of the left doesn't really understand antisemitism

after wwii it became wildly Unpopular to be blatantly antisemitic. obviously, it still happened. but the result of this is that instead of antisemitism being studied as a historical and pervasive form of oppression that has been around for thousands of years & has many many precedents BEFORE the holocaust.... it became:

something just simply Rude to say or do. if you're a polite liberal/conservative or a leftist, it's just something that is socially unacceptable. there is no real weight to this.

something when FIRMLY believed is ONLY held by people like nazis and white supremacists. who, as we know, are The Enemy and none of us can ever be like them at all ever by the virtue of... not being them. no need to watch your own behaviors, bc you are not a nazi! only nazis could ever be Actually antisemitic

something that erupted out of the ground in germany in the early 20th century, culminated with the holocaust, and ended after. antisemitism did not exist before that and it was solved after when the saving grace of the united states and england liberated the jews from the nazis out of the goodness of their hearts

however absolutely none of this is true. antisemitism stretches back thousands of years and it has not, for the most part, been only "fringe" conspiracy theorists and white supremacists who perpetuate it

antisemitism has been, by and large, presented as very logical. throughout, again, the thousands of years of history of antisemitism, very regular people have been antisemites. and most of them had reasons they felt were perfectly logical and understandable and most of all just. jews were trying to kill their children, of course they hated them! jews were purposefully trying to keep them poor, of course they hated them! jews believed Wrong Things and were morally and spiritually corrupt, of course there was something wrong with them. jews betrayed their country, lost them a war that ended with their husbands and brothers and sons dead, and now were living among them and taking advantage of social benefits out of the goodness of the hearts of the german people, of COURSE they hated them! and the nazis themselves were backed up by science at the time. scientific racism was THE science at the time. charles darwin was a scientific racist. it was all very logical.

and did jews actually do these things? no. but these people saw enough proof that aligned well enough with their morals and their beliefs and their fears & so to them it was completely logical and justified. it wasn't a fringe theory that only an insane person would believe in, or something impolite. it was true to them. to their morals, to their fears, to their core beliefs. it was true.

and so now we see a LOT. a lot of leftists being dragged ass first into antisemitism. because they don't even think they CAN be antisemitic. THEY aren't nazis and THEY aren't white supremacists, of COURSE they aren't antisemitic. but... well. the jews are doing things that go against their morals. they're doing things that validate their fears. the jews are violating things that go against their core beliefs! so of COURSE it is LOGICAL that they should hate them. of course, it is still rude to say "the jews are evil" so it gets replaced with "zionist". (and before you ask yes i am anti-zionism and do deeply believe what israel is doing is unjust and cruel) but even that is slipping.

it is getting all the more popular to go that one step further and instead of just making posts like "spam the hanukkah tag because the Zionists need to learn what their religion stands for" that are blatantly just replacing "jews" with "zionists", they are logically moving to being mask off. if zionism is wrong and half the world's remaining jewish population lives in israel, what about the rest? aren't they suspect? would they not ALL commit atrocities if given the chance? aren't they all racist for believing they're an ethnicity? aren't they all complicit? aren't they all threatening our deeply held leftist beliefs? it's a little weird and everyone has been too quiet for too long bc it's been rude to say but now you can get 300k notes for posting blood libel so why would you keep quiet anymore?

why WOULDN'T you just say "thank god someone finally said it i was worried about stepping on toes" when someone makes a post full of antisemitic conspiracy theory. why WOULDN'T you say "i don't care if all of israel gets bombed and every single person dies after this lmfao they deserve it"? (which would wipe out, again, half the world's population of jews- many of whom living there are anti-zionist and actively protesting their government. or. you know. children.) why WOULDN'T you make posts about how jewish identity is just nazi aryanism? why wouldn't you make posts about how the jews are privileged in america bc they run hollywood and the economy? why WOULDN'T you say the star of david is a hate symbol to you now and that you mistrust anyone using it? or that you find anyone speaking hebrew suspect?

these are all perfectly logical. to you. and YOU are not a nazi or a white supremacist. so it can't be antisemitic.

[legandairy-horror]

Does anyone else feel a strange sort of dread waiting for new deltarune chapters?

It sounds crazy right? I admit it's a weird feeling for sure, and I'm not even 100% sure if dread is the right way to describe it. But as more info is revealed and the next chapter inevitably gets closer and closer to releasing I can't help but feel a strange sort of, melancholy? Longing? The only way I can describe it is "when you know the goodbye is coming". The strange somber feeling when you know you’re going to have to leave stuff behind, but aren't quite ready for it yet.

warning: words. Homestuck

In 3 months Chapter 1 will be 6 years old, and in 2 months Chapter 2 will be 3 years old. Deltarune is ostensibly in Early Access but this release schedule puts new chapters closer in time scale to whole sequals if anything, which they most assuredly are not trying to be. This has created a strange situation in the fanbase that I don't think I've ever truly seen anywhere else. One where, In the time between chapters It feels like everyone has had their own chance to decide what Deltarune is to them. To create their own version of this story, to write their own themes that they want to see explored, to imagine their own events and plot twists they want to see play out.

@lynxgriffin Paper Trail Comic Being an Alternate Story following off of chapter 1

@lilybug-02 The Chara Timeline Being one of many interpretations on the popular Asriel & Chara roommates headcannon.

@huecycles Andromeda Chapters being their interpretation on the full game

The innumerable Deltarune Theorists and analysts like HalfBreadChaos, Andrew Cunningham, Stuffed Alpaca, etc. etc.

@vyletbunni Deltatraveler being a whole ass fangame based around a chapter 2 meme that it has long since outlived

And that's kinda the thing isn't it? Once more deltarune comes out, a ton of these projects will just become outdated, it's an inevitability. So what will happen to them? will they become forgotten? maybe, maybe not, it's impossible to tell. but either way it feels kinda sad to think about yknow? that one day all the time and effort spent and all the memories made might one day just cease to exist.

There's a lot more I could say on this topic if given the chance but to keep this tumblr post from morphing into a 2 hour long video essay in text form let me leave off with this.

In the age of the internet and social media there will always be a fan of something. Nothing truly dies quite like it used to anymore, regardless of whatever influencers want you to believe. But that doesn't mean things stop changing, that there wasn't a past that has since been left behind. I'm a Homestuck fan. more specifically I'm a Late Homestuck fan, one who came in after the comic had already ended and it's peak in popularity was long behind it. The fandom's still around all these years later. But it'd be foolish to admit that, 8 years after the comics controversial end, the inescapable trend of new fans replacing old fans has left the fandom wholly disconnected from the monolith that it once was. the only remnants of which lie in decades old discourse and fanfiction. Like old relics of a long forgotten city, waiting to be excavated under a fine layer of dirt.

Before I close out here I just want to make it clear: I'm not saying that we should be trying to return to some nebulous "glorious past" that never really existed. I'm not trying to deride Toby Fox for not working in the sweatshop hard enough to produce more content™, or whatever you wanna try and spin-doctor this post into. It's just a thought that creeps into my head every now that I wanted to share, see if anyone feels the same, yknow?

Besides it's not all doom and gloom. For those of you OG Homestucks who read till the end. You remember Heinoustuck? Guidestuck? Nightfall? Fucking Ke$haStuck? yeah those are still going by the way! after years of inactivity they've now started back up again. some under new authors and some by the same author but still!

You could say a lot about that but to me at least, it makes me feels hopeful in a way. That, even if not everything will survive. we'll at least have some mementos to remember what came before.

[sapphlopods]

This will be one of the hardest things I ever have to do, but I need help even though I hate asking for it.

Please help me escape my homophobic and financially abusive parents. More under "Keep Reading"

I'm Chaim, and ever since I graduated high school, I’ve lived with my parents. Australia has an incredibly bad housing crisis, and it’s nearly impossible for me to move out without friends or roommates who have a pre-established house, which I have none. 

Over the course of the past 4 years, I have watched my father devolve into this angry right-wing conspiracy theorist who thinks all “Wokes” should d1e. He has no idea I’m a lesbian as I fear for what he will do if he ever finds out. 

My mother has a range of health issues, in 2022 she had a heart attack, and this year, she was diagnosed with brain and kidney cancer, which she is in and out of hospital for. Her financial assistance has been delayed over and over, we still need to wait 2 months to get help. 

So, my household's only income is from my father and me. My father has an incredibly bad gambling, drinking and tobacco addiction, he goes through a pack of 30 cans and a pack of 30 cigarettes in 2 days. Tobacco and alcohol are heavily taxed here and are upwards of $60+ each; that’s $120 every 2 days, he earns $1600 fortnightly and spends roughly $840 of it on just his addictions; that’s more than half his pay, and that isn’t including the horse races he bets on. 

That leaves me to pick up the slack on groceries, rent, my mother's medicine and lend them money when Dad “overspends” at the pub. My father would rather starve than lessen his addictions a bit so we can afford to stay in our house and have food to eat. 

This has been happening for years even before my mother fell so ill she couldn’t work but it's gotten worse. I do not want to leave my mother, but she will not leave my father no matter what since she sees nothing wrong with what he does. I’m tired of being nothing more than a piggybank and a maid to my parents since I will never be able to move out when all my money goes towards keeping a roof over our heads. Even while I was on vacation, they still called me up and asked for money. 

I’ve wanted to move out for a long time, but my situation is getting direr by the day, and I can’t save a single cent to leave like this. I know many problems are going on in the world right now that deserve people’s time more than this so thank you for reading this far. 

If you can spare anything, please send it to my ko-fi. It'll be going towards getting stuff sorted so I can move to my partner Cinna, who lives far away in Chile, but I have no other option now. 11/12

I also have a few items listed on my eBay that people might like, a lot of it is fandom stuff and collector things I have accumulated, I'll be putting more stuff up slowly as I sort through my things preparing to move. https://www.ebay.com.au/usr/sapphlopods

[arminsumi]

Satoru simping for you and Suguru telling him to give up (lol)

Note : this is just crack i found in the drafts lol enjoy??

Warnings : 🔞 mdni / suggestive

Satoru grits his teeth and makes a frustrated growl. "Fuck. She's hot." he mutters under his breath.

He looks away from you, like it was just too much to handle.

Satoru turns to Suguru, "Suguru."

"Yeah?"

"Should I ask her for her number?"

"Who — her? Nahhh, she's out of your league." Suguru says.

"What the hell! you're supposed to be my supportive best friend."

"No — I'm a cunt first and foremost before anything." he jokes.

"Can't your cunty mouth manage a little pep-talk?"

"It would be disingenuous. Satoru, I don't think you should be messing around with the principle's daughter."

Satoru makes another frustrated growl.

"Fuckin' bullshit..." he grumbles under his breath. He looks away and sinks his hands into his pockets.

"Besides," suguru adds, "she's got a boyfriend."

"—and you only tell me this now?! After I've been pining after her ass for how long!!" Satoru seethes.

Satoru looks at you annoyedly, but still admiringly. Like a doting puppy.

"Fuck it! Boyfriends are temporary!"

"Calm down, Satoru. No need to let your morals degrade over some girl."

"She's not just some girl, Suguru! Fuck, just look at her."

"Give it up, man."

"Maybe you're deterring me so you can take her all for yourself."

"Oh my god, Satoru. you sound as insane as a conspiracy theorist."

"Maybe she's into conspiracy theorists! Hey, I'll go up to her and whisper all sexy into her ear; "ooh, baby you know the moon landing didn't happen~"

Satoru looks around searching for a way to make his joke funny.

"—but I'll be landing on your craters tonight for sure."

"OH MY GOD. Satoru. stop."

Satoru continues his bullshit.

""Can I rocket into your pussy, babygirl?""

"Stop."

Satoru's laughing like a seal and going red in the face. He keeps annoying his best friend with examples of his wacky pickup lines.

"Wanna know why they call me Neil Armstrong, baby?"

"Satoru, I don't know why we're friends."

"Bitch you love me!"

"This is why she's out of your league. Because you're a nutter and she's a normal person."

"How do you know! She might be a nutter too. Shit, or at least I'll make her into one... yeah... I'll make her crazyyyy for me."

"... Satoru, don't drive her nuts."

"Okay, I won't drive her nuts. I'll just let her suck on my nuts."

"What the hell (lol)?"

"Yo, listennnnn, one look from her makes my balls feel tight and full." Satoru admits unashamedly.

"Ough! Too much information!" Suguru grimaces.

"SHE MAKES MY DICK HARD SUGURU!"

"LALALA NOT LISTENING!" Suguru plugs his ears and gets up and leaves the cafeteria.

[creature-wizard]

Scams, Hoaxes, Conspiracy Theories, & Cults Everyone Should Know About

Jilly Juice: Jillian Mai Thi Epperly claimed drinking sixteen cups of her super salty cabbage concoction each day could regrow missing limbs and cure everything from cancer to homosexuality. In reality, overdosing on so much salt caused followers a host of health issues that Epperley dismissed as "healing symptoms."

Nonhuman Body Hoax: Jaime Maussan attempted to pass off mummified human remains as nonhuman beings to the Mexican government. (This isn't even Maussan's first hoax, by the way. He has a history.)

Love Has Won: Amy Carlson, a woman who'd walked out on her own children, started a New Age cult in which she presented herself as "Mother God," the creator of the universe. She claimed to be in contact with dead celebrities and alien beings, and taught a conspiratorial worldview. As her health declined, she attempted to treat herself with colloidal silver and alcohol, and her behavior became increasingly abusive. When she finally died, her followers sincerely believed she would return to life and kept her body in a sleeping bag. (She did not return to life.)

Seed Faith Offerings: Reverend Gene Ewing came up with the perfect get-rich-quick scheme to prey on desperate Christian believers: tell believers that if they "sowed seed" by giving money to him, God would bless them with even more money in the future. He made millions of dollars from these donations, while most of his followers never saw the miraculous returns they were promised.

William Walker Atkinson: In the early 20th century, William Walker Atkinson wrote around one hundred books, many of which he wrote under various pseudonyms. Some of these pseudonyms included alleged Hindu mystics. That's right - this guy was practicing literary brownface to sell his mystical ideas.

The LDS Church: In the 19th century, a man named Joseph Smith claimed that an angel had told him where to dig up a set of golden plates that were supposedly written by ancient Hebrews who'd come to North America. Smith even had eleven close associates who vouched for the plates' existence. Yet the script they were allegedly written in bore no relation to actual ancient scripts of the Near East, and the the names the locations in the books he "translated" were very obviously derived from placenames he would have been familiar with. (For example, Oneida/Onidah.) Oh, and actual archaeology and DNA studies have discredited pretty much everything from this guy's weird racist narrative.

Fake Cancer, Fake Cure: Wellness entrepreneur Belle Gibson claimed that she'd cured her brain cancer with natural remedies. Gibson never actually had cancer in the first place.

Medbeds: Back in 2020, QAnons and QAnon-adjacent people started circulating claims that a new form of healing technology was about to become available to the public within the next several months or so. Depending on who you asked, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and even the Galactic Federation of Light were involved. The time of their supposed unveiling came and went, and what do you know, there are still no functioning medbeds used in actual medicine.

COVID Vaccine Zombies: Conspiracy theorists have been claiming the government practices high-tech mind control for ages now. One recent iteration of this is a conspiracy theory claiming that people who'd received COVID vaccinations would have malicious DNA code activated by 5G on October 4, 2023, turn into zombies, and riot. The time came and went, and no zombie outbreak happened.

Ms.Scribe: In the early 2000s, a Harry Potter fan known as "msscribe" or "Ms.Scribe" faked her own harassment through a number of sockpuppets, with the apparent goal of becoming friends with some Harry Potter fandom bigwigs. She manipulated the fandom for a few years until the deception was finally uncovered.

[gatheringbones]

[“People are attracted to the concept of a Nordic-style law that criminalises only the sex buyer, and not the prostitute – but any campaign or policy that aims to reduce business for sex workers will force them to absorb the deficit, whether in their wallets or in their working conditions. As a sex worker in the Industrial Workers of the World observes,

I find that how easy, safe, and enjoyable I can make my work is directly related to whether I can survive on what I’m currently making … I might be safer if I refused any clients who make their disrespect for me clear immediately, but I know exactly where I can afford to set the bar on what I need to tolerate. If I haven’t been paid in weeks, I need to accept clients who sound more dangerous than I’d usually be willing to risk.

When sex workers speak to this, we are often seemingly misheard as defending some kind of ‘right’ for men to pay for sex. In fact, as Wages For Housework articulated in the 1970s, naming something as work is a crucial first step in refusing to do it – on your own terms. Marxist-feminist theorist Silvia Federici wrote in 1975 that ‘to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it.’ Naming work as work has been a key feminist strategy beyond Wages For Housework. From sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s term ‘emotional labour’, to journalist Susan Maushart’s term ‘wife-work’, to Sophie Lewis’s theorising around surrogacy and ‘gestational labour’, naming otherwise invisible or ‘natural’ structures of gendered labour is central to beginning to think about how, collectively, to resist or reorder such work.

Just because a job is bad does not mean it’s not a ‘real job’. When sex workers assert that sex work is work, we are saying that we need rights. We are not saying that work is good or fun, or even harmless, nor that it has fundamental value. Likewise, situating what we do within a workers’ rights framework does not constitute an unconditional endorsement of work itself. It is not an endorsement of capitalism or of a bigger, more profitable sex industry. ‘People think the point of our organisation is [to] expand prostitution in Bolivia’, says ONAEM activist Yuly Perez. ‘In fact, we want the opposite. Our ideal world is one free of the economic desperation that forces women into this business.’

It is not the task of sex workers to apologise for what prostitution is. Sex workers should not have to defend the sex industry to argue that we deserve the ability to earn a living without punishment. People should not have to demonstrate that their work has intrinsic value to society to deserve safety at work. Moving towards a better society – one in which more people’s work does have wider value, one in which resources are shared on the basis of need – cannot come about through criminalisation. Nor can it come about through treating marginalised people’s material needs and survival strategies as trivial. Sex workers ask to be credited with the capacity to struggle with work – even to hate it – and still be considered workers. You don’t have to like your job to want to keep it.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Why The Ending Sucks

Ok I figured it out. Hear me out:

The entire comic has a running theme best summed up as "who is controlling the narrative, and why are we listening to them?"

Hussie plays a caricaturized version of himself that he describes as "buffoonish" and "oafish". Caricature!Hussie is well-meaning, but a dumb idiot who's incredibly biased in favor of certain characters and in disfavor of others (the most obvious example being his "love" of Vriska, but there's also the way he constantly disparages Eridan). As a result, you have to be VERY SKEPTICAL and VERY CAREFUL when approaching Homestuck's narration, because even when the "best" narrator is at the helm, he's not 100% trustworthy and incapable of giving the readers an unbiased view of the story.

I say "best" because, importantly, Hussie isn't the story's only narrator. He and Doc Scratch explicitly fight over control of the story - Doc Scratch, the child abusing predator who engineered Alternia's fascist murder society, whose shaping of its history is explicitly described by character!Hussie as "fanfic". He is then killed by Lord English, who is described by Hussie as embodying the "toxically masculine" and by extension, the patriarchy, and Caliborn explicitly takes control of the story. John even grapples with Caliborn's version of events, calling out how sexist and misogynistic and shitty it is.

So if we're keeping score: control over the narrative is LITERALLY wrested away from Hussie (who was already struggling to be unbiased) by fascists, abusers, and the patriarchy. It's stressed multiple times that Caliborn/LE are responsible for literally everything that ever happens; the reason the Game Over timeline ends the way that it does is because the alpha timeline is, in essence, the narrative LE is telling: the forces of fascism get to claim the new universe, thereby propogating itself, while friendship dies and all hope is lost.

Who's in control of the narrative, and why are we listening to them?

There are other minor examples of this, too: Aranea is an exposition fairy, and she's biased as fuck and wrong ALL THE TIME about her own teammates. Karkat's explanations and rationalizations are constantly tinged with his own self-loathing and self-blame. Sollux and Meulin are both prophets as per their Mage class, but are both so bogged down by their own emotional issues that the futures they pick out are actively harmful. So on and so on. At nearly every turn, you have to interrogate who's telling the story, what their motivations are, and what they're overlooking or deliberately obfuscating.

So given that this theme is so prevalent, and so thoroughly weighted toward "well, actually, maybe you shouldn't take narration at face value and should interrogate it and come to your own conclusions," it would be Really Weird for the story to go "actually, you can totally trust the narrative now because everyone gets a happy ending".

So, I know that it makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but here's my genuine take on Homestuck's ending:

The ending is shitty on purpose because the viewer is intended to take it as a dare to refute the narration and make something better.

Why are we letting character!Hussie tell the story? He's a biased idiot. Why are we letting the various avatars of LE and Caliborn tell the story? They're fascist, misogynistic, predatory assholes.

And - because Homestuck is a story about life - why are we letting idiots, assholes, abusers, and creeps dictate the story of real life? The world is full of forces that would try to take control of the story and make everyone else play along, represented in microcosm within the text of Homestuck. We cannot let those forces win.

So please go out and do something kind and hopeful and loving in the world today. Thanks for reading.

[zinnie-zoloft]

Monty immediately 100% believing in astrology (even though it’s apparently still fake in the dbda universe and he’s literally a witch’s familiar and should know that) makes me wonder what other stuff he’d believe in if he got to be human longer

Basically I need magical conspiracy theorist Monty who is very occasionally actually onto something that helps solve a case

[lunamugetsu]

Bring your sidekick to work day!

Inspired by the "What if Question was the one who saves Danny from GIW?" post that I made awhile ago.

Bring your sidekick to work day!

It was a tradition that started around the time multiple superheroes were taken on sidekicks. Everyone in the league knew why they'd bring their sidekicks to work. Their sidekicks get to socialize with peers their own age and they could properly introduce themselves to other heroes.

So it was a surprise when The Question, the league's faceless conspiracy theorist, offhandedly mentioned that he'll be bringing his sidekick to work while telling them about what new information he's found about Cadmus and another new government agency he thought they should start looking into.

The heroes found it hard to believe.

Question has a sidekick.

Surely they must have misheard.

No way that guy would want a sidekick, let alone get a sidekick.

When "Bring your sidekick to work day" arrived everybody was prepared to see the heroes and sidekicks.

Superman with Superboy

Batman and his 10+ kids

Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl

Flash and Kid Flash

The list went on

The heroes all mingle before realizing that they haven't seen Question. Maybe they did mishear the man? Or Question got his words mixed up?

That was until the computer announced the arrival of Question and a guest that was unidentified.

They all turn around to see the faceless trench coat wearing investigator followed by a tinier faceless trench coat wearing kid. The kid was practically a clone of Question, except...tinier.

"This is my sidekick. Who." Question points to the faceless kid

Flash: Who?

"That's me!" the kid says pointing to himself.

"Why don't you acquaint yourself with the others." Question tells his sidekick who just nods and goes off to introduce himself with the others kids.

Batman: I didn't take you one for having a sidekick.

Question: I could say the same for you. And the sidekick thing just kind of happened. The kid wouldn't leave me alone and I couldn't let the kid get himself into any trouble.

Batman: Understandable

Meanwhile with the sidekicks.

Everybody's asking Who various questions about Question and how he met the man. They barely know anything about the guy.

Question 1: What's the deal with your name?

Who: It's a work in progress. Since my mentor's name is Question. I figured my name should be like a question.

Question 2: How do you eat?

Who: I shove food into my face

Question 3: Where's your face?

Who: Wouldn't you like to know

Question 4: Do you know about his conspiracies?

Who: Of course I know about his conspiracies! I'm one of them

Other sidekicks: What?

After some talking, the sidekicks get along with each other very well. When they reunite with their mentors the computer rings stating that John Constantine was coming along with a guest.

The heroes then all watched as a girl with white hair and green eyes wearing a trench coat and was dragging John Constantine by his sleeve. She grins and introduces herself as Dani with an "i" and that she's John's apprentice.

Dani then spots Who and they immediately do the Spider-man point at the other meme

Who (Danny): you got a trench coat mentor too?!

Dani: Where's your face?!