#too grown for stupid internet discourse | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

trickstarbrave · 1 year ago

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"this is to say nothing of the grown adults on social media who make discoursing on the "opposite side" their full time hobby when really they are only making the situation worse in an effort to feel morally superior" Lol these are the people who are defending the ability to enjoy things in fiction without being policed. I can't believe you can have such an insight into the problem and then completely miss the point by acting insufferable to the people advocating for just letting people enjoy what they like. You're no better than the people who send death threats honestly since you want to ally with the people who want to police every online space and censor people. They'll come for you next, and none of us will be there to defend you from the antis when they decide your fiction is morally reprehensible

i debated not answering this because you are being rude and annoying and i dont like this kind of pointless arguing, but let me make this clear:

you are not helping address the problem. acting morally superior and righteous in the same brand of obnoxious is just about as much of "activism" as the "pro-shippers" who do it too. all you are doing is picking fights to get high off the rush of anger and dopamine. you are not "advocating" for anything. you are not addressing any of the problems. you are not fundamentally changing anyone's minds.

you are working on a bland, black and white mentality that ignores the complex reasons behind stuff. just by me saying that you have jumped to "so obviously you like sending people death threats and support it and are no better than the people do that" just like how the people who don't like your weird incest ships think you must obviously be an irl abuser.

"anti" means nothing. neither really does "pro-shipper". this us vs them mentality has to die before we see any progress. we cannot just keep using the internet for outrage. instead of arguing with people online and making stupid arguments about how actually your fiction IS moral and is actually better than other people's stuff and that everyone who doesn't think exactly like you do must love sending people death threats, you could try doing something actually fucking productive. push back against censorship online. disrupt algorithms. educate people that engaging with content they don't like on algorithm websites means they will see more of it. create a forum to freely share stuff with less harassment and vitrol. stay educated on what bills have lead to this censorship and push back against them or protest about new ones that keep being introduced.

all i can see from asks and posts like this is: you dont want things to change. you don't really care about the reasons behind it. you are right and other people are wrong because you don't like them. you like arguing online because you get a rush from it. you are doing this because you like fucking "winning". you dont care if you don't change a single person's mind because you enjoy the moral superiority you imagine you have. which are all the reasons the equally obnoxious people you hate and insist you are nothing like keep arguing with you. it is an endless cycle because you all enjoy the cheap thrill of arguing and bitching online that feeds into our worst impulses as human beings. i know im not one to fucking talk because i've also been known to jump into internet arguments, but i can at least recognize the problem and try to address it.

so long as you continue to act like this and act like your behavior is self righteous activism, this kind of shit will create a feedback loop. literally deactivate your fucking discourse blog, stop getting into pointless arguments online, and do literally anything else to address the problem. stop thinking that when i am addressing harmful mentalities online that feed into negativity and bullshit that you are immune to it because you're smarter or better than the people you disagree with. you're not. you're obnoxious.

if you send another anon i will be blocking you. knock it off. grow up.

#i have 'insight' into the situation because i have been around long enough to see this pointless bitching for what it is #pro ship vs anti ship discourse is just POINTLESS #you are not addressing anything.

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bylertruther · 3 years ago

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no cause the last anón is so right. I scrapped a 50k byler fic because I actually got worried people might call me weird or a freak like they do others. I was on twitter when the whole fiasco went down and it pissed me off but if you even tried to speak there were so many accounts saying you were “speaking over minors” and calling you a predator/pedophile. So many of my moots deactivated bc of the hate- they eventually started attacking people for their ages alone saying it was weird that 20 year olds theorized and talked about byler. Literally word for word “you’re a freak if you’re 20 and read byler fics. Why are you fantasizing about two little 14 year old boys making out” if they would take a step back and think that maybe people are so interested in this relationship is bc they see their younger selves in these two characters then maybe they wouldn’t say such stupid shit. Anyway sorry for ranting I just have been fuming since that whole thing happened. I just wish they would take a step back and stop and think about why they see a kiss between two boys written and immediately shout creep.

oh no, anon! i'm so sorry to hear about your fic & your experience. i hope you feel comfortable enough to post it one day, if you still want to. 🥺 and don't ever apologize for expressing yourself!

not to be a cunt, but i am a cunt, so, ahem. from the bottom of my heart... fuck them kids. 🫶 i literally do not give a single shit about any of the ""discourse"" they inflict on us all. "speaking over minors" why are you even speaking to begin with, huh? 🤨 why are you buzzing into an adult's space and picking a fight when a) literally no one fucking asked you to, and b) you're just going to cry "waaaaah but i'm a minorrr :(" as if you're somehow the victim in this situation after they dare to defend themselves against your serious and unsupported allegations? be normal or piss the fuck off and do your homework.

and why do people take them seriously? disregarding the fact that anyone of any age can be a shipper & the awful homophobia laced in such rhetoric...

this is the internet. no one owes you shit & the wild web will never, ever cater to you. you need to curate your own space and protect yourself. this is, like.. basic shit. like, bare-fucking-bones basic shit. it's not anyone else's responsibility but your own. they taught me that in school, my parents told me that, and also i have a functioning brain that can come to that conclusion, too. people need to stop pretending like what these people are asking for—which is your silence and your shame—is reasonable. it's not. content gets tagged, there are multiple extensions to blacklist any tags you don't like, some of it gets put behind a privacy wall, block buttons exist, many websites have filtering options, and so on and so forth. there are multiple measures people can take to both find things and avoid them. and a lot of the time, content is something you have to seek out yourself. so, if you don't like it, why did you click on it? why spend any time on it when you could've just backspaced? how is your ineptitude anyone else's problem?

also, people need to stop throwing the words pedophilia, pedophile, and predator around. you're being an insensitive jackass when you do that. someone writing about two fictional characters is not abusive scum of the fucking earth. you're watering those acts down and showcasing your ignorance for the world to see when you throw their names around carelessly. a child predator does awful, sinister, repulsive things to real life people who did not deserve that. someone writing a first kiss or practice kissing fic is not anywhere near that and i'm tired of people pretending like this is an okay thing to say or even think. just shut the fuck up and stop saying those words if you don't actually understand the gravity of what they mean.

another thing: a lot of these people aren't just kids. grown folk fall for the same shitty rhetoric, too. it's all just groupthink and herd mentality. no one wants to get attacked so they just repeat the same shit without thinking about it beyond "protecting" themselves (which is senseless as well because conditional acceptance is not true acceptance, but i digress). this fandom would be in a much better place if people were willing to stand their ground and defend their friends when this stuff happens. it gets worse and worse if you just turn a blind eye to it and fall in line. we're all waking up and finally seeing the consequences of that now.

of course, this doesn't really apply to when you're getting attacked by hundreds of people. that's... just shitty and hard and demoralizing. i'm not victim-blaming, because no one wants to be on the receiving end of that and i know that you can't control what others do.

my argument is that it gets to that point because the fandom as a whole just lets it slide by never holding the right people accountable for their actions. they allow the needless bullying to happen. they allow the rhetoric to get crazier and crazier. they allow people to get fucking crucified for shit that isn't even remotely inappropriate. they reblog posts they don't believe in because they don't want to be the odd one out and get accused of something by someone with more followers than them. it's just... we, as a whole, need to support each other more and put our foot down when shit like that starts happening.

it isn't normal. it isn't okay. it hasn't ever been okay.

like... i KNOW that you KNOW that it isn't weird for them to kiss, for people to want them to kiss, or for people to make them kiss in their creations. i KNOW that you KNOW that it isn't weird for anyone of any age to enjoy a love story of any kind. we know these things. some of us just pretend like we don't online for whatever fucking reason. and i don't get it! i don't get why they would do that and willingly allow this place to become worse for it. you don't get anything good out of that.

also, a lot of those people are being trolls. they get a kick out of attacking people as a group, because that's the only time they feel brave and the only way they get attention in life. they don't think before they say things, because they don't see you as a human being—you're just pixels on a greasy screen. they use catchy social justice lingo to make what they're saying sound like something you should support, but at the end of the day, they're literally just gussying up the same right-wing shit we've been subjected to for ages. it's regressive rhetoric that's clear to see once you've allowed yourself to see it.

like, i agree with you. i do. you're absolutely, undoubtedly right in what you say, but... i just can't bring myself to argue that, because it's in response to what was a senseless attack to begin with. and we shouldn't need to defend ourselves and our communities against what isn't true.

homophobia, bullying, and trolling are irrational, illogical pursuits and i can't stand the idea of treating them with any ounce of seriousness in this context. to apologize would be to accept their absurdity and validate their accusations—accusations we know in our heart of hearts to be incorrect and baseless. and i won't ever do that! i won't give them that satisfaction and i wish others wouldn't either.

they keep doing this, because they haven't met any opposition yet, because we keep acting like we have any reason at all to feel shame for wanting stories about people like us, about something as basic and universal as love and connection. they don't care about our reasons. they don't care about our defense of ourselves. it's not ever about us. this is their cry for attention, good or bad, at our expense and they need to be starved out already.

like.. this is just unsustainable. it's mind-boggling and i remember kicking and screaming about it months ago in what felt like an empty room. and look at where we are now! we're already at the point where you can't win in any kind of way no matter what you do. you can't age them up, you can't leave them as they are, you can't ship them if you're older than eighteen, you can't write AUs, you can't write canon compliance, you can't write canon divergence, you can't make them kiss, you can't make them anything more than friends but you also can't make them not-friends, etc etc. we've officially been shoved into the "fuck it, we ball" stage, because this is a pissy fandom and you are never going to please everyone so you may as well just do whatever the fuck you want.

i sound soooooooo unbearably preachy in this response lol, but like... literally... all we have is each other! we all love byler and we're all here to have fun and find like-minded people. we can't keep acting like this in-fighting lunacy is reasonable and just a difference of opinion, or like it's based in any kind of sense at all. we know that it's okay to ship byler at any age. we know that it's okay to have fun and enjoy ourselves. these people want to make us feel bad. they want to silence us. why let them and give them that satisfaction? why is what they want more important than us and our happiness? i hate the idea of anyone ever feeling any kind of shame or fear over something as innocent as this. i hate the idea of them winning by getting into any of our heads like that. i just hate it.

now, this last bit is specifically for you, anon, but it goes for everyone else, too: please, please, please, i am holding your hand in both of mine and begging you to not let anyone take away the things that you love and bring you joy or your wonderful creations that you've put so much of yourself into. i promise you that there will always be people who will see you, understand you, and cherish what you have to offer, and they are the ones that matter most (after you of course hehe). we all have to find our people and just go crazy together and block out everything else. that's the only way to get through this without getting burnt out. 💛💙

#sorry for the mushy preachy response but you broke my heart anon! and i got mad! and also sad!#i'm tired of pretending like that shit is normal or okay or reasonable WHEN IT JUST FUCKING ISN'T!#KNOW NO SHAME MY BROTHERS IN BYLER KNOW NO SHAME 📣📣📣📣#sigh. anyway.#asks #byler #long post

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artificialcaretaker · 3 years ago

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Y’know I don’t talk about stupid discourse shit because it tends to make me feel bad and because I do not want to surround myself with people who spend the time that they could be comforting themselves with just rambling about how they’re better than other people online and making themselves feel even more angry. I do, however, feel that I like. REALLY need to get this thought out. I’m open to constructive criticism if something is really that bad here, but I do not want anyone calling me or anyone else anything for how they feel. Ok, let’s go.

Calling people “Puriteens” is, no offense, incredibly stupid, and on a more serious note, very insensitive. To everyone in the situation.

I think it lays mostly in the word itself. One of the key parts of the word is “Teen”. Teen. You are referring to a child here. Yes, I know “Teen” is a technically broad term, but if you’re using the term, you’re probably an adult who is considerably older than the people you are talking about. In this perspective, they are children, no matter how close they are to being legally considered an adult. If you are complaining about teenagers, you are complaining about people who are significantly younger than you.

The very fact that grown adults spend their time talking about how kids are “Ruining our sacred, precious fandom spaces” is kind of like. I don’t want to sound MEAN here. I don’t want this to seem like I have any ill intent but like. Come on dude. Like, I’ll get to other stuff later but like you literally pay taxes. You have bills and rent and a job and you have to go to the doctor and get shots without someone holding your hand. While there are people who take things extremely far, I can assure you that it is not people who still have a bedtime who are truly ruining your fun. You consider yourself an “Internet veteran”, right? Block them! Report them! Chances are, because you are a fully developed and mature individual, you aren’t stuck on the thought of “Oh gosh, but what if I seem rude?!” You have the ability to adapt to new ideas and communities coming into the spaces that you once enjoyed, and you have the ability to transition into something that you’d feel more comfortable in. I could leave Amino, you can leave Twitter.

Now onto the more important aspect here, I am most certain that there are going to be people who see this and go “Dawwwwww the little minor is ‘opinionated’ how cute! The adults are talking, though, go sit at the play table with your little cousins” and I would like to say that this is part of the problem. The problem is that kids and teenagers opinions, feelings, and sometimes traumas are consistently overlooked because they are “Too young to understand what they’re talking about.” Going back to the “Internet/fandom veteran” thing, a very important thing to note is that you were once a hurt child who sought out fandom for comfort. I’m not saying everyone finds community as an escape but I have yet to encounter a single person who’s deep into fandom who also didn’t have some baggage. You were a kid once. You were a kid, and you were on your favorite websites, talking to your online friends about your favorite shows and ships, and that was the only place you truly felt safe. And because you’ve grown up now, the natural belief that all your feelings from when you were young were over exaggerated makes you think, “Anyone who does that is over exaggerating, because I was over exaggerating.”

You were not. You were a hurt child seeking comfort.

These accursed “Puriteens” are doing the exact same thing.

They’re also hurt, they’re also seeking comfort and community. They’re also trying to process how they feel.

And they don’t need to “Toughen up and accept that they’re not gonna like things” because we both know that you did not do that either. Because when you were a hurt child you were not over exaggerating and you were not holier than thou, accepting everything and everyone.

You were a hurt child. You had strong opinions. You did not want some people to be anywhere near you. That’s a normal thing.

Maybe you didn’t make callouts and maybe you didn’t cancel artists and maybe you didn’t doxx people but to be completely fair maybe not everyone is or wants to associate with criminals.

But you were discomforted by something at some point. Extremely discomforted. Discomforted because it reminded you of the exact reason why you are in this community; Because you have been hurt by something and because you want to be with people who will understand and help you.

You cannot expect children to be comfortable with everything you post or comfortable with blocking and blacklisting things as soon as they join a fandom because they are children. Maybe you don’t remember, but a developing brain is inconceivably bad at making sure everything is ok. There are so many things whirling around in the brain and they don’t want to focus on any of it, no matter how much they should take precautions. It’s possible, but it’s difficult. When you’re trying to feel comfortable, you do not want things to be difficult.

I’m not here to say that I have the answer to every single ounce of fandom discourse. I’m not here to say that all of one group is horrible or that all of one group is innocent.

But you’re talking about kids that you once were like. You need to consider how you felt when you were younger and you need to consider that this is literally the exact same thing.

#discourse #shipcourse #fandom discourse #rant #puriteens #because they key word is needed #I’m not using ‘[blank]ship’ tags #I’m scared of those #personally I think the solution to this all #is to just be a considerate person #it’s difficult to truly come to terms with how everyone else feels about things #but it’s much better than blaming everything on someone else without considering how they feel #‘bullies are abvsive because they’ve been abvsed’ and all that

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danganfan42069 · 3 years ago

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About me

hi im danganronpafan42069. he/him 20↑ latino

some tags: my post and stuff - my opinion and stuff - big mood - for me <3 - ask - my negative tags for you to block if you want to masterpost

Danganronpa is one of my biggest guilty pleasures, i can count on my fingers all the things i like about it and genuinely think are well made. But i like some character's concepts and sometimes the dialogue and story are so ridiculous and absurd that i end up having so much fun.

Im not that active on the fandom and barely consider myself to be a part of it because almost all my opinions about ships, characters, storylines and the game/anime in general are very unpopular. I'm just happy minding my own business and vibin in my corner ^_^

Feel free to disagree with me and/or block me if something here makes you uncomfortable, but please don't try to start a discourse. I don't intend to change my opinion of anything and i don't want to change yours (unless you're respectfully asking my more detailed opinion about something), we're just going to waste our energy and waste our time on this.

i am very happy following this mentality here and i think you should try it too!

My favorite friendships and hcs of their relationships (WIP)

ps (this is kind of obvious but i think it's important to make it clear): i don't think these characters or ships that i don't like are problematic (i mean with exception of haiji i think) or think fans of the ship/character either (whole game is problematic if you think about it), it's just not my cup of tea

Tiny Q&A:

What are you referring to when you say "anti"? It's not the ant1 vs pr0ship discurse, it's someone who is "anti-some-ship-that-is-totally-fine-and-legal-by-law", the problem happens when this person in question is too immature and can't respect other people's opinions so they are chasing those who like their notp being inconvenient and annoying (and sometimes they even trivialize very serious social issues and topics)

Are you pr0shipper or ant1? I'm a grown ass adult. I work, I have a family, I have better things to do than use these internet bubble terms and discussions. I think incest and mainly minor/adult (ped0philia) ships are really fucked up even though they are fictional and/or trauma coping but I also think it's really fucked up to harass and make death threats??????? I don't want any of that on my screen so i block them all (and i also report if I think it's too fucked up)

My little disclaimer i have on any post of mine:

My little disclaimer i have on my opinions/headcanons post

A few warnings first, since you're here to read it I recommend reading these paragraphs extra to avoid stress for you and me :)

Almost everything I'm saying here about the characters is obviously MY OPINION and how I feel about the characters and their actions and not a concrete fact. I just want to express my opinion as many people in the fandom express their negative opinion about my fav characters and I respect that, so why can't I do the same? I know my opinions are unpopular, but that doesn't make them any less valid because opinion is something personal and there is no right or wrong

I'm censoring character names because I know some of my opinions are negative so I don't want to spoil someone's good time by having my post appear in the character's main tag. I'm also even saying in the title if it's a /pos or /neg analysis and I have a unique tag for my opinions (which you can block if you want), so you're proceeding at your own risk

I don't need to be so respectful with the characters because they aren't real, but I think we all should be respectful with who likes or doesn't like the character, because these are real people and have feelings.

And obviously I don't think someone liking or disliking this character doesn't make them a "bad, stupid, inferior or problematic person", it's just their opinion and deserves respect too

To be honest I'm not posting my opinion with the intention of changing someone's opinion or starting some kind of debate, I just want to express my opinion and that's all. It's like a public diary, it's one of the definitions of a blog after all ^_^

(About my headcanons) This isn't exactly a theory or an attempt to change anyone's mind and I know that none of this is canon and most likely not intended as I see it. I'm just want to talk in more detail about my headcanons and my lines of thoughts on them.

#my post and stuff

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mechanicalinertia · 3 years ago

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STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction (Sort Of): Terror From The Deep! Ancient Fansites! Pre-Millennial Relics!

Tumblr wiped my first draft of this post, but let's give it another go all the same. Basically, I've spent many a late night hunting Bubblegum Crisis fan 'pages' (back when a website was called a webpage, boy wasn't that a time) via various links, links to other links, links to sites that can only be accessed via the Wayback Machine, ancient internet archaeologist shit. It's... fascinating work, to say the least. There's a lot of good, a lot of bad, and overall a lot of content that I feel that fans wouldn't dream of producing nowadays. RPG fansites, for example, chronicling various mecha a play session threw together via Mekton and whatnot. Or just straight-up review and explanation sites. Or sites dedicated to holding an author's fanfiction independent of Usenet or wherever.

Are any of these useful resources for a Crisis superfan? Probably not. Are they as engrossing as a good fanfic? Again, probably not, unless you're weird like me. Either way, let's get right into it.

Andy Skuse's Raven's Garage: Probably the biggest fansite still being hosted, on an individual server no less. Old, too, it got its start in 1995. Let that sink in.

Raven's Garage is a massive site, grown over the years by virtue of archiving other people's lost 'infosites', Bert Van Bilet's fanfiction, download links to Duke Nukem 3D reskins, and Craig Wigida's Fanfiction Guide... and one of Skuse's own pieces of fanfiction (it's not very good, we'll leave it for later). It's massive, not all of it is totally functional (but that's all the bits Skuse lost to time, not his fault), and it's just... essential, I guess? Yeah. Essential sounds right.

The Bubblegum Crisis Center: While this site does exist fully on the web, it's worth noting that it's primarily focused on the AIC-solo outings of Crisis (2040, ADP: To Protect And Serve, Parasite Dolls) instead of, you know, the good stuff. (Parasite Dolls always lacked a certain something for me... creativity? It's not badly written the way 2040 is, but it feels like too much of a retread of old ideas.) So we're just going to ignore it for now.

Bubblegum Crisis Links Page: A nice little Geocities (how many of these sites have a black background? Geez) dedicated to linking to other people's stuff. It's pretty big, but it ultimately pales in comparison to...

A Bunch Of Links With No Name: I'm not actually sure where I found this page, but what I do know is that it's very useful to track down small or otherwise insignificant dead pages which might be marginally amusing. You know, the kind of pages marked as 'shrines' to a given fictional character (this was before the term 'waifu' got into discourse courtesy of Azumanga Daioh). There's some weird shit in here, much of it of dubious quality, but it's funny? You can sort of giggle at how stupid people were on the internet even back before social media got just about everyone online for good. Like, and this is just an example...

The Disgruntled Fan's BGC Page: There's a few pages like this out there, where basically one guy has a beef with Priss for existing and just extrapolates that anyone who likes her is stupid. Fanfics like this, too. I've long held that if you don't like Priss, then you may not really like Crisis as much as you think you do, for she is its emotional core for better and for worse. But noooo, somehow her being part of the story makes her a screentime hog who prevents the story from reaching its true potential. Whatever that means.

(Is BGC's story not high art? Sure, but does it neeeeeeed to be? Moreover, was that Priss's fault or just the fault of creators who wanted to make something fun that didn't try to be more than it was? I'd argue the latter.)

Still, though, the writer here doesn't like No Armor Against Fate, apparently because Priss slept with a cokehead in the original version (not Neo, I don't think), and because he felt that Hagen shoved lesbian tendencies on every girl in the series. Which, hey, knowing Hagen he's probably not wrong! Still doesn't excuse the snobbiness that feels incredibly cringey in retrospect. Oh, and speaking of which:

JChao's Bubblegum Crisis Review Site: This is comedy gold. Cringe comedy, mind you, but comedy nonetheless. This is another one of those guys who wanted BGC to be 'deeper', which sounds all well and good (okay, he likes Sylia more than Priss and wishes the former got more screen time) until you click on his ADP Files review:

"This series may easily be what BGC should have been."

Grammar problems aside... yeah. This guy thinks that High Impact Sexual Violence The Anime was somehow a masterpiece of deep insight into the human condition, which should tell you everything about how seriously to take his opinions. No, really. It's funny. Laugh.

Sylia: Da Bomb: This is probably the only 'shrine' page I'll put in here, because I think it's... interesting? Y'all know I'm a serious Sylia / Celia simp, so I was interested to see what this was about when I found it on a links page. The argument the guy is laying down is essentially that Sylia is a) probably a Boomer, b) she's the coolest Knight Saber, and c) she's a stone-cold bitch who cares mostly about the mission and keeping the Sabers together, not about them individually, and we ought to love her for it. Which... yeah? Kind of? Maybe? The point is this guy makes some half-decent points (and ribs on Rei Ayanami fans) that maybe you might even halfway agree with. So if you want a decent shrine, check this out.

Bubblegum Marriage Prospects: Priss and Sylia: Even before the term waifu was popularized... there was simpage. Deep simpage. These two pages are but one part of a massive compendium of nerds writing about whether or not x or y anime girl would be good to marry and have kids with I am not making this up. And they come off very differently.

Priss? She's sexy, fast, wild, furious, dangerous, you could make good money off her rockstar career ("If you can manage a pop star, you can probably reap an enormous amount of cash"), just don't bring her home to mom and get ready to do most of the housework. Sounds great.

Sylia? Relatively attractive, but cold-blooded, solely dedicated to The Mission, and the sex? Get this:

"At first glance one would expect her to be vanilla to the core; but positions of power, abnormal childhoods, high levels of stress, and outward emotional repression are often associated with sexual... eccentricities. Do not be overly surprised to find yourself bound hand and foot, gagged, and/or suspended from the ceiling at some point during your honeymoon."

See what I'm saying? This is funny, how much thought people put into this shit like twenty years ago. And what's even funnier is that I can form opinions about this that disagree with these two writers, I have put enough thought into this. What is wrong with me? A lot.

Christian Conkle's Bubblegum Conundrum: Now we get into RPG-based fansites, which as a rule are a little less chatty and have more nice, calming spreadsheets outlining large mecha used to kill people. How pleasant.

Anyway, this site focuses around a campaign set in the Cascadia Metropolitan Axis, (Portland-Seattle-Vancouver - take that, Shadowrun!), one where the PC's and other characters actually get marker-drawn art of their fine selves and their hardsuits, plus other gear... so that's a high bar to clear right off the bat, having actual art of everyone and their toys. One gets the sense that Conkle understands the tone of BGC, too, cyberpunk that's just a little superheroically melodramatic, focusing on macro plots instead of micro plans. So it's all great fun to read.

Also worth looking at is Conkle's great big 'Garage' section, which contains tables used to rapidly construct various big bad mecha in the RTAL system... give or take some house rules. Good house rules, but house rules nonetheless.

Christian Conkle's Dragon Knights 2050: It's a later campaign Conkle did, this time constructed as an Eva ripoff, where humanity uses giant mecha piloted by kids to fight the orbital Boomer Kingdom. I never looked into it much, because hey, it's an Eva ripoff, it's really BGC. I include it out of amusement more than anything else.

Robert Farquhar's Bubblegum Crisis Web Archive: It was discovering this page, one of the many recommended by RTAL via BGC EX - that one expansion I gushed about a few posts back - that inspired me to write this whole post. And if that doesn't mean something to you... yeah.

See, even if Farquhar (whatta name that is) was focused more on an ADP-style campaign with upgraded Masamune Shirow-lookin' battlesuits, the thing about this site is that it contains the work of several other player teams uploading their hardsuits and Boomers and powersuits and characters and even a few Cyberpunk 2020 conversions for all the world to see. So there's a lot of cool concepts, and even some MS-Paint-lookin' art of some of said concepts. For that alone, I love it deeply.

Actually, there's one particular piece of art which I think was made by a guy who designed a separate hardsuit concept that I really liked. I tried finding the guy's site, but it's gone, too. Another unsolved mystery.

Kain The Seeker's Bubblegum Crush: Another site featured in BGC EX, focusing on a campaign set in Cyberpunk 2020's Night City, but alas, it's woefully incomplete. The only part of the campaign site, really, is some background and some stuff about the characters, and that's it.

Luckily, we have a rough idea of why this site is unfinished thanks to Farquhar: apparently the hard drive of 'Kain' (I do so hate people using that name for edgy fictional characters) crashed, the site was lost, and then it was resurrected, with all the Boomers and whatnot that we see fragments of on the Web Archive. Alas, that site proper is lost to time.

Maybe that's for the best, though. Some of those Boomer designs are literally 'lol your waitress Boomer now has a laser gun concealed in her, prepare to die player characters', a cheap-o CP2020 trick if there ever was one. I don't want to know what the rest was like.

Bubblegum Crossfire: Sabers and Angels: A simple little site focusing on an LA-based group, featured in BGC Ex. There's not a whole lot to recommend it, the art's small portraits and not very good ones at that, the story's a little less exciting than Conundrum... but it's there.

Bubblegum Crossroads: Chicago 2033: No art, but it's a complete RPG site with some cool worldbuilding and a cool concept for interchangeable 'battlegloves' allowing some modularity for combatants.

That's it, so far. Go forth, my children! Explore the Dead Net!

#stmpd reviews bgc fanfic #bubblegum crisis #bgc #old web #geocities

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race-week · 4 years ago

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hello i started to find a new interest in f1 (since 2021 bahrein gp) and motorsport in general but i really feel off next to f1 fans bc i feel old even if im 16 bc y'all all had this interest v young from your parent and im just here from the internet and two i feel its a rich people space only (both drivers and fans) and i dont belong so yea it is normal or Im just crazy? sorry its sound very stupid but i have nobody to talk about that. Love your blog and wish you a very pleasant race tommorow.

Hi anon - hope you are having a great weekend!

It’s great to hear that you are taking an interest into f1 and motorsport in general and the fact that you like my blog means so much to me 💖

A few years back yeah, most of the f1 community had gotten into motorsport young or through a parent/family member but with the first season of drive to survive on Netflix coming out in 2019ish that brought a massive influx of new fans and that has continued with the following two seasons.

There is a massive range of how people have gotten into f1 and I actually think that’s a good thing as the sport very much was a old rich white mans sport but it’s grown massively.

Yeah you are right to a degree it is an expensive sport to compete in for the drivers (even before they get to f1) as well as to watch (depending on where you are and the broadcasting rights - in the UK where I am Sky have all the broadcasting rights and it’d cost me far too much money a month to be able to watch it if I didn’t use my dads account)

Please don’t tell yourself you don’t belong here, my goal with this blog is to have a space for new and old fans to learn a little bit about f1 and have some discourse about different topics - the community on here is very different to other f1 communities online and it definitely loses the “old rich man” sport stereotype, I guess it is normal to feel like this when you are just beginning to find out about new interest but you are definitely not too old, I watched f1 a lot when I was younger and then watched intermittently for a few years, until drive to survive and lockdown made me rediscover how much I had missed watching it.

I’m hoping that this will be an exciting first season for you to watch if you stick around as it looks like we might have a title fight on our hands 🤞

Hope you enjoy the race tomorrow, thanks again for your message 🧡

#anon ask

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omegawizardposting · 5 years ago

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I genuinely do wish that things like “religiogender” and other wild identities were made and primarily used by trolls, but here’s the thing: they aren’t.

You know who they are made and primarily used by?

Teenagers.

That’s one reason why I stopped engaging in MOGAI-related discourse. I’m twenty-seven; I’m too old to be arguing with kids on the Internet. These days, if I have a take, I post it on my blog, and if a literal fetus tries to come at me, I block them. You’re a child, and that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, but it is really weird for you to be trying to engage a grown man in discourse on tumblr, and it would be even weirder for me to respond.

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smokeybrandreviews · 5 years ago

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Binary

This started out as a whole thing about Brie Larson. She’s started a YouTube channel and i figured I'd follow it just for kicks. I’m not a huge fan of massive Hollywood stars invading more accessible spaces but, technically, they’re the “You” in YouTube, too. I can’t be too mad at that. Of course Google is going to cater more to their brand, mostly because they bring in the duckets and understand PR so they know ho not to cause an ADpocolypse, but it’s still mad sh*tty. Larson’s first post was just her being goofy, trying to figure out how to even be a YouTuber. You kind of see a side of her that i figured was there, but never really was able to confirm. Brie Larson is the poster child for Millennial geekdom and i find that adorable as f*ck. Which is why i don’t understand the MASSIVE waves of hate she’s getting from the community. Cats are reveling in her perceived failure, it’s actually insane.

Now, before we go any further, i just want to be clear; I am a fan of Brie Larson. I think she is excellent at her craft. Ma is from my hometown and it’s always great to see someone make it out of this cowtown. I believe she has every right to her opinions and the fact that she voices them from such a visible platform, makes her one of the most endearing and real celebrities in an industry maligned by the phony. Brie ain’t quite Russell Brand but she is very vocal about the unjust sh*t she sees and will totally let you know it. That, i think, is why she garners such vitriol. Look, I'm a black dude living in the US. If she gets on TV and says f*ck white dudes, I'm inclined to agree. But she didn’t say that. What she said was there needs to be more voices making film, different perspectives in the arts. White dudes dominate the industry and she’s tired of seeing that movie. I don’t understand how that’s a controversial statement. It’s true. We need more dynamic, more diverse, storytellers making films out in the wild. The thing is, that one statement earned her the ire of every entitled white boy with time and and the internet. These motherf*cker decided to take that personally and we were off to the races.

When Brie Larson was announced as Captain Marvel, i was okay with it. I thought Charlize Theron or Katee Sackhoff would have been a better look but i get it. Larson is young and can portray the character for years to come. Kind of how Florence Pugh is going to take over Black Widow duties from Scarlett Johansson. Pugh can be that character for close to a decade, as can Larson. Once again, however, the interwebs were set asunder with rage and malcontent over the Cap Marvel announcement. It was f*cking ridiculous to me. Sure, she didn’t look the part going into this but neither did Gal Gadot, the latter turned out to be the best thing going in that trainwreck DCEU. Larson grew into the part, put in the work to look the part, and is committed to the role. She did her research, consuming massive amounts of the comics, trying to find Carol’s head space, which was a goddamn feat. Captain Marvel is as controversial as Brie Larson, herself. And it’s just as stupid.

Look, i adore Captain Marvel. She’s my fifth favorite Marvel character after Spider-Man, Doctor Doom, Laura Kinney, and Illyana Rasputin. In that order. Captain Marvel grew on me during the whole Mighty Avengers and Disassembled story lines from years ago. I have no love-loss for Bendis but that cat did wonders for building up more obscure characters, Carol being one of them. I also like what he did for Luke Cage, too, but that’s not what this essay is about. I’ve been a fan of this character since the early 00s and have rode this Carol train for years. I jumped on bored when she was rocking her leotard, which i miss terribly, took my time to dig up the back issues where she was in the original red and blue digs and moonlighted as Warbird for a bit. Then, Marvel Now happened and f*cked it all up. Carol went from this attractive, uber-powered, mess of a woman to a cold, manly, aggressively stupid caricature of herself. The Carol Danvers i had grown to love, with all of her faults and trauma, became some sort of butch nightmare and the poster child for why Woke Marvel was failing. I don’t think that’s fair.

Comic Carol was on her way to becoming a real force in the Marvel universe. She had learned there was worth in her strength, one she had to drag out through deep introspection and an understanding of who she really is. No longer was she just a gender-swapped, copyright placeholder that no one knew what to do with. Now she had agency. Now she was a force. Now she was relevant. Now tore all of that away. After Marvel Now, all of that growth and nuance was thrown out of the window. She became the idealized version of what the SJWs thought a “Strong Woman” should be. Marvel gave her a massive push in an effort to cater to this burgeoning Tumblr dynamic and it failed miserably. Marvel wanted that Steven Universe crowd and they tried real hard to get it but that sh*t did not work. The changes to the universe weren’t extreme or feminist or PC enough. Courting a fanbase that had no longevity, Carol was sabotaged and thrown to the wolves. That’s the environment we were saturated in when Disney announced Larson as Carol for the MCU. It was a perfect storm of Nerdrage, one that has not died down in any capacity all these years later for either Brie or Carol.

I don’t think the feminist slant given to the Captain Marvel movie was actually such a big deal. I think the vitriol that flick faces stems from the combined maliciousness both the new version of Carol in the comics and Brie Larson, herself, garnered. It’s kind of crazy the massive tantrum everyone decided to throw over this movie. Cats were looking for this thing to fail as some sort of petulant schadenfreude ignoring the fact that this movie wasn’t made for them. As frustrated as i was with the ludicrous discourse, i knew this movie wasn't for me. his wasn’t my Carol and i was good with that. Unlike Marvel who pandered to the trend of PC nonsense, the MCU had a clear vision in mind for the audience they wanted; Young girls. They wanted a character who was strong enough to hang with Thor, stand equally with Iron Man, and have the respect of Captain America. Captain Marvel was the best option. She would be the tentpole hero of the MCU going forward and i accepted that. I went into the film with that understanding and, on my way out, i saw, firsthand, what this movie meant to the target audience. There was a little girl, about nine or so, gushing abut how cool Captain Marvel was. She as ecstatic to see a girl like her, kicking so much butt. In the face of that, every entitled argument you have against the character falls apart in my eyes. Captain Marvel is to young girls and woman, as Black Panther was to us black folk. It’s the same energy.

Do i think the film could have been better? F*ck yea, i do. I think the script should have had one more revision and the directors definitely felt out of place. They’re good at their jobs, they mostly make A24-esque fare, but a massive, multi-million dollar, space epic connected to the most popular film franchise in history? Nah, these cats were way out of their depth. I think Feige dropped the ball on this one, a rare miss. I think Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Lynne Ramsay, Claire Dennis, or Lorene Scafaria would have constructed a much better film, both visually and narrative wise. I think if the movie was better as a whole, a lot of the controversy and vitriol would have been neutered. Carol is written quite wooden and a little pretentious. The interactions between the supporting cast feels forced. The overall narrative is fine but definitely could have been embellished at parts. Captain Marvel is boring and i don’t know how that happened. You have one of the strongest characters in comics, with a distinct, visually appealing powerset, and you make her movie boring? Really? More than anything, though, is the absolute mistreatment of Sam Jackson and Nick Fury.

The writing reduces Nick Fury, the mind behind the entirety of the Avengers Initiative, to lap boy sidekick in an effort to up Carol’s own stature. That sh*t is poor writing and it’s mad frustrating to see. I hate narratives that have to job established characters, in an effort to push new additions. I just wrote a whole goddamn thing about that with Punchline, Joker’s new “partner”. It’s bogus, cheapening the character and opens up an avenue for bad-faith complaints. Rey Palpatine is another great example. Her entire character is built on the slow, methodical, violent, destruction of the Skywalker legacy. Interestingly enough, that character was launched in the same environment as New Carol so i understand why the movie is the way that it is. I don’t agree with it, but i know why. It was an incredibly poor choice to introduce Captain Marvel in this way, however, and she’s never recovered. Brie has never recovered. You want a 90s buddy-cop space opera? Lethal Weapon with Skrulls and starships? You need your Murtaugh and Riggs to stand on equal footing. That was not the case with this flick. Having Nick Fury job to Carol Danvers for two hours was the wrong way to go about all of this and i think a different creative team could have made something truly excellent.

It’s nuts to me that this is even a thing though. Brie’s personal controversy is so f*cking stupid, i choke every time i think about it. How are you mad she stand up for herself, her gender, and everyone else in a position of persecution? Don’t you want though with a platform speaking up about the inequities of our country? I feel like the same people who hate Brie for her vocal advocacy, are the same people who stan “All Lives Matter” when ever someone says Black Lives Matter. That sh*t feels like the same energy to me. I feel like the criticisms launched at comic Carol have real validity, even if most of them are just whiny man-children who miss the leotard. I miss the leotard, too, but come on? We’re passed that now. I do think, when written well, Carol can be a force in the books. Her run as part of the new Ultimates was pretty chill I think she needs that in order to be her true self, until we establish a true self for the character. It’s weird to say but Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel previously, has been around for fifty years, and no one has any idea who she is as a character. I think Captain Marvel in the MCU, both the character and film, are hated for the wrong reasons. The fact that no one has any idea who this character is, makes for a lousy cinematic experience. The team put together in an effort to flesh this character out, didn’t have the creative capacity to do so and we were left with little more than PC tropes and Feminist agenda. The MCU let both Brie and Carol down in that regard.

Brie Larson isn’t a terrible person and she deserves more respect put on her name. She an accomplished actress with a bevy of awards and accolades to her name. She’s been in great films like Room and Scott Pilgrim, never once garnering a controversy. The fact that she speaks her truth, a truth the establishment doesn’t want to hear, should not disqualify her talent or the fact that she seems like a really chill person. Carol Danvers is a dope ass character with an amazing amount of potential. When she’s written well and not traded upon for trends, she can have real staying power. Her abilities open up a plethora of interesting, creatively fertile narratives yet to be written. Disregarding her just because Marvel decided to gamble on the pretentious third-wave feminism wave is shortsighted and makes you look like a childish brat. You’re entitled to feel however you want but let’s be clear; Brie Larson and Carol Danvers deserve so much better.

#Captain Marvel #Carol Danvers #Brie Larson #Marvel

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sui-senka · 6 years ago

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The dumbest post

I think y’all should be here to witness the dumbest post I’ll ever make, as I’m not all about getting into discourse and that, and any other self-identifying Vergil lovers please come here:

@creepyscritches, @brasspetalsx, @fandomhell97, @breezeinmonochromenight, @kaldea88, @xalmasyx, @hornyangrybean, @noir-sorrow, @catspook, @xenontrioxide, @zilla-may-cry, @boobble, @vergilshusband, @tifaroni, @littlebluewraith, @im-a-clown, @genovaempera, @neodicronus, @thelessiknowtheworse, @thriilsy, @jestermania, @bunny-girl-sweetseek, @darka3363, @witchkiid, @45, @manadebutt, @magsamaire, @spaghetti-queerghetti, @clairexredfields, @204863-yunglynn, @yuri-subtext, @miss-soso-25, @josuke-kujo, @cameguisada, @trionfi, @glitteryhumanfiretrash, @lewdbunbun, @journalofsparda, @complacentdevil, @infernokid, @emogodmatthew, @brit-o-raptor, @salsa-and-chips, @gemstone-enema

I’d like y’all to bear witness, as I take down this bitch-ass clown. As I’ve blocked the person in question that I want to call out - please tag them into this post to have at them ;) Also - to the other people that didn’t get this, tag your mutuals and get them here.

I’d also like to announce that @thephantomporg84 is now masquerading as @derelict-stranger, and I got a few messages a few days ago about how she was gonna take down her account, and how she wants me to block all of you, which is ridiculous as you are all blogs that I have known and followed way before her and also I don’t know you either. I told her that I didn’t want to be involved in her drama, but here I am.

It’s kinda hard for me to make this post, as I genuinely thought that she was cool in the beginning - she helped to give me more DMC asks in my inbox, and she always reblogged my stuff, as I’ve been trying to make it with the big guys - like @myfairmidnightladyspade.

But I saw the stuff that she says online to you all, and I think I got some anon messages from her asking if I was a terf or not... and yeah - my heart broke. I feel like I have been deceived in some way. What I wanted to be there was someone who was cool, and funny to talk to, but turns out that person is petty, heartless, immature and straight up spiteful.

I may have to justify myself in why I got messages from her - I was only trying to console her, but to do it in a neutral way as I wanted no part in her drama.

Also - i’m probably not gonna show any evidence for how much she sucks cause there’s tags and anon posts dedicated to that sort of thing

I want you on tumblr, and you on Reddit to find her, and in the /v/ section of 4chan to block her and report her for all she’s done. I want you to wipe her existence from the internet until there is nothing left.

Now - I need to change the flow of the conversation by directing it to you, @derelict-stranger.

I’d like you to kindly log off, take a breather and think, for a second about the actions that you’ve done to the people that I’ve mentioned above.

I’d also like to tell you that your suggestion to block all those people above is complete nonsense. Why would you make me block blogs who have perfectly decent and awesome content, and to those who I have talked to longer than you? why would you make me block blogs who I don’t know? Quit trying to get me on your side. I want no part in your drama like I said before, and stop trying to manipulate me into getting me to give a shit about you.

I’d also like to tell you that your situation is entirely self-inflicted. That you trying to talk to me won’t work, the only reason that people are apparently “attacking you” - is because you, in fact, are the instigator, are the catalyst of all this hatred.

You - @derelict-stranger, lack any ability whatsoever to disagree well. From where I’m looking, all of this started because you don’t like Vergil from the Devil May Cry games and you don’t like the plot of 5, which seems extremely stupid to me, as he’s only a small-ish part of 1, one of the best boss-fights in 3 and just a mere mention in 4. The fact that you need to incessantly attack content creators who merely like him is stupid. Either keep those opinions to yourself, ignore them, or do my favourite -> stick ‘em up your big stupid ass.

It’s also stupid that when people merely like him - you have to bring in your own shitty opinions. No one asked you what you thought, and I’m pretty sure you’re actively seeking out fights with people just to feel good about yourself. It’s also super hypocritical of you ragging on about how much Vergil sucks, when you go crazy for Kylo Ren, as they share some similarities in terms of their vibes and traits. (Yeah - I see you asking for smutty Kylo Ren x Reader requests online.....) Why do you get pissy when people like villainous fictional characters - do your knickers

What I just want to know is what kind of personal gratification you get when you actively hate on a character, and what kind of gratification you get when just because someone disagrees with you - that you have to result using death threats, rape threats, pedophilia threats, racism, slurs, and ableism, transphobia, alt-right rhetoric, neo-Nazi shit, pro-Trump, and homophobic comments to content creators just doin’ their own thing. Is it just to feel like the bigger man, is it to make yourself sound smarter than the other person (Cause you don’t) - like what actually motivates you, what actually makes you want to shit on other people’s parades, huh? Sounds to me like you need to get a life.

The fact that you always need to play the victim is sad and pathetic too:

- That you’re on the spectrum: - Okay, there are a lot of people who are on the spectrum here on tumblr. But they don’t use it as an excuse to justify shitty behaviour especially if it’s unitentional. as I’m sure they and the people they know are. I’m sure they apologise and try to get on with life like how NT people do. As you know - a lot of people of the spectrum feel like they’re being treated as sub-human being babies that do nothing but screech all the time, and they’re taking action to change those perceptions. Your behaviours are not helping their cause.

- That you use depression as an excuse - I’m kinda sympathetic to the whole mental health issues thing. I have them too. In fact, I am a hot mess. But I don’t use that to excuse me hurting other people with intention, and I’m sure many others don’t either. At least 1/4 or 1/3 will have some mental health issues in their life, and yeah, it sucks, and it’s common but it doesn’t make them exempt from them being called out on their shitty acts. the fact that so many people are and can be mentally ill doesn’t make you special, and it doesn’t give you a free pass to attack others.

- The fact that you try to bait people into making anti-semitic comments, so you can call them anti-semitic. Dude, that’s low. I’m pretty sure that’s gaslighting and manipulation as well. You don’t get the right to use your religion/race in that way as a defence when you’re feeling attacked so that you come off a better person. I’m friends with many jewish people, and they’d never have the gall to do that. I know that your peeople have had it rough, but you can’t use that in an argument just to prove that the other one is a piece of shit, when it is in fact you. I’m muslim, a WOC, and ancestrally speaking, from a country that your so-beloved president essentially banned their right to seek a better life in the states. For as long as I can remember - I’ve seen news about my kind being universally hated, I’ve been brought up in a post-9/11 world where for as long as I can remember that me and our kind are the enemy (so I can sympathise) - but you don’t see me and other muslims here using those petty tactics that you use, because unlike you, we’re not myopic and we know that won’t get us anywhere.

I mean, this behaviour sounds bratty and childish - so I was thinking, she’ll probably grow out of it. Then I find that you’re in you’re mid-twenties, and I think “you really haven’t grown up at all, have you?”, and honestly it just makes the behaviour worse as you are resulting to middle school/high school tactics -> especially making me block all those people, calling them sociopaths and evil bitches. This ain’t high school or Mean Girls, moron, this is a fandom. A place where people can create, share, like and comment on content that makes you happy. I don’t think you understand what that means - cause all I see, and everyone sees is you spewing hatred everywhere. Fandoms are supposed to make you feel included, feel happy, feel safe, be a place to make friends. I don’t think you know that, and I don’t think you are even smart enough to realise that you are the reason why our fandom isn’t happy.

And honestly, at this point, the hatred you are getting is well deserved. You deserve to feel like shit if all you are going to do is make others feel like shit.

I don’t know what else to say but:

1. Get the hell away from our fandom

2. Get rid of your internet connection.

3. Get a life.

4. We don’t want you here.

5. You’re scum.

6. Go suck a dick, or flick a bean, whatever gets you off you troglodyte.

I liked you man, I really did. Then I saw how you treat others, and now I know I made a dumb life choice in making friends with you. If only you weren’t such a piece of shit, we could have been good friends.

I don’t want you here on tumblr. They don’t want you here. No-one wants or needs a toxic parasite like you on this website.

Yours sincerely,

sui-senka, who just sucked Vergil’s dick yesterday, and liked it.

#devil may cry #dmc #discourse #dmc discourse #honk off #thephantomporg84 #derelict-stranger #🤡

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fourteenacross · 6 years ago

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octet - 5/25/19, 2pm

Hello, hello, I'm back from New Jersey! Which, you probably didn't even know I left, because I never post here anymore, but since we've yet to find a new platform for fannish happenings, I don't really have anywhere else to post show notes and the like.

Anyway, we saw Octet and Hadestown over the long weekend. I saw Hadestown at the NYTW in 2016, but I saw it the same day I saw Hamilton for the first time and my notes are lost to the ages. More about that later, though. (Tomorrow, probably.) For now, I'm going to focus on Octet.

So, here's what I knew about Octet going in: - Part of Dave Malloy's five year residency at the Signature Theatre - internet/discourse - Alex Gibson - a cappella? - support group?

The day before I did a little bit more digging, but I was kind of into going in blind, so I didn't dig too much.

Overall, I really liked it! My above the cut review is that, like all good Malloy shows, it brought up a lot of interesting concepts and shined a light on very relatable behaviors and ways of thinking. It doesn't really have a plot or narrative, and seems to largely exist to explore different types of internet denizens. As such, the characters vacillate between being actual people and being archetypes. I think all of this is fine--not everything needs to be a tautly plotted story, it's okay for this to be a song cycle, not a narrative musical. But I'm putting that out there for anyone who's thinking about going, just so you're aware when you head in.

First off, the set dressing is amazing. It looks just like a ratty church all purpose room, down to the way the light switches are labelled and the signs on the wall with clean-up instructions for group leaders. The walk in is papered with flyers advertising self-help groups, tutoring, charity walks, etc.

The show is set up like a support group meeting. A couple actors come in before the start and clean up the detritus of a bingo game and set up for the meeting, and then the group gathers and they begin. The group is “Friends of Saul,” and group members are told to put their phones off and in a basket against the wall, as they're here for various screen addictions.

Hymn: The Forest: This was a very Malloy song--it starts off a a meditation on a beautiful forest and takes a left turn. Delightful. Halfway through, Velma comes into the meeting and joins the other seven folks for the end of the hymn.

Refresh: Paula, the group leader, welcomes Velma to the group and tells them that Saul can’t be here this week, but he’s asked her to lead. She then asks if anyone wants to share. Jessica acquiesces and talks about how she was the subject of a viral video and has been "egosurfing" ever since, a compulsion to read all the shitty things strangers are saying about her without knowing her at all. (Unsurprisingly, Malloy says this song was heavily influenced by his feelings post-Comet.) Margo Seibert kills this song, which delves into our kneejerk tendency to pile on, sometimes without knowing or caring about context. It made me think a lot about how this goes both ways--the song focused on the negative, but obviously Milkshake Duck Syndrome is the same basic concept at its core.

Candy: Henry offers to share next. He talks about how his life is going okay at the moment, he's been on a few dates, but he hasn't had the heart to tell the guy about his "problem" yet, which is that he's addicted to video games. The song obviously invokes Candy Crush, but also refers to various other games including MMORPGs, FPSs, RPGs, and other phone puzzles games. I love this song--it is insanely catchy, Alex Gibson is delightful, and it's also profoundly sad and relatable. Henry eventually reveals that he uses games to avoid the real world and he's fairly sure he doesn't care if he dies, so he uses these games to string himself along and pass the time. Ouch. Also hashtag relatable content.

Glow: Paula shares next and talks about how she and her husband are both screen addicts and how they'll lie next to each other in bed, each on their own devices, ignoring the other, and how she wishes he would stop bringing the catastrophes of the world into their bed. She's lonely and sad and he doesn't see it because he doesn't look up from his phone. Starr Busby is incredible and, as a person who had to take an eight-month twitter break because she couldn’t handle the constant barrage of despair, I feel this song pretty hard.

Fugue State: Paula sets a metronome ticking for a five minute silent fugue state. The characters cycle through various thoughts about social media and the internet, calling out specific formatting for jokes and call out posts and "um actually"ing other people's comments in a whirlwind of commentary on how we interact with each other online. It's a very well put together song, but it's another one of those moments where it's clear this is a collection of songs about a concept rather than a narrative story.

Hymn: Monster: There's a five minute break, in which Henry approaches Velma, who's been quiet up to this point. She launches into a fast and awkward explanation of how she's on a self-imposed internet hiatus because she keeps getting tied up in discourse that's not good for her. She talks about being a part of a previous group that was not good and how she's since gotten into tarot instead, but there are parts of that group that aren't good, too (she delves into the Sephora Starter Witch Kit debacle), so instead she's taking a break and only talking to her one friend, whom she refers to constantly as "my friend." It was a very stark moment of self-recognition, tee bee aitch, and Velma is definitely the closest to the fannish millennial internet archetype. She says she found the group after Saul broke into a chat with her friend to tell her about it, so her friend said she had to come to check it out. After her monologue about all of this to Henry, the others return from their break to sing a hymn called "Monster" that talks about online trolls and how engaging with them and reading their exploits poisons your brain.

Solo: Karly and Ed alternate in this song, coming together in moments of similar sentiment. It's really an interesting way to handle the topics in question. Karly is singing about dating apps and how hard it is to find a dude who actually cares about her and the thin line between being asserting herself and the possibility of being the impetus for another MRA mass shooting. Ed, meanwhile, is a lonely dude who is on the verge of turning to the incel community because they can relate to his feelings of rejection and isolation. The whole thing is creepy and awful and very well blended--there's some empathy on both sides, while also making it clear how awful these dudes are.

Actually: This is Toby's song. Toby is a former punk kid turned conspiracy theorist. This is the song I struggled with the most. I just couldn't follow it narratively--I wasn't even 100% positive about the "conspiracy theorist" part until I could come home to read the lyrics. The lighting in this song was wonderful, though, and the ensemble was great. It just didn't click with me and it was harder for me to follow.

Little God: Dang, I loved this bit. It was the weirdest, and also had a distinctly Douglas Adams flavor, which was especially apt as I was attending the show on Towel Day. (So, honestly, it’s not surprising that I liked this bit so much, in retrospect.) Marvin, a neuroscientist, is up late with his new baby daughter when he has a vision from god. He chalks it up to a dream until god appears to him again the next morning. He goes to his lab, where all the other scientists have had a similar experience, and god appears to them in the visage of a little girl, whom they call Little God. They do a series of tests to prove whether god is real, and can manage to find scientific explanations for them all, trapped in this cycle of seeing wonderful things and then dissecting them clinically. Velma ends his story by telling him he's "The Hanged Man," the tarot card that represents everything one believes about oneself being flipped on its head.

Tower Tea Ceremony: The group starts a tea ceremony, passing around cups of tea, after which Paula comes around adding drops of something to the cups. Velma nervously asks what it is, and Paula calmly explains that it's a powerful group psychedelic that induces a five minute coma. Everyone else is chill with this, but Velma is visibly startled and nervous and does not drink her tea. Everyone else passes out, leaving her alone.

Beautiful: While everyone else is passed out, Velma sings her story. She was lonely and felt ugly and fat and stupid. She spent a lot of time alone and cut herself, but eventually found another girl just like her on the other side of the world. She had the same interests and liked the same things and felt the same way. She tells Velma that she's worthwhile and that there's light inside of her and, through seeing the same within her friend, she's able to start to accept that about herself. Kuhoo Verma is something else entirely on this song. It felt so personal and quiet and perfect. And, to be honest, it really anchored the show for me. After almost twenty-five years of being a nerdy, lonely kid on the internet, I tend to be very kneejerk protective of internet friendships. When people deride the internet as toxic, my urge is always to defend it because it's the source of all the good things in my life. I didn't have a lot of friends as a kid and I was socially anxious, but the internet was a way for me to meet other people who liked the same weird things I liked. These days that's a much more common, accepted story, but it was weird and new in 1996, so I spent a lot of years either lying about how I knew my friends or insisting that the internet wasn't just pedophiles and murderers. Obviously in the years since, the internet has grown into something bigger and, frequently, more toxic than I could have imagined at ten, eleven years old on the AOL Jonny Quest message boards. The urge to defend it has never gone away, however, and so I was obviously a little nervous about this show. But I trust Dave and I know that he's a big ol' nerd like the rest of us and doesn't pretend to be above our petty, silly forms of entertainment. And I'm glad I did, because it's important to me that this was the song he ended on--a quiet reminder that there's good to be found on the internet, that it's not all bad, that parts of it can be life-saving.

Hymn: The Field: The show ends with the group closing out their meeting with another hymn. Paula tells everyone next week’s meeting will be somewhere else and that she’ll email the details. Velma says she isn’t sure if she’ll come back, and she’s told that it doesn’t matter—the same people don’t always come week to week, but Saul will make sure there are eight people in attendance. The hymn is a nice, sweet song about coming together beyond the fighting and ugliness to appreciate each other and the world.

So, yeah, overall, I enjoyed it. I really needed to sit and think about it for a little bit after first seeing it, and I think repeat listenings will find a lot more to enjoy about it. Like I said, there’s not so much a story or narrative to get lost in, but the individual songs hold up well in the loose framework of the show, and a lot of them are both catchy and thought-provoking in a very Malloy way. I’m glad I got to see it, and I’m interested to see where it goes from here, if anywhere.

#octet #dave malloy #show notes

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sometipsygnostalgic · 6 years ago

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A matter of discourse

Kind of autobiographical, which may be boring. This post is a very brief discussion about my experiences with online discourse.

I’ve changed a lot since my A-timer days back in 2016 when I was first engaging in genuine discussion on the internet for the first time. Back then I was fighting the fight for stuff like Bubbline to be allowed on television. There was a lot of insane and aggravating discussion. It felt fun to let off steam by having a proper go at someone I knew was wrong though. It developed some solid communication skills as well. I felt alive!

When I opened my tumblr, suddenly lots of things were a big deal. Friends sharing posts about tragedies that had happened, about venomous members of different communities. This only escalated after I left the Atimers for Homestuck fandom, which was itching for a good fight. So I got in the gang with various LGBT bloggers, and watched the material they were sharing.

So, there was stuff like Zamii, like scandals about ships, like scandals about what people did on other accounts... lesbian shippers were at war against gay shippers....

...and back in the cartoon fandom shows like SU were going under intense scrutiny from the people who enjoyed them, an overtly progressive show like SU had attracted an overtly progressive audience which was going to take absolutely no prisoners whatsoever, even on stuff that in most people’s eyes would never be a big deal. Standards that no other show in the history of television had lived up to.

It’s not so much that SU etc were bad, or that they were not bad, but the thing that got to me was how the crew reacted. They couldn’t deal. They jumped to defend the show, say it was sooo not bad, that everyone else was being stupid. People deleted their accounts and stopped communicating with the internet. That was the harsh blow - the crew had decided the entire fanbase were not worth speaking to, because somebody criticised their work.

Not unlike what had happened to Homestuck, I feel.

This was the time where I decided to step away from my tumblr account. I felt like I had to police everything I post because I was at the time a popular blog, if I stepped out of line - something ridiculously easy for a moron like me - then I wouldn’t be lynched as such, but my casual friends would reject me. I felt like this meant my tumblr friends weren’t true allies and it didn’t feel right to expose myself. (Not inclusive of the Group Chat friends or certain individuals from this site who are a whole different story of people I’ve neglected, I’m really sorry.)

Watching the crews of all my fandoms just walk away at the first obstacle took the spirit out of being a fan too.

Besides which, Homestuck was ending. It had decided late in act 6 to perform a round of virtue signalling which I felt was kind of facetious considering Hussie’s actual views on everything and the lack of energy he’d been putting into the story. Until the story ended I believed that maybe he’d changed, but then A7 dropped and I realised I was right all along. Years later, the epilogues have only reinforced my perspective that Hussie only wrote A6 to be so progressive because that was what he thought his current fans would be into, not because he thought it would be a good idea or the right thing to do. It shows because of how badly he’s handled it.

So I joined the Homestuck reddit and became more active there than on Tumblr. Then I joined the Homestuck discord.

The place at first was kind of... cold towards me, because of my reputation for being a firestarter whenever the topic of LGBT ships in homestuck came up (a reputation I am proud of - together we inflicted genuine change in the way the reddit handled homophobic content). I took a liking to it though because there is a ton of people and I didn’t have to engage in horrible one-on-one discussions where there could be intense emotional labour. I didn’t have to deal with people’s personal drama, with suicide threats, in-group fighting. I didn’t have to deal with callouts, because while they were a thing, they were just a silly thing that wouldn’t result in being kicked unless you were a genuine cunt. And I have grown to trust the place to protect itself from truly vile people. There are enough channels and there’s just enough activity that you can discuss whatever you like with a small group of people and have a good nonjudgemental discussion, though it will be layered with lots of sarcasm and maybe a couple of nasty comments, which I think I’m a bit weird for enjoying getting thrown at me. Playing the Fool is my forte.

Watching the news now, even looking on tumblr, but ESPECIALLY looking at twitter, it’s so intimidating seeing how much people hate each other for acting naturally. Whether this is people who would be described by many as “social justice warriors” or people who would self describe as “anti social justice warriors”. I do think the latter are significantly more evil and petty to be honest because they’re doing something far worse over an issue that’s less severe than whatever they’re defending.

The major issue appears to be people reacting without genuinely looking into whatever they’re being clickbaited with. This is stupidity at its finest.

To summarise my position: If you see something and it’s making you feel strongly, I implore you to sit back, think about what you’re looking at, maybe do a bit of research, then think about why it’s happened, and why it’s making you feel strong. If you do all that and your opinion is the same, great! You’ve got a well thought out opinion.

If you refuse to do this, you’re being dumb and you should not try to cause controversy or grief.

If you’re causing drama or harrassment about something purely out of spite to someone else who you don’t like much, go fuck yourself.

Okay, post is over, go home everybody. Your homework for tonight is the controversy of the Homestuck epilogue, why it became what it was, and whether it’s justified to be angry. Please submit papers by tomorrow morning for review.

thiswillbemynextblogpost

#homestuck #steven universe

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tumblunni · 7 years ago

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Man, god, im just suddenly thinking about "ak/ur/oku" and like.. How the fuck did that even become such a huge thing in early 2000s fandom? Dear god so much early gay shipping in fandom was super unhealthy "sinful" bullshit made by straight people for fetishy purposes rather than genuine representation. But a/kurok/u was such a weird one because it was like.. Just globally accepted and never aknowledged to be problematic?? Man i still remember how lil 13 year old me didnt know there was anything wrong with it, like seriously when stuff like this becomes popularized it ends up sending bad messages to actual queer youth. Learning about your sexuality via the internet cos there's no sex ed irl for you, abd you end up stumbling into toxic fandoms before you have the critical thinking skills necessary to know that this stuff is bad and shouldnt be imitated. Like seriously one of the things i worry about EVERY NIGHT AT 2AM THAT KEEPS ME FROM SLEEPING is that stupid lil 15 year old me made a post on deviantart going like "are pedophiles really all bad? I mean it sounds like an illness. I mean maybe theyre just scared and they want help." Like im terrified constantly that someone will find that old thing and judge me as if i still believe that apologist crap, or as if it was actually an opinion i formed from a fully developed mind, rather than from a kid who (as far as i knew) had never met a pedophile, thinking about pedophiles in the abstract, while being influenced by fuckin pedophile-dominated fandoms and having NO IDEA. and of cooooourse i wanted to believe that i was mature for my age, i thought that was a compliment.. Uuuuugh...

Sorry, going a little offtopic there.

But anyway isnt it kinda weird how akur/oku was just.. Not even regarded as pedophilia? And when i was a kid it wasnt just me not understanding the gross parts of the fandom, i legit never thought axel was that much older than roxas. And it was one of the more popular gay ships cos at that point as far as we knew it was the only person axel had any sort of backstory with, and he cared so much about this guy that he was willing to sacrifice his life to help sora even when he knew roxas would never come back. At the time without further context it seemed like a reasonable assumption to make? And it wasnt until Days that i realized axel was intended to be an adult rather than a teenager, and even worse A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO MADE THAT SHIPPING ART KNEW THAT. Uuugh it was so gross in retrospect to go back and see all the clues i missed that these people were fetishizing roxas's inexperience and veey much writing him as underage. AAAAAAA!

Anyway im glad that shit is now recognized as shit and now we have canon evidence of this dude being old as balls. And honestly i love the relationship of him as a big brother/dad to roxas and xion a lot more, even though as a kid i was desperate for any kind of queer representation in kh. Like.. I never really actually liked the ship that much or felt any chemistry? I just latched onto a few bad writing flubs that could potentially be interpreted as Gay Evidence because i was SO damn desperate! Like i felt like i had to support all these gross abusive ships in fandom cos if i wasnt then i was being 'homophobic', i mean they were THE ONLY AVAILABLE OPTIONS, right? :( Its only now ive grown up i can see how wrong that was, and how people just used it as an excuse to make gross shit and get away with it. Like how in Black Butler all these 'yaoi fangirls' kept erasing the rarest of rare things, a canon trans woman, because 'its sexier if its gay'. Ughhhh. And seriously that discourse still exists for poor Grell, and there's still a lot of these shitty bigoted people pretending to be allies, but like seriously this was EVERYWHERE in 2005! And lgbt rights and even lgbt communities at all were way smaller and less available to the poor teenagers who really needed that positive influence while they were figuring out who they are. So man the abusive side of yaoi fandom was WAY more powerful, and wya more.mainstream, with barely any criticism. And the whole content of this fandom was creepy fuckin adults making pedo porn, and kids who just discovered they were queer and tried to headcanon their favourote characters as being like them. Fucking predator heaven! So yeh that ruined KH for me and definately made me scared of returning to Black Butler for almost a decade. And then i found out that the manga itself has none of that pedo shit and that one of the fandom's biggest abusive gay man archetypes was actually a trans woman this entire time, and just gahhhhh....

Also like seriously this is a tad offtopic but can we kill the anime trope of either everyone looking young or everyone looking old? Or creepy things where just one character looks the wrong age in order to fetishize pedophilia? I dont think kingdom hearts was one of those intentional ones, like i mean there's super bad shit where its like 'this 5 year old looking person is really 9000 years old/actually 18 and just hasnt had their growth spurt yet' (somehow its even more insulting when theres not even a magical excuse) Or the other way around and we have a character thats canonically underage but drawn looking sexually mature with big ol knockers so its somehow okay. The existence of those horrible things is why i end up feeling uncomfortable even seeing ambiguous ages as just a trope in completely innocent anime, yknow? Like in pokemon and digimon all the 10 year old protagonists are exactly the same height as all the adults, and all the female love interests for ash have to be early bloomers in terms of chest and hips, while notably Iris is the only one who actually looks her age and also the first non love interest. Its another reason why i prefer the new art style for the latest season, they make everyone look like kids and Lillie continues to look like a kid even though she's the main girl and has all the cute scenes with Ash. The girls even got very normal looking kiddy swimsuits in the beach episode! Why is that so uncommon, to find the bare minimum thing of underage kids not being sexualized at the beach??

Soooooo yeah, thats at least part of why kid me thought axel and roxas were within a similar age range. Like i thought roxas was maybe 16 and axel was 18?? Somehow?? I dont even know, kingdom hearts isnt even SUPER bad with the 'kids look like older teens,all adults look like age 20 at the most' anime syndrome. Its probably more because id been raised on games and anime that followed that trope, before i played kh. And as a kid you just dont really know the exact differences between 'old', like i mean i knew teenagers were tall and boys get a growth spurt, so somehow it made sense to me that axel could be the same age as roxas?? And man even if i knew he wasnt, i was barely educated at all about pedophilia and i didnt know the nuances of it. I just knew 'its bad for adults to marry kids' like man i was really behind the curve in general learning due to my undiagnosed autism and abusive parenting so like HERE'S 12 YEAR OLD ME NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT THE SEX ASPECT. And i didnt know that adults in relationships with teenagers was bad too, or like 16/17 year old teens dating kids... I was so fuckin dumb... I really cant believe that not only did i believe stupid adults saying 'pedophilia isnt bad if you're non offending, its okay to make cartoon child porn as long as you dont physically abuse real kids' but also i somehow just DID NOT EVER REALIZE that axel was an adult and roxas wasnt even a goddamn older teen...

So yeh im making a lot of excuses for why my stupid younger self was blindly parroting bullshit, but im not trying to excuse how goddamn wrong and bad it was. I still wake up ashamed in the middle of the night for crapoy decisions i made as a dumb kid, and in terrified that some shreds of it might still exist out there on the internet and maybe someone else could read it?! Gahhhh! Seriously could i have accidentally helped spread that bullshit brainwashing to other kids? And seriously when people say this shit is harmless they just need to look at this, look at how being into problematic yaoi is such a common 'phase' for ACTUAL CHILDREN. Like its not fuckin NATURAL for kids to fall into this stuff, they do it because they dont know any better but the people making the goddamn founding blocks of the fandom are fuckin grown women fetishizing gay men or grown men fetishing lesbians. There's people who do know better who actually conciously decide that a/kurok/u is a good ship while knowing all the goddamn details of what it actually is and exactly what theyre supporting by shipping it. Ughhhhh!

So yeh fuckin Please Stay Safe In Fandom, Kids

And pedophiles have absolutely none of my sympathy, please ignore that goddamn shit i wrote as a little kid being fuckin groomed by a fandom without even knowing it.

This also applies a lot to the rest of LGBT+ aside from just gay shipping, like seriously it took me til age 18 to find any positive representation of trans people or even a proper explanation of what being trans is, yet before i was even 8 years old i'd seen a million 'lol gross man in a dress who gets sexual gratification from wearing women's underwear' jokes in kids shows. And when i was 12 i'd already been exposed to the fuckin hell of m/pre/g thanks to its prevelance of untagged n/sf/w shit in the kh fandom. And by age 15 i'd been exposed to pedophile apologists arguing whether child porn was okay if they only got off to that and didnt personally abuse that kid with their own hands. All of that shit but actually learning about homosexuality and gender in sex ed would have been 'too much' for someone my age...

God what a fuckin mess. Fuck im really really fuckin worried that any of my ignorant comments at those ages could have been read by other ignorant kids and contributed to that disgusting fandom atmosphere. Fuck i think about this so damn often im so damn ashamed of how ignorant i used to be yet i know the adult fuckfaces making pedo shit never reel one lick of shame any damn day of their life. I used to excuse their shit as an actual kid cos i just ASSUMED they would be ashamed and want to seek help! Gahhhh..

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pinelife3 · 5 years ago

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Whatever happened to Lainey Gossip?

Lainey Gossip was the smartest celebrity gossip site on the internet. I was an avid reader for most of my adult life. You may recall my April 2016 blog post about gossip and, in particular, blind items. Well, it’s been nearly a year since Lainey posted a blind item. In the site’s heyday (pre-2017), she posted a blind roughly once a month.

Beyond the drop-off in blind items, the site has decayed in a number of ways. It’s become smug and self-aggrandising. They rolled lifestyle content onto the main blog feed, so now I have to scroll past posts about, I kid you not, baby names. (Caring about baby names is so inherently stupid to me, I feel genuinely irritated just being exposed to that content. Just name your kid something out of the primary religious text for your culture/region/family. Adam can never go out of style.)

The main thing which has turned me off Lainey Gossip is the writers’ misapprehension that the site is some kind of arbiter on social justice issues. Every other day there is a post with some insufferable moralising about feminism, equality, systemic racism, Rowling’s transphobia etc. It’s not that these are bad takes - I actually agree with what they’re saying. But I don’t want to hear it on this site. I don’t refer to gossip writers for guidance on this. Lainey is not a political activist. The writers on the site are just regurgitating ideas and lessons they’ve learnt elsewhere. This post from June was the final straw for me. The relevant part of the post is Alia Shawkat’s apology for saying the n-word during an interview in 2016. The clip of her actually saying the n-word seems to have disappeared from the internet, but basically she was describing a time when she and some of her friends arrived in a very nice hotel and how she thought of the lyric: “Nigga, we made it" from the Drake song “We Made It”.

Here’s Lainey’s analysis:

As people have pointed out on Twitter, 2016 isn’t that long ago. And Alia was in her 20s. Whether or not you decide to cancel her, as many are doing, is up to you.

I can’t fully account for it, but the phrase ‘Whether or not you decide to cancel her is up to you’ rubbed me the wrong way. Whether you decide to cast her into the fire for not correctly censoring herself when quoting a Drake song. Whether she is destroyed as a person forever. A worthless husk. Irredeemable. Whether her soul should be torn out and her body fed to crows. That’s up to you. The new god? It’s you, the reader of this gossip blog!

youtube

This was during the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests and discussion this year. So, in the second half of the article Lainey gets high on her own farts, like so:

While I have never used the n-word casually, and many of you may say the same, we do all engage with Black art, we do all borrow from it, consciously or unconsciously, in the ways we express ourselves, in the way I have expressed myself here, from fashion to language to GIFs. Think of how much cultural colloquial vocabulary comes from the Black community – recent examples include “lit”, “snatched”, “shady”, “flex”, “tea”, and phrasing that’s become commonplace and permanent in our language like “chill”, “dope”, “extra” – all of this comes from the creativity of Black minds. And they’re almost never credited for it.

So yes, of course, call out people like Alia for their irresponsible use of the most egregious words, but at the same time, let’s all consider how much we owe to the Black community for what they’ve given to us and for little we’ve given back in respect, appreciation, and credit. Because while the immediate urgency of Black Lives Matter is to prevent more senseless killings of Black people, the broader focus of BLM is Black dignity in all forms, and all of this is related. We can’t say that we honour Black humanity if we are erasing their contributions in all aspects of our lives.

Thanks Lainey. To be clear, I wouldn’t mind if this was the only time she’d shared an opinion like this - but this type of argument is repeated ad nauseaum across the site. She’s a therapist. She’s a civil rights activist. She knows what’s good for you. She speaks with great authority on how to solve racism.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and Lainey is apologising for the hideous shit she used to write on her blog in the early 2000s where her takes were often racist, homophobic, and/or misogynistic. In her apology post, she wrote:

Many people object to cancel culture. My personal opinion on it is that while cancel culture is not always judiciously applied, it does have value. Sometimes people should be cancelled. And if you visit this website often, you might be thinking about whether or not to cancel me. That’s fair.

...I have been conditioned in white supremacy, and I have enabled white privilege, even as a person of colour myself, because we too, given that white supremacy is so dominant, can have bias... When I started this site back in 2003/2004, I wrote misogynist things and slut shaming things, and racist things. And as the site grew in popularity, it served as confirmation bias, that there was an appetite out there for this kind of content, and I wanted to keep delivering it. Over time, I learned and grew, along with many of you who have learned and grown. And through it all, I have talked about my progress, calling out my past mistakes and leaving much of that content on the site instead of deleting it. There are some things, though, that have been deleted because I was embarrassed and I didn’t want to be part of it and obviously didn’t want to perpetuate those thoughts. But in the process of doing that, I realised that that would be erasing history – and for marginalised people, their pain and trauma is constantly being erased and invalidated. My leaving it there to be eventually called out is nothing compared to their experience.

Many gossip blogs were like this in the nascent stage of online journalism. They called it snark - and it was very popular. I think in some ways this was to differentiate blogs from the content and coverage in traditional gossip mags. Most gossip magazines are toothless - because they want celebrity interviews and exclusives. But, in 2006, a website was never going to get an interview with anyone worth interviewing so why bother to be nice - especially because being cynical and mean was more entertaining for the average reader. A lot of the gossip coverage that occurred back then would never fly now: ridiculing Britney for shaving her head, fat shaming, cruel coverage of celebrity eating disorders, slut shaming. The edgelord humour of the early blogs was crushed beneath the wheels of progress.

I don’t care about what Lainey wrote in 2006 - I don’t think it’s nice, I don’t think it’s interesting or funny, I wouldn’t have chosen to read it. But it doesn’t change my view of the site as a whole. What it does do though, is highlight how hollow all the talk of respecting women, honouring Black culture, working to be better, being good allies, etc. is on this site. Because it’s not really about doing that shit - it’s about telling other people off for not doing it. Lainey has weaponised wokeness as her new snark.

After the fall out around Lainey’s embarrassing old articles, a banner was added to all of the articles on the site which were published before 2013:

She’s effectively disavowed half of the blog’s history. Lainey Gossip launched in 2004. Is it really fair to say that articles published in 2012 were posted during an early period of the site?

What is Lainey doing when she toys with Alia Shawkat’s fate like Anton Chigurh tossing a coin? She knows in her heart of hearts that she has also said things she regrets, also said unsavory things in public that she didn’t really mean. It’s so weird: can’t you see the parallels between yourself and her? Lainey is pretty clear in her apology that she’s acknowledging the problematic history of the blog because people were exposing her on social media. Were it not for this, she likely would have continued writing about problematic shit other people did 10 years ago without acknowledging that she is no better.

Again, I want to be really clear: my issue isn’t with the articles she wrote in the early days of the site. It’s the weirdness around publicly criticising people when your own behaviour is comparably bad. What could you gain from doing that beyond reveling in the snark? Destroying someone else before the mob you helped create comes for you?

Let me remind you: THIS USED TO BE A GOSSIP BLOG with analysis of celebrity culture, movie deals, blind items, industry insider stories. Now it’s just been sucked into the culture war vortex. Ruined by the discourse.

Gossip used to be talking about other people’s business: Speculating about which Victoria’s Secret model DiCaprio would pick up next. Investigating rumours that Jennifer Lawrence faked her tumble on the stairs at the Oscars. Analysing why a celebrity filed their divorce papers in California rather than Texas. Waiting to see which celebrity would be the first to wear Marchesa on a red carpet after the fall of Weinstein.

Gossip is a way of learning what is acceptable in society, a way of observing how others perceive and react to the decisions people make - and how behaviour which violates societal norms attracts backlash. It’s even more interesting when the subject of that gossip is rich and famous. Lainey Gossip is no longer turning out this kind of content - so where can we go for these insights?

The best barometer for conservative public opinion on celebrity movements and the related enforcement of societal norms is the The Daily Mail comments section. The Daily Mail itself seems like something of a journalistic agent of chaos: I would have assumed that they swung right, but they post pro-Trump articles and anti-Trump articles. They do not seem to have a dog in the fight: the world turns, empires rise and fall and The Daily Mail persists.

In the ‘entertainment news’ articles on the site, no impassioned arguments are made, no particular analysis is shared: the journalists position themselves as impartial observers just reporting the facts. Occasionally a piece is clearly designed to bait the readers - for example, any time they mention the price of someone’s home in the headline... “Celebrity in $13 million mansion reminds fans to appreciate the small things” or that kind of crap. But the article itself is just a list of facts. No analysis, no reflection - just positioning.

Also interesting to observe is that The Daily Mail comments section is typically quite harmonious. Readers generally have similar take-aways from articles and it’s very rare to see an argument break out in the comments section. It’s as if Daily Mail readers think with one mind:

Stay with wife many years? Very good. Society like this. Daily Mail readers approve.

Stay with wife many years and maybe wife is slightly overweight? Oh yes - this guy is the best. International hero. Daily Mail readers all agree: we love.

Stay with wife many years and then divorce her? Hmm let’s see how this situation develops before we judge...

Stay with wife many years and then divorce her to be with younger woman? You die now.

The Daily Mail comments section is a glance into the void. A pit of human misery where people say exactly what they think. No subtext. No analysis required.

They like Pierce Brosnan because he is a straight-forward nice male celebrity and he has been with his wife for a long time - his wife is a little overweight so it makes readers feel good to imagine that he might not be repulsed by the average woman.

They do not like Emma Roberts because in 2013 she was arrested for beating her boyfriend in a hotel room. This was a long time ago and not many people think about it now. She has a successful career and is well liked on social media. But that’s because those youngsters forget.

The Daily Mail comments section does not forget. Their memory is long and their pity is scarce. They are society’s hive mind. The majority. A snapshot of what 95% of the planet’s population would think on any given subject - which actually makes for very interesting reading.

Forget about Lainey Gossip, trawl The Daily Mail comments section with me.

#lainey gossip #alia shawkat #cancel culture #gossip #the daily mail #pierce brosnan #emma roberts

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smokeybrand · 5 years ago

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