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innuendostudios · 3 years

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They��ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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isthemicon · 4 years

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Why as a Chair shipper I think Dair relationship was necessary and how it was completely ruined

Disclaimer: If you are Dair shipper please try to read it with an open mind. I’m in no way trying to show which ship is superior (they are equal, they both have fans that care and find them interesting) I’m simply trying to show my perspective and my disappointment on the way it was handled.

Okay let’s get to real thing.

Why I think that at point Blair needed to be with Dan and why Dan needed to be with her ?

Let’s first talk about where at the point Blair is in her life. Blair is a completely broken woman. Everything she believed in turned into dust. In a time span of like a year she got engaged, got pregnant, was hurt in accident, lost a baby, man she loved nearly died, she made a pact with God, was ready to give up her happiness believing that it is the right thing to do (I also have post touching that subject so feel free to check it out) and then she learned that all of that was for nothing. She was humiliated and in her mind that was all her fault, she was the only one to blame, that her decisions lead her to that moment where she isn’t sure of what might happen next.

She no longer wants that many emotions, she wants the world to slow down (kind of like when she got back together with Nate in season 2).

At that point she learns more about Dan’s book and about the character of Clair. Clair is a woman that didn’t lose a baby, wasn’t in marriage that was a sham, Clair’s world was simpler. Clair’s world was everything that he life wasn’t at that point. Clair is very much like Blair but she isn’t her, the “bad qualities” in Blair aren’t something that she pretends to have, her scheming, her love of the UES, it is all part of her. They also don’t make her bad, they just make her three dimensional character.

She can’t fully eradicate them but for a moment she can pretend that they are not there. For a moment she can be a women that doesn’t care for those things.

Because the truth is that she is not yet ready to be fully the proud Blair she really is. She needed time to heal and she couldn’t get back with Chuck. Not because he would hurt but because Chuck was part of the Blair she wasn’t ready to be.

So she gets together with Dan, he is there to make her feel like Clair, to make her see what a life could be. From the writing point of view, he is also the be a buffer between her and Chuck. Because at that moment she was not ready to have her happy ending with Chuck, she needed to heal and clear her head, to figure things out on her own. In a real life she would go to the therapy, would give herself some time but that would not make an interesting show, viewers wouldn’t understand why they aren’t together if no one isn’t standing in their way. That’s why she starts a relationship with Dan, he is her friend so she doesn’t mind spending time with him, they have common interests, they have fun together. She is in a way using him to see what could be and what should be. She needs that relationship, she won’t regret it but she also knows that it isn’t truly real.

That relationship was always supposed to end but the way it ended was frankly disappointing because they could have handle it in a fantastic way and have a really grown up story that understands characters and doesn’t just look to shock the viewer.

They’ve ruined it by handling the break up the way they wrote it.

The fact that they don’t actually have talk where they break up is awful and very inconsistent with their characters. In my opinion by the end of season 5 they should have talk, a sad but honest talk. Where they establish the future of the cannon relationships. Where for example Dan realizes that Blair will never be in love with him and he tells her about in something along “it was always him wasn’t it ?” lines. She with tears in her eyes tells him that yes, Chuck will always have her heart, that she will forever cherish the relationship she had with Dan, that it was important to her and helped her but wasn’t meant to be. She would then say something like “we both wanted this friendship to be something more because it would be easier than what truly is in our hearts” telling him that she also knows that just as for her it always be Chuck, for him it will always be Serena. Then they would both give each other a blessing, they would remain friends that they both needed each other and would support each other on the finale journey. It would be consistent with the way they were acting towards each other in the first half of season 5 and would actually show that they truly cared for each other.

Unlike what they’ve done. The fact that they had Dan sleep with Serena at the top of the bar at Sheppard’s party while still technically being with Blair is just awful. There is no way that after everything they have been through, both Blair & Dan and Serena & Blair, they would do something like that. They knew that it was the worst possible thing to do. They knew that it would hurt Blair, even if she didn’t have romantic feelings for him. That it would wake up the memories from a period of time that was difficult for her. And then for them to run away without a word ? For Dan not to let Blair explain even though she tried to contact him, showing that she still cared enough for him to do the right thing and have the closure. They’ve completely ruined the bond that they had and made their relationship unimportant, almost on the level of Marcus or Carter. As if Dan was yet another Blair’s romance when he clearly was more than that. They’ve also ruined all the development, taking them back to season 1 where the couldn’t care less for each other.

The thing is they haven’t done to make Chair work, or because it was the only option for it to end this ways. They’ve done to make a Dan in season 6 work and by doing that they’ve ruined not only their friendship and his character but also they’ve started this ridiculous battle that is in the fandom. I’m not talking here about him being gg thing, that could still work out without that shameful ending of their relationship (I think Dan should be a gossip girl, I also have a post on that), I’m taking about Dan writing the articles about his friends and turning into someone that is seeking revenge. Which is sad and out of blue because even with him being the gossip girl he still was a character that didn’t want to destroy that world but he simply wanted to be a part of it.

#gossip girl #blair waldorf #chuck bass #love #ship #dan humphrey #nate archibald #serena van der woodsen #chuck and blair #gg #chuck x blair #chair #overthinker

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pluviophile-bookworm · 4 years

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AWAE 2x4 rewatch: thoughts and reactions

See, this is the kind of cold open that I like, not like last time. I never figured that one out. But let’s not dwell on that. I’m here for 2x4, so let’s dive in.

Oh, so that’s the one with the Lady of the Lake? I’m sure this will be great to watch.

Of course Eliza Barry would spoil everything. I would have liked to see this play out. Of course, not like in the book, since Gilbert isn’t there, but somehow. See, this is why I didn’t remember this reenactment happening. Because it never really happened.

The consequences of whatever happened to the gold rush thing are still present, as is made obvious by the conversation the Barrys just had.

Why on earth would Anne take Matthew’s private correspondence, and why would she read it to the girls? Oh, yes, because she’s Anne. She can’t help being Anne, you know.

“... with the kindest, most wonderful man...” - true, Matthew is that.

Matthew really doesn’t have the words - at least not the words needed to give the love talk to Anne, which he thinks she’s asking for... but still, in Matthew we trust.

Give Jerry instructions about the hay? About how to do the job he’s been doing for quite a while now? Ok, this is just looking for excuses.

I see Gilbert is still experiencing Trinidad. I thoroughly enjoy looking at scenes like that.

“there might be gold on your land and you’d rather move coal” - to be honest, there’s way more money in that coal than in the “gold” in Avonlea. so Gilbert had better stay where he is and move his coal. He’d be better off that way.

Yeah, and would a man spit “danger” up like a garden hose? I thought so.

And now Anne is answering the letters in Matthew’s name? How Anne of her!

So now Diana and Minnie May will be home-schooled in etiquette? Well, I guess one of them is ahead of the other, but Minnie May will surely be the one that comes out more prepared for real life if thing s go as they’re going right now.

Also, that was kind of cruel. “Childhood is over.” For Diana, that’s a teeny tiny bit more acceptable taking into consideration the times this takes place in, but for Minnie May? She’s like 5, maybe 6 or 7. This is just cruel. And I’d bet Diana would rather read books than balance them on her head while curtsying. But being a proper lady is a number one priority, isn’t it?

I see what Nate did is taking its toll on Marilla, and she’s taking it worse than everyone else. It’s understandable why she would feel that way, but what’s with the Cuthberts (and the honorary Cuthberts - I mean dear Jerry, of course) blaming themselves for what that sick bastard (does this count as a swear word? There’s no swearing on main, but I reckon I’ll allow this one. My clean words is not enough for Nate.)? It’s just not right.

Oh, that’s the one where Anne dyes her hair green. Good. I figured it was high time for this episode to come along. After all, her hair grows out to half its previous length by the end of the season, so it had to happen already. Let’s see.

Anne and her tales would be a way better seller than the man who sold her the hair dye.

You know, Anne is right about old things being special and full of life. I wholeheartedly agree that they have so much more in them than new things. But when it comes to books, for instance, I love new and old ones the same. Wait, who’s talking about books? Oh, I am, of course. I must still be hung up on Diana balancing one on her head.

What does Marilla have against Italians? I’d really like to know.

Oh, so this is not where he sells her the dye? Maybe later in this episode? We’re not even halfway through it yet.

Gilbert is answering Anne’s letter. No ink stains on his side, I see, because he’s using a pencil instead. Wise.

And the correspondence with Jeannie continues as well. This will end up in tears and possibly the “depths of despair”, but at least she’s enjoying it for now.

Ah, Cole is here. This promises good things, even if he just does regular stuff.

Oh, poor Cole. He feels he’s not man enough just because of who he is. But it’s not true. He’s a lot more of a man than certain people he shares a classroom with. And I’m not even talking about the students alone. Ah, speaking of the devil, there’s Phillips.

Is this when Anne’s “agent of love” antics will be found out? Yes, it seems so. Well, it was good while it lasted. Gosh, it’s rare for Matthew to speak with such a tone, but it sure is scary. Maybe that’s exactly because it’s rare.

Ouch. Jerry did nothing to deserve getting screamed at just for asking an innocent question. But Anne does that sort of thing sometimes. And she’s hurt too, so it’s understandable.

Oh, it’s the fox. This sure is getting interesting. But it’s so heartbreaking to hear that Anne thinks Matthew of all people doesn’t love her any more. She should know better than that.

Gosh, what’s with everybody? Why is Diana yelling at poor little Minnie May about fishmongers and marriage? MM is too young for any of this business. She’s too young to have her childhood taken away. So is Diana, to be honest.

Minnie May is once again asking the real questions. “How come no one loves each other anymore?” I’d like to know that too, you wise little one. But if this is enough to break her mother’s stone cold mask, it would be nice.

She’s done it. Minnie “God” May has made her mother realise a thing or two, and now Eliza is doing that for her husband. This is beautiful.

There we are. Bash doesn’t even know Anne yet, and he’s already captain of the Shirbert ship. I love this.

Oh, that’s the one with the baby delivery. This is when Gilbert finds his vocation. Here’s an extract from my diary from when I first watched this same episode: I’m watching Anne with an E, episode 2x4, and I have to say Gilbert helping a woman give birth is one of the most heroic things I’ve seen in fiction lately. If Anne could have seen it, she would most certainly have thought of it as one of the most “romantical” things that can happen. Although I’m not sure the scene is the best thing to watch before bed… That’s all I’ve got to say. There’s nothing new I can add to it.

Ok, I have got something to add after all. “You get that white man away from me!” speaks volumes about the relationship POC had with white people back then (and somewhere still have, quite unfortunately). All I’d like to say to poor Ruth here is that she’s got nothing to be scared of, but sadly, I can’t. I’ll have to let he find that out herself.

“He’s my brother and I trust him.” I already knew that Bash felt that way about Gilbert, but it’s beautiful to hear it out loud.

The way Gilbert talks to Ruth about his own birth reminds me somehow of Dr. Doogie Howser, from another show I love almost as much as AWAE. I wonder if it’s because of their similar ages adding to the similar methods.

There. I believe she’s sure now that she can trust Gilbert. I’m glad dear Ruth saw that all white men are not the same.

Doc. I bet Gilbert likes the sound of that. I’m so glad for him.

“She’s certainly been blessed with a life with you at Green Gables.” These words of Jeannie’s couldn’t be any truer. But I also believe Anne is a blessing for GG in return. Also, in a way, her “agent of love” was successful.

I’m so glad to see the Barrys goofing off and having fun for once. They truly needed that. I hope they do it more often, even if it’s not on screen.

“I have you.” This was so beautiful of Matthew to say. Sure he doesn’t speak much, but when he does, he says the right words. You’ve got to love a man like that.

Oh, the locket(s)! This is truly beautiful. Sure this episode was lagely depressing, but it paid off in the end.

Let’s sum up this episode: Eliza Barry gets parenting wrong; Anne takes over Matthew’s previously non-existent correspondence with Jeannie; being a proper lady and being a man; the aftermath of Nate’s crimes; not the one where Anne dyes her hair; the Shirbert ship is sailing in letter form (although it’s “not a love letter”) and has a captain now; Minnie May is God; Gilbert discovers his vocation by delivering a baby; in Matthew we trust; the Barrys learn to live fully; the DiAnne lockets

#anne with an e #awae #renew anne with an e #renewannewithane #anne shirley cuthbert #gilbert blythe #bash lacroix #diana barry #jerry baynard #cole mackenzie #marilla cuthbert #matthew cuthbert #queue're bigger than that #jnk watches awae #awae 2x4 #awae season 2

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Psych 2: Lassie Come Home Easter Egg and Reference Guide

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The following contains spoilers for Psych 2: Lassie Come Home.

As fun as 2017’s Psych: The Movie was, its 2020 sequel Psych 2: Lassie Come Home will likely supplant it in Psych-Os’ hearts, because it’s got 500% more Carlton Lassiter (Timothy Omundson). But how does it stack up to its predecessor in terms of Psych callbacks and pop culture homages? Using our Spencer powers of observation, we’ve tried to catch every recurring inside joke between Shawn (James Roday Rodriguez) and Gus (Dulé Hill), plus all the episodic-specific bits. It’s a feature-length Hitchcock homage, but it’s also the toughest Easter egg hunt of your life. C’mon, son!

Psych 2: Lassie Come Home Easter Eggs and References

The title is a reference to Lassie Come Home, the 1943 Lassie movie about the beloved dog making her way home from Scotland. A German-language remake came out early in 2020.

It’s always a treat to hear the Psych theme song “I Know, You Know,” performed by creator Steve Franks and his band The Friendly Indians.

Lassiter wakes up to Shawn and Gus hovering above him at the recovery clinic is a throwback to when they kidnapped him for his bachelor party in “Deez Nups” and he came to with them screaming “Surpriiise!”

Morrissey the rescue dog reprises his role from Psych: The Movie in being adorable, incredibly nosy, and oblivious to Shawn’s hissing commands.

Sarah Chalke’s nurse character Dolores is most likely a nod to San Francisco’s Mission Dolores church and cemetery, the location for Carlotta Valdes’ grave in Vertigo.

Right out the gate, Dolores is treated to the requisite Gus nickname: “My name is Shawn Spencer, and this is my partner Bill Poopingtons.” However, Shawn and Gus take a sidebar for a very meta argument about their ongoing bit (while fitting in another bit):

“Gus, don’t be the night your dad fell asleep inside your mom. We can’t just stop doing bits we’ve been doing for ten years. We have fans, they have expectations, there’ll be a huge backlash.”

“Shawn, we are two dumbasses, we do not have fans.”

Compromise: Gus gets right of refusal until they land on a nickname he prefers. And so:

Bill Poopingtons > All the Pips in One

Ding-Dong Ditch > Claude O’Dern > Big Poppa Pump > Lemon-a Lemon-a Lemon-a Liiime

Leggo My Eggo > Norman Brown Butter > Dijon Hounsou

Gus also calls himself Jermajesty, channeling some Jackson Five energy.

“Black Jello” was Gus’ nickname in their adult dodgeball league.

The Herschel House is likely a nod to Herschel Daugherty, who directed over two dozen episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents…

Gus and Shawn are still bickering over driving the drivers ed car, even if we don’t see it in the movie. They do manage to be just as bad at turning the right direction when riding a motorcycle together.

“Now I know this ‘goofy little white guy/sexy black dude’ routine the two of you have going like the back of my scrubs.” Sarah Chalke played Elliot on Scrubs, whose JD/Turk bromance walked so that Shawn/Gus could run.

Shawn calls Dolores “the nurse from Color of Night,” the 1994 Bruce Willis erotic mystery thriller that won a Golden Raspberry for Worst Picture.

The boys get Jamba Juice because you never turn down an opportunity for a Jamba.

Shawn likens Gus’ pubic hair to Eddie Murphy’s mustache in his 1987 stand-up film Raw.

Shawn offers the dismembered hand to Gus to “knuck it up softly,” per their penchant for fist-bumping.

They later do fist-bump outside the old Psych offices, but not before channeling Han Solo and Chewbacca in Star Wars: The Force Awakens: “Gus, we’re home.” “[Wookiee sound]”

Psych has become a French-themed cat café… for now, at least. It’s not an alternative universe from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but the current subletter’s pop-up business. The proprietor (not the girl from Orphan) is played by Allison Miller, James Roday Rodriguez’s co-star in A Million Little Things.

“I am a psychic. He is a sympathetic pooper.” Poor Gus’ intestinal system gets called out again.

Henry’s (Corbin Bernsen) put-on voice gets compared to Tom Waits, Kathleen Turner, Harvey Fierstein, and Diedrich Bader.

Shawn neglected to tell his landlord that he’d moved, which tracks with his behavior in the series finale “The Break-Up.”

Henry reveals that in addition to telenovelas, he enjoys zeitgeist-y sobfests: “You left behind a slow cooker with a three-pound roast in it. You nearly This Is Us-ed the entire block.”

“This Is Us—Dad, why are you watching that show? They have the same show on ABC but newer”: Shawn’s shoutout to A Million Little Things.

Lassiter mistakes Reese Kessler, his supposed shooter, for country music singer Conway Twitty.

Lassiter’s to-do list includes “tape Galavant,” the short-lived musical comedy fantasy series created by Dan Fogelman (This Is Us), in which Timothy Omundson played King Richard. It also includes items poking fun at Lassiter’s crankiness (“yell at nature,” “chirping bird d-day plan”) and tenacity (“solve black dahlia”), and heartstring-tugging items (“pre-register for ironman” as in the triathlon). He also has written down Shawn’s S.E.I.Z.E. mantra from his short-lived career as Lassiter’s life coach in “S.E.I.Z.E. the Day”: Seize Eggs I don’t know Zebra Eighties.

Juliet (Maggie Lawson) lying to Shawn sounds strange, though not as strange as Lupita Nyong’o—the Tethered Lupita—in Jordan Peele’s Us.

Shawn’s “romantic dinner” for Jules is the menu from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (jelly beans, pretzels, buttered toast, popcorn, and ice cream sundaes) because it’s all they had at the gas station on the way home.

That prompts an iconic “C’mon, son!” from Gus.

Gus’ ringtone is “I’m Mr. Bootyman,” which is both Henry’s ringtone and the song featured in Buzz McNab’s bachelorette party stripper routine in “Deez Nups.”

Gus’ (technically Jules’) green snuggie bears a striking resemblance to official Psych contest merch.

Lassiter spotting mysterious bleeding figures out his window is an homage to Rear Window.

Richard Schiff (as Dr. Herschel) was Dulé Hill’s co-star in The West Wing.

Potterhead Gus wants to know if there are any people hiding in the pipes of the Herschel House, “speaking in their own tongue, perhaps Parsel.”

The Psych boys’ map of suspects briefly includes the Hell Hag from Gus’ dreams in “A Nightmare on State Street.”

Shawn has only been to Norway once with his brother-in-law Ewan O’Hara (John Cena), but they don’t talk about that… Maybe that’s where Psych: The Movie went after its cliffhanger ending?

Ova’s Norwegian song/chant toast at the Viking’s Ice Den is very similar to the Swedish toast in “Right Turn or Left for Dead.”

Ova’s violent son Per is first described as “the bearded Daryl Hannah.”

Shawn’s excuse to Detective Buzz McNab (Sage Brocklebank) for being in Santa Barbara is that he forgot a frisbee signed by German writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

Shawn’s first reaction to Jules potentially being pregnant: “You know the windows in the loft don’t even fully close, right? I’m gonna have to replace them, otherwise this is Baby’s Day Out all over again.” As Gus reassures him, he always did get worked up over John Hughes’ worst idea.

At the old Psych offices, Shawn pulls out the jousting lance from “100 Clues”—as well as a pineapple! He looks about to ask, “Should we cut this up for the road?” (his question during the pineapple’s first appearance in the pilot, plus at the end of Psych: The Movie) but stops himself.

When Lassie believes that fellow patient Mr. Wilkerson (Kadeem Hardison) has been walking around, Shawn and Gus have to go “full Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” to interrogate the supposedly catatonic patient.

Shoutout to Jessie Spano’s infamous “I’m so excited, I’m so excited, I’m so scared!” speed speech from Saved by the Bell.

If it’s not Scrubs, the boys are getting compared to Ren and Stimpy.

Mary Lightly (Jimmi Simpson) returns in another incredible, extra-hallucinatory look into Shawn’s brain… this time as a baby, since Shawn’s got fatherhood on the brain.

“We got jackaled!” Gus shouts upon learning that Wilkerson can walk—a reference to “hitting the jackal switch,” or going into stealth mode.

Shawn has always had a thing for singer Jewel, even after the Civil War movie (1999’s Ride with the Devil) and the Bollywood song.

Of course there’s a nasty dance when Shawn and Gus figure out who they think is behind everything.

Gus declares that “I am not going to let you shoot Shules’ baby!” only for the Chief (Kirsten Nelson) to ask, “What’s a Shules?” That’s the fans’ name for Shawn/Jules, a cute nod to a series OTP.

And of course, we can’t forget the fact that Jazmyn Simon, who plays Selene, is Dulé Hill’s real-life wife.

More than once, Shawn quotes The Handmaid’s Tale in reference to Gus and Selene’s baby: “Praise be” and “Blessed is the fruit.”

Dolores compliments Lassiter’s “chest of hair plentiful enough to wake all of Destiny’s Child.”

Shawn comes up with possible names for Gus’ child: Shaft, Shaftie, or D’Shaft—just like Gus’ nickname Sh’Dynasty (with a “God’s comma,” or apostrophe) from “Santabarbaratown.”

They also both coo “c’mon son” to Selene’s womb.

Selene’s proposal to Gus includes his negotiation that he and Shawn have adjacent homes with connecting pools, a callback to Shawn and Gus talking about their dream setup in “The Break-Up”; as well as Pluto! She asks, “Will you make me the happiest woman on this planet, on Eres, and Pluto?”

Shawn tells Juliet that “you’re my person,” the iconic Grey’s Anatomy line (though one would argue that Gus more accurately is his person).

When Lassiter stands (shut up, you’re crying) to meet Marlowe (Kristy Swanson), they place their palms together—like they did when he would visit her in jail, like they did at their wedding. My heart.

Join us on the Easter egg hunt—let us know what references we missed!

The post Psych 2: Lassie Come Home Easter Egg and Reference Guide appeared first on Den of Geek.

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goforwardgreenwriter-blog · 6 years

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The Worm Reads: Empire of Storms, Ch 5 - 6

“Last chapter was probably my favorite, and gave me hope that maybe everything won’t be so bad.” -a fool’s last words.

Aelin stared and stared at that piece of paper, at the names that had been signed long before tonight, the men who had decided against her without meeting her, the men who had changed her future, her kingdom, with just their signatures.

I feel like SJM is trying to make us feel sorry for Aelin, but.... no? She hasn’t proved herself worthy of being a queen at all! She flat out admits that these men have never met her - does she really expect these people to hand over the throne of their kingdom to someone they’ve never met?!?!?! WHAT IS gOING ON WHERE IS THE LOGIC

Aelin breathed, “Our doom gathers in the South of Adarlan—yet this is what you focus on?”

Umm yeah because the ruler of the kingdom is a very important job and one that is needed for war?? They need a strong leader to help guide them through the upcoming battles, Darrow is absolutely right to be concerned about this.

“The Bane,” Darrow spat, “is now ours to command. In the event that there is no fit ruler on the throne, the lords control the armies of Terrasen.”

You go Darrow! He’ll be the leader Terrasen needs and defend his kingdom while Aelin prances around demanding her crown be handed to her without her doing any work and threatening anyone who refuses to kiss her ass.

Something cold and oily clanged through [Aelin]. Marriage to a foreign king or prince or emperor. Would this be the cost? Not just in blood shed, but in dreams yielded? To be a princess eternal, but never a queen? To fight with not just magic, but the other power in her blood: royalty.

Hoo boy, the “I can’t marry for love but I have to marry for my kingdom” trope. I don’t mind this trope if it’s done well ( I guess I’m a sucker for that drama) but SJM is either gonna A. sweep it under the rug afterwards and never address it again, or B. milk the angst for all it’s worth and then come up with a last minute solution that doesn’t make Aelin have to make any decisions or compromises or work for her happy ending.

She had laughed once at Dorian—laughed and scolded him for admitting that the thought of marriage to anyone but his soul-bonded was abhorrent. She’d chided him for choosing love over the peace of his kingdom.

Karma is a bitch ain’t it

Aelin spoke into the dark, toward where Darrow was seated. “I suggest, Lord Darrow, that you become accustomed to this. For if we lose this war, darkness will reign forever.” There was a scratch and a hiss—then a match sputtered as it lit a candle on the table. Darrow’s wrinkled, hateful face flickered into view. “Men can make their own light, Heir of Brannon.”

Darrow literally takes no shit!! Why isn’t there fanart and posts dedicated to this bad ass old warrior instead of countless fans gushing over Aelin? Seriously, I’d ask for a Darrow backstory novel but SJM would fuck it up, no doubt.

But Aelin looked to Ren, his face tight. And over the roaring in her head, she said, “Whether or not you vote in my favor, there is a spot for you in this court. For what you helped Aedion and the captain do. For Nehemia.”

*chokes back on sobs* I miss when it was just Nehemia, Aelin, Dorian, and Chaol in the glass castle..... they really were simpler times.

Darrow expresses that Nehemia was a better princess than Aelin is (which is true) and references her death and Rowan fuckin’ threatens to kill him. So gg, you all are just proving Darrow’s point that none of you are fit for the responsibility of ruling/helping Aelin rule.

A messenger arrives and informs them that Rifthold will soon be under attack from the Ironteeth witches.

Aelin wondered if Manon Blackbeak would be leading the attack—if it’d be a blessing. The Wing Leader had saved them once before, but only as a payment for a life debt. She doubted the witch would feel obliged to throw them a bone anytime soon.

Ohhh is this foreshadowing that Manon is going to join Aelin’s side or am I reading into this too much? I’m worried that SJM is gonna reduce Manon to just another blind follower of Aelin hnghhh.....

Rowan’s hand brushed [Aelin’s]. “I will save him,” he murmured. “I wouldn’t ask this of you unless it was … Dorian is vital. Lose him, and we lose any support in Adarlan.” And one of the few magic-wielders who could stand against Morath.

Uhh and you’d lose one of your first friends you made after you were freed from the mines? The guy who you were once in love with? Seriously, she’s talking about Dorian as if he’s some weapon right now and not one of her best friends! I s2g as soon as Aelin met Rowan it was like Chaol and Dorian never existed in the first place and all that development she had with them got swept under the rug.

Since Darrow said that they needed allies, Aelin plots for them all to meet up in Skull’s Bay after Rowan rescues Dorian. Wait.... Skull’s Bay is from The Assassin’s Blade. But that means-

“I thought you knew Rolfe,” Aedion said. Aelin gave him a grim smile. “He and I parted on … bad terms, to say the least. But if Rolfe can be turned to our side…”

Rolfe!!! He was another interesting character from the first book (not a good guy, if I remember correctly, he owned slaves) who actually made Aelin work in order to beat him and gain victory. I’m excited to meet him again.

Alone with Rowan, Aelin said, “Darrow expects me to take this order lying down. But if we can rally a host in the South, we can push Erawan right onto the blades of the Bane.” “It still might not convince Darrow and the others—” “I’ll deal with that later,” she said, spraying water as she shook her head. “For now, I have no plans to lose this war because some old bastard has learned he likes playing king.”

Uhh fuck you?? For acting like Darrow is the bad guy here?? He cares about his kingdom and rather than let his grief over his deceased lover consume him, he fights hard to protect his people and makes sure the crown doesn’t go to anyone who will start a war over the stupidest shit. Fuck you Aelin, Darrow would be a much better ruler than you.

But if Rowan was caught, if Dorian was caught … “I can’t—I can’t let you go—” “You can,” he said with little room for argument. The voice of her prince commander. “And you will.” Rowan again traced her mouth. “When you find me again, we will have that night. I don’t care where, or who is around.”

That really is their only motivation at this point, huh? Aelin just wants this war to be over so she can bone her fae prince whenever she wants without any interruptions. I need a drink.

So Rowan leaves in hawk form to go rescue Dorian and Evangeline is going to stay with Murtaugh, since Aelin at least has the sense to not bring a child to a pirate paradise.

Aelin kissed the girl’s cheek and whispered into her ear, “Work your magic on these miserable old men while you’re at it.” She pulled away to wink at the girl. “Win me back my kingdom, Evangeline.”

I almost felt my heart melt at this cute interaction, but then I remembered that Aelin means Darrow and SJM wants the audience to hate him and that mood flew out the window. I’ll be the only Darrow stan on this website if I have to, damnit.

Aedion said to Ren, “Unless you want to swap one tyrant for another, I suggest you get the Bane and any others ready to push from the North.” Murtaugh answered for his grandson, “Darrow means well—” “Darrow,” Aedion interrupted, “is now a man of limited days.”

LITERALLY WHAT THE FUCK AEDION!!!! Darrow rightfully denies Aelin the crown and you’re gonna fucking murder him? You need his alliance if you’re gonna win this war holy shit y’all are so fucking stupid!

Aelin said, “We don’t touch Darrow.” “What?” Aedion snapped. Aelin said, “I’d bet all my money that he’s already taken the steps to ensure that if he meets an untimely death, we never set foot in Orynth again.” Murtaugh gave her a grim, confirming nod. Aelin shrugged. “So we don’t touch him. We play his game—play by rules and laws and oaths.”

For once Aelin is finally using another method of negotiation other than killing people but stop framing Darrow as if he’s ~evil~ for not giving you your crown when you’ve done nothing to prove to any of the lords that you’re fit to rule! I am utterly baffled that SJM really thinks Darrow is in the wrong here.

So Murtaugh has been loyal to Aelin’s family, treated her with respect and kindness, and offered to look after Evangeline while they’re gone, so Aelin.... slices her palm and threatens him that if anything happens to Evangeline she will burn all of them. I’m not even joking.

Aelin clenched her bloodied palm into a fist, holding it in the air between them. “Because of that loyalty, you will understand what blood promises mean to me when I say if that girl comes to harm, physical or otherwise, I do not care what laws exist, what rules I will break.” Lysandra had now turned to them, her shifter senses detecting blood. “If Evangeline is hurt, you will burn. All of you.”

Seriously, can someone tell me if I’m going crazy?? AELIN THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BE YOUR ALLIES YOU CAN’T GODDAMN THREATEN ALL OF THEM!!!!! Murtaugh has not said one bad word to you and you’re threatening to burn him!!! WHAT THE FUCK AELIN THIS IS WHY YOU ARE NOT QUEEN YOU STUPID DKAHDFJAHFKDH

“Threatening your loyal court?” sneered a cold voice as Darrow halted a few feet away.

Oh thank god Darrow is here, a character who isn’t brain dead stupid. Seriously, number 1 Darrow stan right here.

Her heart strained, but Aelin said to Ren, that scar hidden by the shadows of his rain-drenched hood, “I wish we had time to speak. Time for me to explain.” “You’re good at walking away from this kingdom. I don’t see why now would be different.”

HOLY SHIT REN IS JOINING IN THE AELIN ROASTING!!! Ren and Darrow are the only good people in this entire goddamn kingdom.

Aelin said, “I promise you that no matter how far I go, no matter the cost, when you call for my aid, I will come. I promise you on my blood, on my family’s name, that I will not turn my back on Terrasen as you have turned your back on me. I promise you, Darrow, that when the day comes and you crawl for my help, I will put my kingdom before my pride and not kill you for this. I think the true punishment will be seeing me on the throne for the rest of your miserable life.”

>IMPLYING THAT DARROW WILL EVER NEED YOUR HELP YOU STUPID FUCKING ASSHOLE WHO CAN’T EVEN GET THROUGH A SIMPLE MEETING WITHOUT ALMOST STABBING SOMEONE

I FUCKING HATE AELIN SO MUCH TO THINK I WAS ON THE FENCE BEFORE HOLY FUUUUCK

Ungh... I can do this. So they finally get their asses moving and Aelin sees the Little Folk have left her another present.

Brannon’s temple on the coast had been rendered carefully—a clever little contraption of twigs and rocks to form the pillars and altar … And on the sacred rock in its center, they’d created a white stag from raw sheep’s wool, his mighty antlers no more than curling thorns.

Obvious foreshadowing is obvious.

Finally chapter 6 holy shit. Chapter 4 gave me hope that the book was picking up but chapter 5 just shit all over my hopes and dreams.

Dorian Havilliard, King of Adarlan, hated the silence.

Dorian’s POV! Sadly since the books utterly forgot of his existence aside from torturing him emotionally after book 2, Dorian doesn’t get a lot of attention anymore. I liked him in the first three books, but given what happened to the other characters, let’s see how SJM butchers him..........

He lifted his hands before the view, his palms callused from the exercises and swordplay he’d made himself start learning once more.

A ruler who teaches himself how to fight in order to help protect his kingdom? Fuck yeah.

Dorian has some inner turmoil about being held captive and tortured and the revelation that his father had been possessed by a demon for years, and it’s.... good? It’s well written, Dorian’s problems are understandable and sympathetic, and he’s clearly taking precautions so it doesn’t happen again. Nicely done!

Dorian flexed his fingers, frost sparking in his palm. Raw magic—yet there was no one here to teach him. No one he dared ask.

I mean, the poor guy can’t even control his magic because all his friends who have magic are off pretending to be a good queen. *glares at Aelin*

He was halfway through the pillars of books and papers when he spied the horizon. When his city began screaming. Spreading into the distance, blotting out the sunset like a storm of bats, flew a legion of wyverns. Each bore armed witches, roaring their battle cries to the color-stained sky.

And here we go! I’m hoping for a good action scene, since the witches are so badass (even though I feel bad for Dorian and his people). We also switch to Manon’s POV.

With the height and distance, Manon fully beheld the carnage as the horizon at last revealed the sprawl of the capital city. The attack had begun without her. Iskra’s legion was still falling upon it, still spearing for the palace and the glass wall that crested over the city at its eastern edge.

This build up is really good! I’m excited to see Manon kick ass (even though again, the people she’s fighting are innocent).

Manon aimed Abraxos for the stone castle atop the hill, barely peeking above that shining glass wall—the wall she had been ordered to bring down— and hoped she had not been too late in one regard. And that she knew what the hell she was doing.

A cliffhanger to end the chapter. Although the wording leaves me to believe Manon isn’t actually going to do any fighting, but we’ll have to wait and see.

#the worm talks #the worm reads: eos #anti sjm #anti tog #anti eos

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dailyaudiobible · 3 years

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08/27/2021 DAB Transcript

Job 23:1-27:23, 2 Corinthians 1:12-2:11, Psalm 41:1-13, Proverbs 22:5-6

Today is the 27th day of August, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible, I’m Brian, it is great to be here with you today, man we are, we’re closing in, we’re closing in on another month. I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves but once in a while, I look at the calendar and see the date and wow, August just began, it feels like. And, here we are. And so, let's just be here now and take the next step forward together. That's gonna lead us back into the book of Job and today we’ll read chapters 23 through 27.

Commentary:

Alright, so as we continue our journey through Job and the conversation, which is what most of the book of Job is, a conversation between Job and his friends, they’re trying to set him right, he's trying to set them right. Actually, he’s not really trying to set them right, he’s just trying to hold onto his integrity he’s trying to say, “you’re trying to correct me in ways that aren’t correcting me because I haven't done what you've claimed I've done even though you have no grid for this, even though you think I must be, I must be worthy of this judgment. I must've done something. I must actually be a secret center. I must have evil in my heart somewhere. I don't.” And that's what Job is holding onto and so, it’s gets into a completely existential debate because Job is, you know, talking about things that he has observed about God and his comings and his goings, things that he has seen over time. And then his friends try to explain, why God does the things that he does. And so, it turns into this argument or this continued conversation about what God does and does not do and that also sounds quite familiar. For Job though, all these explanations about why God does what God does and doesn't do what God doesn't do. They didn't answer Job's ultimate questions. Like he’s still in that kind of zone where he's like I know all the things that you're saying, I’ve said all the things that you're saying to other people. I know all this. This is a different situation. I don't need your human wisdom. I'm telling you the things that I have seen about God and you’re trying to explain why. I need God, like I need God, not you. I need God to tell me what is going on and then Job says if, and I quote “if only I knew where to find God. I would go to his court. I would lay out my case and present my arguments and then I would listen to his reply and understand what he says to me.” So, Job and his friends are in the back and forth because generally, even in response to that they’re kinda saying, like only righteous people could ever hope to find God and so there's a reason you're not able to find Him. Job’s like this is not right. And I quote Job again “as long as I live, while I have breath from God, my lips will speak no evil, and my tongue will speak no lies. I will never concede that you are right, I will defend my integrity until I die. I will maintain my innocence without wavering. My conscience is clear for as long as I live.” Right, so there it is. They’ve tried everything to convince Job that in some ways he deserves whatever it is that he's getting and Job is saying not so, that's not true and you cannot change my mind. I am innocent before God and so it's an impasse. I mean, they can keep going in circles, but it's an impasse. Job wants to find God, even if finding God kills him. He will hope in God, even if that is a hopeless pursuit and there it kind of is, there's where the mirror sort of goes up for us. Why are we charging hard after God? So, He can make life easier? So, He’ll fix something? So that a struggle will go away? So that something that makes us uncertain will make us certain? So that He’ll give us wisdom so we can make a bunch of money? I mean, we can, the things we have asked God for over a lifetime, it's a myriad of things and all kinds of categories and we have to ask ourselves so why, when I have pursued the hardest after God was it because I needed Him to do something for me? What if he doesn't do it? What if you don't get the answer? What if the struggle doesn't go away? And I’m not trying to say that's what you can expect. Our Father is a loving Father, but He knows everything, a lot more than we know. And there's a lot more going on than we know. And so, we have to ask ourselves, am I in hot pursuit of a relationship with God because of the benefits that brings me? Because we’re seeing something a little deeper in Job because Job is basically saying I will pursue God, even if that kills me, even if He kills me when I find Him. He is my only hope, that is the only place I will find my hope and if that's hopeless, so be it. I will still hope in God, which is very different than trying to tow a specific line so that God feels obligated to be fair and give us what we want. So, we have an invitation here as we move into the weekend to just ponder, why are we doing this? And if it doesn't work out the way that we want it to work out, will we be able to say, blessed be the name of the Lord, I will pursue God, even if that is the end of me, there is no other hope. Or are we more like children and we didn't get what we want and so we go into the bedroom and shut the door and throw a fit, scream into the pillow. It's…it's probably, the truth of the matter is probably we’re…we’re both, we’re both of those things, it just depends. And that just shows us how erratic we can be and so just to consider why we are pursuing God is helpful to bring up some things in us that probably need to be dealt with.

Prayer:

And so, Holy Spirit, we invite You into that, bring those things to the surface. Shine the light of truth into our hearts, even the dark recesses and the corners, shine the light of truth, so that we may see what is true and what is really going on within us so, that we might be transformed. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it’s the website. It's where to check in, where to find out what's going on around here. The app is also a place to do exactly that. So, if you have the Daily Audio Bible mobile app just push the drawer icon in the upper left-hand corner and that'll open up the drawer and it fairly…you find things like the Community section and I mention it because that's where to get connected and that's where the Prayer Wall is and the Prayer Wall it...it never stops. It's always on its…it's never off. And so, you know, those times when you can't sleep, maybe…maybe the Prayer Wall is the place to go and tell a little bit of your story so people can pray for you, but it's also a place to face outward. There is no shortage of need and so to pray for one another and then just a little word of encouragement to each other is profoundly helpful and so deeply encouraging and so it's easy enough. There's a place we can encourage each other all the time and find encouragement around the Global Campfire and that is in the Community section at the Prayer Wall so check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, thank you. Throwing a little log on the Global Campfire is well, it's how we are here and so thank you profoundly if, what we do together, showing up every day and moving the next step forward together through the Scriptures and through a week and through life, if that makes a difference in your life than thank you for your partnership. So, there is a link on the homepage. If you’re using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner. Or the mailing address is P.O. Box 1996 Springhill, Tennessee 37174.

And as always if you have a prayer request or encouragement you can hit Hotline button in the app, which is the little red button up the top. Or you can dial 877-942-4253.

And that's it for today, I’m Brian, I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Prayer and Encouragements:

Hey guys it’s Sparky. Praying for all of ya’ll. I wanted to give some encouragement to Jerry from Duluth with your daughter that's, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm sorry to know where you're at right now but just to give you, give you a little hope. Five years ago, I lived in a camp trailer that my grandmother owned. And I was strung out, I had two kids, I’d been married twice, been to rehab to get off meth. It was a road and there was a point were screaming and hollering and being drunk and yelling at parents and breaking hearts and I was just so clouded and I want you to know that there's hope, there's hope for the pregnancy. I hope everything works out in the way that it's supposed to and it will. And, I just want to let you know, all I have to say is but God. My wife that I met, met me when I was…I was a pretty rough fella and we started going to church. And she…she, she was an epic part of my life and she brought God into my life, it’s doable. I want to know that. And there’s roads that we all go down and I hear the trouble and the…on everybody's heart and I’m praying for all of you guys but be encouraged. God does amazing things. And if you would’ve told me I would be working on a Master’s degree right now I would have laughed at you. So, thank you and I love you guys. Be blessed and God loves you too.

Dear loving family, this is GG from Gville. I want you all to know that you are my true friends. You guys are exactly like those friends of the paraplegic man who, do you remember in the gospels how he was brought down through the ceiling in order to be healed by God and couldn’t had gotten there on his own without those people coming alongside him to bring him down. And that’s what you guys did for me without knowing it I was stuck in fear and in self-pity. And there came a moment that I had this realization and I heard myself thinking man some kind of God, puts me through Lime disease, then seizures, then my dad dies and now I’m pregnant and I feel terrible. And I just realized immediately wait, no, those are all things that God didn’t put me through those are the things that He got me through. He is a good Father and He healed me of Lime, he healed me of seizures, He comforted me in the grief of my dad dying and he has blessed me with a child. And as I began to rejoice not in one day but over a course of days those physical systems began to disappear. When I think about the Lord how He saved me, how He raised me, how He filled me with the Holy Ghost, how He healed me to the uttermost, when I think about the Lord, how He picked me up and turned me around, how He set my feet on solid ground and makes me want to shout Lord, You’re worthy of all the glory, all the honor and all the praise. Amen. I love you.

Hey this message is for Trent from Rockwell, Tennessee, this is Mandy from Georgia. I just heard your encouragement and I just wanted to say that I, I totally understand. I was raised in an abusive situation also and the things that we grow through, people that have never been there can’t even fathom and even I, sometimes think about some of the stuff that happened when I was a kid and just can’t believe that it really happened but I’m with you. I know that, that God got us through it and I know that as crazy as it seems for these things to happen that you know, for me that stuff prepared me for things to come and it gave me and understanding, I guess, for what my three children that we adopted, had been through as well. It’s weird how things work, isn’t it? I just wanted to say that I totally get it, I understand and it just, thank you for calling.

Hello DAB family it is the 24th of August at 6:26 PM this is Sarah from London. I hope everyone is having a blessed week, just know that I am praying for each and every single one of you as your requests come in. But today I'm just calling to pray for Afghanistan because of just everything happening in that nation. I don't watch the news. I try to limit the amount of times I do actually watch the news because I do find a lot of things that go on around the world quite distressing and it is to the point that I do get quite, it does affect my mood and my spirit. But it’s just so sad with what's happening there with all the innocent families of children and just everyone that is just there that has been affected by what is happening. And just prayers for that nation. Prayers for Afghanistan because there’s nothing that God cannot do, just praying for God's hand upon that nation, there’s nothing too big for our God. May His will be done for every single one in that country for people to know that there is only one true God our Abba Father. May His protection be upon all those suffering in Afghanistan. In Jesus name. And may all the prayer warriors on the Daily Audio Bible family continue to pray for that nation. There’s s nothing too big for our God. In Jesus name. I love you all, have a blessed rest.

Good morning DAB family, this is Dana and I’m calling in from South Carolina. This is my first time calling in; I have been listening for about seven, eight years and thank you Brian for all that you do. I was listening this morning to the prayer requests and the lady that called in about the chronic pain, the RIC that she's suffering with, I'm praying for you that God completely heal you and deliver you and I pray that He would begin to place in you, the burden to pray for others to be healed, be it physical or emotional and as you are praying for others, God would begin to relieve the pain that you're going through. I also want to pray for the lady that called in that lost her son and that she says there's people that are around her feeling like that she needs to be getting past this at this point. I can’t imagine what that would be like to lose your child at any age. But I pray that God would surround you with people that would be a little more sympathetic to what you're dealing with and going through and I pray that God would just give you peace and hope and that you completely put your trust in Him and I pray that He would wrap his arms of love around you and again just surround you with people that are there for you to support you and give you a shoulder to cry on when you need it. I thank You Lord for all that you do. I thank You for Your blessings. I thank You for Your healing touch, physically.

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