#You do not have to attack them or say they’re misleading on purpose like I think most ppl on here

[stuckinapril]

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[missnight0wl]

Alright, let’s talk about Eddie Munson.

I know that quite a lot of people don’t like that Stranger Things once again killed a new lovable character instead of someone from the main cast. That’s a fair complaint, and I get it. Personally though, I’m not too bothered by that. I mean, first of all, I have to say that I wish we could get rid of the mentality that “a good show HAS TO have meaningful deaths”. No, fuck that. I don’t need people I care about die to feel that the stakes are real. But even if you insist that we need deaths, I’d actually be fine with Eddie dying – if it made sense. I’d still be devastated, but I’d accept it. The problem is that Eddie’s death had no sense or purpose.

Eddie’s death was basically built on this idea that he was always running away, but now – he finally didn’t. Right? Cool. Too bad it’s bullshit. Because the main moment when he run away was after Chrissy’s death. Then, he was running from the police. But like… Both these situations were totally justifiable. Do you really want to tell me that Eddie needed to redeem himself for running away after Chrissy levitated, her limbs were broken in all directions, and she bled out of her eyes? Are you seriously telling me that I’m supposed to hold it against Eddie? Or that he was running from the police when he didn’t understand what’s happening and had no means to defend himself?

If the writers wanted to work on the idea that Eddie tends to run away from his problems, they should’ve put more effort into showing it earlier. For example, maybe Eddie could see Chrissy being harassed by someone in the first episode. He didn’t stop it because Jason was nearby or something, so he assumed that someone else would help her. And so, he walked (run) away. Then, it’d make some sense if he said later: “I didn’t run away this time”.

There was nothing Eddie could’ve done to help Chrissy. Nobody knew about the favourite song solution back then. And even if Eddie knew about it, it’s unlikely he knew Chrissy’s song or had access to it in his trailer.

Also, I’m not saying that the distraction part of the plan in Volume 2 was stupid, but… it was pretty damn stupid. Don’t get me wrong, Eddie’s concert was epic as fuck, but still. I mean, the thing is that demobats were first attracted by the sound, right? They weren’t like: “Dude, I can see from here that Eddie Munson is absolutely killing it! We have to see it up close!”. So, here’s a crazy idea: use a fucking recording. And don’t even try to tell me that they weren’t able to make a recording loud enough. Even if so, then make the concert shorter and switch to the recording when the demobats are close enough to hear it but not to see Eddie and Dustin. Then, put another loud recording in another trailer to mislead demobats. Use remote-controlled cars to mislead them with some movement outside. Attach something bigger to the car to draw their attention! Seriously! I know they didn’t have much time overall, but they really could’ve invested better in what they had.

And speaking of time. Eddie said that he’s “buying more time”. But… was he, really? Because I hate to say it, but it didn’t feel that way. Seriously, it seems like the main problem was about getting demobats away just so Nancy, Steve, and Robin could go inside the house. The way I see it, demobats could come back once the crew was inside because demobats wouldn’t know they’re inside. Because they didn’t see them walking in. Am I wrong here? Am I missing something? I suppose demobats could be alarmed when the crew was attacked by the vines. But at the same time, I actually don’t think they would be because they didn’t stop attacking Eddie. I mean, shouldn’t protecting Vecna at the house be their priority in this situation?

You know, I even wondered if one of the reasons for killing Eddie wasn’t that they didn’t know how to get him out of the accusation of murder. However, I quickly realised that the solution for it was pretty easy: use that fucker, Jason. Jason ended up being a huge waste of time. His only purpose was to be a pain in the ass. And I get it: sometimes, you need a character who’s simply just that. In fact, I quite liked the duality of the real-life threat versus the Upside Down threat. Still, Jason could’ve been a pain in the ass with a purpose. And the worst thing is that it was all there. He was a suspect after Chrissy’s death (very understandably, if I might add), but then… we just forgot about it? Frankly, I really don’t get it because when they found Jason with dead Patrick, I was like: “Oh dude, you’re in trouble now…”. And you can’t tell me that it didn’t look like Jason was guilty. But nope! Nobody even considers that Jason tries to frame Eddie! They think he’s crazy, sure, but that’s it. And I’m like… so confused by that.

Here, this is what the final version of the events should be like:

Chrissy had problems at home, we possibly have the school counsellor to support this claim. She wasn’t dealing with it well, so she decided to buy some drugs from Eddie. Jason caught them, and unfortunately for Chrissy, it didn’t suit his idea of a perfect couple. Maybe he even thought that she has an affair with Eddie. Jason kills Chrissy and tries to frame Eddie. Eddie runs away because he has nothing to prove his innocence. In the meantime, Nancy and Fred are investigating the case. Fred finds something, and he follows the lead. That’s why Nancy couldn’t find him. Fred learns the truth about Jason, but Jason kills him as well. Later on, Lucas learns that Jason is trying to frame his friends, so he “betrays” him. Unfortunately, it means that Lucas is on Jason’s black list now. Then, Jason spontaneously kills Patrick, hoping that he’ll catch Eddie and blame him once again. Eddie runs away though, so Jason comes up with the whole story about Satan and whatnot. Finally, Jason tracks down Lucas who happens to be with Max at the time, and he tries to kill her before killing Lucas. Luckily, he’s stopped by the earthquake.

DO YOU SEE HOW IT’S ALL THERE ALREADY?? THEY WOULDN’T EVEN HAVE TO LIE MUCH!

I know there’s not much evidence against Jason, but there’s nothing against Eddie either. And I’m sure that not everyone in the town would believe that Eddie is innocent, he’d probably still be hated and whatnot, especially since Jason’s body is conveniently missing. But you know what? I don’t care! It’s better than unnecessary death!

Honestly, I don’t understand how it went so wrong.

And don’t get me even started on the fact that Dustin seems to be the only one affected by Eddie’s death at all…

[colorfulcast]

I’ve been a lot on Tumblr lately. This post is for me.

Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Over the last couple months, I’ve come to believe that the Israeli government is exterminating Palestinians on purpose, because they want Palestine to no longer exist. They want both Gaza and the West Bank to be Israel.

I’m not sure Israel wants this because, after the October attack by Hamas, the government wants to make absolutely sure something like that never happens again, or if they have wanted to get rid of Palestine for the last few decades, and are using Hamas as an excuse. Or something in the middle.

But it’s clear they are committing a genocide for their own end. It is clear that the Israeli government cares little, if any, about Palestinian lives. And it is clear that they will do nearly anything to control the news that comes out of Gaza. That they are willing to tell lies and kill journalists in order to keep that control. And none of that is acceptable. I think the state of Israel should be dismantled.

But there has been something on my mind.

In the above paragraphs, I talked about the Israeli government, and not it’s people, because that’s more comfortable to me. I dislike authority, and government. I think people are generally, inherently good. So if an army occupies a city, killing hundreds, that’s the governments fault for making that decision. And if the Israeli population goes along with it, then that’s because they’ve been lied to. Or mislead. Or brainwashed. Or suppressed.

But I’ve seen interviews with Israeli people on the street saying that they think what the army is doing is good. I’ve heard stories of them celebrating the deaths of Palestinians. Maybe the population of Israel knows what’s happening in Gaza. Maybe the majority of the Israel population is in favor of a genocide.

One tactic the Israeli government and media use, is that they label any criticism of Israel as antisemitism. It’s a smart tactic. No-one wants to be antisemitic. Anti-antisemitism caused the holocaust, which is like, the bad thing.

And so. You should specifically criticize the Israeli government. The Israeli government is doing a genocide. But not because they’re Jewish, but because they’re settlers. Israel needs to be stopped. The fact that they’re Jewish is insignificant.

And it’s important that you don't turn that criticism towards Israel into criticisms about Judaism in general. Judaism didn’t cause this genocide. Jewish people are not to blame. The Israeli government is to blame.

But what if... Israeli Jewish citizens are also to blame?

If most Jews in Israel are in favor of the genocide, and the government listens to what they want, then these Jews are at the very least complicit in the genocide, right? That doesn’t mean that I wish any harm onto them, it just means that like. I lay the blame with them. This is their fault. They have blood on their hands.

The reason why I’m writing this is because of a post I saw. Specifically this one.

It’s about how 95% of Jewish Israelis are pro-genocide. A writer named Zachary Foster made a Twitter post about it, and a Tumblr user named shashiatnight added that this genocide is “not just the work of Netanyahu but the culmination of the hope and work of every Zionist and their ancestors”. She ended the post by saying “Death to all of you.” It was eventually reblogged by a blog we follow.

It made me uncomfortable. I don't wish death upon them. And I feel like 'every Zionist and their ancestors' is too vague of a group. I read some replies and notes, and I wasn’t the only one who felt uncomfortable, which made me feel a bit better. Still, it got me thinking. Should I blame the Israeli Jewish citizens who believe the genocide is justified?

One thing I noticed is that the post didn’t share a link. So I tried to find out where the figure came from.

There is a program called The Peace Index. It’s a group that runs monthly polls on the population of Israel. Often around the question of the likelihood of peace. They choose the people not completely at random, but search out many different people from many different backgrounds in order to create a representative national sample of the adult population.

In the poll the Tumblr post was about, about January 2024, found here, they had 502 Jewish respondents and 103 Arab respondents (in Israel). Enough in my opinion to say something, but not necessarily completely representative. A few interesting results:

- 26.7% of Jewish respondents were in favor of peace, and 9.0% thinks it will happen.

- 74.8% of Arab respondents were in favor of peace, and 51.5% thinks it will happen.

- When asked to predict what the other group would answer to the first question, the Arab respondents correctly predicted that the Jewish respondents would not be in favor of peace. The Jewish respondents incorrectly predicted that the Arab respondents would not be in favor of peace.

- 38.4% of Jewish respondents were in favor of annexation of the occupied territories by Israel. (compared to 7.7% of Arab respondents).

- 66.1% of Jewish respondents think the number of casualties on the Palestinian side have been ‘completely justified’ and 21.3% think they have been ‘relatively justified’. (Arab respondents responded with 5.8% and 6.8% respectively)

- 50.8% of Jewish respondents responded that the The Israel Defence Forces have used an appropriate use of force, and 43.4% responded that they used too little force. (Arab respondents responded with 20.4% and 3.9% respectively).

A few questions are still going through my mind after reading this. If ‘only’ 38.4% of Jewish respondents want to annex Palestine, but only 26.7% of Jewish respondents want peace, what do most Israeli Jews want the war to accomplish? I feel like I’m still missing things here. The Jewish respondents also seemed much more opinionated then the Arab respondents (the Arab respondents answered ‘Don’t know’ far more often). And… how is 'Arab' defined, exactly? Is this anyone living in Israel that is not Jewish?

But let’s put that aside from now. That last point in the poll, about 50.8% + 43.4% = 94.2% of Jewish respondents thinking that the Israeli army used either an appropriate amount or too little force, is the point that was shared online.

Zachary Foster took that point and made a Twitter post, saying “95% of Jewish Israelis are pro-genocide. Let that sink in.” And then that post got screen-capped and shared on Tumblr by shashiatnight.

Zachary Foster, wrote an article a few days later where he goes into more detail. One part that caught my attention is this:

And this part at the end:

The article argues that yes, Israeli Jews believe the propaganda from the Israeli government. That's why they're scared of Arabs and in favor of the war. But there is a deeper problem then that, where Israeli Jews believe Jewish lives to be much more valuable. Where killing hundreds of bad Palestinians is justified if it means saving one good Jew.

So... ok. Alright. I wanted to know why most Israeli Jews support the extermination of Palestinians. And it's because they value Jewish lives above anything else, and believe the Israeli propaganda about the army being a force of moral good.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from all of this, other then: Ethnostate = Very bad. Like. A nation that exists to protect one group of people above all others is very bad. Any nation that has it laws favor one group of people over the other is very bad.

A government of an ethnostate can convince its people a genocide is justified, because it's people already believe that some lives are more valuable then others. The only remedy for this is to make ethnostates not exist. Israel should never have been founded. And now that it exists, it should be dismantled. Or at least: It should treat members of all religions and ethnicities the same. A two-state solution isn't good enough.

I don't feel like my actual opinions have changed since the beginning of this post. But I've grown more confident in them. I feel more at peace.

I guess I was still doubting some things, about how exactly I want this conflict to resolve. Like... sure, I've donated a little bit of money for Gaza. But what do I actually want, beyond the end of this genocide?

I want no ethnostate, ever. I want Israel to either stop existing or change to such a degree where it no longer resembles an ethnostate.

Does that put me at odds with people saying "Palestine will be free from the river to the sea"? I don't think it does. I think if Israel would stop existing that would be a good outcome. It's just that I'm also fine with Israel changing into no longer being an ethnostate. Which... hmm... If Israel changed that radically, would it really be 'Israel' any more?

I think the phrase 'Free Palestine' it can be broad enough to encompass my feelings and opinions. I'll add it to our Tumblr and Discord bio from now on.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Games Workshop declares war on its customers (again)

There’s a difference between a con-artist and a grifter. A con-artist is just a gabby mugger, and when they vanish with your money, you know you’ve been robbed.

A grifter, on the other hand, is someone who can work the law to declare your stuff to be their stuff, which makes you a lawless cur because your pockets are stuffed full of their money and merely handing it over is the least you can do to make up for your sin.

IP trolls are grifters, not con artists, and that’s by design, a feature of the construction of copyright and trademark law.

Progressives may rail at the term “IP” for its imprecision, but truly, it has a very precise meaning: “‘IP’ is any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers, competitors and critics, such that they must arrange their affairs to my benefit.”

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

In that regard, it is a perfect grifter’s tool — a way to put you on the wrong side of the line for simply living your life in the way that works best for you, not the grifter.

Now, copyright and trademark’s framers were alive to the possibility that they might become this kind of weapon, and they wrote limitations and exceptions into each doctrine that were meant to safeguard the public’s right to free speech and free action.

But those limitations and exceptions are weirdly self-eviscerating. Both trademark and copyright’s limitations assume that they aren’t being weaponized by immoral sociopaths. Both collapse if they are.

Take copyright. Copyright has a suite of limitations and exceptions under various global legal systems, including US law. US law also contains a specific set of exceptions colloquially called “fair use,” a subject of much mystification for lay people.

Under fair use, someone accused of copyright infringement can ask a judge to find that their use of someone else’s copyrighted work is permissible because to deny it would be socially harmful.

The fair use law sets out four factors that judges MAY consider when considering such a claim. Note that these four factors are neither comprehensive (judges can weigh other factors), nor dispositive (failing to satisfy a factor doesn’t disqualify your use from being fair).

If that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry. It is confusing. As the lawyers say, “fair use is fact-intensive.”

The specifics of a use really matter: who’s making the use, what they’re using, why they’re using it, how they use it, and how much they use.

That’s why anyone who claims that “X is never fair use” (for example, commercial fanfic) are full of shit — as are people who say “X is always fair use”).

Commercial fanfic absolutely can be fair use. No less a body than the Supreme Court says so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

Despite all this ambiguity and nuance, IP grifters who want to force other people to arrange their affairs to their own benefit are laser focused on the four factors, reasoning correctly that if they show a judge that the factors favor them, they’re more likely to prevail.

Half of the four factors are out of the grifter’s reach. As a rightsholder, you can’t control “the purpose and character of the use,” or “the amount and substantiality of the portion used.”

But the other two factors are more readily within the IP wielder’s remit. As someone seeking control a work, you can frame “to the nature of the copyrighted work” by talking up how much creativity and originality went into it, which judges will weigh in your favor.

More importantly — and disturbingly — is the way that an IP holder can influence the fourth factor: “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

Think about that fourth factor for a moment here: if my use of your work doesn’t cost you any money, then it’s more likely that my use is fair.

The corollary: if you can bully some people into paying for something they’ve always gotten for free, then you can claim that the people who refuse to pay are ripping you off — that there is a “market” for the use, and that their failure to pay weakens that market.

This is effectively what’s happened to music sampling. Seminal albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” were produced with thousands of uncleared samples — but at the time, no one was clearing samples.

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Had the rightsholders to those samples dragged Public Enemy into court, they wouldn’t have had the fourth factor on their side. No one was paying for samples, so a failure to pay for samples had no “effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work.”

However, in the 33 years since Nation of Millions dropped, paying to license samples has become common practice — and the mere existence of paid samples makes not paying for samples more legally risky.

So say a rightsholder decided to aggressively license simple quotations — as the Associated Press did in 2008, when it offered to sell you a license to a 5-word quotation for a mere $12.50.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010341.html

All other things being equal, a short quotation from a news article is likely to be fair use. But if the AP managed to terrorize enough bloggers into coughing up $12.50 for a 5-word quote, it could create a market for 5-word quotations.

That market would change the fair use argument for people who don’t pay — yes, they’re making a transformative, critical use, but they’re also undermining the market for the copyright, and a judge might find this change tips the scales away from fair use.

Even more importantly, the additional uncertainty might stampede more people into paying $12.50 for a 5-word quote rather than risk a $250,000 statutory damages award for copyright infringement.

The more people who pay for 5-word quotes, the sturdier the market becomes and the riskier it is to rely upon fair use.

The fourth factor looks like an escape valve for uses that harm no one.

But it actually rewards to bullies who intimidate others out of money they don’t actually owe — until they do.

Trademark has a similar gotcha. Trademark is very different from copyright. Fundamentally, trademark is about protecting buyers, not sellers. Trademark meant to help buyers avoid being tricked into buying an inferior product because it was deceptively named or styled.

If you buy a can of Coke, you want the true Black Water of American Imperialism, not an inferior brand of dilute battery-acid.

But if your Coke turns out to be a fake, you might shrug off the harm or balk at the expense of punishing the fast operator who mis-sold you.

So trademark empowers Coke — and other vendors —���to punish third parties who trick their customers, acting as their customers’ champions. Trademark doesn’t exist to prevent Coke from losing money to a rival — it exists to help Coke drinkers get what they pay for.

Trademarks can be registered with the USPTO, who nominally weigh trademark applications to ensure that they’re distinctive and original. Practically, examiners are busy, sometimes careless, and ideologically inclined to grant, not deny, claims.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/14/son-of-cocky-a-writer-is-trying-to-trademark-dragon-slayer-for-fantasy-novels/

But you don’t have to register a trademark to assert it. You can threaten or pursue legal action on the grounds that someone has violated an unregistered trademark, which is any distinctive graphic or phrase that is associated with your product.

Registered or unregistered, trademark enforcement primarily comes down to whether a “naive consumer” would be mislead by someone else’s use of a mark. That is, when you bought a Coke-branded sack of chicken feet, did you think it was blessed by the Coca-Cola company?

If there’s no likelihood of confusion, trademark holders struggle to enforce their trademarks.

This standard seems reasonable, but, like the fourth factor in fair use, it has a sting in its tail.

One of the ways you can induce confusion in the public is to gain a reputation for being a litigious bully. Say Coke is known far and wide for clobbering anyone that uses its trademarks, no matter how trivial the use and no matter how bad it made them look.

If Coke is truly notorious for its zero-tolerance policy, that will lead to a widespread public understanding that every time you see Coke’s marks, the use was blessed by a Coke lawyer — meaning a use that might not otherwise be found to be confusing can be made confusing.

“If that was any other company’s trademark, I’d assume that they had nothing to do with it — but since I know Coke has an army of baby-eating attack lawyers who destroy anyone who uses a mark without permission, that must be an authorized use.”

Like fair use’s fourth factor, trademark’s confusion standard rewards the most vicious and uncaring businesspeople with new rights that their more reasonable competitors do not enjoy. IP selects for sociopathy.

Now, IP — in the most sinister sense of the phrase — has pervaded every industry, but the contradictions of IP are felt most keenly in its spawning grounds: the culture industry.

Culture is in tension with the control of ideas, because culture is the spread of ideas.

Creators (and execs) are vulnerable to the pirate/admiral fallacy: “When I take from my forebears, that’s legitimate artistic progress. When my successors do it to me, it’s theft.”

This pathology, combined with ready-to-hand IP weapons, incentivizes all manner of wickedness. Remember when Marvel and DC teamed up in a bid to trademark the word “super-hero” so that no one else would be allowed to use it?

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

These perverse incentives are made tragic by the inherently participatory nature of culture.

It’s not merely that Marvel and DC wanted to steal the word “super-hero” right out of our mouths.

It’s that super-heroes are culturally important because of how we take and remix them in our lives. Marvel went on to use the law to stop us from pretending to be superheroes online, something Casey Fiesler called “Pretending Without a License.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277598023_Pretending_Without_a_License_Intellectual_Property_and_Gender_Implications_in_Online_Games

Which brings me, at last, to Games Workshop, a company that has consistently led the IP bully pack, indiscriminately terrorizing the Warhammer 40k fans who made it a massive commercial success.

Warhammer is a strategy/roleplaying game that is played with miniature creatures that players buy, modify and paint. If you’re not familiar with all this, maybe this sounds a bit like toy soldiers.

It’s a lot more interesting — not just because of the game rules or lore, but because of the incredibly, unbelievable, jaw-dropping virtuosity of Warhammer players when they paint and style those miniatures.

There’s a reason I look forward to Saturday morning’s weekly linkdump from Jonathan Struan of the week’s best Warhammer and other RPG miniatures:

https://www.superpunch.net/search?q=warhammer&max-results=20&by-date=true

and why I follow incredible painters like Aurelie Schick:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/110246635@N06

Warhammer is intrinsically participatory, co-creative and active — it’s not media you consume, it’s media you produce.

Games Workshop has become fantastically rich off of this…and they hate it, and they always have.

For years they’ve pursued fans for producing their own fan-made supplements and additions to the game:

https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/99301

The more Warhammer players complained about the indiscriminate censorship of their fan media, the harder GW cracked down on them, wiping out whole genres of creative work:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/48933/games-workshop-files-purge-09

GW claimed it was only defending its rights, the grifter’s signature move, making you a crook for having the audacity not to put their shareholders’ interests ahead of your own.

Then Games Workshop claimed a trademark on “space marine,” a generic term that had been widely used in science fiction for decades, including, notably, in Heinlein’s classic “Starship Troopers” (1959).

https://web.archive.org/web/20130207002144/http://mcahogarth.org/?p=10593

They didn’t just go after RPGs that used the phrase — they used trademark claims to remove novels from Amazon for having the phrase in their titles.

“Space marine” is a generic phrase, but GW was betting if they were sufficiently, spectacularly brutal in their enforcement, they could create a proprietary interest: “Now, I know GW destroys anyone who uses ‘space marine,’ so this ‘space marine’ must be endorsed by GW.”

GW just launched a new set of terms of service, including: “individuals must not create fan films or animations based on our settings and characters. These are only to be created under licence from Games Workshop.”

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-WW/Intellectual-Property-Guidelines

Now, this isn’t how copyright works. There are many ways in which a fan film or animation could be fair use, no matter whether GW forbids or permits their production. But this isn’t mere overreach: it’s a direct play against the fourth factor in fair use.

If GW can establish that all animations and vids are produced under paid license, then any fanvid that doesn’t pay for a license has a weaker fair use case, because the fourth factor protects existing licensing markets.

Indeed, as Rob Beschizza points out on Boing Boing, GW timed the terms of service change to coincide with the announcement that they’re launching a subscription service including “cartoons, in-house hobby videos, access to a vault of ebooks and mags.”

https://www.pcgamer.com/now-even-warhammer-has-a-subscription-service/

This is bullying with a business-model, in other words. Fans have figured out how to have fun with each other for free, and GW wants them to stop and pay the company for its in-house version of that fun.

Warhammer creators are demoralized and disheartened. The creator of the hugely successful Oculus Imperia Youtube series posted a heart-rending message of surrender.

https://twitter.com/OculusImperia/status/1421136444437970949

Oculus Imperia also edits “If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device,” (TTS) another beloved Warhammer fan series. Alfabusa from TTS posted his own absolutely demoralized goodbye to his work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXljeaktnDA

Ironically, both channels would have a stronger fair use case if they mocked and criticized Warhammer, rather than celebrating it, as fair use tips favorably towards critical uses.

The fact is, they love their hobby and its community and they want to improve it, not tear it down.

Neither wants to get dragged into a brutal copyright case against a deep-pocketed corporation. Even people with great fair use cases balk at that:

https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

Now, some people might be thinking, what’s the big deal? Why don’t these creators just make up their own stories instead of remixing the ones that come from Games Workshop?

Those people are assholes.

*All* stories are fanfic of some kind or another. Every mystery novel is a remix of Poe’s Murders In the Rue Morgue. Games Workshop’s stories are the thrice-brewed teabags of many sf writers (remember “space marines?”).

Tolkien straight up ripped off his characters from the 1000-year-old Norse poem “Elder Edda,” which features dwarves named “Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Nori, Dori, Ori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur.”

https://musingsofatolkienist.blogspot.com/2015/07/hobbit-origins-catalog-of-dwarves.html

Culture is made of other culture.

GW made something wonderful with Warhammer — by plundering the stories that preceded it.

The sin isn’t in the taking, it’s in the pretense that it never happened, and the vicious grifting that punishes anyone who does unto GW as they did unto everyone else.

[inawickedlittletown]

Queerbaiting and Buddie

(word count: 1,900)

I keep saying that I don’t want to spend any more time on 9-1-1 meta or fic, but the events of this weekend made me open up a document where I had some unfinished meta and in light of the S4 finale airing tonight, I thought I might at least write this: 

“Queerbaiting is a marketing technique for fiction and entertainment in which creators hint at, but then do not actually depict, same-sex romance or other LGBTQ representation. They do so to attract a queer or straight ally audience with the suggestion of relationships or characters that appeal to them, while at the same time attempting to avoid alienating other consumers.” 

That is how Wikipedia defines queerbaiting. And I really feel like everyone needs to read that and then read it again and realize that what is happening on 9-1-1 with Buddie is NOT queerbaiting. 

I don’t want to go into the long history of queerbaiting because we would be here all day and anyone that wants to do some research should go and do so. There are a lot of resources out there. Use them. 

But the short of it is this: queerbaiting has a lot more to do with the way a show is promoted, with the way that anyone involved in the show talks about a queer ship, and with the show deliberately scripting scenes that hint at a relationship without any intention of following through. Expectations and wanting a queer ship to go canon and those expectations not being met do not alone equate to it being queerbaiting. 

For any of us that have been around a long time there are a lot of perfect examples and if you compare Buddie to any of them, they are very different. I’ll name a few:

Merlin/Arthur

John Watson/Sherlock

Emma Swan/Regina

Derek/Stiles

Castiel/Dean Winchester (though they did go canon...barely)

Lena/Kara

Buck and Eddie do not fit into that list. Which isn’t to say that someday they could belong there, but I just do not believe that they will even if Buddie never becomes canon. And this all lies in how Buddie as a ship has been treated both on screen and off. I’ll break it down by season. 

S2: 

Eddie is very clearly introduced as a new character, a straight Army veteran with a disabled kid and family drama. He and Buck have immediate chemistry. We can’t deny that, or deny that from that first episode there are immediate sparks. Unintended sparks, but sparks nevertheless. And it is easy to tell that no one on the production team expected that and the story reflects that. 

Yes a foundation for their friendship is formed and yet the season long story focuses on Eddie’s relationship with his estranged wife and Buck is dealing with his own growth after being left by Abby. Their friendship shines and their scenes are great but none of them suggest romance and there are actually a lot of episodes where Buck and Eddie barely interact in S2 aside from in the background or for small work related moments (this mostly happens after Shannon returns). 

S2 does give us the first acknowledgement from the powers that be aka Tim Minear that they know what the fans have seen. This is why the elf scene exists, but it exists in a space where it’s a nod to the fans and not meant to do much more than that. The other moment is during the call with the livestreamer. But S2, places them completely and without question on a strong friendship. 

S3: 

We see a lot more conflict for Buck and Eddie in this season and we see how close and important they are to each other. Those are the two main things. That can be read as friendship easily and it’s a season where both Buck and Eddie deal with their pasts and in one way or another start to get closure while their friendship remains intact. 

Yes there are some scenes that make us squint and go huh, wtf? (I’m looking at you kitchen scene), but narratively we also know that neither of these boys is ready for a real relationship with anyone, let alone each other. But we can bask in how close they are as well as how Christopher fits in into all of it. 

But in S3 we are also introduced to Ana and we see the return of Abby. We also get to see that Buck and Eddie have become closer than ever and that the lawsuit only serves to highlight the importance that they both feel about having the other available to them. I’ll also quickly mention that Eddie Begins worked hard to highlight Buck’s devotion to Eddie. 

S4: 

Without considering the events of the finale (I am avoiding spoilers and know nothing about it or the speculation), we’ve seen Buck and Eddie both grow and get further closure on their past. This season has paralleled them well and their friendship has not faltered, they’re as close as ever. 

The beginning of the season was heavily focused on Buck and we saw him grow as a person and begin to work on himself in a healthy way and we’ve seen Eddie be supportive of that. 

We also have Ana to consider and her relationship with Eddie as well as the return of Taylor and yet the appearance of these women has not changed the Buck and Eddie dynamic. And I find it fascinating that Eddie beginning to date Ana, is the thing that prompted Buck to start dating. The parallels are all over the place but it is the strength of the friendship and the way they care so deeply about each other that remains whether that becomes romantic is still to be seen, but it could still go either way.  

Off-screen by the end of S2, Tim Minear had already addressed Buddie by throwing in that elf scene in a wink/nudge fashion that said “I see you” and in the scene with the girl with the livestream with the comments. During S3 he tweeted about being frustrated by the fans demanding and being hostile and thinking that that would make him more likely to do what they want (I’m paraphrasing what I remember seeing). Tim has never once said that Buddie will happen or shut the door on the ship entirely, but he did say he did not want to engage in conversation about it because he doesn’t want to get into arguments with fans. 

Oliver has always been enthusiastic about Buddie and has even said that he would be perfectly fine with it happening both a while ago and more recently in promo for S4. Conscious of queerbaiting and not wanting to give fans false hope, he has specifically said that he does not know if it will or won’t happen and that he wouldn’t speak on that as he’s not the one making that decision. His support for it happening does not mean he has any sway one way or the other. He’s said this a few times and even wrote a letter to the effect to make it clear to fans that the last thing he wants is to disappoint someone due to something he’s said. 

All in all, it just isn’t a constructive environment for anyone working on the show to interact with fans on this topic because any time that they do, they get attacked by overly enthusiastic buddie shippers that in many ways are making everything worse. 

In all of the interviews from Tim that I’ve seen, he has always been very quick to hint at what was coming up on the show in a way that at times has been misleading on purpose. The number one thing that comes to mind is early in S4 where Buck was said to get a new woman in his life. Tim absolutely made it out to seem like it was a girlfriend while knowing fully well that it was a therapist. This is an excellent example of what promoting and hinting is actually like. No one from this show has done that in regards to Buddie. 

No one has gone out of their way to hint that it may happen in a way that excites the fans. And this is one of my main reasons for knowing that Buddie is not a queerbait. At no point in the life of the show so far has anyone used Buddie in a promotional way to bring in viewers. Because THAT was the whole point of queerbaiting in the past. 

It was a way that some showrunners found to bring in a lot of viewers when they needed to up their numbers in order to show networks they were worth keeping around. Someone figured out that LGBTQ people wanted to see themselves represented so much so that they would tune in to anything that promised an LGBTQ character in some fashion. It was a tactic that worked well in the landscape of tv where there was so little LGBTQ content on mainstream media that anyone wanting it would latch onto anything. And then they just wouldn’t deliver on those relationships or characters. In 2021, that is not the world we live in any longer. 

In today’s tv landscape there is so much to watch and so much to pick from and diversity has grown, it is celebrated. Queer characters are well represented as are queer relationships and queer stories. The times are different. A while back I was listening to a podcast (Bait: a queerbaiting podcast) and something I found interesting was how the hosts both agreed that in today’s tv landscape there is no more real queerbait and that we won’t easily find anything like the ships I mentioned above. I think I agree more with this than I expected to, because I do think that it exists in some spaces, but it definitely isn’t what it used to be. This is a good thing. 

Specific to 9-1-1, this is a show that has that diversity and that isn’t afraid of tackling that diversity and giving us interesting and nuanced perspectives and stories embracing that. We have characters of color, women in positions of power, a F/F relationship, two multi-racial relationships, a disabled character, other queer characters including a M/M relationship. There is so much in this show that embraces diversity and that embraces the reality of what the world looks like. To call it queerbait is to disrespect everything else that this show is and has done and the hard storylines that have been tackled that we would not have seen on tv ten years ago. 

And I get that Buddie would be another breakthrough. It would be a novel way to tell a queer story, and it would be amazing if it were to happen. The set up is there, but it isn’t fully realized, and Buck and Eddie can still be read as just friends if we take off the shipping goggles. But it also isn’t queerbait or likely to become queerbait and people have to stop calling it that. 

What Buddie resembles is one of the many unintended slow burn ships that have frustrated viewers in many forms across fandoms and we just have to go along for the ride and maybe it will happen. Or maybe it won’t. But if we know anything about relationships on tv, it is that a lot of the fun comes from the journey, even if the destination is good too. 

[schmergo]

Weird obscure little rant here: There's this one particular conspiracy theory I've seen floating around the internet a lot lately that's a minor pet peeve of mine. There are a lot of more famous, major, and dangerous conspiracy theories going around right now, ones that are clearly anti-Semitic, anti-science, and doing genuine measurable danger to families and communities across the countries. But those have been extensively covered and analyzed by way more knowledgeable people than me (those articles are very much worth reading), and I don't think there's anything new I can bring up there.

The one I'm talking about is just skirting mainstream discourse and starting to become more widely known. It's the Missing411 'conspiracy.' The reason I put 'conspiracy' in quotes is that this isn't a traditional conspiracy theory with a clear bogeyman or scapegoat like some of the others. A traditional conspiracy theory usually goes something like, "[Group of people] are secretly [doing bad thing] so that they can [accomplish sinister goal]. but they control the [powerful organization], so nobody knows about it!" 

By contrast, Missing411 is super vague. It basically boils down to, "Mysterious disappearances are taking place throughout America's national parks and protected wilderness lands, and they fit a pattern!" There are hints among fans of this theory that the National Park Service knows more than they're letting on, but the extent of their 'involvement' doesn't seem really central here. The 'theory' doesn't come right out and explain any root cause for this pattern of events, just drawing attention to the pattern itself, though, once again, there are hints as to a deeper meaning. 

Here's the thing: "Missing411" is the brainchild of one guy named David Paulides who wrote a bunch of expensive self-published books compiling these cases. He's an ex-police officer (either retired or fired, depending on who you ask) who also happened to be super invested in Bigfoot hunting before he started with "Missing411," and, indeed, a lot of Missing411 stories do seem to point toward something... sasquatchy without ever coming right out and saying it. The other thing is that Paulides is the only one who can officially label a case a Missing411 case. A lot of people on the internet will say, "Oh, this sounds like Missing411," but Paulides is the one authority on which cases count and which don't.

Turns out a lot of 'missing person' cases in the national parks don't fit these criteria, and others that Paulides claim do are stretches. The criteria themselves are loose, and a missing person doesn't need to fit all or even most of them to be considered a Missing411 case. Missing411 cases include people who were never found, people who were found dead, and people who were recovered safely. Common factors in these 'patterns' include such vague terms as berries or berry bushes playing a role, being found near or in bodies of water, bad weather shortly after the disappearance, someone who is sick or disabled going missing, and someone being with a group at first but becoming separated from them after a surprisingly short period of time. And, of course, the fact that these disappearances take place in National parks and protected wildernesses.

Humans naturally seek and recognize patterns and make connections, but are categorizing cases in a way like this really helpful? I've seen people on the internet gleefully jump to this explanation whenever someone goes missing in a national park. Comments of "Google Missing411!" are common on news articles about this topic. I honestly think it's insensitive to the family members of the missing people who are looking for answers-- and misleading to those participating in the investigations. Currently, there's an incident going on in which a young couple was traveling cross-country in a van and visiting many National Parks. The man returned home with the van but without the woman, who hasn't been heard from in a few weeks, and isn't talking about what happened. Believe it or not, I've seen internet posters comment, "MISSING411!!!!" in response to this tragic story. A few months ago, a young man disappeared in Shenandoah National Park and his body was later recovered. I followed the case closely and the posts by Shenandoah National Park were full of "MISSING411!!!!" comments, despite the fact that it was very clear what led up to the disappearance: according to family members, a new medication caused psychosis and led to him driving in his pajamas from his home to Shenandoah (his family followed him there), crashing his car, and running into the woods, unprepared to deal with wilderness and not in good mental health. 

Like I said, I think this gleeful pattern-recognition is a little distasteful, but more than that, I think Missing411's eagerness to spot sinister causes behind disappearances in the wild is problematic for another reason: I think the average American has a difficult time grasping the concept of 'wilderness' and its dangers. We're used to everything being safe and convenient for us in our towns and, because national parks are popular tourist destinations, it's easy to forget that there are many dangers that exist in wild public lands. 

Inexperienced hikers often misjudge their skills and set off on trails too challenging for them and with inadequate water and supplies. Even experienced hikers can easily get lost or turned around-- and cell phone signals are usually nonexistent in national parks. Falls from cliffs, ledges, and waterfalls (mossy rocks near waterfalls are often lethally slippery) can mean injured people end up in inaccessible areas where they're not visible from the trail. A sudden health emergency like a heart attack, stroke, or even a broken leg can occur during vigorous physical activity. Abrupt changes in weather can change a pleasant stroll into deadly freezing temperatures in the blink of an eye. Dangerous wild animals like bears do live in the national parks. Although national parks are popular tourist destinations, these dangers are very, very real and can happen to anyone, and the parks themselves emphasize the importance of being prepared when entering wild areas.

On a darker note, remote hikes and camping trips in national parks are often a convenient way for people to cover up foul play (a few of the high profile Missing411 cases seem to fit this narrative). And, like the young man who disappeared in Shenandoah, many people who disappear in the wilderness alone are mentally unwell and, in many cases, disappearing on purpose. (National parks are sadly a popular place for people to take their own lives.) 

Some of the common Missing411 traits, like people being found without clothes on, could be explained by foul play but, more likely, it's a phenomenon called 'paradoxical undressing' that happens when you have hypothermia to the degree that you actually feel warm. Family members will talk about how a missing person is an experienced outdoorsman and unlikely to go missing, but 60 years of experience in the woods also comes with the health limitations of advanced age-- the 'mysterious' disappearance of a partially-sighted man with notable mobility issues might not be a huge mystery. Others, like the presence of berry bushes and bodies of water, points to basic survival instincts. Why so many disappearances in national parks? Well, it's a lot harder to be found in dense wilderness than in, say, an Arby's parking lot.

I've watched two Missing411 documentaries, which are easy to find on mainstream streaming services, and, while many of the cases covered are truly strange, some seem easily explainable by Occam's razor, and the selection of why some cases are included and others aren't seems bizarre to me. Some don't even involve a disappearance at all but hearing or seeing strange things in the woods. Some don't involve national parks or public lands. There are very vague hints throughout that 'Bigfoot type creatures seem to exist in the woods and use outer space or interdimensional technology to hide themselves from people or spirit people away, and the government might know about it' but nothing more than vague hints.

 Like I mentioned, some of the cases they profiled point toward foul play. The most prominent case featured in the original Missing411 documentary was about a little boy named Deorr Kunz Jr. who disappeared on a camping trip with his family... but there's also no proof that he actually was on that camping trip with his family... and the family's stories have some discrepancies... and even if it really was a disappearance from the campsite, the stories are that the grandfather thought he was with the parents and the parents thought he was with the grandfather.

 Life is often boring and repetitive and it's totally normal to use stories to make ordinary life more interesting and exciting, but the almost... gamified way that I've seen internet dwellers react to real-life stories of heartbreaking disappearances and deaths in dangerous and remote locations is kind of disturbing, and similar to the over-the-top fanciful theorizing I've seen from other, more insidious conspiracy theories. The idea that there's a secret 'other world' being hidden from us behind the curtain of society is enticing, but it can lead down paths as confusing and dangerous as the ones that real travelers get lost on in the wilderness.

[thoughts-on-bangtan]

Tbh i find it rly funny how other shippers have started to feel threatened ever since lets bts and have started camping on vminie twts. Like it was a sincere statement from tae and even us vminies wont take it as a love confession or anything. But these other shippers, i get feeling threatened or sad but how does attacking other shippers make their ship anymore real. I m also seeing some toxic taejinners which i m shocked i didnt know they were like that. Anyway i guess even vminnies need to be

More level headed and not go into delusions. Yes it was a very sweet and very genuine statement but that doesnot prove that vmin are a real couple. It jist proves what we always knew that vmin are precious to each other and have a very deep bond. So i hope vminnies wont become cocky and be toxic to other shippers. Please do consider posting this ask bcoz i m seeing some vminnies getting swept up in their own thoughts.

I do mostly agree, and I’ve also seen this new very aggressive wave coming at vminnies from other shippers in the last two days, though admittedly that wave has been steadily building for quite a while now. I’ll never understand that mentality, since ship w*rs are one of the most pointless things you can engage in since, like you pointed out anon, even if one shipper camp “wins” against another, that won’t change reality and their ship won’t magically become real or more valid or anything like that. As ARMY we should appreciate every bond within BTS, regardless if it’s a bond we think has potential of being romantic or is “merely” platonic. All their bonds are wonderful after all.

But, what Admin 2 and I find even more alarming in all of this is the literal tsunami of hate and toxicity that’s been happening against Tae since Let’s BTS. It’s happening on all sns platforms and it’s just truly vile and crosses all the lines and then some. When you check the profiles to which those posts belong, it’s quite easy to tell that they are either solos or “believers” of other ships who very much did not enjoy Tae’s words, or Jimin’s to Tae.

What can we do? Well, we can’t police how people will behave on sns, can’t police and watch every Vminnie and somehow get them to “behave”, that’s simply not realistic. The bigger a “fandom” grows, the harder it becomes to control it and make sure everyone stays rational and doesn’t get swept up in petty fights and other stupid things. The bigger the “fandom”, the more likely it is that you’ll find a few bad apples even if the bigger part of it all is rational and chill. The only thing we can do, realistically, is pay attention to our own mindset, to not allow ourselves to drift off into delulu land in such a manner that we, too, turn into “believers” preaching conspiracy theories and spinning crazy speculations. If we want to be delulu, we should always remember to put our hats on (just in case), make that clear to the people reading our posts/tweets, and remember that none of us, regardless of whichever ship we like, will ever know if any of our thoughts are true unless the members themselves tell us.

As long as we remain rational, stick to facts and quotes that we have sources and actual, factual “evidence” for, instead of just making things up to fit our narrative, we should be okay. Besides, even just taking Tae’s words to Jimin about how he likes him the most at face value is overwhelmingly sweet, genuine and impossibly sincere, and shows how beautiful their bond is.

The only true advice I have is this: don’t give in to any ship w*rs. If other shippers come into your space and try to mess with you, ignore them. The block button is truly your best friend, or if too many come at you, go private and wait it out. Don’t try to argue or reason with them because regardless of what you’ll say, and how solid your “proof” is, they won’t care. They just want you to react, want your attention. They want to feel powerful by seeing you bow down to them, by getting you to eventually give up. Or, which I’ve also seen, they’ll take your observations about vmin and make them their own, claim their ship does that, too, or that they’re the only ones with which that’s true. Even if it isn’t. And if you see something that crosses the line into pure hate, or purposeful(ly) misleading/misrepresentation of things in a way that is really harmful, report it. 

Eventually, if you don’t give them attention, they’ll give up because it’ll stop being entertaining.

A little addition from an anon we just received and I agree with:

what is saddest for me is how those people who claim to be fans do not accept tae’s sincere words and decide twist it to fits their narrative. for how many years tae and jm have been talking about how they like each other. Are they calling them them false and liars? it’s unhealthy. it's about respect. people are crossing boundaries. If vmin are all over the place is their choice. The same goes when they keep their private time to themselves.

Or when tae and jm are “always” with other members. And what we as vminie do? We respect that. Why people think they can decide what the members should or shoudnt feel about each other. They know each other for 10 years while those people claim to know them better lol. People should think more how that is insane. Anyway let’s enjoy VMIN they want us to enjoy it. because tae said 95z are love so let’s love and ignore the rest 🥰 

[bakujho]

Strap in folks, it’s rant time.

So, let's talk a bit about manipulation and abuse present in fandom. It’s uncomfortable, but fuck it lets go, I’m tired of the “good vibes only” push that sweeps all this shit under the rug. I’m not pretending to be an expert by a longshot here and I’m happy to discuss, but I have dealt with enough abusive and manipulative people personally and professionally to spot em a fucking mile away and generally keep my distance. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed a gross trend where there are people being attacked, then are guilted into keeping quiet because the Abusers make it seem like it’s not worth mentioning or that it doesn’t really matter... Unfortunately, the Abusers know exactly what they’re doing, they’re really fucking good at it, and they know exactly the kind of response they’re going to receive (because in some cases, this isn’t the first fandom they’ve pulled this same shit in). 

Right off the bat though, lets get some basic facts about fandom out of the way. No one in fandom owns any character: be it interactions, personality or anything else about said character. No fandom creator owns an idea, or has any right to tell people off for having similar ideas/techniques/styles etc. There’s no such thing as a completely original singular thought, and pretty sure if you think of something ‘original’, there’s inspiration from another source. No one owns a hairstyle, a costume, a backstory, a colour scheme, an item, a scar etc etc. If someone has a similar thing, neat, clearly you’ve got similar tastes. If someone has a carbon copy of your creation on multiple points, ABSOLUTELY question it, but having the same hairstyle isn’t copyright infringement, and having a similar history isn’t ripping someone off, it’s coincidence. 

Going to put the rest under the cut, CW for manipulation tactics, abuse, and all those sorts of goodies.

So, I’ll start with the Abusers here. Everyone knows who they are, they know who they are, unfortunately the victims of them are worried about speaking out because, for the most part, the ones abusing people are in a position of perceived power and speaking out against them can put the victim in a tricky position. No one wants to be ousted from a fandom they enjoy for speaking out against someone that’s been around fandom since its inception. Which brings me to my first point.

Power: Abusers LOVE the feeling of having power (be it follower count, general clout, perceived hierarchy etc) and get really uncomfortable when they feel someone new comes to threaten their position. So, what do these people do in that situation? Option A is to completely ignore and hope they’re not dethroned, Option B is befriend immediately and subtly manipulate the person to keep a close eye on their actions. Keep your friends close, but enemies closer amirite? 

So how the fuck does a person subtly manipulate another person, shouldn’t it be obvious? Fuck man, I wish. But there’s a lot of different techniques used to keep people reigned in and submissive: guilt tripping, evasion/diversion, attention seeking, lying, intimidation, playing the victim etc etc. So obviously these will all present differently based on the abuser, but the goal of all of them is the same. To stay in power, and keep control over everything they can. 

So how would all of these present online? (of course these examples leave some wiggle room for context lost in text/translation/cultural differences etc, but for the most part it all fits the same pattern that the abuser would use in a face to face situation). 

Guilt- tripping: “Well you wouldn’t be here if not for me” “You owe me for your place in the fandom” “well if we really were friends you’d do this for me…” etc etc. Things that pit your emotional attachment to the Abuser against you, the closer you are, the easier it is. Suddenly the Victim finds themselves indebted to the Abuser for their ‘friendship’ that the Victim didn’t realize was conditional. 

Shaming: Invalidating the victims feelings by saying things like “even a child knows better than this”, “it’s okay you don’t understand, you’re probably young”, “I’ve been around fandom longer so I know how things go” etc etc. It makes the Victim feel like they’ve done something wrong by drawing boundaries for themselves, or sticking up for themselves. Remember, the Abuser doesn’t want to lose their crown so they will talk down to their Victims to make them more unsure of their stance, second guess themselves, and feel bad that they spoke up in the first place. 

Projection: “Others have done X to me, I would NEVER do the same” It’s a simple yet effective tactic. The Abuser takes the things they’ve done to people, say it happened to them, and shift the blame to the now faceless enemy so the Victim feels obligated to side with the abuser because, yea, those things mentioned fucking SUCK and no one wants to experience it. No one wants to be that asshole saying “no you deserved it” (because no one fucking deserves to be doxxed, swatted, hacked, etc etc)

Playing-the-victim: Abusers LOVE playing this game. It’s their bread and butter to set the stage for manipulation. “Having a really hard time rn, sorry im such a fuckup”, “struggling with mental health”, “this is all so hard for me” (legit though, if you are struggling please seek help where/when you can, mental health is important). So any of these statements alone can be harmless, and overlooking someone's mental health can have dangerous outcomes, HOWEVER, when these sort of statements are paired with the other things mentioned, it’s no longer simply a vent or a way to work past personal demons, it’s a way to gain sympathy and support, and it is very intentionally done to garner that emotional response from those that will listen to them. 

Attention-Seeking: can be as simple as “no one interacts with me anymore”, making a dramatic vague post, deleting that same post and making a newer, more dramatic post but this time seeking affirmation from the good responses of the last post, posting cryptic messages that ooze “ask me what happened” (vaguebooking is a plague), basically anything that is asking for a response without asking. How is it manipulative though? Guilt. If you’re aware of the Abuser, these types of posts are meant to abuse the Victim's sense of empathy, the natural response to these sorts of posts is “what happened, I’m sorry that happened to you”. 

Diversion/Evasion: straight up changing the subject or switching the blame to anywhere BUT the Abuser. The Abuser says “change X you’re copying me”, the Victim responds “I feel I didn’t copy you”, and the Abuser presses “well the fandom might not think so” and changes it from a personal issue to a larger, more aggressive problem. In this case, the Abuser is the ONLY one with a problem, but are purposely misleading the victim to take the blame off themselves. It’s not THEIR problem, it’s the FANDOMS problem...now making it the Victims problem. 

Blame: Abusers love to blame everyone BUT themselves for their perceived problems. Fandom isn’t interacting with them as much? It’s the fandom that’s dying. More drama in the fandom? Well there’s too many people here now. Getting called out for bad behavior? That’s the problem of the person who CLEARLY doesn’t understand how fandom must work. It’s the age old tale of “I’m perfect, it’s obviously everyone else who is wrong”. At what point does the Abuser realize that they may be the cause for their own misery? They don’t. 

Intimidation: This is a fun one that’s usually a last resort because if the Abuser is pretending to be a sheep caught in a snowstorm, it doesn’t look good for them to publicly announce they’ve been the wolf the whole time. It looks like “well I have X on you”, “if you only knew what I could say about you”, and “I could ruin you” type shit. Of course, in most cases, the Victim hasn’t done anything to warrant this sort of aggression, but the queen is losing her pawns and is now grasping for anything to fight back with. And who knows what sort of lengths the Abuser has gone to to gain information on the victim. It’s pretty easy to find out a lot about a person online, so the Victims back down due to the threat of the unknown.

Avoidance: refusing to talk about the problem, which is an issue I have with fandom itself, in this case. The “no drama good vibes only” is so fucking detrimental when there are problems that need to be addressed. An Abuser will push the narrative that they’re only here for a good time and don’t want drama, while actively creating drama in the shadows. Its not a problem if we don’t talk about it, right? If no one knows, it’s fine. It’s fine. No, it’s manipulative, and if there are problems they NEED to be talked about, because that’s how you find resolutions. 

Denial: This one ties in with avoidance and blame, in that the Abuser will straight up deny that they’ve ever been, or have ever created a problem. The Victim is making a big deal from nothing, they can’t control how others feel about them, so they’ve done nothing wrong. The Abuser will claim they had the best intentions when approaching someone, so clearly they have done nothing wrong. 

Lying: Including omitting any information from arguments that may paint the Abuser in a bad light. The Abuser absolutely doesn’t want anyone to find out what they’re up to, so they’ll say exactly what they need to to change the narrative surrounding them. It could be minor changes to conversations to complete fabrications. Ex “I only approached X to make sure they were okay after X happened”, but X screenshots tell a completely different story. It’s not always easy to catch an Abuser in a lie, especially when there’s the push for “no drama” so no one talks about their personal experiences and can confirm/deny what was/reported to be said. 

So bringing all of those points together and bringing it back to the Abuser wanting to have the power to control what they like/don’t like in fandom. Once they have that feeling of invincibility, they may coyly ask people to delete posts that could lead back to them looking bad, politely ask another creator to change their creation because the Abuser doesn’t like it, or them asking nicely to stop interacting with another member of fandom the Abuser doesn’t like. It may not seem like much at a first glance...after all they asked nicely. However, once you look a little harder and a little longer, it becomes very clear that the intention is to stay in control. The Abuser will do ANYTHING to stay on top, and will employ every trick they have in their arsenal to sew discord and mistrust amongst other members of the fandom to keep the fingers pointed anywhere but at themselves.

So, sound familiar to anyone? My inbox is open for anyone who wants to chat about the topic. If I’ve now made you uncomfortable and you’re going to unfollow/block, cheers, wish you the best. And if you’re feeling called out and attacked by my post? GOOD, stop being a fucking shitty person. 

A few last reminders before adding some resources:

Setting and enforcing personal boundaries is not abuse.

Choosing not to interact with those who make you uncomfortable is not rude.

It is important to call out abuse when you encounter it, it could save someone from becoming a victim themselves.

Always stand up for yourself, you’re your own best advocate. 

Now for some resources: I used a few of these while researching along with my old textbooks from my psych, abnormal psych, and human relations classes I took back in university.

Manipulation tactics

How to recognize a guilt trip

How to spot an attention seeker

[ingek73]

The Curious Case of Meghan’s Earrings

POSTED BY LAINEY

ON 03/03/2021 AT 5:53 PM

If it wasn’t obvious that the new report in The Times, featuring information provided by royal aides, was part of a smear campaign against Meghan Markle, the story about the earrings, packaged in along with allegations that she bullied staff members, pretty much drives the point home. It has nothing to do with anything. If you’re team royal, you could argue that the bullying story could serve as a rebuttal against whatever Meghan may say about the royals not welcoming her during her interview with Oprah, so for them, I suppose they could justify it in that context. But the earrings? The earrings are purely for the purpose of character assassination. It’s low.

And it’s also misleading. Meghan wore the earrings in Fiji during the Sussexes’ 2018 tour three weeks after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. According to The Times, they were a gift from Mohammed bin Salman. What The Times doesn’t include in their report though is that the CIA didn’t release the findings from the investigation into the murder, confirming MBS’s ordered it, until after Meghan wore the earrings. Not that most people didn’t already suspect MBS, obviously, but if you’re going to include the three weeks after the murder detail, you may as well complete the information so as to give the full picture of what everyone would and wouldn’t have been aware of at the time. Also not included was an explanation for how jewellery is managed in the British royal family.

Meghan didn’t just have those earrings sitting in a drawer in her closet like a regular person. That’s not how royal jewels and royal gifts work. They’re catalogued. They’re kept in fancy storage. Like the fanciest library ever. PEOPLE has a more detailed explanation of this:

“PEOPLE has learned that the earrings were gifted on March 7, 2018, from the Saudi Arabian royal family. Neither the Duke nor the Duchess of Sussex was present when they were given at Buckingham Palace, and as is protocol for any wedding gift of this nature, they remain property of The Crown.”

So for Meghan to wear the earrings, a few other people would have had to know about it, and consider it. Again, that’s how the royals operate – decisions like this go through multiple levels. She’s not the only person who has to wear this “scandal”. There are advisors in place specifically to address which jewels should be worn and which ones shouldn’t. Remember all that drama about her wedding tiara? The whole point of that dust-up was that Meghan wasn’t allowed to just waltz in there and demand the tiara of her choice. And it’s unlikely that she rocked up to the jewel room and did that with the earrings. With all the gifts that the Sussexes would have received from around the world for their wedding, there’s also the matter of whether or not she was keeping track of all of it, especially when these kinds of gifts are kept somewhere else. So was she not properly briefed about these earrings and their origins? Initially, at the time of the tour, the explanation that the earrings were on loan from a jeweller – the Crown jeweller, as we know now. Did the people who manage the jewels not do their homework and fail to advise her properly? Did she know and just not care and expect to get away with it? That seems to be the suggestion from these royal aides contributing to The Times’ story but, again, if that’s what went down, they’re not filling it in either. And would these vipers miss an opportunity to tell us about the time Meghan wanted to wear these earrings so badly she overlooked a murder?! Like, the way they’re going about this attack on her, if they could make that direct line, they would. And they haven’t here. Which is why this situation is so bizarre. They seem to be setting her up to take the fall on her own for these earrings but it’s really hard to believe that she was the only one involved in this earring mystery.

It is really something though that they decided to dig this up and throw it out there ahead of the Oprah interview. Something really filthy. And if they’re resorting to this kind of filth, they must be panicked as f-ck about what Harry and Meghan might say. Which of course only amplifies interest in the Oprah special. If the royals are this pressed, how bad is it going to be?

[harunokazesblog]

I know I asked you question (sorry) but I wanted to remake again to add more on what's going with chapter 137 if that's okay.

If Porco, Ymir (104th cadet), Grisha, Kruger Kushava, (previous beast titan holder) Bertholdt, Marcel, are willing to help the Alliance where are the rest of the previous titan shifters that want to stop the rumbling (and Eren) what would that prov in the end? Will the cycle of hatred (that Eren mentioned in Chapter 130) finally end or keep on repeating itself (like Kruger mentioned)? What is the mission exactly?

If Ymir (104th cadet) wanted Historia to have a future why would she agree to help the Alliance to stop Eren (and the rumbling)? Does Ymir (104th cadet) know that Eren has protected Historia for the past 4 year's to keep her safe?

If the rumbling has stopped (for now) it isn't over for Eren because when he fully wakes up (inside his titan form) the real fight starts. Remember in Chapter 117 when Reiner held Eren down and Eren was pissed off I'm betting it will happen again in Chapter 138.

The next chapter (I think) we might get a pov view (or a flashback) with Eren and Historia to continue the rest of the conversation (and confirmed the truth) where it left off and a fight between Eren and Reiner for the final (5th) battle begins. Also if the previous (dead) titan shifters are helping the Alliance I wonder if the founder Ymir might appear to join the fight to help Eren?

I wonder what Eren might be planning because we got nothing from him yet. The last time we saw Eren was in Chapter 133 (as a kid) he hasn't been show since then.

Do you think Isayama wants us to think that the Alliance might win against Eren (and the rumbling) and Armin will survive because he's the narrator of the story (in the anime not manga) and the final panel (teaser) means nothing of the character holding the child while saying: you are free? Sometimes if a narrator dies then there could always be someone else to replace them in the story right?

The foreshadowing of you are free was mentioned first by king fritz (in Chapter 122 as he freed Ymir to go and die in the forest) then 11 chapter's later it was also mentioned by Eren Yeager (in Chapter 133) so if it's possible that Eren (maybe) will survive at the end of Attack on titan chapter 139 (final chapter) then it will make sense that he will the one holding the child (from Historia) in the final panel (teaser) that Isayama has revealed in 2018 in his interview.

It can't be Grisha because he's dead and he also forced his own child to inherit a titan curse to live for 13 year's. A parent has a choice to either listen to their child or not.

It can't be the farmer (unknown) because how would he know that the child is free? Free from the cycle of hatred that Eren is trying to get rid of by unleashing the rumbling (colossal titans) and destroying Marley? So what the he'll has the farmer done to free the child (that may not be his flesh and blood)?

Only 2 chapter's left then it's over for Attack on titan manga (even though we still have the anime to watch for season 4 until that ends) and honestly I have no idea what to do after Attack on titan ends for me.

Hello, sorry for the delay with the answer, mostly I answer it from my cellphone, but since it is a rather long question I do it from my laptop (LOL).  Reading all your post, I agree in the majority; let's remember that the author throughout this last arc has shown Eren's POV on half of pieces (ch 122 - 130 - 133) his true motivations and real intentions are still a mistery, like this cover he hide jealously his hand.

Characters like Armin or Mikasa (his best friends) have failed to understand Eren, a clear proof is the currect Anime Director, he must constantly ask Isayama about the scripts, try to understand and translate correctly the character, the same seiyuu Yuki Kaji (who reads the manga) can’t understands his character 100%, it’s certainly something that the author does on purpose to give the final WOW factor to us the readers...and it will be interesting to see.

Chapter 130 give us pieces, but they’re so mixed and put in a way that It can cause different interpretations and that is what the author wants, he gives us the clues but at the same time misleads the reader.

On that chapter Eren mixed like 4 POV’s (on different times) with Zeke, Yelena, Floch and Historia...

Ironically Historia is not on that panel where the rest of 'friends' are...

To add some point on your comment  ch 137 Eren didn’t appear in any panel, no expression, no surprise of defeat, or anger like Ymir.

Hey Armin and CIA are ruining his plans!!! ... this obviously raises doubts that he has been defeated, he simply has allowed things to happen on this way 

Why? We don't know yet the only clues we have is that Eren had access to a future moment that hasn’t been revealed yet, and that allows his current friends freely to fight.

Eren on this entire manga he has repeated the word 'freedom' ‘free’ more than 50 times

and the man on the last panel mentions the same thing, (how funny XD)

If Isayama really said that the man on the final panel "surpassed his father"... well...

Thanks for asking!

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Hiya! I just saw your post about microaggressions in media, and I was wondering if you'd be willing to explain a little bit more about how Dragon Age negatively represented indigenous peoples; personally, I saw how the parallel was drawn, but I'd like to understand the difference between metaphor/symbolism and negative derivement. If you don't wanna, that's ok! Thank you for your time : )

Sorry if you wanted this to be replied to privately. I’ve gotten a few other questions about it so I just decided to do a masterpost.

I do feel obligated to mention that I have a Dragon Age tag and that I’ve gone into detail about the issues with the games here and here.

Now, with that being said. . . I’m going to put this under a cut because this is an important topic to me and I’ve never gone into as much detail as I should have. I’ll also give a basic but long rundown for people who haven’t played Dragon Age and aren’t aware of the context. I’ll try to make it obvious where that part ends for people who just want to skip right past it.

Disclaimer that I never really played Origins so this will only focus on DA 2 and Inquisition.

This is gonna be really fucking long and I apologize for that.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with the Dragon Age franchise, here’s some basic information relevant to this topic. There are four fantasy “races” in the game; the humans, the elves, the dwarves, and the qunari. For the purposes of this conversation, we will not go into the dwarves and the qunari. 

Humans are the dominant race in the game, with control over every government in the continent that the franchise focuses on, Thedas. They follow a religion called Andrastianism, which is centered around the Maker (a vague and featureless single god who is almost always referred to as male) and Andraste, the Maker’s mortal wife and prophet who was executed and burned at the stake. In other words, it’s Fantasy Christianity™. The religion is separated into two branches, with one being led by men and only being common in one country in Thedas and the other being led by women and being common in the rest of Thedas. Just like Christianity, it is very heavily focused on converting people. As far as I’m aware, it is the state religion of every country featured in the franchise. For the purposes of this conversation, I will be referring to this religion as the Chantry, the in-game equivalent of the Church being used for Christianity.

Elves, on the other hand, are exactly what they sound like. They’re elves, but not traditional Tolkien elves. They have the same lifespan as humans and don’t seem to be particularly special. The important thing to note is that they are very much an oppressed group and most racism you encounter in the franchise is aimed at the. They were the original peoples of many parts of Thedas, indigenous to several parts of the continent before they were violently massacred in wars and outright genocide, all in the name of Andraste. Here’s some information about the main attacks on the elves, in the form of the second Exalted March, a form of religious crusade. Cultural sites, including burial grounds and religious temples, were pillaged and destroyed. Historical records were confiscated and edited, language and culture records purposely destroyed, and countless artifacts were stolen and sold to wealthy humans. This happened long before the events of the games, but are ongoing issues, which I’ll get into later.

Modern elves in the game are separated into two main groups: city elves and the Dalish. 

City elves are elves who are disconnected from their cultures and live in human settlements, where they’re often forced to live in slums (called alienages), pushed into dangerous and poorly paid work, and face violent abuse and mistreatment from humans in the cities. City elves are usually Andrastian, just like disconnected Natives are often Christian, though they cannot hold positions in the Chantry.

The Dalish, on the other hand, are elves immersed in their cultures, living in nomadic clans led by their Keepers. The majority of Dalish elves follow the Evanuris, the Elven pantheon which is made up of nine deities that each represent different aspects of Elven life. According to Dalish lore, these deities are not active in the world anymore because they were tricked by the ninth deity, Fen’Harel, a trickster god who sealed away the rest of the gods from the world. When Dalish elves reach maturity, they undergo a ritual that involves receiving their vallaslin (blood writing), which are intricate facial tattoos that represent different deities in the pantheon and, supposedly, reflect that person’s role in their community. I suppose the Native equivalent is finding out what clan you’re in. Dalish communities are centered are around halla, a type of deer that the Dalish see as sacred and use as a form of travel (they pull aravels, a kind of wagon), food (milk and meat), clothing, companionship, and guidance. The parallels to bison should not be lost.

Elves are also frequently enslaved, particularly in Tevinter where slavery is still completely legal.

Now. Humans, elves, and qunari all have a connection to the Fade, the origin of all magic, spirits, and demons. That means that they all have the potential to have mages, people born with magic and a deeper connection to the Fade; they’re the DA equivalent of sorcerers in D&D for all you nerds out there. Across the board, mages are heavily oppressed (with the exception of mages in Tevinter). 

Because they can be possessed by demons and potentially use blood magic, they’re seen as inherently dangerous and forced into Circles, isolated areas where they’re under constant surveillance as they learn to control their magic, and that surveillance is done by Templars, an order of warriors trained to be able to repress a person’s magic. Any mage that doesn’t have absolute control over their magic is made Tranquil, which cuts off their connection to the Fade and, along with removing their ability to use magic, also removes their ability to feel emotions, have desires, and experience dreams. It’s essentially a fantasy lobotomy. In some Circles, this is done on the whims of Templars to any mage that causes the slightest issue for them. Other forms of abuse are also incredibly common in Circles.

So! That’s the end of the context explanations! Let’s move onto the indigenous-coding in the game!

The coded group in question are the elves, particularly the Dalish. They’re also coded as Jewish and Romani, which makes the information that’s going to follow even worse. Despite popular belief, this coding is not actually up for debate and has been directly confirmed by David Gaider (scroll a bit, and be warned that he uses the g-slur). Since I’ve already explained what Dalish elves and city elves are, I doubt I have to get into how exactly they’re Native-coded and I don’t really feel like doing that anyway. So let’s just get right into the issues with this coding.

The first issue is the elves themselves. Elves are cool, I love elves. But it’s really fucking shitty to make the Christian-coded group human while the group coded as indigenous, Jewish, and Romani is inhuman. It’s a really common trope in fantasy and sci-fi and directly contributes to the dehumanization of our communities. It also gives fans the ability to brush off criticisms of their depictions because they’re “just elves”, something I see in the fandom a lot.

We also have to think of how elves in media are depicted in general. They’re usually magical beings with unnaturally close ties to nature, and as a Native person who has been asked if I can speak to eagles and if I live in a tipi in the woods, that is not a stereotype that needs to be further associated with indigenous groups.

Elves are degraded constantly by every character in the series, and the narrative depicts Dalish elves especially in a terrible light. There is only one companion in the entire series who actually genuinely cares about the Dalish, and that because Merrill is Dalish herself, having left her clan to live in the city; she’s also frequently mocked and depicted as naive and ignorant despite being a grown-ass woman and her rivalmance is dangerously unhealthy and toxic. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you can have two elf companions, both of who explicitly hate the Dalish and disapprove of any pro-Dalish stances. One of those companions, Sera, also hates elves in general and frequently distances herself from them. Solas is a whole other can of worms.

If you play as a Dalish Inquisitor in DA:I, you are faced with constant mockery and scorn at every angle. Dorian, a Tevinter mage, explicitly tells you that slavery is better than being poor and that his family treats their slaves “very kindly”. You cannot call him out on this; he says his piece and then the conversation ends and can literally never be mentioned again, even if you romance him. Cassandra, who is very pro-Chantry, asks you why you can’t just “make room” for worshipping the Maker alongside the Elven deities. Any support of the Dalish earns you immediate disapproval from all of your companions. You cannot be openly Dalish without being directly punished by the game.

I mentioned earlier that Dalish elves and city elves both live in tightly-knit and isolated communities, Dalish elves in the form of nomadic clans and city elves in the form of alienages. There’s safety in numbers, but when you’re surrounded by enemies, that can also be incredibly dangerous. At multiple points in the series, entire alienages and clans are massacred. More often than not, this is completely unavoidable, and when it can be avoided, it’s extremely difficult to do so. 

In Inquisition, if you play as a Dalish Inquisitor, you will start to receive war table quests regarding your clan. If you make even one wrong choice (and there are several choices you have to make, most of which are misleading), then your entire clan is massacred along with the elves in the city they’re settled by. The incident leading to their possible deaths is actually caused by a human noble poisoning other humans in the city and blaming the elves, since the alienage had a different water source and there was a clan settled near the city.

In Dragon Age 2, you can directly massacre Merrill’s entire clan. Even if you choose not to do so, the clan suffers heavily, losing their First (the future Keeper) to the city and then losing their Keeper to demons. They end up stranded in that area due to their halla dying, which means that their aravel couldn’t be pulled.

At another point in Inquisition, you encounter a clan that suffers heavily as well when a huge swath of them are massacred by Red Templars. You can do absolutely nothing to prevent this.

In the same area that the last clan I mentioned is found in, there are several quests regarding it, several of which stick out to me. 

One requires you to literally desecrate a Dalish burial site to finish the quest (The Spoils of Desecration, it’s literally in the name).

 Another quest gives you the task of finding a sacred golden halla, a legendary spiritual and religious figure to the Dalish, and guiding it to the unnamed Dalish clan. In this quest, you can also choose to just straight up kill it (The Golden Halla).

There’s a main storyline quest that involves going through a historical site to discover the truth about a massacre that had always been blamed solely on elves. At the end of the quest, you can choose to give these new records to either the clan I talked about or to the Chantry, who, if I remember correctly, modify the records to be about the Dalish becoming violent after one of their clan members converted to Andrastianism (The Knights’ Tomb). If you choose to give the records to the Dalish, a follow-up quest involves the clan asking for your help gifting a halla to the human village that was part of the incident, which you need to either trick or force the village into accepting (Bestow Mourning Halla).

Moving on. . .

In the quest Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, you meet the human empress of Orlais, Celene, who you have to protect from assassins. You also meet her handmaid, spymaster, and former lover, an elf woman named Briala. And of course, Celene’s terrible cousin Gaspard, who is not really relevant for this discussion. Just know that he’s awful.

In this quest, you have to uncover information about these three people and use that information to manipulate the situation and get your desired ending. There are several possible endings you can choose, but we’re going to focus on one specific one for right now, namely the one where you can choose to help Celene and Briala reconcile and become lovers again, with Celene ruling Orlais and Briala being her partner and advisor. Sounds great, right? The lovely women get their happily ever after and everyone is happy.

Except that the game doesn’t give you the full story. Not in the slightest. Instead, it depends solely on you having read The Masked Empire, a book that is completely separate from the game and that many players don’t even know exist. It gives a very different context to this game, and especially to Celene and Briala’s relationship. I recommend reading this post from @dalishious because I cannot possibly explain the situation better than they have on their blog. If you’re into Dragon Age, I recommend giving them a follow in general because they offer some really great perspectives on DA as a Mi'kmaw person who knows a hell of a lot more about the franchise than I do.

(The quest also tries to convince you that Briala is on the same level as Celene and Gaspard. That is complete bullshit, as dalishious gets into here.)

So, to add to its very long list of crimes, Bioware purposely withholds information from the player in order to trick you into getting an elf back together with her violently racist and incredibly dangerous abuser.

And if I remember correctly, you can also discover a hidden room in Celene’s palace which is filled with broken Elven artifacts that Celene was experimenting with.

In Inquisition, you also encounter at least two Dalish elves who explicitly talk about being kicked out of their clans for being mages, left to make it on their own or die. Which is. . . absurd and doesn’t fit pre-existing lore at all, since clan Keepers and their apprentices are literally mages themselves AND it’s already been shown that if a clan cannot support or doesn’t need people with specific skills (not just mages but also crafters, traders, hunters, etc), then it will actually send those people to other clans to live with them. Merrill, the Dalish companion mentioned earlier, is one such case, with her original clan having an excess of mages and sending her to a different clan who needed a mage to train as a first. Changing that to say that clans now outright abandon mages, especially as children, was a ridiculous choice and makes me feel like it was done purely to show them as ~savage~.

(I personally headcanon that it was a lie spread purposely by clans to protect themselves, playing off of racist ideas of what they were like. No templar would go up against an entire clan just to drag two or three mages off to the Circle, but multiple mages? Five mages? A dozen? Now that would be worth the risk.)

And now it’s time to get into the worst part of the games, by far.

Trespasser.

In this DLC, you discover that one of your elf companions, Solas, is actually the god Fen’Harel, and that he’s essentially trying to destroy the entire world to “reset it”. 

You also discover that your gods are false.

That’s right. Bioware based this community and culture off of Jewish, Romani, and Native peoples. And then made the gods fake. Explicitly told players that the Dalish are wrong about everything they’ve ever known, that their religion is all fake, and that it’s their own fault because they dared try to recreate their culture with the scraps they had left.

Oh, but it doesn’t end there, no. The gods aren’t just fake, they were actually slave owners! They were rulers of an ancient civilization and the vallaslin, those beautiful markings that represent a Dalish elf’s pride in their culture and their place in their community, are actually slave markings to show who your owner is!

I need you all to take a moment to process this. To think about the implications of basing a fictional culture off of oppressed communities in the real world, as a foil to the Fantasy Christianity™ that you as the player are constantly shoved towards, and then making that culture’s religion into something so terrible and warped.

Have you thought about it? Because I have. I’ve thought about it a lot.

So yeah. There’s my extremely long rant about indigenous coding in Dragon Age. I hope it helps the very few people who manage to get to the end without getting sick of it lmao

[dyalinohera]

An Open letter to Quippy.

Through the various relationships in my life, I have learned a lot about trauma through learning everything I could about various mental issues because the after-effects of my own personal trauma were preventing me from living life normally. I was lucky enough to have family members, be blood or found (or a little of both), who have always tried to help me and love me very much. 

Recently in my life, I lost a good friend to a misunderstanding during a PTSD episode and their partner took that opportunity to swoop in, gaslight myself and another good friend of mine. Before this moment, I only knew a few things about this partner. ONE. My friend.... Let's call them Q.... was not having sex with this person but they were in a romantic relationship. TWO. They sometimes had fights and Q admitted so to me. Three. About a week or so prior their partner admitted that they were being abusive towards Q in various ways. No details. 

After having been subjected to a gaslighting attempt, my other friend P actually crying, and then Q threatening to kill themselves... Well. I blocked them both and ran for the hills. I did have a private private server with Q and I could have reached out to them at a later date, but I could smell the badnews rolling off of F (the partner). 

About a month or so after this event I received a message from Q (on Christmas day like a wonderful puzzle to work over) and I discovered something horrible. Abuse victims will mirror the abuser's maladaptive control techniques and further become entrenched in the Abuser's guiles. 

Below is that message. I have removed any names pertaining to those whom I have dubbed 'P', 'Q', and 'F' from this message. Any text prefaced with ( and ends in ) are my own comments on what did and did not happen while pointing out each tactic used to try to scare, confuse, and manipulate me in some way. 

I am not a healthcare professional of any kind. I can’t diagnose disorders. I simply have learned how to identify abusive tactics from the counseling I have received for PTSD. 

And finally, before we break down this wonderful message, I would like to dedicate this to those who are being gaslighted right now and I pray this essay finds you somehow.

                                         Making It Clear That If Any Distress Comes To Any Other Parties Because Of This Message Then It Will Be Because You Dragged Them Into This. You Will Shoulder That Blame, Not Us. Remember How You Thought We Should Have More Control Over When And Where We Have A Crisis? Practice What You Tried To Preach With Your Reactions To This Message.

(This right here is an excellent show of blame-shifting, gaslighting, and emotional manipulation to throw their victim off and start questioning themselves.) 

To:[Redacted] [Also referred to as "recipient" or simply "you"— as the term will only be used to refer to the recipient for the purposes of this message. Only exception to this being quotes taken directly from the recipient's own messages.] From: [Redacted] [also referred to as "system" or "us/we" for the purposes of this message]

(This Legal jargon is used to make the sender feel more secure and righteous in their anger, which is very much from being scared, pulling power away from the intended recipient.)

This Notice Was Written After The Messages You Decided To Delete Before We Saw Them, Which Leaves Us Only To Assume That They Were Harassing In Nature. That Is Why This Message Is Being Sent. We Wish To State Our Intent In No Uncertain Terms In Order To Avoid Any Possible Misunderstandings. You Will Receive No Further Communication From The System Unless It Is In Order To Inform You Of Actions Being Taken Against You.

Due to the fact that you were intent on:

Blaming the system for being in crisis

Expecting a person/system who had been sent into crisis by an attack to be the one to carry full responsibility even when unaware of key information and still being actively attacked.

(I never did any of these things. What I did was say that a public chat server in discord with people who are emotionally sensitives, me included, was not the correct action and upon them threatening to take their own life, I was sent into a state of fear and reacted with aggression. Was this a smart thing for me to do? I have no idea but it was what I did.)

 Refusing to re-read the very exchange you were attacking the system over in order to see that the system had not been given the information you were insistent they had been given and were attacking them over.

“I am not text shuffling for exact proof. They made it clear that it was affecting them negatively.” "The moment they spoke up about internalizing the guilt is the moment it should of stopped." “[Redacted] said. That they felt it was their fault.” "They said they felt it was their fault."

(I had two chats going on with the poor P who was watching this System go into a severe PTSD episode and lash out at everything around them. I got confused in my panic HOWEVER I was correct in saying that this system was not right in going into that chat and doing that, not because it hurt someone else, though it is apart of it, but because it is a dangerous state to be in. Please note that the text Q is quoting is from my chat with F. Q is F’s mouthpiece now.)

Refusing to acknowledge that you were wrong even after discovering that the information you were attacking the system for ignoring was actually sent to your private messages, not the chat where the system could see said information.

“Okay. They didn’t say what I thought they did. That was in my DMs." "But. I am not gonna talk more of this.”

(Again. This is an attempt to gaslight and invalidate my views and what I did.)

Being a hypocrite by expecting the system to flawlessly read someone while in a blended and unstable state while you, yourself, still drunk dialed the system twice on 08/02/2020 after you had been explicitly told not to do so on 07/24/2020 due to the fact that being drunk dialed causes the system distress.

(I got drunk and sad. I am prone to doing this when upset and I am working on it. HOWEVER. I didn’t say anything on these calls. I only said hi and looked tired. After that, the system did not talk to me for quite some time afterward, but I gave them space and I never made this mistake again. People. If someone keeps bringing this sort of thing up when you have been trying, get away from them. This is a clear sign of abusive tactics. I’ll also go even further in saying that I didn’t even imply that is what SHOULD have happened. I said that was not right. I even told F that Q needed to go to a professional, they are at serious risk and needed help. All I got was excuses. In situations where someone is going through suicidal episodes you have to do everything in your power to get immediate help.) 

Ignoring the fact that both times the system was asked if they were okay they told you they weren't yet you still attacked them under false pretenses.

(I was confused and scared at the time due to ya know, someone I care for greatly threatening to kill themselves. SO. Idk)

 Acting like you have any idea just how far the system has come from the state they started in a decade and a half ago. You have neither room nor right to even dream of attempting to invalidate anyone's progress. Much less that of those who have survived what you never could have.

(I never did any such thing. I tried to empathize and place myself in their shoes to better understand their struggle because I know what it means to be different with different needs and so forth. I am a compassionate person.)

 Attempting to validate your stance after your argument fell apart by claiming you were thinking of leaving anyway. People do not get excited about an increase in activity from those they wish to distance from.

(There were various languages that the system was using that were bothering me but I didn’t say anything because I really cared for them. There was also was a revelation that their romantic partner was abusive and it was brought forth in the public chat. Please keep in mind I was mainly talking to their partner in the end and I decided that for my safety to leave and block both Q and F)

Doing all of this after misleading the system into believing that you were understanding of how difficult it could be for someone to live in a head with people who actively want to kill the body they're in.

(I am still understanding of it. My issue was and will always be the fact that there was a refusal to look at the problem, what they had done, step back, and get help. Because the only thing that was made clear by this message even being sent to me is that I made the right choice to block both Q and F.)

Proving that you need to stay the hell away from abuse survivors because abuse survivors have been blamed for the side effects of survival enough by people like you.

(I never ever blamed abuse survivors for their problems. The system’s abuse is valid, HOWEVER, these past abuses and the unique cognitive issues that come from that trauma does not exempt you from accountability from your actions in or out of high-stress phases. It is up to the individual to find and attempt to get better and stronger from these issues and find solutions that are unique to their situation.)

Any future attempt from the recipient to contact or otherwise interfere with [redacted] or any of said system's alters will be viewed as a hostile act w/ intent to cause further distress and/or harm. Any such attempts will also be viewed as harassment and shall be dealt with via whatever practical — and, when applicable, legal — means deemed necessary. Drunken episodes are not exempt from this and will also be treated as harassing contact. (<Oh my god they really are trying to hammer home I am some form of ‘evil’ just because I was sad and got on camera for a couple of seconds.) 

Just remember, we apologized to the one we inadvertently caused distress to. You were far too weak to be able to do so. We even left you unblocked following the incident to give you a chance but all you did was send us messages you obviously thought better of before they got to our machine. Thank you for confirming that we really will be better without you in our lives because we don't need people who can't face their own shortcomings involved with our system. If you cause any member of this system further distress — in any form — then we swear to you that we will use whatever tools we must to contend with you. 

(Again, more blame-shifting, bringing up that they apologized without addressing the times I have apologized for the various stupid things I did while dealing with amygdala hijacks and so forth. I’ve been in intense therapy for PTSD and underwent EMDR which entails going over trauma memories in hopes to desensitize the brain so that the fight and flight response isn’t triggered so often. AKA. I have literally gone over very traumatic events, in detail, while doing this therapy. I am an abuse survivor, but Q is very clearly still the victim of current abuse.) 

We only hope someone returns the favor to you when your depression is at its very worst.

The account this notice has been sent from will not be signed into again after sending this message on 12/25/2020. Any responses to this notice will go unrecognized.

(And the final last message shows how angry they are at me for leaving a group chat and blocking them. This is from a fear response. A lot of people think that Amygdala is responsible for aggression responses. However, it deals with fear. Aggression and anger is a response to fear. Thus, those who tend to use these abusive tactics are fundamentally scared of not being in control of you. PTSD episodes are called Amygdala Hijack and I am willing to bet Q sent this to me during one.)

Now. For the messages that I had deleted. 

It is hard for me to process my emotions. I tend to get bogged in how to say things in my head but when I try to speak or write it all comes out wrong. The original messages were wordy and confusing and… not very good. So here and now, on this space that you the reader walk on, I would like to formally give those messages to Q in simple and clear terms. 

Quippy, 

I love you. 

And I miss you. 

Please don’t die. 

[lookwhatilost]

I’m going to use this video as something of a case study to prove my point. Some things that are necessary to point about Ben Shapiro: he is an intelligent person, he speaks quickly, and he makes good quips. This makes him very good for the YouTube video “LiBtArD wReCkEd” compilations. He’s also very dishonest and he tends to misrepresent statistics. This is, of course, because Ben is a fascist and fascists don’t care if they’re telling the truth.

So, this is a thirteen minute video, and barely a fraction of what this student is laying out is going to get covered. The reason why Ben is letting him talk as much as he does in the beginning instead of interrupting him the moment he started explaining what socialism is is because he’s looking for something to quote back at him. Usually he’ll let his “debate” opponent talk until he finds something to do this with, and hit them hard on the point he stops them on.

Next we have this “workers or the government” thing Ben comes back at him with: he clearly said “workers owning the means of production”. He even said it twice, I believe, and Ben pretty much says “I know you’re talking about that, but if you said THE GOVERNMENT owning the means of production, that would be very ineffective” and then he rattles off on that. Even though this student never said anything about redistribution – he deliberately stepped away from that point at the very beginning. He acknowledged the fact that Ben will often talk about redistribution without actually engaging with the core points of socialism and, once more, he never said anything about government control and he never said anything about lack of free market enterprise. Socialism and free market enterprise aren’t in any way disparate. Market socialism is a thing.

Hypothetically, what you’d have to do here is let him talk on, and when he’s done, say “That was great and all, Ben, but I pretty clearly said worker owned means of production. Would you mind answering the actual question.” You can’t treat people like this in good faith. Ben knows exactly what he’s doing here with his talking points. No one brought up the Scandinavian countries. No one brought up government owned means of production. Nobody brought up free market enterprise. Nobody brought up being paid $100,000 to dig holes in the ground. No one brought up redistribution policies – unless you count the kid bringing it up to clarify that this wasn’t what he was talking about.

He then brings up that he’s an owner. Ben is smart enough to understand the basic principles of socialism, but he recognizes he isn’t capable of addressing any substantive criticism, so he’s deliberately pretending to misunderstand what this kid is saying. “Freely choose to alienate your labor” as if you have any choice in society these days. That’s like saying you freely choose to shit inside of a toilet. You don’t have many other options in regards to that. You can if you want to, but eventually, you’re going to get in trouble with it. Again, this is a deliberate misinterpretation. The workers owning the means of production gets brought up, and he spends the first two minutes of his response saying “if you meant the government owning it, that’s disastrous, and by the way, Norway is actually capitalist, and socialists won’t tell you this, but they actually have free market enterprise. And I’m a worker, so workers do actually own the means of production. Isn’t Bill Gates a worker?” Aren’t the tens of thousands of people under Bill Gates also workers? We’re talking about all workers, not just the one worker who also happens to own the company.

Him crafting rebuttals that actually take into consideration the tenants of socialism would, at least on some level, give the socialist credence to argue in a reality based sense. If a reactionary defends their belief system by attacking socialism in ways that are actually salient, you’ve set the socialist up to debate in a fact based argument, and that’s not what reactionaries dominate. Reactionaries dominate in a purview of recited dialogue trees, of snooty quips, and emotionally based arguments. This is where they thrive. They do not want to bring the argument into a reality based discussion.

In three minutes, he’s introduced so many stupid misconceptions that the student is going to spend more time arguing against the misconception than he will putting forth his own argument. He could spend a literal hour trying to correct the dumb, deliberate straw men that Ben Shapiro has thrown out here and never will he get a chance to substantively put forth any real advocacy for socialism.

To counter his “criticism” on labor theory of value: what if you spend a lot of time and money digging up diamonds from the ground? There are plenty of diamonds that get dug up that have absolutely no mechanical or industrial purpose. He’s saying “labor theory of value is dumb and bad because the market theory of value is what’s correct” without presenting any sort of argument to support that. Neither of these are holistic theories, both of them have valid places in society as lenses of interpretation, but this is not a substantive criticism. It is, in fact, very stupid.

It also helps that he has all the social capital in this situation. You never, ever want to challenge a reactionary when they have the podium and you don’t, and while they have the audience and you don’t. If they are even slightly intelligent, it is literally impossible for them to lose in the eye of their audience.

When the student brings up Mondragon: this is what reactionaries do. They define capitalism as freedom. Capitalism is when the owners of capital own the means of production and socialism is when the workers own the means of production. Not that we should take much that economic theorists say for granted on the account of most of them being cheerleaders for capitalism, but there are plenty of things that Ben laid forth that many economic theorists would disagree with. For one, he’s laid out the assertion that free markets are somehow absolute to capitalism and antithetical so socialism, that worker owned communes are an example of capitalism, and the degree to which government intervention is present in an economy is deterministic to whether or not it is socialism. Reactionaries operate in a delusory, fantastical land where the characteristics of capitalism are amorphous and capable of being shifted to suit one argument to another. In one instance, capitalism is the liberator of the working class, the distributor of technology, and in another instance, the very real consequences of capitalism are instead a product of corporatism, of government intervention, of “globalist” policy. Not true capitalism, mind, just other things.

And hey, guys, I’ve read the Communist Manifesto. Does anyone remember any segments in there where Karl Marx claimed the government needed to cram down and force people to participate in guild markets? Does anyone remember that part? I don’t.

Anyway, this is why you don’t argue with reactionaries when they have the podium and you don’t. The student got a bunch of time to speak where he laid out a very calm point, Ben got a bunch of time to speak where he then said a bunch of shit that had nothing to do with the kids argument to mislead the audience, and then deliberately interpreted what the kid was saying to present a straw man that the kid would have to correct. Now Ben has got the student in a position where he’s basically saying “I don’t disagree with anything, you’re basically saying capitalism. Worker owned means of production? That just means the people who own it also work at it, right? If Republicans did that, would you vote for them?” The kid is never going to be able to correct all this, not in a million years, and now when he speaks up, Ben is going to keep hammering this in, deliberately interrupting the kid and forcing him to answer misleading questions.

This is how you win a Ben Shapiro debate. This is how you “own libtards”. You get the mic, deliberately misinterpret what they say, you throw straw men at them and force them to defend or respond to that, both of which are impossible, and then, just to keep them off base, you continue to interrupt them when they respond to your point. It’s a very, very simple formula to follow if you are intellectually dishonest and a complete fucking asshole.

But yeah, the free market is not exclusively capitalist. For one, the free market does not have prescriptions. The free market is not a physical entity, it’s a concept that some people aspire to, unfettered trade. And free market socialism is a thing, yet again.

At around the 8 minute mark of this video, the student makes a bit of a mistake because he’s not really harping in on the public vs private ownership of the means of production, but Ben Shapiro’s line there is completely irrelevant: “So companies shouldn’t be able to have investors?” This is a tangential question. This would be like him talking about socialized ownership, and Ben leans into the microphone and asks “well, who’s the CEO then, dummy?” This is to say, it’s tangentially related, but it has nothing to do with the thrust of the argument.

His counter to the pencil factory example is pathetic. No one mentioned doctors. No one mentioned everyone in society getting paid the same amount. This has nothing to do with doctors and pencil factory workers, this has to do with pencil factory workers and pencil factory owners. He thinks this is a “gotcha” but it literally has nothing to do with the argument the kid is making.

It is so, so difficult to maintain your composure when you are around a hostile audience. At least if you were on stage, you would have the positional authority over them. You’d be in a place where, at least physically, you are given credence by the architecture of the room – standing atop something, having the lights on you, being behind the podium, having unfettered control over the mic. These things can lend you a lot of confidence. But if you’re just standing there and someone else is holding your microphone, and the audience claps whenever Ben Shapiro says something… Ugh.

But it comes as no surprise that Ben sees capital and labor as one and the same, because he’s a fucking capitalist and he’s a piece of shit. To him, people and money are just interchangeable cogs in a larger machine that he benefits from, and that is how most capital owners see them. After all, labor is a resource, and capital is a resource, and that’s all you look at them as – resources – there isn’t much of a difference between the two. Now, of course, you’ve got a few more ~libcucky~ takes on it, like how humans are human beings, and we have rights, and should be entitled to happiness and respect, but that doesn’t really factor into that sort of economic, capitalist worldview.

To summarize, this juxtaposition, “you’re a socialist, I’m a free marketer. You’re talking about things that are voluntary, which means they can’t be socialist, because socialism is authoritarianism”, this is the dichotomy that he’s been trying to reenforce this entire conversation. I don’t know how deliberately he’s doing this, but it’s very effective. In the mind of every audience member right now, what Ben is doing right here is destroying this “libtard” right now by saying “Heh, idiot. You think that’s socialism? How can that be socialism if there’s freedom involved?' and that’s basically what he’s going for here. But when the kid gets flustered and struggles to make a coherent point in the face of all this, Ben can just shit on him. And then the people who edit this shit put in airhorns and laugh tracks so the smooth brained dipshits watching this unironically know when to clap and bark like seals at the libcuck getting owned. It’s pathetic and it’s not a real argument. Fin.

[cat-vase]

Chupacabra!Tim AU

The chupacabra is a cryptid first spotted in Puerto Rico, but nowadays has also been spotted along the Mexico-United States border, in Latin America, and in the southern United States. However, it has been spotted as far north as Maine (near Canada), and in countries such as Russia, India, and The Philippines. Chupacabra means "goat sucker" in Spanish, and it is said to suck/drain the blood out of farm animals with two or three small, circular puncture wounds in the neck/chest of the animal.

There are two versions of the chupacabra:

1- A reptilian/alien-like creature. It is bipedal (walks on 2 legs and has hands), and has leathery green scales all over its body, along with spines/quills sticking out of its back. It stands similar to a kangaroo, and some people say it hops just like a kangaroo does too. It has red eyes, and is sometimes depicted with wings. It is said to stand at about 3 or 4 feet tall.

2- This is the one I like and will be using! It is a more dog-like creature, and reported to look like a Peruvian Hairless Dog, a Xoloitzcuintle (Xolo Dog), or a fox/dog/wolf with Mange. It is hairless, very thin (bones are easily visible) despite having thick skin, and has an especially pronounced spine (usually having spines/quills like the reptilian version). It has very deep set eyes, is usually brown in color (to blend in with the environment), and has a mouth full of extremely large fangs along with sharp claws on its paws.

Some people portray it more similar to a goat (it's usual choice of prey) — it is still very large and quadrupedal (walks on 4 legs), but with horns and other features more similar to a goat.

Some people also depict this dog version, like the last, with wings and other features more similar to a bat, but not reptilian.

Others have the it be smaller — the size of a large cat or a smaller dog. It is similar to a Sphynx cat in appearance, but serves the same purpose all as the other versions of the chupacabra (draining blood from animals to feed).

It can also be more insect-like in appearance — having longer legs and a more rounded body, possible extra limbs (more slender and pointed than a dog's limbs), and has a long proboscis where its mouth should be in order to drain blood out of its prey. Large eyes and antennae are also common with this kind of chupacabra.

The dog, despite being quadrupedal, is able to stand on its back haunches and appear bigger than it actually is, and to reach higher places.

Now, onto the actual Marble Hornets part! (Under the cut because it’s long!)

Tim is the chupacabra. It has the same base personality as Tim Wright (avoidant, yet compassionate once someone gets close), but it's the cryptid. It can shapeshift between the different dog versions of the chupacabra people believe in. For example, Brian says he expected the monster to be bigger and have fur. Tim's body involuntarily shapeshifts to match Brian's belief, but as it hasn't spent time with people before this, it can control its shapeshifting properties fairly well due to experimentation on its own. Though, sometimes things do go wrong. 

Since Tim Wright doesn't exist as a person in this universe, Alex is the one to bring The Operator to the group (after all, it was around him when he was a kid). Alex is the one taking the medication in this universe, and Alex still thinks killing everybody is the solution to defeating The Operator. Brian is still in the woods — Alex still dragged him out to the abandoned hospital (no personal associations, Alex just thought it was a creepy and far away enough location for no one to know what happened to Brian) and practically fed him to The Operator, and so Brian has a personal vendetta against Alex. While Brian doesn't really know what the solution is, it's not killing everybody, and Brian wants to make that loud and clear (if Jay and Alex can read code, that is).

Jay is still involved like usual, but because Brian and Alex are at each other's throats (and Brian is also stealing Alex’s medication on the regular), Jay isn’t a big concern right now. Brian is purposefully making totheark videos to mislead Jay and make sure he stays off of whatever trail Alex is trying to get Jay to follow. Jay is trying to find Jessica anyways, so thankfully, hopefully, Jay won't get hurt anytime soon.

The chupacabra is known to wander in the south. Hot, usually in the desert but not always, and so it stumbles into Alabama and, coincidentally, Rosswood. It has no goal other than to feed and keep moving, keep out of the way of people (they're the ones farming and making it easy to hunt, there’s no need to hurt them unless something goes awry, and even then, the chupacabra usually chooses to run).

Until it finds Brian. Rosswood is a large area, a large wooded area, coincidence after coincidence, but Brian is trying to make sense of the place, so of course he'd explore far enough away from his cabin to find the fucking chupacabra. It runs, at first, as it always does (the man has a gun, it knows those can hurt, of course it runs), but they keep meeting. Brian always stays silent, observing, watching. Trying to figure out what the creature wants from him, if anything at all.

One day, one fateful day, the creature finally is brave enough to step toward the man. Brian steps toward it as well, and as it bows its head, Brian touches it. Gentle, not even a pet, but the creature makes a noise. Not a growl, yet not a purr either. Brian jumps back, as anyone would, but the creature nudges forward again.

The creature leaves at dawn, but Brian talks to the creature whenever it comes around — it's all he has, he doesn't want to put Jay or Jessica into danger by directly talking to them. So he talks to it, gives it a name (the first one that comes to mind is Timothy), and one day even leads it to his cabin. Brian shows Tim his camera, not even knowing if it understands English but wanting to try, just in case. He doesn't let Tim follow him whenever he goes out into town or when he follows Alex, but Tim seems to come around to the cabin every couple of days no matter what. 

Later on, Brian is shot. Not fatally, but it hurts, and there's a lot of blood. Tim doesn't show up then, despite being in the woods, where it has chosen to roam for now. So Brian lies there, on the forest floor, hidden from Alex but not having enough energy to get back to his cabin. The next morning, the wound seems to have at least stopped bleeding and has started to scab over, and Tim appears. It carries Brian on its back, back to the cabin, and lies Brian down as gentle as it can. Brian starts talking to Tim again, as he does, and he asks why it helped him, not expecting a response — the most he’s ever gotten is ears moving, a head tilt, deep growling, or tail wagging as it moves around. 

However, Tim nudges the spot next to Brian's wound, and then scampers over to a dead rabbit in the corner of the cabin, telltale puncture wounds in its neck.

Tim doesn't want to hurt Brian on accident (even if it doesn't go for humans, it might out of instinct), so it stayed away because it could smell the blood, and could smell that it was Brian nearby. Tim stays with Brian as he heals, and they're a strange pair of friends, but Brian's befriended a monster and he's ok with it. They’re both ok with it.

Until Brian dies. Alex and Brian fight again, and it's more rough than ever before. Brian gets shot again, but it's fatal this time. He's shot in the head, and left in the forest to die.

Tim, of course, finds him, and whines and howls over something its never felt before. It doesn’t even try to feed, too distraught to try and do that to a human that helped it. It takes the box — the box, it knows, takes the things in real life and puts them into the box, and you can look at them forever unless you press a special button on the box to make them go away. It takes the box in its mouth, and stalks towards Alex. Brian, before, had explained where he was going, just to talk. Tim has spent a lot of time on farms, so it knows some of the words humans use, and Brian had taught it even more, so it knows where Brian went to find Alex. 

Before trying to lure Alex out of his house, it paws at the box until the special red light turns on. Tim stalks towards the doors and windows, breaking them until Alex, with his gun, the gun, runs outside. 

Tim mauls him. Tim had never mauled anything before — only pulling apart animals for Brian to eat after it itself had fed. After all, all it needed was the blood, and if Brian didn’t need it, it knew the other animals would use the flesh. But not this time. Alex didn't deserve that, he only deserved destruction. 

Alex was the most gratifying feed of its life.

But due to feeding on Alex, Tim is now being stalked by The Operator, as Alex was infected with The Operator sickness. Tim doesn't mind. In fact, The Operator keeps it closer to Jay and Jessica, who are still trying to find each other. Jay knows Alex is dead (the mauling was on the news), but not Brian, and he’s trying to figure out why the codes stopped and what actually happened to Alex (there’s no way it was a wolf, there was no blood in Alex’s body, just on the ground). 

Tim tries to protect Jay, and Jessica is currently stranded in Rosswood right now with her phone only letting her do certain things, so while Tim roams the woods it tries its best to attack anything that might hurt Jessica.

[gmebackup]

psychology 2 Electric boogaloo

So yesterday I posted about the psychological aspects of the entire stock craze.

Today I want to go a bit more in depth of how PSYOPS (psychological operations) normally work for military, but also how they apply to us today. if someone wants me to go in depth on how psyops is used on businesses feel free to let me know I'll do some research and post here

There is a certain order when it comes to PSYOPSIn order to create a successful PSYOP the following must be established:

1  clearly define the mission so that it aligns with national objectives   2  need a PSYOP estimate of the situation   3  prepare the plan   4  media selection   5  product development   6  pretesting - determines the probable impact of the PSYOP on the target audience   7  production and dissemination of PSYOP material   8  implementation   9  posttesting - evaluates audience responses   10 feedback

Before these steps can occur, intelligence analysts must profile potential targets in order to determine which ones it would be most beneficial to target. In order to figure this out, analysts must determine the vulnerabilities of these groups and what they would be susceptible to.

The analysts also determine the attitudes of the targets toward the current situation, their complaints, ethnic origin, frustrations, languages, problems, tensions, attitudes, motivations, and perceptions, and so on. Once the appropriate target(s) have been determined, the PSYOP can be created. this is the basic outline of how a PSYOPS work, now lets compare that to the entire GME situation

this is the basic outline of how a psyop works, now lets compare that to the entire GME situation

1 they need to find out what we think/feel and find our weakness.

this is the most simple one as we work in plain sight and let everyone see our DD

2 Can they pull this off? can they create FUD and divide our ranks?

Also easily yes

3 the plan:

Divide and conquer, make them doubt themselves and show their comrades are not as brotherly as they imagined.

4 the Media selection is also fairly easy to fill in

modern news media, meaning TV, newspapers, and reddit itself. We’ve all seen the people on tv saying we are idiots, we are dumb etc etc News article after news article stating that it’s over And here is the only one that may have actually shown to have some effect: other users Other users saying we missed the boat, other users showing their “gains” and using others to turn against each other. 5 Product development See how well it’s doing so far? 6 pretesting Can and will these things affect us? Yes and no, the media didn’t work as we could see the facts were skewed across the board, and they are still using short ladder attacks so… no Having other users spread doubt… Yes, this has worked for some people. 7 product and dissemination Normally this is where (if it was used by a military operation) it would be implemented, but due to time constraints I believe they started right after the “planning” phase in 3 8 Implementation Putting it to use, again I believe the implementation begon at point 3 9 posttesting Evaluation of the audiences response, do they react and how do they react 10 feedback If it works, at which points, if it doesn’t where and why? This last one is very easy, noticed how all mainstream news died off about the negativity towards GME BB AMC and NOK? But how the influx of new users on WSB become more prevalent? This is because they knew we didn’t give a fuck about the mainstream media, we cared about our brothers in arms.

Now with knowing some of the basics lets do a quick and dirty analysis of all of this, From end of 2020 to about 18-01-2021 the sentiment was positive. At this date we saw a wide range of implementation of the media. And everyone was saying we were stupid etc etc. Hell we even got a billionaire to cry on tv

This negative attention seemed to only bolster us in our conviction that we were and are correct in what our DD has lined out for us.

Ok so the main media networks don't work, What does?

Ok so the main media networks don't work, What does? Well lets use their main tools (reddit) against them. And what did we suddenly see since the 27th/28th? Suddenly the mod team changes, and this is very important because if you control the people who control the board you control the narrative, skewing it from positive to negative. (as we’ve seen a lot of people getting their positive posts deleted, their DD deleted etc etc) We also seen a massive influx of bots, negative posters, people showing their “gains” And this seemed to work so they stuck with it. Now look at these last paragraphs and compare them to a normal Psyops mission. Do you think they kind of align a lot? Good because this is what we have been using since as long as we can remember Some real world examples of things like this being implemented are for example: The Gleiwitz incident Hitler invaded Poland, took control of their radio tower and made it seem like Poland attacked Germany, this way he could “retaliate” without any repercussions at the time. As he was only defending his country.

Operation Bodyguard A plan to mislead the Germans during WW2 to make them think the time and place of the invasion (D-day) would take place at another time and date then it did. There are a lot of WW2 examples but I think it’s more prudent to focus on modern day as this was the beginning of modern psyops, but it has evolved a lot since then. To most people when you say “PSYOPS” they think of Vietnam, and rightly so as here we were starting to use more and more psychological methods. First off this is a very interesting read; http://www.psywarrior.com/VietnamCommanders.htmlAnd for the people who think PSYOPS are no longer used, they are and they’re still recruiting; https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/special-operations/psyop/psyop-history.html

Vietnam;

The Phoenix program; The program was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong via infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. The CIA described it as "a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong". The Phoenix Program was premised on the idea that infiltration had required local support from non-combat civilian populations, which were referred to as the "political branch" that had purportedly coordinated the insurgency.

Operation Wandering soul; Now this one is actually one that is pretty fucked up in my book, this was an OP that screwed with their heads on such a level this one should be criminal.

The VC believed at the time that the dead should be buried at home or else the soul was stuck wandering the earth aimlessly, sounds fairly normal if you believe in those things. But then the US was like “they aren’t at home right? What if we play distorted human sounds and zombie like sounds to fuck with them”. This is the gist of what happened

Check this site out for more on OP Wandering soul: http://www.psywarrior.com/wanderingsoul.html

Now to keep this a bit shorter I will give you a couple of operation names here which you can research if you want, they are important in this grander thing but or else this post would turn into another thesis on PSYOPS. Operation CHIEU HOI Operation MOCKINGBIRD (highly unclear of the scope but it does reflect a lot of what we see today in the ways of media manipulation) Operation FIELD GOAL (leaflet drop mission, much like the recent “GAINS” posts as it has the same effect, either you get convinced the squeeze is squoze or you lose morale)

Modern day(desert storm to now)

Gulf war Banknotes; This one is a very good one, as they used banknotes which had some added text to it, sounds innocent enough right?Nope this one was one of the more effective ones they used in desert storm/shield.http://www.psywarrior.com/GulfWarBanknotes.html

Give it a read because it’s too good to just give a small synopsis here.

Command Radio Solo over Iraq Because Iraq was still a technologically lagging country back then they used radio to give out propaganda, again using mainstream media to push their idiology.http://www.psywarrior.com/CommandoSoloIraqScripts.htmlThis page has everything on it, including the scripts they have used at the time.

Some other golf war things to look into:

http://www.psywarrior.com/Iraqleaflinks.html

Compare those to the disinformation we are receiving when it comes to gains and why we should sell.

Operation OBSERVANT COMPASS 2003 initially an op to get Joseph Kony and to end the “lord's resistance army in central afrika.

Toppling of Saddam Hussein statue Arguably the most visible image of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in central Baghdad. Allegations that the event was staged have been published.

It is claimed it was actually an idea hatched by an Army psychological operations team. Allegations surfaced that not only were the cheering group of people surrounding the statue in fact smaller than they were made out to be, in media depictions, but that also the group were not local to the area and were instead brought in by the military for the specific purpose of watching and lending credence to the pre-planned toppling.

Use of music in interrogation of prisoners. Again this one is one we all know about, using heavy metal on Iraqi prisoners, as they’ve never heard heavy metal this fucks them up beyond belief. this is a more hands on PSYWAR but it's morale based

Pentagon analysts and the mainstream media In 2008, The New York Times exposed how analysts portrayed in the U.S. news media as independent and objective were in fact under the tutelage of the Pentagon.

According to the NYT:

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance

CNN and NPR interns incident In 2000, it came to light that soldiers from the 4th Psychological Operations Group had been interning at the American news networks Cable News Network (CNN) and National Public Radio (NPR) during the late 1990s. The program was an attempt to provide its PSYOP personnel with the expertise developed by the private sector under its "Training with Industry" program.

The program caused concern about the influence these soldiers might have on American news and the programs were terminated.

National Public Radio reported on April 10, 2000:

The U.S. Army's Psychological Operations unit placed interns at CNN and NPR in 1998 and 1999. The placements at CNN were reported in the European press in February of this year and the program was terminated. The NPR placements will be reported this week in TV Guide.

Conclusion:

Am I saying the army or government is involved? No What I am saying is that most of the information regarding PSYOPS is publicly available, and anyone with a decent understanding of sociology and psychology can use this to their advantage. And I’m sure that not everyone who was in PSYOPS at one point or another, would stay there forever. These people usually branch out and use their acquired skillset and use it on the open market to get some big bucks. And while there are laws forbidding the U.S. government to use misinformation/PSYOPS on their own people, there are none for corporations, so they can still implement this. What you can see here is a fairly simple pattern and Modus Operandi. Just translate it to modern times.

-TV and Radio have been used to spread doubt about “is this over or not”.-They use twitter as an outlet showing “experts” who say we are stupid bad or nihilists, this is bait don't take it ok?

-Leaflets have been updated for the modern day, “LOOK AT MAH GAINS” “LOOK IVE SOLD SO SHOULD YOU AT AN ALL TIME LOW”, pictures are all we need instead of leaflets now. Why sell for losses? If you believed in the stock then believe in it now, even Mark Cuban said “if you can afford to hold, hold. That’s what I would do.”

Infiltration and seed Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. Make people lose faith in the cause they are in.We have seen this with bots, and real people who are suddenly in the WSB group and other groups, but it’s funny how it’s mostly concentrated on WSB no ?We have seen other members talking to people on Webull asking if they’re getting paid and they flat out said yes 20 bucks for every post with minimally 3 interactions.When those naysayers get caught on reddit and pointed out suddenly they do an account wipe (seen this at least 5 times myself and seen others post about this).

Control the narrative

This is the most important one can do, if you control the narrative you control the way people think interact etc Since a week or so WSB has become very negative about something they were rallying behind for months, like on the flip of a dime.

New mods instated, old ones removed

And suddenly all the positive things about GME are suddenly gone. u/zjz has been removed out of the blue while being one of the better mods on there.

Right now they are controlling the narrative and spreading “fake news” I fucking hate Donny but I’m ashamed to admit that he might have been right about the entire fake news idea. Because look at the news media; Gme craziness they will crash the market GME craze over now silver Silver now Uranium They all went broke etc etc. EVERYTHING BACK TO NORMAL PLZ DONT LOOK

But if you look at multiple sources…. The shorts are not covered at all The Short ladder attacks (which we can just call ladder attacks at this point) keep going day in day out because we are not selling and they keep shorting it.

Take the facts that you can check yourself. Cross check over and over and over, you will see automatically which ones are correct (if a 100 say the outcome is 120 and 20 say they’re at 50 look at the credibility of those people giving the information).Do your DD, cross check with the DD of other members (this is most likely why WSB removed these)As this is the most powerful one, who is on board who does what why do they do it etc etc.

Normally the announcement that Cohen,fils-aime, Francis, Durkin AND Kruger would impact the stock in a very positive manor, yet the stock went down 20% that day

Compare your findings with the Median of when something like that happens normally the stock shoots up, you can find what’s actually happening and what is being pushed on you.

Like: people have already sold out their shares (while the data shows otherwise https://www.reddit.com/r/GME/comments/lejf39/good_news_apes_are_holding_numbers_are_out_apes/ )My conclusion is that there are a lot of things happening behind the scenes to keep us infighting and divided, as long as we all keep positive we can actually come out on top of this.

Make no mistake gentlemen we are at war. And half the war is a war of hearts and minds

Capture their minds and their hearts and souls will follow

[the-nysh]

How would Garou react to bakugo?

GUAHAHA! Oh man, you guys are really going for the jugular now! X’D First it’s how Garou might react to Stain, now it’s pitting favs against each other?! Aaaauughgh welp! *cracks knuckles* I suppose I can take a bite at it. ;) Forewarned though, I’m speaking from the place of appreciating both characters (cause I’ve seen plenty of other posts in poor taste that end up trashing either one out of dislike + misinformation about them.) So what I’ll say is probably not gonna be that -obvious- take you might want me to cover. Because, first I’ll need to lay down some facts to clear up some common misconceptions:

Kacchan (current manga) is still a high school student (a kid), and an aspiring hero in training (not a professional one..yet). So already both of those points keep him off Garou’s radar. Kacchan, despite his ‘delinquent’ looks, is also a serious honor student a nerd who sticks as closely as he can to the rules, and is similarly a loner who, for the most part, keeps to himself. He does not go around purposely antagonizing other ‘extras’ for the lulz or caring one bit about their business (he actually tells them the opposite: stay back), unless they insist on getting in his way or catch his attention, personally offend him (or those he respects), or directly challenge his world view + perceptions on what it means to be weak and/or his goal to be the best. Which, coming from an upbringing that only praised him for his quirk + talents for greatness since he was 4 (which is extremely dehumanizing when it sidelines all other merits of his character) it’s left him with some crippling fatal flaws: gifted child syndrome, a terribly abrasive and explosive personality (matching his quirk) with a short temper, and an inferiority complex that may flare up if his self-worth is questioned or threatened. Which he’ll then implode and beat himself up for when he feels like utter shit: weak and powerless. All of this he’s slowly trying to unlearn (old habits die hard tho) and deal with during his serious hero training, while also gaining the more mature awareness to make up for his shortcomings. Because, it’s been made very clear to him that he can’t succeed as a hero if he does not. He knows this.

Kacchan’s goal is to be the best hero (just like, or in fact, even better than All Might by surpassing him) and he seriously puts his all (100% effort) into it. No matter what anyone says; he does not care what they think. So he cannot be swayed into the ‘dark side,’ and that is absolute (from Hori’s ‘word of god’). He has all the budding traits to be the perfect hero and make it work, but unfortunately his abrasive behavior, poor social tact, and anger at being underestimated + not being taken seriously so often misleads others into misjudging his intent. They think he’s more fit to be a villain and write off his potential, which actually leaves him to be quite unpopular in-universe. But to those who know him (like Deku: ‘he’s a jerk but he’s amazing’) his rough language and attitude may be an irritant and difficult to translate (also making him intimidating and often unapproachable to strangers), but because Kacchan proactively takes charge to confront and win against any problem (no matter what it takes, including if that means damaging himself, utilizing teamwork, or securing the safety of hostages/victims first before apprehending the aggressors), he actually rallies group morale and inspires others to follow him. Which is the mark of a good leader (and yes, he truly is amazing). 

Now with all that said, I’m sure some traits and key words in there stick out as very familiar and similar to Garou, but also very different as well. But first, unless Kacchan gets the allowed clearance for it (again, rules) and proactively takes charge with the intent to take him down as a ‘villain’ (while calling himself a hero) and attacks him first, then otherwise Garou really doesn’t have a need to fight him (yet). But he will defend himself accordingly even if he’s attacked by a kid. And importantly, he’s not gonna judge him on who he used to be (nor would he even know or be aware of Kacchan’s past), but on who he presents himself now. If that ever happens and they do end up fighting, then Kacchan’s also the tenacious type who will not give up or concede defeat, doing everything it takes to win. Now that’s an interesting challenge! 8D Garou might even be impressed a kid has a similar amount of guts + grit as him, cause Kacchan will find a way to keep fighting even if he physically cannot stand up anymore. (Oho!!!)

As for what Garou thinks about him, Kacchan’s abrasive attitude + language (esp from someone who aims & presents himself as a hero) might really tick him off if that image contradicts Garou’s ideal of what it means to be a ‘true hero.’ But also because they’re both similar intelligent assholes + adaptive prodigies, I would…very much like to see a verbal battle of wits between them. (Just let them both go ham with the insults + hot takes and I’d totally grab popcorn for that! 8′D) Garou might assume and take some resentment from how Kacchan appears to be fighting from a position of privilege (good family status, strong quirk, popularity when in-universe he’s actually not, no impediments on his goal to become a hero, etc) because…that’s the opposite of what Garou ever believed he could have. The choice; that confidence. To full-heartedly be a hero despite what anyone else thinks or labels you. And that’s one of the biggest differences between them. Because Kacchan puts his all, with confidence, into being a hero. His best. No compromises or half-assing anything without properly following through to the end. :O (Actually this might really impress Garou too, as it consists of what he wants to see from the heroes he challenges, yet so many often disappoint him.)

But also, Kacchan’s smart, sharp, and observant too. He’d notice something’s off about this Garou guy who somehow calls himself a villain/monster. And since Kacchan efficiently attacks things at the source, he’d wonder, what the fuck is his problem?! But he’s not gonna be nice or soft about it either, heh. Oh man, now that would be fun if Kacchan could figure it out too. 8D I would like to see it!!! Cause they might actually get somewhere and realize/challenge things about the other that they haven’t yet fully grasped about themselves. (Or, worst-case scenario, a confrontation between them might turn out very messy and non-constructive if they can’t ever see where the other’s coming from. Garou’s got the compassion for it, but might also offend Kacchan too if he ‘holds back’ on him for being a kid.) So hmm! It’s a very interesting scenario to think about!