#also hell I might actually be a biased viewer.... for the wrong side which is an interesting experience

[ryouverua]

Which parts about Gou make you vibe with it? Personally speaking, especially after ep 22, it just seems like a big Satoko character assassination and betrayal of og Higurashi's themes - it doesn't feel like there's any heart or meaning to it. But I am of the opinion Higurashi, with its ending, didn't need a sequel to begin with. This isn't mean to come across as confrontational, I'm just genuinely curious.

1) You’re absolutely valid, anon - and tbh, my feelings might change depending on how the last few episodes go (and also on whether there is a season 2 because I really cannot see how things can wrap up with the time we have left) and 2) apologies if this comes out as a mess, because this answer is going to be pretty free-form.

So first of all, I do actually agree with Higurashi not needing this sequel. I enjoy the fact that it exists, but I think it’s better to treat it as ‘canon, but separate’ as opposed to canon, if that makes sense? If people want to go and consider this non-canon, I think that’s okay. In fact, I think the canon Matsuribayashi is still ongoing with Rika alive and Satoko bitter, and upset and... well, multiple ways that could turn out. The first ‘loop’ Satoko experiences starts when she goes to the shrine and touches (Oyashiro? Featherine? whoever’s) horn, with no death whatsoever. The Rika and Satoko in that world don’t die (which is actually something that struck me as odd last ep, but I think was done deliberately - there’s a canon fragment where they just... live and grow apart, and whether we’ll get resolution on that is yet to be seen).

As for the Higurashi themes... interestingly, I’m not 100% sure it does betray them. Friendship, communication, working together - and their subsequent breakdowns - led to this. People grow older and follow different paths, it’s true. Mion, Keiichi, and Rena follow their own paths, hopefully well-adjusted, and knowing they have a home to go back to. Rika feels secure in knowing that she has her friend group to fall back on and Satoko at her side. And Satoko...

Well, this Satoko is fresh off of Matsuribayashi. Even if she has the implied growth of past timelines like the others do, she never experiences those shining moments of triumph from Meakashi-hen & Minagoroshi first-hand. And even if she had one of them, a single moment of triumph doesn’t overwrite years of co-dependent tendencies (which Rika certainly encouraged - there are plenty of times in Minagoroshi where she said that a life without Satoko is pointless, which is admirable up until the point that she gets outside of the bird cage and just.... doesn’t follow through with that anymore). This is definitely where the lengthy POV narration of the VN would really come in handy, because this negative-character arc she’s going through actually does seem feasible to me.

I’m going to switch gears to mention something I found really interesting about today’s episode - the bookstore scene. I think that was the point of no return - Satoko, if Rika hadn’t chased after her and kept insisting that Satoko could and should share her dream and talked over her concerns (when she was very clearly upset!), may have walked away, and I find that fascinating.

I don’t really talk about it much here, but Rika isn’t that high on my character list. She’s a great character, and she doesn’t deserve any of what she’s going through, but for whatever reason I’ve always enjoyed the others more - which is why I enjoy it when they showcase the flaws born from her looping. And I gotta say, when she started talking over Satoko’s clear anger and upset about not being able to function in a school environment, not being able to keep up with the homework, how she wouldn’t fit in *** and kept insisting that she wanted to share her dream with Satoko, I couldn’t help but think - Rika, why aren’t you asking what Satoko’s dream is? I know you want to keep Satoko by your side because she was always your comfort for the last 100 years, but your Protagonist Complex is showing - Rika has a bad tendency of thinking of the world as centered around her (which was beaten into her by being the Queen Carrier, by the fate of the village being affected by her death, etc etc), and it reared its head in that moment right when Satoko was ripe with anger and spite from the last loop just ending. Hinamizawa finally accepted Satoko as a part of the village again, but then she experiences that same alienation twice over 10 years with the only family seemingly abandoning her so I just... can’t help but understand her a little bit, in that sense. Having Rika insisting that Satoko come anyway and ‘it’ll be fine’ despite Satoko saying, ‘no, no, it really won’t’ be without communicating why she knows that - that she experienced it twice now - does seem to fit in with the Higurashi experience in that sense.

Gosh, I don’t know if this is all coherent but I should probably post for now, and I can elaborate with more focus on what you’d like if you want to hear more thoughts.

*I’ve been seeing people say ‘She went evil just because she didn’t want to do homework’ which is fine as a joke but I will Fight the ones who are serious

**This is a little personal but I actually uh. Actually have some experience with a friendship gone sour after following a good friend to post-secondary school and I won’t go into the details (though I can thankfully confirm I did not go on a time-loop murdering spree) but suffice it to say, Satoko’s feelings of heartbreak resonated with me in an uncomfortably personal way, oops

***Where is Shion?!?!?! Shion is clearly the missing answer. Shion will solve EVERYTHING

[amandabe11man]

a VERY LONG post about Hell on Wheels

YEAH i forgot about this post in my drafts... it’s been like a year since i finished the show now and i feel i’ve barfed everything out into this post (that i can think of), so here it goes (you’ll have to shield your eyes after the spoiler warning if you don’t wanna be spoiled btw. i can’t seem to be able to add a read more-link...) :

SO... i finished watching “hell on wheels” at last, pm half a year since i started. it’s funny because i was under the impression that i’d sOMEHOW be able to binge all five seasons within just one month (reason: i wanted to watch it before my free trial on HBO’s website went out). honestly, that wouldn’t have been possible because it was a LOT more emotionally draining than you’d think at first glance... after being gutpunched three times in a row in season 4, any reasonable human would need a little break.

anyway, it feels-- weird. i’ve never been big on following tv-shows so i haven’t been able to relate to that feeling ppl describe once they’ve finished a show they’ve become so attached to, except NOW i can relate. the show’s not groundbreaking, it’s not perfect, but i’ve had a lot of fun. what a ride it’s been...

looking back, i’d say HOW’s biggest weakness is its tendency to forget or ignore certain plot points. i guess that’s not too weird, with such an arsenal of characters, but still, i find that’s what bugged me the most, if anything bugged me at all. for example--

[SPOILERS for those who might wanna watch it after seeing me go on abt it, idk]:

first off, what REALLY grinds my gears is how ezra dutson’s plotline was handled. it was set up perfectly in the beginning; having him escape from the swede (who promised him that, and i quote: “i’ll find you, ezra! i always do”), the original plan was obviously for ezra and the swede to “reunite” some time in the future so that ezra could tell everyone that the swede killed his parents, thus tying up loose ends and giving some closure to that whole arc. some might say this would’ve been too predictable, but i would rather have that predictable storyline than having it just end unceremoniously like it did, with ezra dying ACCIDENTALLY and off-screen by sidney snow’s hand, simply as a way to further bohannon’s pain and set the stage for ruth’s final arc. this might’ve been fine, if the writers had made it so that ezra actually, y’know, TOLD SOMEONE WHY HE’S AN ORPHAN TO BEGIN WITH. but they didn’t even give the viewer that form of closure, instead just deciding to use him as a plot device for the other characters’ increased angst... bohannon and the others were never even made aware of ezra’s last name, and this is all what bugs the everliving SHIT outta me: the only ones who know, or will EVER know, ezra’s full story is the swede and the viewer, tho after season 4′s end, ezra is never mentioned or acknowledged again-- not by bohannon, and not even by the swede. ezra went from convenient character with a PURPOSE to “nameless” orphan forgotten by history. thanks, writers...

then there’s the whole deal with campbell coming to town to reinforce The Law™, which wasn’t a bad arc, mind you-- campbell and his goons were the most infuriating little shits for a while there-- but the thing is; didn’t campbell LIE to his men about the president giving him the position as governor? i might’ve misunderstood it, but i’m PRETTY sure the president didn’t give him THAT much of an upstanding role, but that campbell just went ahead and took that position anyway? if that was indeed the case, then that’s another plot hole, cause nobody finds out about campbell’s possible trickery to become the governor. nobody rats him out, despite literally no one in “his” town liking him all that much, so they’d have no reason to protect his “secret”. (correct me if i’m wrong on this one though. i might be misremembering things)

then there’s the other pretty infuriating issue of bad guys never getting called out for doing bad shit (unless it’s the swede, who gets all the blame, all the time), for example:

major dick bongbendix(???idk he had a silly name like that) is presented VERY MUCH as a bad guy in the beginning. y’know, just casually beheading natives on all his missions and collecting those heads and taking them to the bar like a fucking nutcase-- those little details. he also seemed to believe in racial biology, so yeah, definitely not a good guy. but by the end, he’s been watered down into some quirky guy who’s ALMOST on friendly terms with the main characters. yeah, uh-- seems everyone (writers included) collectively forgot the whole public display of cut-off heads he had going on...

aaron hatch: started off as a guy too proud for his- or his family’s own good when he shot the police officer, BLAMED IT ON HIS FUCKING SON and then just kinda let bohannon hang the kid even though it was pretty obvious hatch was just shifting the blame away from himself. THEN he reappears with some other mormons and causes a full-on shootout in the town (probably getting some people killed, i don’t remember), TAKES EZRA (also a mormon) HOSTAGE SO THAT BOHANNON WILL COME WITH THEM WILLINGLY and passive aggressively forces bohannon to marry his daughter who bohannon knocked up. somewhere along the line, hatch’s bad side is just thrown to the wind, and bohannon at one point describes him as “a good man”. yeah, ABOUT THAT--

sean and mickey mcginnes: unlike the ones mentioned above, these two started out as seemingly decent dudes, but ended up pm as secondary villains in the end. however, like the ones mentioned above, they hardly face any consequences for whatever crap it was they did in boston, OR the fact that they killed and fucking mutilated/dismembered a man in cold blood (a man who WAS gonna kill them, yes, but HE did it because he thought they had killed his friend, which wasn’t a farfetched idea since mickey DID brag about killing the dude even though he didn’t actually do it). sure, they face their OWN demons as time goes on, they get ostracized, and they start losing faith in each other as well, which ends up with mickey killing sean before the latter can confess(?) his/their crimes. so, while sean was spineless and a creep, at least he thought about finally owning up to what he’d done in the end, whereas mickey lives on to keep doing shady shit, killing people, and getting increasingly more corrupt. he does end up pursuing new goals in the end, but it’s obvious he’s not happy about it anymore. that’s-- really all the comeuppance he ever gets, and the only one who knows about his shady businesses are pm just bohannon, durant and eva (also, personal gripe here-- they seemed to not settle for “just” tarring and feathering the swede and publicly humiliating him, but i’m pretty sure i recall mickey telling bohannon they were thinking about having the swede killed too. keep in mind, this was BEFORE the swede truly lost it and started killing people left and right. apparently, being kind of a douche about taxes is bad enough to warrant being tortured and cast out by the entire community... i’m obviously biased here, but still-- the mcginnes bros’ double standards are amazing to behold)

now that i’ve aired some of that out-- here are some highlights, according to me:

unexpected friendships, like that between eva and durant. i’d say the swede finding that stray dog and fawning all over him qualifies into this category too

durant and campbell fighting in the mud before finally coming to an agreement -- just- durant and his competitors being petty as fuck, honestly. it’s hilarious

bohannon trying to get through to elam by reminiscing about their friendship, especially since bohannon isn’t one to show his feelings often OR get sappy -- in fact, EVERY time bohannon loses his stoic facade is a good moment. when he was gonna bury elam and he just broke down completely for the first time since we were introduced to him... that shit had me in tears as well, but man was it a great scene

jimmy two-squaws

every time the swede opens his mouth (yes, even when he’s spouting some lies and bullshit like that)

ruth’s character development. i admit i didn’t like her at all in the beginning, idk something just felt off about her, but man did she ever grow on me. just-- how everyone kinda relied on her eventually, even though she’s only like in her 20′s or something... she still became a pillar of the community. bless ya, ruth :’ı -- also, her essentially adopting ezra was Pure as heck. I Lov it

the fact that this was the 1800′s and the only backlash the (openly) LGBT characters faced for it was pm just “yeah they’re a bit confused maybe but they’re not hurting anyone”. maybe that’s not very realistic but WHO GIVES A SHIT AMIRITE

mr tao just being a sweet old man

chang’s sunglasses, straight out of Django Unchained

mr toole’s complete heel-turn from racist POS to someone who sticks by his word to turn himself around. that shit was impressive coming from him, tbh

bohannon just calmly running into a buffalo by the train tracks

mei posing as a grown man instead of a boy (which is what she looks and sounds like, oml)

another thing i realized is that bohannon is a classic gary stu. there’s just no getting around that fact after seeing him being revered by most everyone he meets, how he’s somehow the only person able to build the railroad(s) fast and efficiently, and even wooing the literal PRESIDENT and becoming close friends with him-- all this despite his Bold and Brash personality. of course, there’s more to bohannon than these gary stu-symptoms, but i felt someone should bring it up, for the lulz

[tessatechaitea]

The Invisibles #3

This is exactly what taking drugs isn't.

Our world is composed of geniuses and not-geniuses. That's the kind of statement a not-genius makes because it's so fucking obvious. Do you ever have to say anything that pretty much says "All of the people on the world are either this or that"? Anyway, the point I was making wasn't that I'm one of the not-geniuses even though it's the point I accidentally made. The point was that in the non-genius camp, we have those who are smart enough to recognize genius and those who sit grumpily in their pee-puddles whining about how the high-falutin' elites are trying to make things different. Different, in this case, generally means better but if you're a non-genius who can't recognize geniuses, you're just mad that somebody said french fries might not be the most nutritional side dish (even though you could still live in a world where you acknowledge that french fries are both not even close to nutritional and also the best food on the planet. I mean, you have that choice. But I guess the pee-puddle you're sitting in (which is slowly leaking into your gun cabinet) has probably distracted you from rational thought). Again, that wasn't the point I was going to make (about the french fries!) but I have a problem staying on topic. Partly it's because I've never been able to stay on topic (you should read some of my college essays which I'm not going to release to the public so even though I suggested you should read them, you won't be reading them. Ever) and partly it's because of another reason that I forgot while typing the college paper parenthetical statement. My point might have been that you can recognize a genius because they can state plain what other people are obfuscating in their pronouncements. If you're not smart enough to recognize the genius, you might think the genius is spreading propaganda, mostly because you really want to believe the thing that isn't true because it shields you from guilt or blame or repercussions stemming from following your own selfish desires at any cost. The genius is reviled by people who can't recognize genius and viled by people who can. Or unviled? Previled? Maybe I should have just gone with lauded. You might think I'm saying all of this in regards to Grant Morrison but you'd be wrong. I'm actually saying this about A.R. Moxon, the author of The Revisionaries, whose Twitter handle is @JuliusGoat. He did not pay me to point out that he's a genius although he probably should have. I suppose it's not too late. Being that he's a genius and knows the smart thing to do, I'm sure he'll buy my RPG when he Googles his name and/or Twitter handle and finds me sticking my tongue way up his asshole in this post. I mean, I'm basically saying he's smarter than Grant Morrison! Getting back to Grant Morrison, is he really a genius? I'm not so sure. I think maybe he's just a libertine who did a lot of drugs and traveled to a lot of sort-of-spiritual places (not to be more spiritual but to get his hot genius take on spirituality in a place that smells of burning corpses and goat semen while he shits his guts out back at the hotel high on hashish). Sometimes when you've done acid and other illicit substances, you feel the need to think you've risen above the flock by doing a thing most people will never consider doing. Maybe Grant doesn't exactly feel this way but some of his stuff sometimes comes across as that. I mean, sure, if you've ever done LSD or the like, you've definitely experienced a sort of melding of yourself with the profound and the mundane and the timeless in a way that usually only schizophrenics experience. You have done something that has changed you from the person you were before. But thinking that it has somehow made you different or better than those who haven't done it just means that you've never talked to people who went to high school in the flyover states. I've known some really boring and backwards people who did a lot of acid simply because there wasn't anything else to do out in the cornfields. It really did surprise me, a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, to discover how prevalent psychoactive drugs were in the Midwest and Plains states. I thought that was just the hippies and children of hippies! What I didn't think, though, was that it made me a non-sheep (like the guy in my San Jose State creative writing class who once wrote a story about how he had broken from the flock because he dared to try LSD. The teacher loved his take and luckily for me, she was blind so she didn't see me rolling my eyes and making jerk-off motions from the back of the class. I mean, wow, dude. You dared to try LSD. I was probably on LSD while listening to the teacher read that stupid ass story!). Okay, maybe my whole take on "Grant Morrison thinks he's better than everybody else" stems from my envy of the idiot jock who wrote a stupid story that the teacher loved while she mostly just reacted to my stuff with "WTF? I guess I see how nostalgia can seem like a dream and the pop culture death of Superman can sometimes be more powerful than the death of a close family member but why did you choose to make none of this linear and what the hell do your Star Wars figures have to do with your future death? Also, the baseball game between Heaven and Hell where Heaven wins because Hitler snarls 'Jew' and then beans Jesus with the pitch to push in the last run was decent." Now that we've resolved some of my issues (I mean, maybe not "resolved" but at the very least "put out there in the open so you know where my biases are coming from"), let's get on with The Invisibles #3. When we last left our homophobic pouting white suburban "my mother doesn't hug me enough" anarchist protagonist, he was about to be hunted to death by a mystical group of human fox hunters in the secret London hidden beneath the one everybody thinks of as the "real London." I sort of hope the kid gets murdered. But then we won't get to see him learn his lesson which allows viewers to also maybe a learn a lesson. It's sometimes why you need characters like Mrs. Oleson from Little House on the Prairie. Although it was kind of enough to have Laura Ingalls who was a selfish devil child who was always learning lessons from humble and righteous Pa (who probably only killed one or two Native Americans, making him a stalwart saint of the frontier). I suppose the audience didn't need an over-the-top scurrilous villain like Mrs. Oleson. Although without Mrs. Oleson, how could the show have glorified the true saint of the frontier, Nells Oleson? The patience and kindness of that man were a testament to, um, patience and kindness!

I'm assuming Dane spends the next twenty pages snot-crying into a used coffee filter.

Dane continues to hang out with Tom of Bedlam because Dane can't survive on the street on his own and he knows it. He's not hard at all. He's a little wanna-be suburban gangster who read half of a book on anarchy and now thinks he's better than the slack-eyed populace going about their normal day-to-day bullshit. But he also thinks he still needs money and a place to live. He's not really great at the anarchy thing. But maybe if he listens to Tom, he'll learn a little bit about life and his heart will grow three sizes. Not because he suddenly cares more about everybody; it'll be a side-effect from learning the Dark Arts. Tom casts a spell so that Dane can look through the eyes of a pigeon as it flies about London. While Dane is seeing the hidden, creepy monsters lurking behind reality that pigeons can see (just as Pigeons can enter the afterlife in Moore's Jerusalem. I'm sure there are other urban horror stories that tell of the magic of pigeon vision. Did Lovecraft ever right any pigeon poems?), Tom tells Dane the secret history of cities. They're a virus that has propelled man from small villages which barely change across the centuries into huge population centers that use up the life force of the hosts as they build more and more and more, bigger and bigger, until, one day, they can build a rocket to propel the city virus into space and onto a new planet. Tom has seen, in visions, other planets affected by the virus, dead planets where the buildings stand as gravestones for the previous used-up races that contracted the virus. It's all very Lovecraftian. Not in the racist way but in the visions of other realities that change the nature of your own reality once you realize their existence. Hmm, that can actually kind of describe racism. I suppose Lovecraft's xenophobia was what made his stories about strange, unknown terrors so compelling. After teaching him loads of magic, Tom decides to teach Dane the most important lesson:

It's a really good lesson but also it's just Tom's attempt to get Jack Frost to appear.

Tom teaches Dane not to be a sheep or, in Tom's words, a robot. It's one of those weird lessons that everybody thinks they learn but nobody really learns it. Like when people read just that one Frost stanza on some poster in their English Lit class from "The Road Not Taken". Everybody gasps in air as the profundity of that single stanza (extracted from the context of the larger poem, much to the detriment of all of us) washes over them and they suddenly believe they've seen what life really is. Life isn't doing the thing you're supposed to do! Life is living to the fullest! Carpe diem! But the feeling of that moment erodes. It is eroded by the path we all take as we pretend we've taken the other path. We stop seeing that their weren't just two paths but many. And we get a job and we get a spouse and we get a house and we get a child and we occasionally think of Frost's single stanza and we decide, "You know what? I'm going to find the time to jump out of a plane!" or "I'm going to climb Everest!" or "I'm going to sleep with somebody of my same sex because I've always wanted to and hopefully my wife won't find out!" And sometimes we do and sometimes we don't; it doesn't really matter. Because the thing about taking the path less traveled is that it's still a path and it still represents the path you took and, you know what, there's that other path over there that I never got to experience and it's just shitting all over the path I'm currently on. Some people somehow block out the phantom possibilities and they're the lucky ones. The ones you can claim they have no regrets and maybe they're speaking truth when they say it. But mostly they just try not to think about it. Because once you start peeling at the wallpaper of your current life because the wallpaper, which others upon first glimpsing might think is beautiful and extraordinary, but which you've looked at every day for thirty years, you're done for. And you don't do it to find the beauty of what's underneath; you simply do it to see something different. And the new thing hasn't been scrutinized and deconstructed and critiqued; there's been no time to obsess over it. It's imaginary and if you happen to be like most people, imaginary must be better because why imagine the worst?! Okay, okay. I've just outed myself as not an anxious or depressive person! But I also don't go peeling at the wallpaper, so who knows? Maybe I do imagine the path less traveled was an intense tragedy?! The Invisibles #3 Rating: A. It's still pretty good and I'm still upset that I only have a few issues. Recently, I was thinking of writing an essay about how the worst thing about growing up is how you stop feeling things. Not that you stop feeling anything at all! Just that you stop feeling feelings that were once overwhelming and all-important. Like the crush you had in junior high. Can you imagine if, at forty, you still felt those feelings so intensely (among all the other ones you've felt across your life)? I understand that feelings must abate over time or we'd all be fucked up from not being able to get over our first crush while simultaneously not moving past the death of our closest grandparents. I get it. And some would say it's a mercy. But lately I've been wondering, "Is it?" Maybe I want to still feel those seemingly inexhaustible passions. I was reminded of wanting to discuss this because Tom says in this issue, "They made you forget how to feel, eh? Remember it now? Like everything new and the sun itself spinning behind your ribs, filling you up with silver. Like the way it was before they made robots of us, sentenced to a life behind bars we're trained to set in place ourselves." Now, that Tom speech was more about the whole "we're the shepherd of our own sheepdom" thing but in a robot and prison analogy. But the other thing about feelings made me remember how I was recently lamenting not feeling all of the things I once felt. Like the basket case from The Breakfast Club says, "When you grow up, your heart dies." And while you can argue whether that's true in the sense that you just stop caring about things, I think it's absolutely true in that it just slowly winds down and isn't capable of feeling how it used to. It's like a rechargeable battery that can no longer keep a charge. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, every single one of my friends, at one time or another, wound up weeping in my basement apartment about something in their lives (usually a woman!). I can't even fucking imagine that now. Maybe they'd be a bit upset or hurt or depressed but hardly disconsolate. I thought I would never get over the sadness at the loss of my grandfather or (and this might sound ridiculous to some but others will understand) the loss of my first cat as an adult, my precious little Judas. And while I obviously won't ever "get over" them (my eyes tear as I write this), I am no longer destroyed by the mere thought of their non-existence. A week after my Judas died, I saw Guardians of the Galaxy in the theater. Judas was always my Raccoon Boy so I almost broke down near the end when one of the characters put their arm around Rocket to console him. I made it out of the theater before absolutely losing it and snot-crying all the way back to the car. And so I can see how retaining that level of feeling over anything would be counterproductive to actually living, I absolutely miss it. I profoundly miss it. I want to be kicked in the stomach until I can't breathe by my feelings. I want this every day even if I know it's the cursed wish of a Monkey's Paw. How can anybody feel everything so palpably for their entire lives? And yet, how can we not?!

[marzgurl]

I had one YouTube comment come in that I was willing to read and respond to. I’m fine sharing it here, along with my response. This was the original comment. “MarzGurl, you really need to stand up for yourself better and make a video and talk about this whole thing. I'm not gonna come out and say it out right, because I'm sure you have certain words banned from comments. When you left Channel Awesome, you had no qualms about making videos on that topic in the past, and you even discussed the situation with JewWario. But now with these current accusations you're floundering around, you have hardly done anything other than tweet day and night about it. If you really believe what you are saying, then prove it. Your primary audience is not Twitter, it's YouTube, and if you are directly involved with this, your audience has a right to know. Have a discussion video on your channel about this movement and don't hold back on it. Don't censor comments, don't hide the like bar, and be open with your full side of the situation. But be truthful with your facts as well, because plenty of people are willing to obviously prove you wrong if they don't. It's simply too coincidental that there are plenty other channels making videos and proving innocence, when there is no one more prominent than you that could make a video in response and prove them right. It doesn't need to be constant back and forthing, you can do just one video to acknowledge your involvement and be done with it. Just stop pretending this isn't going on and that you're not losing subscribers by the minute.“

And the following was my response.

Although this is off-topic for the video, this message was polite enough all things considered, so I will dignify it with a response. (For what it's worth, thank you, Mort, for your two cents.) 

Here's why I don't make a video about it. 

 In general, I am not a drama channel. I had words to say about Channel Awesome because I was directly tied to them for nine years. That was a huge hunk of my adult life. And in regards to JewWario, there was no getting around the fact that my husband and I made a movie dedicated to him, only to turn around four years later and find out he was hurting people. There was no way I could NOT address that. That hurt like a bitch. Here I think I'm friends with a guy, and in the end he lied to me, to his wife, to other people he was cheating with, to all of his friends--hell, his wife didn't even know that Channel Awesome had fired him. I was way too personally involved, and that NEEDED to be addressed, especially because I thought I was proud of our movie we made. Now I hate it. I hate that we put so much time and effort into something, and involved all of these other people who thought THEY were doing the right thing, working on something THEY could be proud of. And in the end, it didn't mean anything. It hurts, man. Hurts like hell. 

I don't tweet day and night about this. This isn't my life. Just because you can read a bunch of tweets really fast doesn't mean that it's all I think about. You just consume a bunch of it and think that's what life is. It's everybody else bringing it to my doorstep night and day, yourself included, that's what the reality is. My channel is not a place where I want Vic to take up residency. All those other channels? They accuse me of standing alongside victims for "clout" or to "give my channel attention" or whatever, never mind the fact that I haven't made any Vic content on my channel. Meanwhile, those other YouTubers are actively making a ton of money on the drama, and making entirely new videos every time I or someone else involved breathes. In personal opinion, that's pretty scummy, and I'm not out here trying to scrape cash from a dumpster fire. These are people's lives, Vic's included. I don't want YouTube attention OR money based on the lives of victims OR Vic. That doesn't seem to stop anybody else from doing it. 

My Twitter audience and my YouTube audience are also very similar in numbers. People come to me on Twitter daily. YouTube is slow for me. And that's what I'm comfortable with. I have a life outside of YouTube, and nothing I do is with any explicit intention of doing it for more views. YOU might spend more time on YouTube. I do not. I could be wrong, but I would expect that you haven't spent much time with me or my content to understand that I have decided the pace in which I interact with each social media platform. Twitter is absolutely where I spend more time and where I talk to and reach more people. And I'm happy that way. 

In the beginning, there were a handful of people trying to have a more rational discussion about this, not a screaming, angry rage-filled discussion. People who stood with victims. And every single one of those videos, even from a girl very calmly and rationally talking from the experience of having studied law, got shouted down in her comments and dislike-bombed. Anyone who has dared say anything in support of victims rather than Vic may as well have not even bothered, because the conspiracy theory channels out there have all radicalized tens of thousands of viewers who are now out there on a rampage and flooding every inch of every social media and jumping down everyone's throat. I can't say that people standing with #KickVic have not done similar things at all, which of course is reprehensible. But to say that it is equal in any way, shape, or form would be SEVERELY misleading. On the daily, I'm getting death threats or people wishing that I WOULD die, and I haven't even made a video. It would be 100x worse if I actually did. 

Mind you, there is absolutely a part of me that would LOVE to talk about this, to pinpoint every step of the last two and a half months of this dumpster fire, and even to address how I have been an asshole in the distant past, too. But everything has shown me that it wouldn't matter at all, and that people wouldn't actually watch. They'd just stick to their biases and comment- and downvote-bomb. 

HOWEVER, one day... MAYBE one day I would consider doing it. But here's what would have to happen. 

This whole thing has to be over. And I mean REALLY over. Like, this whole court stuff that people say is going to happen? It has to actually happen. And it has to go all the way through, and it has to wrap up and end. Or any discussion of it happening has to finally drop. There has to be some indication that we are on the "other side" of this thing, and I don't know what that would be or when that would be. Because to make a video in the middle of it would just make MORE stuff happen that doesn't need to happen. I acknowledge my part in partially igniting a fire. But I'm not out here trying to make a video which amounts to throwing gasoline on that fire. Leave that to the conspiracy theorist channels. They're doing a fine enough job of that all on their own. 

Those 300-some-odd people who unsubscribed? Cool. Let them. Out of 18,000, I'm completely content with that. If that was the ONLY number of people who can't understand that the victims should be at the very least listened to and that the conspiracy theorists are out for clicks and money and don't really care about Vic or the situation at all and just want to stick it to the NPC SJWs or whatever it is they're terrified of, then I'm absolutely fine with where I'm at. All the other tens of thousands of people currently at my doorstep? You weren't watching me in the first place, and you were never going to. You were never going to subscribe to me, and I wasn't out to get your subs. In reality? Little to nothing in my life has changed. I'm gonna just keep going about my normal routine. I'd suggest you and others do the same, but I'm not so naive as to think you'll do me (or yourselves) that courtesy.

Anyway. That's where I'm at on the subject of making a video on the topic. In summary, for the time being, that is a staunch NO, unless there is VERY CLEARLY a light at the end of the tunnel in all of this.

Have a good day.

[qwertsypage]

Great Content from JSConf Budapest 2019

JSConf Budapest is a JSConf family member 2-day non-profit community conference about JavaScript in the beautiful Budapest, Hungary. RisingStack participated in the conf for several years as well as we did this September.

In 2019 we delivered a workshop called "High-Performance Microservices with GraphQL and Apollo" as our contribution to the event.

Now I'm happy to share the news with you that all conference talks are available online!

Top Picks by the Community:

Essential JavaScript debugging tools for the modern detective by Rebecca Hill

Debugging JavaScript can drive developers crazy. It’s not surprising when so many us stick to the trusty console.log - but there are better ways. From tracking down a critical issue in production, to simply struggling to add a new feature and not realising you’ve misread some documentation - debugging skills are used every day but it's difficult to take the time to improve those skills when the pressure is on.

This talk will show you some really handy techniques that will level up your skills of deductive reasoning.

Take on me, web browsers! by Eva Ferreira

In 1985 pop music was mesmerized by the a-ha “Take on me” music video. It’s been almost 35 years since then, the world needs new catchy tunes with impressive video animations… on the web.

In this talk we will explore the bewitching ways we can modify web videos and create immersive experiences worthy of the ‘80s using JavaScript and CSS. Let us swim in the why-not possibility of Chroma key, Rotoscoping and more video animation techniques on the web platform!

API Modernization: Building Bridges As You Cross Them by Shelley Vohr

In an ecosystem undergoing constant flux, what does it mean for an API to be modern?In this talk, I'll discuss the work that's taken place over the last year to deliver modern JavaScript APIs to developers in the Electron project, and the obstacles we encountered along the way.

You'll come away with a deeper understanding of how open source projects can more effectively balance innovation with maintenance, as well as perspectives on how to appropriately consider end-users and their needs when modernization affects the code they use.

Check all JSConf videos below:

Accessibility vs latest Web APIs. Can’t we just get along? by Mauricio Palma

Unfortunately, we still treat accessibility in the same way we deal with front-end development for older browsers, something to be done at the end. What if I tell you that we can use the latest Web APIs and still offer an inclusive and accessible experience.

In this talk, you'll learn how to combine Web APIs such as Speech Recognition and Geolocation, with performant Javascript techniques to create empathic user interfaces.

Testing in production: Ideas, experiences, limits, roadblocks by Jorge Marin

Are you afraid of testing in production? Do you test in production? Do you use real data?

By definition testing in production is hard. This talk puts together my experience testing in production a large scale system that affects millions of users. Experience, ideas, limits, roadblocks, tips and more.

Weaving the web - Programming textile-based interactions by Charlie Gerard

What if you could interact with interfaces and devices using your clothes? When we think about wearable garments, we usually think of the technology as an output. We might think of LED dresses or designer-made outfits that react to the environment but what if instead, we used this technology as an input, as a way to interact with other things.

This talk walks you through the process of making interactive clothing using conductive textile. Also Charlie shows what it can do and talks about the possibilities and limits of such technology.

Composing music with composed functions by Adam Giese

Functional programming can be difficult to learn. Although there are many practical lessons, they are often hidden through academic lingo and dry examples. What if these basics could be livened up and taught through the lens of music?

Together, we will go over some of the basics of functional programming including functional array manipulation, closure, immutability, and composing functions. Adam also shows how they can be applied to the creation of music and musical instruments using the web audio API.

How not to read the room: Creating socially awkward wearables by Stephanie Nemeth

I’m introvert. This can be bit unfortunate, when you are a person that enjoys spending a lot of their free time creating things bedazzled with LEDs… only to rarely wear them out in public. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In an effort to actually share my weird and wonderful creations with others, I decided create a wearable project that would force me to be sociable in order for it to reveal its magic.

In this talk, Stephanie shares how she used machine learning with javascript and tiny computers to make “fashion” that is responsive to the people around you and the attention you are (or aren’t) receiving.

Taming Git-osaurus Using Mystical Trees by Damini Satya Kammakomati

Raise your hands if you all start to panic when you mess up your local git workflow, trying frantically to save your work and eventually giving in to the complications thereby deleting your repository. Well, Git isn’t the terrible dinosaur you think it is, on the contrary, the messier it becomes, the more interesting it gets.

This session aims to make friends with Git and to express the hidden gems in the mysterious git land which will definitely help you to become more productive and look cool in front of your peers struggling with a git-gone-wild.

Web Norms of the World: An exploration of the internet beyond the West by Kat Kitay

Flat, muted minimalism, vast fields of whitespace, millennial pink landing pages: the internet today, amirite? In this talk, we'll take stock of these biases and take a culturally relativistic look at the internet outside of our comfort zone. We'll explore questions like: Why are Japanese websites so information-dense? How does a script like Arabic, read right to left, affect web design? What languages do (or can) programmers across the world use?

The viewers of this talk will walk away with a fresh perspective and ideas for improving our web and making technology that's more inclusive of a global audience.

Legendary Lambdas by Tejas Kumar

The Serverless paradigm is one that is slowly taking over the internet. This talk dives deep into Serverless, particularly Serverless Lambda Functions, and their benefits and drawbacks to web applications. We will also discuss how they can benefit business, being extremely cheap to implement and maintain.

As a practical, technical case study, we will examine serverless performance across a number of popular front-end UI frameworks and measure various metrics relevant to a serverless application.

Mastering UIs with Finite State Machines by Rubén Sospedra

Did you ever feel like monkey patching your UI component? Adding too many if/else, handling a lot of complexity or hacking several non-desired side effects. Did you ever have a problem with double-clicking an async button? Fetching multiple times the same resource in a row? Did you have problems translating UX interfaces and mock-ups into your applications scenes?

All this kind of problems can be properly fixed by applying a different point of view. An architecture based upon Mealy state machines. Also known as finite state machines or automatas. These machines are deterministic, pure and idempotents. Opening a new set of possibilities from predictable components to autogenerated tests.

Deciphering Brainwaves with the Web Audio API by Braden Moore

Early last year, my colleagues and I did something amazing — using only JavaScript, the browser, and the Web Audio API, we were able to decipher brainwaves. It sounds sensational, but it’s (mostly) true. This is a story about how we converted brainwaves into audio signals — and then back again — to solve the problem of epilepsy diagnosis on the web.

In this talk, you’ll get to see a new browser API being used in a novel and unprecedented way, combined with world-leading innovations in the field of epilepsy diagnosis. You’ll learn about the challenges of real-time brainwave filtering and how we solved them. As you’ll see, the technologies we use each day can sometimes be applied in unexpected ways.

A privacy first period tracker? Is it even possible? by Benedicte Raae

Do I want to track my cycles? Yes. Do I want the tracker to push my data to a third party? Hell NO! Do I want the data lying around unencrypted in a database somewhere? Not really. Do I want backup and access from multiple devices? Kinda.. What would I need to learn and is it even possible?

Learn how Benedicte created a secure and private web-based period tracker.

StrangerDanger: Finding Security Vulnerabilities Before They Find You! by Liran Tal

Open source modules on the NPM ecosystem are undoubtedly awesome. However, they also represent an undeniable and massive risk. You’re introducing someone else’s code into your system, often with little or no scrutiny. The wrong package can introduce severe vulnerabilities into your application, exposing your application and your user's data.

This talk will use a sample application, Goof, which uses various vulnerable dependencies, which we will exploit as an attacker would. For each issue, we'll explain why it happened, show its impact, and – most importantly – see how to avoid or fix it.

Testing presentation components visually by Balázs Korossy-Khayll

You have written all the unit tests, integration and e2e tests imaginable to your project, your code coverage is in the skies, you are sure that everything is in working order, your application is ready to ship. Or is it? Frontend developers often face the challenge that even a plethora of tests don’t cover visual differences, and while the functionality might be working and protected by tests, we don’t know much about the layout’s and visual styles’ correctness.

Writing unit tests or manual testing for visual styles is tiresome and error-prone, so at BlackRock we came up with a better solution. Using Storybook we have developed a way of comparing visual differences of the rendered images of our presentational components.

Great Content from JSConf Budapest 2019 published first on https://koresolpage.tumblr.com/