#but also just a general PSA about existing on the internet I guess

[iamthecomet]

I can say I'm not the type to send hate. However sometimes I get mean or sarcastic and people miss the joke. I've been blocked for shipping the characters that I ship and writing the tropes that I do. Which is just annoying because the very same people who block me are the ones talking about my stuff behind my back 😅🤣

Being on the internet is really hard sometimes. What I try to tell myself when I realize someone has blocked me, is that, they are allowed to curate their own internet experience. Not everyone is going to like what I do, or what I say, or how I write what i write. That's ok. I cannot make everyone happy. I shouldn't try. I get to be me, they get to be them, if we can't meet in the middle then that's ok. We don't have to. It takes all kinds to make the world work. What ISN'T cool is blocking someone and then bitching about them where they could still potentially see it. The internet really is like high school sometimes and I'm sorry that people are talking about your work like that behind your back in a way that means you know it's happening. I can't tell you that people shouldn't talk about you--people are people man and that's what they do. Should they be more discreet about it? yes. Should they try not be total assholes? Absolutely. People forget sometimes that even people who make things we don't like are still people. I absolutely get you about the mean/sarcasm bit too. I'm from the North Eastern USA, which is a place where people are known for being sort of cold, and unwelcoming, and sarcastic. It isn't just a stereotype (at least not in my irl community). So, online, I have to work really hard to remember tone tags, or to only talk in that sort of obnoxious, sarcasm, sort-of-mean way to people who know me well enough to know I don't mean it negatively. But that means that when I started talking to people on the internet I agonized about EVERYTHING I said, because I didn't want to accidentally make a joke that didn't land. It's hard to read tone on the internet, and not everyone is equipped with the same social skills or understands the same cues. It feels awful to be misunderstood--and to accidentally hurt someone when you were absolutely not intentionally doing it. And, on the other hand, it doesn't feel great to feel like you're masking who you are to be accepted. There's a middle ground...it took me a long time to find it. We have to meet people where they are, where ever it is. And be good to each other. Like, yes it's fine to block someone if they create content that you are upset by, but there's a respectful way to do that (which involves not being mean about it, especially where the person might see it). Ship and Let Ship. Kink and Let Kink. Don't like; Don't read. You know, all those things. I'm sorry that it's been hard for you, just know I get it. But also, working on not dwelling on what other people like or dislike about you will make your life (on the internet and in real life) so much less stressful. It's hard, and some days it's impossible, but holy fuck is it worth it.

[smp-boundaries]

List of Boundaries: CaptainSparklez

Violence in fanworks: In one of his subreddit videos, Jordan reacts positively to a bloody drawing of him being accidentally stabbed by Tubbo, showing that at least in fanart, he is okay with violence and death.

Fanfiction: Jordan has done two videos where he read fanfiction, one of which was an x reader, and reacted positively both times. This shows that he is okay with fanfiction and the x reader did not appear to put him off, as he specifically chose it for a Valentine’s Day video.

Shipping: There is no distinct evidence for Jordan being for or against shipping as a whole. He seems comfortable with being shipped with Tom Cassell (Syndicate) as evidenced by various videos where they joke about kissing and being shipped together. On the other hand, in the third MC Ultimate, when AntVenom made a joking comment about SparkAnt (their ship name) being revived after they both respawned, Jordan replied with distaste, implying that he doesn’t like being shipped with AntVenom. He has also spoken on multiple occasions against being shipped with Lady Ianite (from the Mianite series), and shows discomfort when looking at romantic fanart of them.

AUs where Jordan is Tubbo’s and/or Crumb’s father: Jordan has reacted positively to fanart of Tubbo and Crumb as his children and is accepting of the AU. However, he seems to be unaware that it is an AU and not canon on the Dream SMP, therefore this cannot be used as evidence for his stance on AUs in general.

General PSA: Jordan does not like people prying into his personal life, which includes his IRL friends and relationship status. He doesn’t disclose this information and people should respect this about him.

Evidence: Jordan reacting to violent fanart, CaptainSparklez reads a CaptainSparklez fanfiction, Jordan reads an x reader, Jordan, Tom, and Mini Ladd joking about shipping, Jordan reacting negatively to the idea of SparkAnt (Jordan/Anteler), Jordan reacting negatively to Sparkanite, Jordan talking about Tubbo and Crumb being his children, Jordan talking about how it’s weird when people ask about his IRL relationships

clip transcripts below cut

reacting to violent fanart Jordan: (reading reddit post) uh, “blood. It was a mistake.” (opens post, revealing Among Us fanart) ah, no, dude.. (playing it up for the bit) ah no, back to back! I can’t believe I have to relive this moment again and again! I don’t think I - it’s - it’s - y’know, I don’t think I ever betrayed him, but I got betrayed in return. It was hard.

Jordan, Tom, and Mini Ladd joke about shipping Tom: (hugging Jordan and Mini Ladd) all in - all in, all in, all in - this feels good. hey, no kissing tonight, alright? Jordan: really? Tom: no kiss - (Mini Ladd kisses his cheek) okay. (looks at Jordan, points to cheek expectantly) Jordan: (kisses Tom’s cheek) Tom: (laughs) oh yeah!

reacting negatively to the idea of SparkAnt (Jordan/Anteler) Anteler: this is team Sparkant, being revived Jordan: no, not that - not that word.

reacting negatively to Sparkanite Jordan: alright people do this weird shipping thing with me, and Ianite, and I realize that it kinda stems from season two but let’s just - I feel like we need to keep it as a platonic relationship between a follower and their god, alright? Ianite is m’lady, my god, it doesn’t have to become like a romantic thing. Alright? alright. cool.

about Tubbo and Crumb being his children Jordan: (reading reddit post) “the Tubbo origin story is growing.” (opens post, revealing fanart) Is that Tubbo jumping out of the ____ to catch a bee? and then Crumb saying “there can be only one?” There actually - I’ve seen things on twitter though - Inga(?), who - who does lots of art and stuff and has done some of the MCC thumbnails, like, did a drawing where I was Tubbo’s dad in the Dream SMP server and I was like “is this a thing that’s actually going on?” I know nothing, I’m confused. But I guess I’m like - I’m Tubbo’s dad. on the server. I have no - I geniunely don’t know, but that’s what I’ve heard. And I’m like “oh, okay.” I guess - y’know. I did say I wasn’t having kids but there wasn’t anything about a kid that already has been had. So I guess it works. It doesn’t - yeah - doesn’t mess with my take. But also we have Crumb now. (laughs) “There can be only one.” But it’s been established that I’m his dad I guess, so - so, there has to be two. It’s already been said and done.

talking about it being weird when people ask about his IRL relationships Jordan: (reading reddit post) “Expose yourself, Jardoon. Did you break quarantine for a video?” (opens post, revealing screenshot of Youtube comments under his video) I can’t - I can’t, like, it’s so - it’s so weird.. to me, that every comment is just - who filmed the video - does any other channel get that? It’s bizzare - like I - I feel like other channels just have people film their videos and it’s - the entirety of the comments section isn’t, “who filmed the video,” it’s - it’s about the video content itself. I just - I mean, I don’t know for sure. Maybe that is a thing on other channels. But - also … and also, I do know other people who live in the general LA area. I’m not just completely solo without the ability to reach out to a single person. I know as much as I stay at home and am confined, I do know other people. Weird flex, I know. “Woah, this guy, look at him out here - knows other people? Who exist? Not just on the internet? Oh ho, mister fancy out here dude, okay. He’s got real life acquaintances and all that. Alright, way to flex on us all!” But I - oh my god dude, it’s so weird. And I made this comparison in my stream a couple days ago, that it’s like my mom when she’s asking about plans and what I’m doing, and I’ll be like, “oh, I’m going to such-and-such with friends,” …. she’ll be like “oh, what’s their name?” And I just think - I mean it’s - you’re not gonna meet them. Are you gonna look up their - like are you gonna look their name plus my name online to try to figure out who they are? I’m confused in that regard. It’s just a person who I know. And - and then, anyway, it’s just - you guys are my mom. (laughs) So that’s where we are with this.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

MBTI, Mental Health, and Uncertainty

This is a long post but I think it might be one of my most important ones, and I hope you can take the time to read it.

In light of a couple recent questions I want to address mental health in a different way than in the PSA post. I do still stand by that post! But it was intended to be more along the lines of providing succinct encouragement with clear steps, rather than a means of providing deeper context.

MBTI is an unreliable way (at best) to deal with mental health. It was not designed for it. It has a few aspects that are useful in a limited way, which is honestly how I feel about MBTI at large - it is one tool in a very large toolbox, and it’s not necessarily the best one at that, and plenty of people get along fine without using it at all. (in fact if you’re not up to reading the rest of this post consider this paragraph my main point and the rest all elaboration on that theme).

On a larger scale, a lot of Tumblr advice is a terrible way to deal with mental health. I recognize I’m offering advice here on Tumblr but in general my statement re: all things mental health is that stigma, accessibility, and poor clinicians are all serious barriers to good mental health information and treatment, but that doesn’t mean that the more accessible options of “randoms on the internet” or “psychological theories with a strong internet presence” are a viable substitute.

I think a personal example may be helpful here, so: I have some very severe food allergies. I’ve had them my whole life. And I do fully believe that they’ve shaped aspects of my personality. In some ways, they’ve made me more cautious and desiring of control over my environment. They’ve pushed me to explore things like cooking. They’ve required me to become someone who plans ahead, who advocates for herself, and who’s comfortable saying a firm “no” to intended hospitality. They’ve given me some areas of anxiety. They’ve made me a faster reader. They’ve arguably contributed to my sense of humor.

If I could push a button and get rid of my allergies, I would, without question, because they are often a source of stress and inconvenience. But they did contribute to me as a person, and had I grown up and developed without them, I would probably be different in some ways - and I have no idea how exactly I’d be different. Would I be as fast a reader or as detail-oriented if I didn’t have to read ingredients lists at a glance? Maybe - I was a bookish kid. Would I be as responsible and assertive? Possibly - I’m an oldest child, I was always on the stubborn and independent side. But really, who knows?

I went to a doctor when I was in grad school for a check-up and a top-up of my epi-pen prescription. I said I hadn’t had to use the epi-pen in years. He mentioned that he had a friend with the same allergy who had a reaction once every year or so because he was a little scattered and a huge socializer and people-pleaser, and so he often had reactions to baked goods around the holidays - baked goods that I would unequivocally politely turn down. Same condition. Wildly different responses.

Mental illnesses or conditions are highly analogous to this experience - if they’re debilitating and unpleasant, even if they’ve caused you to develop in positive ways, you’ll be glad for those benefits but you may wish you could flip a switch and get rid of them.

But other conditions might be so central to your identity that you genuinely would not be you without them, and the issues that arise are because your identity is not well-accommodated in your environment

And while I can speculate on which sorts of conditions fall into which bucket (most people with depression would put it in the first; autism, for many autistic people, is in the second; this is a huge topic I can’t do justice here but you can even see this categorization in my language). But in the end, it’s a case-by-case choice dependent on the person with that condition. For more on the nature of ‘abnormal’ conditions and self-conception I highly recommend the Oliver Sacks essay “Witty Ticcy Ray” specifically, and his essay collections The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. But if you can’t get to those my point is that people’s relationships with things that affect their cognition are complex and deeply personal.

So coming back to MBTI. Is MBTI the reason why I am vigilant and others with allergies are less so? Well, we don’t entirely know where type comes from, but maybe. Maybe it’s my upbringing, maybe it’s my inherent self, maybe it’s something else. We don’t know. I don’t know.

With mental illnesses, there’s a second factor. Allergic reactions are physiological and predictable- doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, if you eat the thing you can’t eat, your body will initiate the immune response. But when your illness or condition also affects your cognition, MBTI isn’t just a reason for how you respond to the condition. Your type, or at least your personality that you attempt to categorize into a type, is both influenced by and feeds into the outward signs of said condition. The outward signs of mental illnesses are themselves diverse! The PHQ-9 survey, a very common depression screening tool, doesn’t require that you display every single possible symptom - just a certain amount of them together (and even then it’s just a starting point for an individual follow-up. So we don’t know what’s ‘you’ and what’s the condition and what’s the combination thereof and even if you and the effects of said condition can really be seen as separate entities.

What this means practically is that figuring out how personality type, in any system, impacts mental health is an astronomically hard task, because both type and mental illness are best described as collections of a sufficient number of coexisting patterns of thought and behavior, not an absolute yes/no. If you’re trying to figure out yourself, again, MBTI is one of many tools and should not be your only point of reference - it’s a good starting point but at some point you’re going to have to leave it and jump into the vast unknown of what the self truly is (I feel very cheesy typing this but funnily enough I think Jung would back me up here). But only you can really do that. I certainly can’t do it for you.

Something that I think a lot of people forget is the origin of MBTI. MBTI was developed using Jung’s idea of cognitive functions as a starting point, and the catalyst was Myers and Briggs (her mother) noticing that Myers’s husband (an ISTJ) was really different from them (both high Ne users) in terms of personality. They took a theory because it matched what they observed in real life. I am unsurprisingly in favor of this. You want to know how people act? Interact with them! You can sum up larger trends in a theory, but it will always be a simplification of the infinitely complex truth. You can’t know how MBTI will make any one person act with any certainty - you can only guess.

Similarly, things like loops and grips are a bit of a one-way street. MBTI theorists observed that certain patterns of stress behavior tended to crop up more frequently in individuals of the same type and came up with names for them and a theory to describe why they may occur. This does not mean that the same behaviors cannot exist in people of other types. This does not guarantee that a person of a certain type and under stress will fall into a loop, a grip, or really do any specific action at all. As I have said many times and will say again, mental illness and stress have real, measurable neurochemical effects and people will ‘self-medicate’ (eg: seeking endorphin-releasing activities when unhappy), and type doesn’t enter into it (which is also why I think the advice to look at your stress behavior is not particularly good).

Finally, even if you are in a loop or grip, if you’re having a difficult time, a decent therapist will probably give you advice that isn’t out of line with MBTI recommendations, because there’s more than one way to come to the same conclusion! A lot of advice is broadly applicable - start with small steps and be gentle with yourself, for example. Play to your strengths - and you don’t need to know MBTI to know what you’re good at. You need to have a general sense of who you are and MBTI is a way to categorize who you are, not a way to do that initial self-discovery.

In conclusion: I know I sound like a broken record, but if you’re interested in human behavior at large please, please treat MBTI as one of many aspects of it. If you have the opportunity to take a class or do some serious reading about neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, or basic statistics I recommend it, and whether or not you can do those things, interact with people! Sitting behind a computer screen theorizing how an archetype that must necessarily describe literally hundreds of millions of people is not really a helpful exercise! “Go outside” isn’t a threat to be read in the tone of ‘get off my lawn’; it might be said in a mildly exasperated way but it is meant as an invitation to a vast resource that you are not using to its fullest.

[aseriesofunfortunatejan]

Motherf*cking PSA about sharing art

This will sound like a rant at first but it’s actually a PSA.

This is not about artists sharing their own art - this is about everyone else. These times around, I have been constantly getting angry because people would keep on sharing art without crediting the artist. I recently joined a Danganronpa Facebook group and people are posting drawing after drawing, extremely rarely giving credit (though a bunch of people have started putting a link, either because I raised awareness or because they’re scared of the mean Jan lady). And get this: most people who do that just don’t know that they should credit the artist. They don’t think about it, because they’re not an artist themselves and they don’t realise what it implies... So you just tell them, they’re sorry, they don’t know the artist for this one, and they’ll try to pay attention next time. That’s called being a decent person. But that’s not all there is; I have stumbled upon people who refused to give credit. Some started to insult me because I dared to “make them look bad by asking for the artist” (keep in mind that since I don’t know who I’m talking to, I’m always being very careful and polite when I do so), some actually stated that they were not sharing the artist on purpose and they would refuse to ever do it. Well let me tell you, kiddo, you’re not some “cool troll on the internet”. You’re a disrespectful piece of sh*t. Disrespectful of someone’s work that you’re also stating that you like. You’re not going to have a lot of friends in life if you take things for granted. So, assuming you’re decent enough to understand, let me explain to you, person who likes to share art that is not theirs (which can be amazing if you do it right), the concept of crediting the artist.

1- Why it is important to credit the artist There is one thing I would like you to know: when you share a piece of art or fanart, you’re not sharing a “picture”. You’re sharing a drawing and someone’s time and work.

It’s not something that just exists and you can use however you want. It’s something a particular person created with their own skills and that sometimes took hours or days. In a piece of art, the artist has put their own skill and style that give it the amazing vibe that you love, oh so much. When someone draws something it’s not just a present to the world. It’s something they made for themselves (or the person who asked/payed them to) and were nice enough to share with the community. Artists. Need. Feedback. I want it to be clear that a drawing is not just something that started existing out of nowhere. It’s directly linked to the person who made it. And the artist absolutely needs to know if people like their drawing, or their art in general. They need for their profile to be seen by everyone so that they can receive good and interesting critics. Artists are people. They are not just something that makes good things. They are people with feelings and if their art doesn’t get feedback well guess what? They’ll stop making it. You won’t get any other of their drawings. Which is a shame because tons of people were sharing their piece uncredited, saying they loved it, on places they don’t know about. Plus, when you share a piece of art with credit, it’s a way to help them out! This kind of sharing is great because more people will see the good art and want to check the artist out, thus giving them more well deserved fans. And you, yourself, by knowing the artist who drew that one drawing you’re fond of, will have the opportunity to see more of their art, that you will probably love too.

2- How does one credit correctly

The best way is to directly share from the source. Reblog, retweet, share the stuff from where it was posted. But if you’re doing it on another website, well, simply enough, give a link to the original piece, by the original poster. If the only post or website you knew about was deleted, you can at least give their username (or usernames), so that people know who it was made by (in case they stumble into their new page!). If their name is written directly on the drawing (or I’ve seen people share screenshots of posts), it’s still better to give a link, but in case you reeeaally can’t find it, it’s okay as long as the writing is clear and readable (you know, if the quality is low and the drawing is all small, you can’t be able to read the name properly). This also means that if the name is written in Japanese and you’re sharing it on a group/website that speaks another language... People won’t be able to search for the artist. If on some drawing or screenshot there’s written 夜神 月 in the corner, I won’t be able to copy-paste it like text (because... it’s on a drawing or screenshot...) nor read it.

3- Common errors to avoid Simply enough, there is some stuff to remember. • Pinterest is NEVER proper credit. Artists don’t post their drawings on pinterest, it’s a website made to share “pictures” from other websites and the worst place for someone like me who wants to scream at the view of uncredited art. • All the booru (danbooru, gelbooru...) websites and zerochan are not proper credit either, because the artists don’t post their art on there, it’s being shared there by other people. Well, it’s at least better because it always leaves the artist’s name somewhere: but since it’s there, you yourself can see it and share it (or at best find their website and share it), because it’s better credit for obvious reasons. • If you see that the page/blog where you found drawing has no other art or drawings with a clearly different style, you can guess that they’re not the original poster. They’re sharing art that is not theirs. Search for credit in their descriptions or for something to punch them with. • Don’t just save drawings... Except for when you do it from some websites (if I remember well danbooru does it right, wouldn’t bet my life on it though) the name of the artist will not be in the file’s name and will be lost forever. If you really want to save a drawing, save it with the artist’s name! Name the file “xxx by [artist]”, this way you’ll be able to find them again or simply credit them if you post the drawing somewhere else. If you’re on your phone, maybe take a screenshot so that you can see the name of the poster too? But in general, I would say, don’t save drawings. Create an account on the website where you found the art and from there like it, or share it. • Instead of searching for art of your favourite characters on Google, do it on a website like deviantArt, tumblr, pixiv or something like that! This way you’ll make sure that you don’t only have Pinterest as a source.

4- What to do if you already have the picture saved and don’t remember the artist • Search for them, obviously. You can use Google Image Reverse Search but it’s not very accurate, especially because if it’s old or made by a famous artist on pixiv, you’ll only find Pinterest links. Recently someone from the same group I was talking about earlier introduced me to this amazing website : SauceNAO. It works almost everytime, you put the picture you saved (in “advanced options” you can put a link) in, and it’ll give you the “best” websites where it found it, the first usually being the one where it was posted. (It also finds it on danbooru pretty often, we’ve talked about that one already) • If you really can’t find them, well... you don’t have to share it. Remember that. You don’t have to post the drawing on that one facebook group or your twitter or I don’t know, you won’t die. Sharing art without giving the artist is disrespectful, period. Hardwork and someone’s creations are things you need to respect and not share around like it’s nothing. You’ll only encourage other people who do it too. If you really really reeeeaaaalllyyy want to share this drawing because it just works too well in a certain situation, at least make it clear that you are not the artist, you don’t know who they are and you are currently searching for them. This way, if someone knows them, they’ll tell you - and people will think of searching for it instead of taking the “picture”‘s existence for granted. And it’s at least the tiniest bit more respectful.

5- Additional info

Right now I only talked about drawings and fanart because it’s what I know the most about, but this also applies for videos, fictions, fanfictions etc. This applies to anything that was created by a particular person and required work, and/or can be considered as art. Just think about this example: Imagine if you'd written an amazing essay and your teacher found it super interesting, so they gave you your good grade but also copied the essay and shared it on his own websites, not saying that you were the one who’d written it. The essay would become famous and no one would ever know YOU wrote it. This is how it feels to have your art shared without credit. You might not even know it.

I think that’s it, and I hope it’s clear. If you’re an artist yourself or love art or are in fandom in general, please share this. Feel free to add something if you think I forgot an element! And if you have some questions, my ask box is open. I think it’s really important that everyone is aware of this and understands it. I decided to make this post because after asking 5 people to give credit to the artists who drew the 12 random different drawings they’d shared of Komaeda each (a boy’s birthday is tough), I saw that one video by Mo Selim being shared on ANOTHER group yet again and had to give credit myself yet again... And I’m just angry that people either don’t know or don’t care.

You need to know. You need to be careful. Thanks in advance for all the amazing artists you’ll give more representation to by sharing their art with credit!

[theconservativebrief]

In early July, a video game writer named Jessica Price embarked on a lengthy Twitter thread about the storytelling differences between games meant to be played as single-player experiences and games meant to be played by lots and lots of people at once, like Guild Wars 2, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Price was a writer for.

Price’s thread received a perhaps too-haughty response from gaming YouTuber Deroir, who disagreed with some of what Price had to say. Price — who is, after all, a woman on the internet and thus is subject to a stunning amount of social media pushback and condescension — put Deroir on blast, first tweeting: “Today in being a female game dev: ‘Allow me–a person who does not work with you–explain to you how you do your job,’” and later following up with: “like, the next rando asshat who attempts to explain the concept of branching dialogue to me–as if, you know, having worked in game narrative for a fucking DECADE, I have never heard of it–is getting instablocked. PSA.”

The Guild Wars 2 community erupted in outrage at Price, who had either stuck up for herself against the endless onslaught of needling criticism that comes with being a woman online or had abused a position of authority to call a popular member of the gaming community an asshat by implication. (Price’s tweet didn’t directly call Deroir an asshat, but it was hard to miss her meaning.)

A few days later, ArenaNet, the company that makes Guild Wars 2, fired Price and her co-worker Peter Fries, who had defended Price in several Twitter threads. Price told Polygon that she was not given a chance to explain herself, or to apologize. She was simply fired, as was Fries.

The broad outlines of the controversy drew comparisons to Gamergate, the controversial movement that began in 2014 and involved a bunch of gamer and alt-right trolls using the cover of concern for ethics in video gaming as an excuse to harass women in the industry and to claim that calls for better representation and diversity within gaming were destroying video games.

Was Price’s firing a result of Gamergate’s actions? Not directly, no. Deroir was not a Gamergate adherent, and he wasn’t agitating for Price to be removed. Plus, plenty of people who found Price to be in the wrong weren’t Gamergaters.

But the answer to that question also has to be yes, because of how thoroughly the matter was discussed in Gamergate’s favored corners of the internet, which mostly jumped to Deroir’s defense, and because of how completely Gamergate changed the way games are talked about online and how women in the industry have to think about what might happen to them, something Price touches on in her Polygon interview.

In the years since 2014, Gamergate has metastasized and evolved into what feels like the entire alt-right movement, to the degree that many of the names boosted by the hyped-up controversy, names like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, saw their stars only rise when they became central to online communities that backed the presidential candidacy of one Donald Trump. Gamergate went from a fringe movement that struck most people who heard about it as a weirdo curiosity to something that took over the country, as Vox’s Ezra Klein predicted it would with eerie accuracy in late 2014.

Gamergate didn’t manage to completely eliminate more diverse storytelling in games, as at least one silly controversy from this year would indicate, but it did slightly paralyze the video game industry. And that paralysis has begun to spread to other spheres of our culture.

Members of the movement have developed a tactic that they have deployed again and again to drive dissension in assorted online communities, using a mix of asymmetric warfare (in which they stage lots and lots of small strikes at giant corporations that don’t quite know what to do in response), the general lack of accountability applied to the movement’s various decentralized figures, and a tendency to turn progressive concerns inside out, in a weird attempt to reach parity. Gamergate didn’t really have anything to do with Price’s firing directly, but it also did, because Gamergate is now everywhere and everything.

The movement arguably elected a president. And just this past week, in a much higher-profile case than the firing of Jessica Price, it got director James Gunn fired from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.

James Gunn attends the premiere of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney

Perhaps the above mention of “Mike Cernovich” has already pinged some part of your brain that remembers keywords from the news and headlines of the past few days; it was Cernovich who helped engineer a push to have Gunn fired from the third Guardians of the Galaxy film, by dredging up and encouraging his followers to circulate several of Gunn’s old tweets. Many of the tweets contain jokes about topics like rape and pedophilia.

Gunn’s roots are in over-the-top shlock cinema (he began his career at the famed low-budget genre movie company Troma, and his first credit is for writing Tromeo and Juliet). He directed the first two Guardians movies to general acclaim, and both his overall positivity and his general disdain for Trump have earned him more than a few left-leaning fans on social media platforms.

But that same disdain for Trump — and, of all things, the widespread pushback against a tweet in which filmmaker Mark Duplass praised conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which inspired Gunn to chime in on the fray — made Gunn a target for folks like Cernovich.

To be clear, Gunn’s past jokes are awful. They have surfaced before — most notably in 2012, when Gunn was hired to helm the first Guardians film. A blog post he had written in 2011 about which comic book characters fans would most like to have sex with drew ire from numerous left-leaning critics and social media personalities. Gunn ultimately apologized for his comments, and vowed to do better.

Later, in 2017, he told BuzzFeed that in the early days of his tenure at Marvel, he’d abandoned the persona that aimed to be a provocateur and adopted the persona that evolved into his current Twitter self. As described by BuzzFeed’s Adam B. Vary:

“I protect myself by writing scenes where people shoot people in the face,” Gunn said, chuckling. “And if I have to think around shooting someone in the face, it’s harder, but I think it’s more rewarding for me.” He cleared his throat. “I felt like Guardians forced me into a much deeper way of thinking about, you know, my relationship to people, I suppose. I was a very nasty guy on Twitter. It was a lot fucking edgy, in-your-face, dirty stuff. I suddenly was working for Marvel and Disney, and that didn’t seem like something I could do anymore. I thought that that would be a hindrance on my life. But the truth was it was a big, huge opening for me. I realized, a lot of that stuff is a way that I push away people. When I was forced into being this” — he moved his hand over his chest — “I felt more fully myself.”

And what’s “this”?

”Sensitive, I guess?” he said. “Positive. I mean, I really do love people. And by not having jokes to make about whatever was that offensive topic of the week, that forced me into just being who I really was, which was a pretty positive person. It felt like a relief.”

Yet all those old tweets remained on Twitter. Considering both Gunn’s 2011 blog post and the way he talks about his old tweets, it seems hard to believe that neither Marvel Studios nor its parent company, Disney, knew of their existence.

But when Cernovich surfaced a whole bunch of them last week in a graphic designed to strip them of as much context as possible, more and more conservative and alt-right personalities started passing them around, and Disney’s Alan Horn finally announced on Friday that Gunn would no longer be working for the company. (Gunn, for his part, made one of the better, “Yeah, I fucked up!” statements in a decade that seems to provide a new one every other week.)

Then Cernovich and his friends turned their sights on other comedy figures with provocative jokes in their past, like Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswalt, and Dan Harmon. Few of these men suffered consequences as severe as Gunn did for past jokes. But all were hounded endlessly on social media. Harmon even left Twitter.

I don’t particularly want to defend Gunn here. A lot of his old Twitter material is truly awful. It often takes the shape of a joke without actually being funny, which is deadly to anybody playing with comedic land mines like gags about child molestation and rape. Meanwhile, it’s also hard to believe that a white dude who directed two of the biggest movies of all time won’t get another chance in Hollywood, even if he has to step back and spend a year or two making indie movies.

But the way Gunn was fired sticks in my craw, just a little bit. It’s the biggest example yet of Gamergate and its ilk forcing a major public figure out of the job that made them a major public figure. By stripping events like this of their context, Cernovich and company might think they’re forcing the left to confront its own hypocrisies, or winning smaller battles in a larger culture war, or simply driving critics of the president off social media.

But make no mistake, they’re also destabilizing reality.

The cancellation of Roseanne in the wake of Roseanne Barr’s offensive tweet has been compared to Gunn’s firing. It shouldn’t be. ABC

The recent event that Gunn’s dismissal has drawn the most comparison to is ABC’s firing of Roseanne Barr from the now-canceled TV show that bore her name. (The series will live on as a spinoff titled The Conners, sans Barr.)

In that case, too, an awful tweet (in this case, a racist remark about former Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett) led to somebody who seemed protected by recent success being removed from the franchise that had yielded said success. And in that case, too, the person fired had worked for the Walt Disney Company, the biggest behemoth in the entertainment industry, one that’s about to swallow another behemoth like it’s a tiny little goldfish.

But pull back some of the layers and the two events couldn’t be more dissimilar. The most obvious difference is the timing. Gunn wrote his tweets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, before he was hired by Marvel and long before he became a critic of Trump. Barr’s tweet was published the morning she was fired.

This is not to say that Gunn’s tweets are excusable but, instead, to point to all the instances in which Barr posted horrible tweets shortly before ABC picked up a new season of Roseanne, only for Disney and ABC officials to laugh them off. If Disney meant to establish a precedent with what happened with Barr, it was essentially, “If you have skeletons in your closet, whatever. Just don’t add any new ones.” Gunn, if nothing else, had seemed scrupulous about the “not adding any new ones” part (that we know of so far, at least).

An even bigger difference between Gunn’s and Barr’s tweets concerns the context of the tweets and the intention behind them. Most of us might judge Gunn’s tweets as bad jokes, sure, but they’re mostly recognizable as jokes, and jokes in the style of 2000s Gen-X comedians trying like hell to provoke a reaction by being as “edgy” and offensive as possible.

What’s been interesting, too, is watching many of the comedians in question — including Gunn and Black but also folks like Sarah Silverman, Sacha Baron Cohen, and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — try to figure out how to navigate an era when the ironic offensiveness they trafficked in has been co-opted by a movement that insists they always meant it, deep down. Most have become vocal Trump critics. But few have managed the transition very easily.

This is the danger in making jokes rooted in ironic offensiveness, even when you’re a master of the form (like Silverman is). At a certain point, somebody is always laughing right alongside you and taking from the joke the message that racism is okay if it’s funny, or that provoking a reaction from someone by joking about rape is funnier than the joke itself.

Ironic offensiveness is far too easy to twist into the idea that nothing is worth caring about, and that getting those who do care to lash out is the funniest thing possible. That idea is now the basis of an entire internet culture that kept splintering, with one of those splinters becoming dedicated to trolling above all else. It eventually got to a point where nobody was sure who was serious and who was joking, or if there was even a difference.

Start to unpack the comedy of the figures listed above, or of their modern comedic descendants and fellow travelers like the terrifically funny hosts of the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, and you’ll find that somewhere, deep down, they care deeply. The ironic offensiveness and shocking humor is meant to spur a reaction that hopefully guides you to a similar sense of caring and sincerity. But that requires genuine engagement and thought, and it’s easy to opt out of genuine engagement and thought when you’re laughing, in favor of taking the joke at face value.

This, I think, is what happened to Barr, who went from being an incisive comedian to being a millionaire many times over to being someone who promoted some of the same conspiracy theory nonsense that Cernovich peddles. (It’s no mistake that many of the tweets Cernovich surfaced to try to tank Michael Ian Black’s career involved him simply talking about pizza — in the worldview of Cernovich and Barr, there is a massive left-wing conspiracy to engage in pedophilia and protect fellow pedophiles, often using “pizza” as a code word for child sex.) Gunn didn’t really believe what he was saying; Barr did.

But does that context matter? Or does the statement itself matter? The fact is, both Barr and Gunn said horrible things. If we draw hard moral lines in the sand, if we insist that certain things matter to us and are important to uphold as ethical guidelines, does it ever matter that somebody might genuinely move past something bad they did in the past, might become a better person? Or are we all, always, defined by our darkest, worst moments?

Gamergate briefly devoured the internet in 2014. But it never really went away. Shutterstock

A little over a week ago, the most popular Gamergate subreddit, Kotaku in Action, briefly went offline. The user who had created the subreddit in the first place, david-me, then posted to r/Drama (a subreddit dedicated to tracing internal Reddit action and excitement) saying that he had shut down KIA. Explaining his logic, he wrote, in part:

KiA is one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated reddit. The internet. The world. I did this. Now I am undoing it. This abomination should have always been aborted.

So in this moment with years of contemplation, I am Stopping it. I’m closing shop and I can’t allow anyone to exploit my handicap. I’ve watched and read every day. Every single day. The mods are good at what they do, but they are moderating over a sub that should not exist. The users have created content that should not be. Topics that do not require debate. And often times molded by outside forces.

We are better than this. I should have been better than this. Just look at the comment history of any users history. The hate is spread by very few, but very often. Overwhelmingly so.

Reddit and it’s Admins are Me. They are the stewards of hate and divisiveness and they let it go. They go so far as to even claim there is nothing they can do about it. Those with upvotes could have been stopped by others with equally powerful downvotes. Fallacy. 100 evil people with 100,000 upvotes can not be defeated by 100,000 with 100 downvotes.

Reddit stepped in. It restored Kotaku in Action, and by extension restored one of Gamergate’s most prominent platforms. The subreddit hadn’t directly violated Reddit’s hate speech rules, even if it was constantly dancing on the very edge of them. If Kotaku in Action is a cancer, as its founder alleges, then it is one that remains free to spread unchecked.

When I was covering the early days of Gamergate, I believed the core of its argument was, in essence, that caring is a waste of time — that wanting video games to have more diverse characters and the industry that makes them to have better representation across the board was a pointless exercise. Gamergate adherents seemed to believe the focus of the industry should be making better games, an argument that ignored that for many, having more diverse games was necessary for having better games.

I was wrong. The core argument of Gamergate, and of the alt-right more generally, has always been that caring is hypocritical. Deep down, both movements believe that everybody is racist and sexist and homophobic, that the left, especially, is simply trying to lord a moral superiority over everybody else when, in secret cabals, they kidnap babies and run child molestation rings out of the basements of pizza restaurants. This idea is referred to as “virtue signaling,” meaning that there is no such thing as real virtue, only a pretend virtue that people deploy to try to win points with mainstream society, when everybody would be better off dropping the pretense and letting their most offensive freak flags fly.

And it’s tricky to combat the idea of virtue signaling, because of course we all virtue-signal all the time. Parents virtue-signal to teach their children, and corporations virtue-signal to make their products seem more palatable to a rapidly diversifying America, and I virtue-signal every time I tweet something that says I’m supportive of, say, the Black Lives Matter movement without joining affiliated protests.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want the broader goals of BLM to be realized immediately, or that corporations won’t take your money regardless of color or creed, or that parents shouldn’t teach their children not to resort to violence when others say or do something they don’t like.

Virtue signaling is still virtue, even if in your heart, you’re so angry or upset that you feel like punching someone. Cynicism about the motivations behind good acts doesn’t erase that the acts are good. We all do all sorts of things for a variety of complicated reasons. It doesn’t erase the fact that the net result of those actions ultimately has very little to do with our motivations.

The argument of Cernovich and his cronies is, ultimately, that none of us is actually good, that we are all venal and horrible, and that we live in a world where we should all, always, be pitted against each other, defined only by our worst selves. And because nobody is ever going to fire Cernovich for all the times he’s tweeted about rape, because he’s a self-made media personality, the war becomes ever more asymmetric. The only people who can hold Gamergate and its adherents accountable are members of the movement, who will occasionally toss someone out but almost always do so under the pretense of a game or, worse, a joke.

There are real people whose lives are ruined, each and every day, by Cernovich and his ilk, and our modern corporate media climate continues to have no idea what to do about it, because the battles are deliberately constructed to strip away context and to predetermine their outcomes from the first.

Twitter isn’t actually everywhere, but it feels like it can be everywhere. Andrew Burton/Getty

I began this article with the story of Jessica Price instead of the story of James Gunn for a reason. It’s entirely possible you haven’t heard of either, but if you’ve only heard of one, it’s almost certainly James Gunn. Yet the devastation to Price’s career will be much more substantial than whatever happens to Gunn, who will at least be collecting residuals from the Guardians movies for the rest of time.

Price’s situation is a valuable lesson in how so much of this works because the circumstances of her firing are muddier and harder to prosecute. Yes, the representative of a corporation that sells a service probably shouldn’t be calling her customers asshats. But any woman with a large enough social media profile knows just how quickly a seemingly innocuous, “Actually…” can turn into a massive dogpile of Twitter yahoos with nothing better to do. What happened to Price ostensibly has nothing to do with Gamergate. But its shadow lurks nonetheless, because it is now everywhere.

Could Price have handled things better? Probably. Should she have been fired for how she did handle them? I find that a lot harder to argue. It suggests that every employee of every organization with a vaguely public-facing persona has to be 100 percent perfect all of the time across all platforms, or else. And if you remove enough context from just about anything, you can make somebody look as bad as you want, unless they’re anodyne and milquetoast all of the time, which leads to sitting US senators suggesting that perhaps James Gunn should be investigated for pedophilia “if the tweets are true.”

The idea, I guess, is that we should all just turn off the internet and step away from social media when things get too hairy. But I would hope we all realize how impossible that is most of the time, and it’s in that imbalance that Cernovich and his pals forever create dissension and uncertainty.

I said above that what Cernovich wants to do is destabilize reality; that might seem like a big leap, but think about it. We’ve already gone from “these are bad jokes” to “if the tweets are true,” from carefully examining the thing in context to quickly glancing at the thing with as little context as possible, so that it looks as bad as it could possibly be. And when you’re fighting a culture war, and grasping for requital, I suppose that’s fair. Culture wars, too, have their victims.

But this still leaves us with a world where the terms of the game are set by a bunch of people who argue not in good faith, but in a way designed to force everybody into the same bad-faith basket. They are interested not in finding a deeper truth but in the easy cynicism of believing that everybody is as dark-hearted and frightened as them, that the world is a place that can never be made better, so why even try? Flood the zone with enough bad information and turn reality into enough of a game and you can make anything you want seem believable, until bad jokes become a dark harbinger of a horrific reality looming just over the horizon.

I’ve never believed that approach can win in the long run. I’ve always believed that in the end, some sort of truth will hold fast, and the fever will break. But sometimes, of late, I wonder if I’m wrong — and the only thing that stops me from convincing myself is the fear that accepting even guarded optimism as futile would only turn me into one of them, forever spiraling and never reaching bottom.

Original Source -> James Gunn’s firing shows we’re still living in the Gamergate era

via The Conservative Brief