#callout after callout after callout for innocuous things

[collegeoflore]

artist vs oc

tagged by @tadpole-apocalypse!!!

i tried so hard but this picrew is honestly not my fav LOL

human-adjacent xarrai bc i couldn’t make them purple. i tried ieriyn instead bc at least he’s human color but he came out way worse so u get xar LOL

i’m a monster so i’m just tagging anyone who sees this and wants to do it. go crazy :3

picrew link here :)

[ratsmp4]

holding myself accountable .

i would like to start off by saying that no one is required to forgive me for what i've done, both in the past and in recent weeks . depending on how long you've followed me, you may have seen this post from a few months ago . it was poorly worded and written in a moment of anger, where i was not thinking straight . i was in a very dark place when i posted it, and i was encouraged by one of my good friends, who will not be named for their safety . additionally, you may have seen this callout post made by one of my former mutuals . if not, i encourage you to read over it, as it could provide much needed context about what happened .

more about the situation will be included under the cut .

Garrett is the protagonist of the Thief games - a cynical master thief who wishes nothing more than to be left alone to steal in peace, but who unwittingly becomes embroiled in a series of epic events.

Garrett exhibits a strong sense of survival and self-interest. While on the surface Garrett is callous, cynical and sarcastic, with loyalty only to himself, he does seem to have deeper feelings for a few of his contacts: Artemus, the Keeper that recruited and trained him; Basso the Boxman, a fellow thief; Cutty, his fence. In extreme cases this seems to extend to even to past antagonists such as Viktoria, although that may be a result of Garrett's own self-interest.

Garrett also exhibits a strong sense of professional pride as a thief: he usually refuses to kill while on the job, saying that he's a thief, not a murderer,[1] though Constantine and Karras died as a result of Garret's actions only because he was able to sabotage their evil plans. Lotus was a mercy killing, as he begged for death due to the inhumane conditions that Garrett found him in. Other than that, Garrett has not killed any humans in the Thief canon. It is implied Garrett also never steals from his allies or the poor.[Fact Check]

Orphaned, Garrett spent his youth on the streets surviving as a pickpocket and message runner.

One night, he saw Artemus walking on the street as people, 'just passed him by like he wasn't there'. Thinking the man had some valuables, he decided to make a grab. However, he was caught, and Artemus, impressed with his ability to see a Keeper, offered Garrett a new life. Garrett was then recruited into a secret organization known as the Keepers, dedicated to observing and maintaining stability in the City.[2]

Not much is known about Garrett's education with The Keepers, except the fact that he was given initial training in the arts of stealth and subterfuge practiced by the Keepers. But, he found that it was much more profitable to make use of these skills as a thief than to continue working for the Keepers as an agent.[3] He was called "the most promising acolyte" in the Keeper annals, but left around the age of 20 due to his "imbalance." It was brought before the council to deal with him using the Enforcers, but Caduca informed the council that Garrett would be needed in the future.[4]

At some point in time, Garrett is now working as an independent thief in the City, making contacts with people such as Basso the Boxman, Cutty and Farkus Bernard. Garrett's first known large score comes from stealing an expensive scepter from Lord Bafford. After which, he breaks into the Hammerite prison to spring his fence, Cutty (who dies while still in prison). This leads him deep into the old Hammerite catacombs looking for treasure. Shortly after this thugs working for the local Warden, Ramirez, attempt to kill Garrett for non payment of tribute. Garrett turns the tables, escaping and going on to humiliate Ramirez by looting his mansion, even going on to rob the local thieves guild. This brazen display of skill attracts the attention of Viktoria, a somewhat mysterious independent fence. She contracts Garrett to steal a magical sword from the eccentric nobleman, Constantine.

Upon successfully returning from Constantine's bizarre mansion, Viktoria reveals that she and Constantine are old associates who were testing Garrett. Constantine offers Garrett a fortune for the job of retrieving the gemstone known as The Eye. Getting to The Eye means Garrett must venture through the abandoned and walled-off Old Quarter of the City to the old Hammerite Cathedral. A mysterious catastrophe, rumored to involve great fires and many undead, caused the area's abandonment decades ago. Garrett finds the cathedral sealed, but the Eye itself tells him of an old Keeper library hidden nearby. Writings there tell of where the talismans that open the cathedral are hidden and how the Keepers almost revealed themselves in order to assist the Hammerites and the Hand Brotherhood in containing a great evil. The first talisman was found in a place called The Lost City, the ruins of an ancient civilization buried beneath the existing city, its entrance hidden by the Keepers. To get the second talisman, Garrett enters a Hammerite temple in disguise. The third talisman was kept with a brotherhood of Mages. The fourth lay inside Keeper secured caverns. Unbeknownst to Garrett, the Talisman was recovered by the guards of the Opera House above the caves. Successful, he then returns to the cathedral and collects The Eye from amid the many undead, escaping with the help from the ghost of Brother Murus, a long dead Hammerite priest.

Garrett visits Constantine to hand over The Eye and collect his payment. Instead of paying, however, Constantine reveals himself to be the fabled Trickster (aka The Woodsie Lord), the entity worshiped by the Pagans, and Viktoria, his consort.

They bind Garrett in vines and Viktoria plucks out one of his eyes, using it to seemingly activate The Eye stone, and leave him for dead. Some time later two Keepers find and free the unconscious Garrett from the vines. The Keepers then leave Garrett to escape by himself through the caverns beneath Constantine's mansion and amongst some new and strange beasts. Once he reaches the surface Garrett decides the only thing to do is visit the Hammerites and tell them about what has happened in the hopes they would provide assistance. He heads for the temple but discovers that the Trickster's minions have gotten there first. Venturing inside he finds the remaining Hammerites in a hidden sanctuary down in an underground cavern. With stealth being the only hope against the Trickster's army, the Hammerites provide Garrett with a booby-trapped copy of The Eye. Garrett descends into the Trickster's realm, where he finds the Woodsie Lord performing a ceremony with the Eye. Garrett stealthily swaps the Eye for its trapped copy, which then explodes, thus striking down the Trickster as he attempts to finish the ritual.

The coda shows Garrett walking back to town alone through the snow. Life appears to be returning to normal. A Keeper approaches, Artemus. The two converse and The Keeper warns Garrett, telling him of a book he should read, and that he can't run away from life. Close observation reveals Garrett now has a mechanical eye. Garrett rejects the Keeper's 'help' in his life and says to tell the other Keepers that "I'm through. Tell them Garrett is done". He then walks away into the city streets. Artemus answers quietly "I will tell them this: Nothing is changed. All is as it was written. The Trickster is dead. Beware the dawn of the metal age.", foreshadowing the sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age.

Garrett's role in The Metal Age begins innocuously. Garrett provides a favor to an old acquaintance, Basso, helping him rescue his love Jenivere, so that he may retire from thievery and elope. Next Garrett breaks into the dockside warehouses to get some extra cash for rent. It soon becomes clear that the City Watch, lead by the zealous Sheriff Gorman Truart, is waging a war on crime, brutally persecuting thieves and conducting nighttime raids on the poor neighborhoods with the intent of rounding up criminals. Truart stages a sting operation in an attempt to assassinate Garrett, but he escapes by using a Flash Bomb. With the newly strengthened police force making burglary more difficult, Garrett begins to wage a personal war against Truart, attempting to blackmail him into loosening his grip on the City by exposing his corruption. In the process, Garrett acquaints himself with the Mechanist Order, a splinter faction of the weakening Hammerites led by the charismatic Karras, whose robotic security devices have begun to guard the City's wealthiest businesses and residences. In addition, he discovers that the Mechanists are manufacturing some sort of weaponized "Servant," made from a human body and emitting a substance known as Rust Gas, and that Truart has agreed to round up vagrants under false pretenses to be used for the project.

When Garrett confronts Truart, he finds that Truart has been slain by a strange creature. Trying to unravel the conspiracy, Garrett reunites with Viktoria deep in the Maw. Viktoria identifies the Mechanists as the true enemy, and the two form a tentative alliance. The combined skills of Viktoria's pagan operatives and Garrett's stealth abilities reveal that the Mechanists are gifting the Servants to the City's nobility, and that they are working on a top-secret endeavour known as the "Cetus Project." The Cetus Project turns out to be a gigantic submarine, the Cetus Amicus, and that the Mechanists are using it to access the remains of The Lost City in search of ancient artifacts. By interrogating the head of the Cetus Project, Brother Cavador, the pair discover that the Mechanists have recovered an object known as a Cultivator, and that they have already begun mass-producing them and installing them inside of the Masked Servants. While Garrett stakes out the Gervaisius Estate and steals a mask and the prototype Cultivator, Viktoria's agents observe Karras hermetically sealing Soulforge Cathedral. The pair conduct an experiment with the Cultivator, revealing that the Servants could be commanded to release Rust Gas, which would react violently with the plant matter inside of wealthy nobles' gardens, wiping out all life in the city, with Karras safe inside of Soulforge Cathedral.

Viktoria claims that there is no time to spare and proposes a plan: Garrett must gain control of the beacon controlling the Servants and command them to return to Soulforge and trick Karras into releasing the Rust Gas, while Viktoria fills Soulforge Cathedral with plants, to wipe out the Mechanists instead of the city. Garrett claims the plan is "suicide", claiming he will think of a better plan, and re-affirms that he works alone. As he leaves, a Keeper informs Garrett that Viktoria has begun an assault on the Cathedral herself. Garrett hurries to the Cathedral but is too late to save Viktoria as she is attacked by an onslaught of Mechanist forces. Her dying action is to fill Soulforge Cathedral with plants, as promised. Left with no better plan, Garrett proceeds to assemble a new guiding beacon and redirects the Cathedral's signal towers back to the Cathedral itself. The plan succeeds, and Garrett locks the servants inside the Cathedral. When the rust gas is released, Karras is killed and Soulforge Cathedral is left in ruins.

Garrett returns to the Cathedral after the reaction is complete and is met by a Keeper, who explains that the events of The Metal Age transpired exactly as written, and that the prophecies contain even more predictions. Garrett, previously skeptical of the Keepers' mysterious ways, reluctantly requests to know more.

[rpbetter]

Hi.. Today I saw someone's carrd and their rules threaten to report anyone who writes csa or non-con, and they threaten to tell all their friends about it, to "make sure they know". I have a non-con type of ship with someone and we're both consenting adults, but this person scares me. Am I in any real danger if they find me or my partner? Should I report them for misusing tumblr reports? Please help. :(

Alright, I'm going to first address tumblr reports here. Unfortunately, tumblr is a bit infamous for how shitty its reporting actually is. I don't honestly know what one would have to do in order for tumblr to actually pay a bit of attention to the complaint (harassment, credible threats, legitimate and provable theft, suicide baiting, and reporting violent hate blogs all have, historically, been ignored), but I strongly suspect that the majority of tumblr's efforts go on visual media. Like porn or what they think is porn. Someone seeing a nipple is definitely worse than running into a hate group that literally espouses killing folks for their race, obviously.

So, while I am not discouraging you, or anyone else, from trying to utilize a broken system, it is a broken system you should not expect anything out of when it comes to user-to-user complaints. In this case, you have the additional problem of trying to report someone for false reporting/abusing the report system when you don't have any evidence. They have not, as yet, tried to report you, and you'd never know if they did. Spamming the report system is likely to garner negative attention, so, if they are frequently reporting users for things that are not against the TOS, they might already be, effectively, reporting themselves for that. More effectively than you're ever going to be able to.

The good news in this case, and all such cases of policing efforts, is that their reports amount to nothing. This is the same broken system, for one thing, for another, the vast majority of users they are reporting are not violating anything in tumblr's rules. You are absolutely allowed to write non-con. Frankly, both tumblr and the United States legal system do not give much of a shit what RPers are doing...or fan artists or fic authors. These people are not real, and that is the crux of it that Goodwife Prudy and the Purity Police just aren't getting. What is going on isn't illegal. Writing pornographic material with a minor is, in fact, illegal, but that's about it. (And still difficult to have investigated for a variety of reasons, but we'll leave that there.)

If there was anything people like this could do without getting involved, they'd be doing it. They can't, it's one of the reasons why their primary tactic is harassment.

Moving onto that...that is definitely the big concern here. If they have cause to notice you, which is possible if they are anywhere near your usual circle of RPers or affiliated with any meme/resource/RPH blogs you frequent, you really only have the option of taking them at their word. Believing that they will launch a campaign against you, as well as whoever you write with.

Your recourse for that would be very little, as I said, reporting them for harassment is kind of a joke. You can do it, but I've yet to see it result in anything other than the reporter being advised to block. And we all know how effective blocking is after the fact.

So, my advice to you is to block them now.

Do not give them the opportunity to notice you and start anything. Block them, block any other blogs they might have, and block blogs they interact with a lot. Where there is one that feels this way, there are always others, and this one has already admitted to using friends as a weapon...so, they're absolutely around somewhere. With the attitude they've displayed, they're not likely to just keep it to telling their friends to block your blog, it's more likely that the most innocuous thing they'll do is put you on a list/add you to a callout blog. Once something like that happens, it spirals very quickly. People will be scouring your blog for everything and anything they can make into something "problematic" to bother you about. Your writing partners and mutuals will start getting the inbox harassment as well. If they feel devoted to it enough, every time you switch blogs they'll make it a mission to find and "expose" you as though you are trying to hide your great "freak" crimes instead of trying to peacefully live your life.

It's better to stop it before it has a chance to start.

I just want to say it again, you're not doing anything wrong. You are an adult writing with another adult about a topic both parties agreed to. It does not violate the site's TOS, and is most certainly not illegal. Everyone has the right to explore darker topics, this is neither a negative reflection on you nor is it something you shouldn't be doing. I'm really sorry that the RPC has gotten like this, and that the best we can do is try to be aware, insulate ourselves, and help our friends to do the same. I know none of this helps with the fear of being needlessly harassed, but if it does happen, try to remember that they're the ones being absolutely ridiculous and immoral.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Thinking about the twitter "villain of the week" phenomenon and call outs that turn into dogpiles. Imagine you're with your family or some other large group for a holiday dinner. Everyone's eaten and you're back in the kitchen washing dishes, with someone else drying. Suddenly, the person drying the dishes notices you missed a spot on one of the plates. Now, people who aren't assholes (and even quite a lot of assholes for that matter) will just be "oh, you missed a spot" and hand it back to you to clean up. Because missing a spot when you're washing dishes is normal and no big deal. So you say "oops" or something and fix it and all's good. But maybe it doesn't go like that. Maybe they go "tsk, (your name) is being so irresponsible, they can't even do something as simple as washing a plate" and then suddenly your entire family show up with a list of everything you've ever done wrong since age 5. That would be utter bullshit, right? That would be emphatically not accountability, right? That would be your family deciding to make your life miserable just so they could feel superior or whatever, right? (That would be abuse, or at least something very close to abuse, since y'know it's important to name things what they are.) (I mean...a lot of people do the "let's talk about 20 different things you've done wrong at one go" thing without it being abuse per se...but it sure as fuck isn't functional.) (And no, the degree of the offense doesn't really affect things. If you, say, abandoned your terminally ill spouse to run off with the affair partner you'd been cheating on them with for the entirety of your marriage, that would be really bad, and it still wouldn't make sense for your family to all get together to tell you what a terrible person you are while bringing up things you did ages ago and so on. The focus should always be on making it better, not on painting the offender as a shitty person. No matter how big the offense. Figuring out who's going to take care of the ill spouse, not determining the exact level of assholery of the abandoning spouse and whether everyone should have known from one thing they said 15 years ago, right? There can be consequences, like not inviting especially nasty people to future events, without engagement.)

So, at one point I joined this one group on Facebook, when I was relatively new to social media. I mean, I'd been on FB for ages, but I'd just been following what my friends posted, I hadn't joined any groups specifically to engage with people that I didn't already know over shared interests. (A very different FB experience.) This group was nominally about being bisexual, but an awful lot of the posts (several a week) involved someone innocuously equating genitals to gender, or some other language thing that ignores the existence of trans people. (This was before I ID'd as nonbinary, but on a personal level that sort of thing still doesn't bug me. I recognize it bugs other people, and it is reasonable for people who do care about this to want other people to alter the language they use.) I'm not talking blatantly hostile stuff like calling trans women men. I'm talking the things that people who grew up being told there's boys and girls and you can tell which is which by looking at them, just do because they haven't yet adjusted their worldview yet. Intent isn't the same as impact, but there is a difference between an innocent mistake and outright hostility. And there'd be literally dozens of people making the exact same callout. And because there were so many responses, everybody in the group would see the post, because that's how FB's algorithm works. And then this would happen again the next day and a couple days after that. And I (being new to this sort of thing) was just like, wtf? Wouldn't it make more sense to set things up so that the mods have to approve posts so they can quietly shut those down and privately tell the posters what rewrites they have to make? Or at least shut down those posts as soon as a mod catches them, or make one callout and shut down replies so it doesn't turn into this snowball that you can't miss? If the problem is this is hurtful to trans people, why intensify that hurt by making sure every trans person in the group ends up seeing the post?

I eventually left.

I imagine people had good intentions, or at least thought they did. That "educating people" this way was the important thing. But thing is, mostly it teaches people that that behavior is OK, that behavior that recall I've already explicitly described as verbal abuse or at least as something very close to verbal abuse, and that's a terrible lesson. This is not how decent human beings interact with other human beings. In similar groups I've also seen one person make a brief call out and the called out person say "oh, I didn't realize, I'll (edit the post, or whatever)" and that's it, and that's entirely different, you know? A single low-key call out, not the entire group piling on. Which is why I don't really like the term "call out culture", because sometimes people have cultures around making call-outs that are actually healthy and reasonable and not abusive, that are much healthier than the cultural default of "if you bring it up, you're the one making trouble," and it really should be normalized for people to do small low-key "hey, you missed a spot" checks without it turning into "I don't have a racist bone in my body". If the person doing the dishes goes "I am a perfect dish-washer and therefore that plate is clean, and how dare you say I don't know how to wash dishes right", that's also a problem. But I do think we should have a way to distinguish between normalizing saying "you missed a spot" about social justice language, and normalizing everybody within a mile radius jumping on and amplifying the message and bringing the person's past behavior into it and also literally telling the person who missed a spot that they're a terrible person.

Especially since, y'know, follow the money? Social media companies financially benefit from those pile-ons. They encourage them. It's in their business model. It's "engagement." If you're cynical about corporations in general or social media companies in particular (and if you're on tumblr, you probably are)...then part of that should be recognizing when social media companies are manipulating people into being more assholeish than they would be on their own. Even when, especially when, it's done in the name of social justice.

[fastcarsgovroom]

Don’t really know what to make of still it but here goes (the Lando Norris issue) Pt 2

This is about the Lando Norris and Max Fewtrell (and other involved streamers) issue so you don't need to read it if it's not in your best interest to. I don’t know if this thing is supposed to have blown over or anything, but I’m posting because heck this is my blog and I want to post about things I think are in line with my personal philosophy (and maybe in-group).     

The entire rant is in five parts:  

Part 1 is where I describe very basically the entire situation, essentially what I saw happening through posts on the tumblr, twitter, and reddit Lando Norris tags  

Part 2 is me trying to describe why some fans felt what they felt and reacted the way they did  

Part 3 is the videos and what was said of them and how I interpreted them  

Part 4 the ‘misinformation’ idk

Part 5 is like, a rant.

Part 2: How people reacted

TW for talks about sex, sexism, and misogyny 

Under the cut

Fans reacted very differently to the whole situation, with some reacting after watching the clips, and some just from reading the posts. Very, very broadly, there were two opposing views:  

I. That the things said on the stream WERE offensive

The fans found that the way Lando and Max F talked about the women were sexist, misogynistic, disrespectful, and disgusting. General interpretations were that:

the women were objectified and viewed in terms of providing only sexual gratification;

the women' attention and companionship were pursued only for the end goal of sexual gratification;

the women and their companionship could be 'stolen', implying that they were viewed only as objects for sexual gratification;

some of the women were referred to as 'that [descriptor]', which further objectifies and dehumanizes them;

a female-coded interest (star signs) and by extension, women, were talked of dismissively; 

even if Lando did not outright say certain offensive things, Max F did, and Lando should not have stayed silent and by extension complicit; and

private matters from personal encounters (implied as sexual or romantic) were discussed on a public stream, even if details were kept vague.

II. That the things said on the stream WERE NOT (that) offensive

Other fans had different, more innocuous interpretations of the conversations, or could not identify specific offensive points that were mentioned. They found that: 

what was said in in the conversations were not particularly sexist, misogynistic, or disrespectful to women;

what was said in the conversations were not personally disturbing, distressing, or distasteful;

the conversations were harmless banter and 'locker room talk' among immature young men that, while can be distasteful, is not particularly harmful or offensive; 

even if the conversations were disrespectful and distasteful, it was not to a degree that warranted negative reactions or callouts;

Lando did not outright say some of the things attributed to him in the callout posts; and

the conversations were too vague and ambiguous to be interpreted as being particularly sexist, misogynistic, and disrespectful to women. 

Some context about young adults, sex, sexism and misogyny, or, why I get how people felt how they felt

Culturally, a lot of emphasis is placed on the importance of romantic relationships and sex in the human experience, especially for young adults. Often, romantic relationships are conflated with sex;

Young adults, especially men, are expected (and encouraged) to pursue sex. In some circles, young mens’ social worth is viewed in their ability to obtain sexual gratification (from women);

In this context, women – their presence, purpose, and worth – are often viewed and judged based primarily on their ability to provide sexual gratification (sexual objectification). As such, women’s own wants, needs, and personhood are dismissed in favor of their ability to provide sexual gratification;

In this context, men can view and treat female figures in their lives – relatives, friends, mentors, peers – with proper human decency and respect, but if they consider a woman outside these roles as a potential sexual or romantic partner, they may tend to view and treat the women only based on their ability to provide sexual gratification;

Sexually-charged language and objectification are so ingrained and normalized in our culture that the people who use it might not even be aware that what they are saying is problematic. Both women and men are socialized to think in these terms;

Women often receive sexually-charged abuse by men and are of course more aware of being objectified. There is nothing positive about being degraded and thought about as nothing but objects for sexual gratification. So of course (most) women are cautious and more able to detect abuse directed at them;

Because of how normalized and ‘harmless’ sexually-charged and objectifying language is, women are often dismissed as being ‘sensitive’ and ‘overreactive’ if they react unfavorably or speak up against such abuse;

At the same time, men who use sexually-charged and objectifying language might genuinely not think that their speech is harmful, because it’s so normalized. At the very least, they were never taught why and how such sexually-charged and objectifying language and speech is harmful, and in turn may get confused and defensive when confronted about things they said. 

These men (and some women) may be otherwise decent people who do not consider themselves sexist, because they do not do ‘obviously’ sexist things (e.g. physical or sexual violence against women, ‘obvious’ derogatory language, etc.) Being a sexist is bad, and since they generally consider themselves as good or nice people, they will get defensive when they are called sexist/misogynistic, without considering or understanding that the normalized sexist language is harmful.

None of this is to excuse men’s (and some women’s, in the context of this issue,) behavior, but to very briefly point out why I think ‘calling out’ or ‘educating’ by stating outright a speech / behavior is misogynistic and sexist might be met with defensiveness. 

Why Lando in particular (and some value judgement from me)

A lot off people found issue in how fast fans were to judge, express disappointment and disgust, and call out (and ‘cancel’) Lando, especially if other drivers on the grid had done what they consider similarly misogynistic and sexist things (and some even worse *ehemmazepinehem*).

Personally, I think it’s down to a few things (caveat: personal interpretation. I might be wrong):

Lando presents this wholesome, ‘nice guy’ image, as who is generally respectful and thoughtful when it comes to people. He looks young, boyish, and has a vague ‘family friendly’ feel to him and, perhaps, ‘safe’. When it comes out that he may have said things that were disrespectful and derogatory to women (in a very familiar, misogynistic way) that did not jive with this image, fans felt disappointed, attacked, and deceived. 

Lando has a very wide audience and younger-skewing fans; people felt that his discussing of what appears to be personal, sexual encounters in a public space, was very inappropriate and harmful, exposing the younger fans to inappropriate behavior, harmful ideas, and setting a bad example;

The ghosts of Dubaigate (a whole other rant, this one), that sort of blew over but was never forgotten. Fans felt that Lando was being deceitful by not disclosing his location and purpose for being in Dubai, insensitive, selfish, and ignorant for traveling, and then getting Covid (but still not outright saying he was in Dubai). That people were quickly back to worrying about him and then being excited for more Lando content when he reappeared with amusing, engaging, and generally inoffensive things, having seemingly brushed the entire Dubai and Covid transgression off, did not sit well with many fans. 

I don’t think I’m going to write about fans’ reactions beyond this right now, because that’ll be another college-essay-length rant. 

Part 3

[teaveetamer]

I think it’s just blown up so much in the fandom because people immediately jumped on the bandwagon of the person creating the tweet to attack the creator over it. It’s the same person who went after the Deduebear week creators, I think their like 15 if I remember right. It’s gotten insane but I can still stay FE is not the worst fandom I am in, unfortunately.

Yeah I did see that it was Dedue Bear Week person, too. I wonder if the “boy who cried wolf” thing is an element to this, tbh.

Like, it’s pretty clear to me that most of the people talking about this haven’t even read the fic in question. So it seems like the four groups are: people who have problems with the fic, people who have problems with what they think the fic is, people who are defending the fic, and people who are defending what they think the fic is.

A lot of anti stuff is very bold-faced in how ridiculous it is. Most people will see something like “drawing Dedue as a teddy bear is racist” and immediately know which side they fall on, because it’s pretty cut and dry and really not all that deep. You can take three seconds to look at the picture and determine for yourself whether or not it’s racist.

But “Confederacy AU” is a lot more murky. It takes substantially more investment to read through a multiple chaptered fanfiction to determine whether or not it has comitted some great sin. The people who haven’t read it but side with the call out hear “Confederacy AU” = confederacy is racist = this fic is very racist.

People who haven’t read it and side against the callout see fifteen year old anti is at it again = fifteen year old anti has a history of bullshit callouts = this is probably a bullshit callout and the fic is probably fine.

Problem is, when you’ve made a reputation by calling out innocuous shit like someone drawing Dedue as a teddy bear, you lose a lot of credibility. This could be the most legitimate complaint about racism in fandom that has ever existed and people would still side eye the accusation just a little because the person making the call out has a history of blowing innocent things way out of proportion.

Then the people who side with the call out, perhaps because they have no knowledge of the instigator’s past history, see people siding against it, perhaps because they are very familiar with the instigator’s past history, and think “oh my god how could you side with the racist fanfic?” which causes much wider spread strife. Now it’s not just about a fanfic that’s perceived as racist, it’s about people calling out their friends that they perceive to be racist for defending it.

[repost-this-image]

PSA FOR TEENAGERS:

1. Do not talk about the stuff that makes you horny around people that you know are over 18. I’m not saying don’t BE horny; you’ve got hormones coursing through your veins saying “Hey, time to start feeling horny at the most embarrassing possible times” and you can’t really turn that off. I’m saying DO NOT discuss fetishes with adults. Do not sext or send naughty pictures of yourself to adults. (Distributing porn of an IRL minor is a felony, even if YOU ARE the minor in question.) Do not request or comission pornographic drawings from an artist. (Distributing porn TO a minor is also a felony.)

I’m not saying this to rain on your parade. I’m saying this because p*dophiles exist on the Internet, and too many members of my generation had to deal with shit they were not old enough to deal with because of said creeps. P*dos will totally act like your best friend as part of the grooming process. Which brings is to point #2:

2. If someone over 20 is romantically interested in people under 17, that person is a predator. You might act very responsible for your age; IDK because i don’t know everyone on this hellsite personally. Doesn’t matter. Anyone who says you’re “so mature for your age” and also expresses romantic or sexual interest in you is grooming you for abuse. Period. End of story.

Remember: They go after underage teens because they want someone easy to manipulate and control. If they wanted a normal relationship on equal footing with their partner, they’d date other adults. (No, age differences between two adults aren’t creepy unless the older partner started grooming the younger before they turned 18. Weird, maybe. Uncomfortable to think about, perhaps. But not predatory the way a 26-y/o going after a 16-y/o is, TRUST ME ON THIS.)

3. Your parents have an obligation to care for and protect you, and to help you learn how to assess risk and protect yourself. Your teacher also takes on those responsibilities while you’re at school. Mandatory reporters are required to tell the authorities if they have reason to believe that you or your peers are being abused in any way. But! No one else is under any obligation to protect you from the world.

Some of us may volunteer to help protect you on an individual basis (like a field-trip chaperone). Some of us may give you information like this post on how to protect yourself. But we’ve also got a lot of our own shit to deal with just trying to live in The Worst Timeline. Not all of us have the time or energy to babysit, and we DEFINITELY don’t have the ability to put foam padding on the entire Internet so you don’t encounter anything that might upset or disturb you. It’s just way too fucking big. There were hundreds of TB of Internet 20 years ago when I was your age; imagine how much more huge it’s gotten since then.

So how do you deal with going to a webpage that makes you uncomfortable? Simple. Have a moment to cringe and say “OH DEAR GOD WHY,” if you like. Then hit the Back button and go look at pictures of kittens or something to get your mind off the Squick.

DO:

Block tags that disturb or gross you out on fandom and social-media sites, so you’re less likely to get a nasty surprise. This is exactly what the ability to block tags was invented for. :)

Being disgusted, feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, suck but they are not the same as having your PTSD triggered. Please don’t use the word “trigger” for stuff that just grosses you out; that trivializes the actual trauma of PTSD sufferers. Just say “that makes me uncomfortable.” Please. As someone who’s flinched from innocuous shit my husband does because of how bad my dad fucked me up, I AM LITERALLY BEGGING YOU.

If an adult starts creeping on you, say “I’m underage and don’t feel comfortable with this. Please stop.” If they don’t, then take screenshots in case you need them for legal evidence, and BLOCK THEM IMMEDIATELY after that. Don’t even fucking respond; they’ve already ignored your boundaries by persisting, and that means that they are dangerous.

DON’T:

Agree to meet anyone online that you don’t know IRL without your parents being there. If they don’t want your parents around, that is a HUGE red flag.

Put personally-identifying information on public webpages. Your age; your last name; your phone number; the town you live in; even your first name if it’s unusual enough. These are tools that Nasty People can use to find you. Make it as hard as possible for them to do so.

Hate on people for shipping characters you don’t ship. It would be an abusive relationship? They know; they can handle that because fictional characters aren’t real and can’t really get hurt. It’s not canon? Doesn’t matter; part of the fun of being a fan of something is imagining “What if?” One of them died 100 years before the other was even born? Does. Not. Matter. It’s fiction; they are not interfering in the real lives of real people by shipping. Don’t intimidate, harrass, or threaten someone for wanting to imagine 2 characters kissing that you personally wouldn’t want to imagine kissing each other.

Insist that someone who has tagged a fanwork as “That Thing That You Hate The Most,” take down the fanwork because it contains That Thing You Hate. They put a warning label on it. If you ignore warning labels, bad things happen; you wouldn’t ignore a DO NOT DRINK label on a bottle of household cleaner, so don’t ignore tag warnings. They are there to protect your mind, just like the DO NOT DRINK on the bleach bottle is there to protect your body. Just say “OMG WHY” to yourself, hit Back, and find something better to look at. Don’t view that fanwork; don’t leave a comment on the fanwork; just Walk. Away.

Don’t make callout posts that have images of The Exact Shit You’re Warning About in them. You’re just exposing more people to the same shit that offended, disgusted, or outright PTSD-triggered you! Don’t do that to people, guys. I’ve seen way more Disturbing Shit in callout posts than I have elsewhere at this point, and I read weird fansmut as a hobby, so that’s saying a LOT. Please, please stop exposing us to that stuff!!!

[thesleepingnotsobeauty]

Fans and consumers of artistic mediums have become so toxic in the last 5-10 years that I'm really worried about pursuing the things I want to do, such as write books and make a webcomic.

It's such a landmine out there of people getting offended over everything, even seemingly innocuous things. Like for example, some persob decides to dig for "dirt" over a popular fanartist because said person was suspicious on why the artist didn't draw gay fanart. Yeah, that was all it took for people to go after this one girl.

If you don't hit all these arbitray diversity points, political topics, moral opinions, etc, it doesn't take much for people to decide you should have your life wrecked. Even if you do hit those topics (Steven Universe, for example), you still get lambasted for doing things "wrong".

You can't go right anymore unless if you full on pander to people, but even then, it's a tight rope act. One person thinking you made a false move and all of a sudden everyone turns on you.

The worst part is that most of these people are a small minority who might not even consume that media, but they can still rally up enough people against you via false or stupid claims, and still destroy your lively hood.

Maybe I'm over thinking things, but I see callout posts all the time for the stupidest things

[robo-cryptid]

Behind the cut: some thoughts about that time I was cyberstalked and how it affects my relationship to bullshit Tumblr behavior.

I mentioned months and months ago and in very little detail that I’ve been cyberstalked before. So that was an abusive ex, and they were doing sort of. Anything and everything to humiliate me, including digging up anything they could and then sharing them with other folks. Some of these comments/activities were under my very real name (like Facebook) and some of these were under pseudonyms and in safe spaces, like fan spaces or, deep irony here, blogs and forums where I discussed things like their abuse. Sometimes they were just sort of exposing me in ways I wasn’t ready for or for things that were almost hilariously innocuous, and sometimes they took me out of context and reframed it in a way that made me seem “crazy” and “a bad person” and so on. All in service to creating a new narrative about me that they controlled. I deleted 99% of my internet presence because of it. I dipped out of the forums where I had emotional support, out of fandom where I’d had years of fun, safe spaces to explore all kinds of ideas, from general storytelling to my own sexuality, and developed very real friendships that I then abandoned. I even deleted a bunch of irl accounts, like my Twitter, and I pretty much stopped using Facebook.

It sucked. The scrutiny and narrative spin worked to isolate me in some places, because it was fucking humiliating, even for things I wasn’t ashamed of, because I was supposed to be, apparently, according to this asshole and the folks who enabled them, and in others the thing that worked was me just... leaving. Isolating myself from other people to get away from this one. (Again. Years after the original abuse.) I don’t really know what else they wanted to accomplish, but they took that much from me. And even though it was years ago, I’m still pretty fuckin’ mad about it and really easily activated. 

Sometimes I legitimately freak out a little bit about sharing personal info online. Like sharing that story makes me feel like I’m exposing myself to it all over again, because maybe the details are just specific enough and maybe they’re still waiting. I do it anyway when I can, because I value human connection and because fuck you, buddy, but, you know, sometimes it’s not as easy as “here’s a cute story, lol.” Because immediately after posting my “here’s a cute story, lol,” I might get a tiny panic reaction. Same with posting bigger thoughts or ideas, sometimes posting fic, honestly anything that can make me feel a little bit vulnerable is susceptible to that. This week, despite being thirsty for validation and joy and engagement and all the things that come with posting a new chapter, I instead had a little panic bubble any time I saw a new comment or notif in my inbox. Isn’t that fun?

Anyway. If you ever wanna know why I think Tumblr callouts, harassment and so on are bullshit, or why I might aggressively respond to being asked to enable it even in very small ways, or why I might get very stressed out watching even well-meaning people enable it or have intense guilt-ridden anxieties over the fear I may have enabled it myself in any capacity, there you are. I mean, there are other reasons, and honestly I shouldn’t have to disclose a traumatic experience to say “that’s shitty,” but. It doesn’t even have to be me; I only have to see it. 

I watch folks engage in the same hyperscrutiny-isolation-harassment-controlling-the-narrative-of-someone-else behavior as my abuser. Over ideas. Over head canons. Over ships. And some ideas are important to talk about and treat critically, although I wish we’d treat that with some goddamn nuance once in a while, but maybe the instinctive, automatic “oh right a garbage idea means a garbage person is behind it” is. not super healthy. for you or for the other person. Most of the time they are not-garbage people even if you don’t like some of their ideas. But maybe, radically, even garbage people deserve not to be hyper-scrutinized and isolated and harassed.

So there you are. If you are ever tempted to engage in that -- or to enable someone else to engage in that -- singling out and shaming and general uncritical re-framing of another very real person, I hope you at least consider what you may be enabling and at least consider how very much it looks like that time my abusive ex ran me off the internet and stole fandom (and all the community-safety-joy it entails) from me. And I sincerely, deeply hope that you reconsider what it means if you try to frame that as justice.

[chirpingtiger]

“You can find our super rational conversations on my blog but it’s seriously an entire different person who was given this blog just to be angry and annoying and basically ruin everyone’s good time by being a bitch.”

@one-piece-of-harry

Would this be a bad time to point out that 90% of the argument you had with “the old person” was actually the same person you’re currently complaining about...?

(Like really, who the hell else writes all of their replies as 10-page essays?)

That whole big long post you’re lauding for being so rational and polite? Yeah, that was mostly her.

There have been two of us on here for a while. Everything she posts, she clears with me before posting. I didn’t hand over the blog, I gave her permission to start a fight because you had said the conversation was getting tedious and we both wanted some action.

Or did you forget this?

The only reason you’re noticing any difference is because we’ve both just had our tolerance level worn to about 0 by Tony stans over the past few months, and have stopped caring about being quite as polite to people who are A-okay with sending and encouraging anon hate, or defending people who go on anon to call names and tell non-Tony fans to go die, or hijacking unrelated posts to go off with non-canon “hot takes” about how Steve and Co. are totally evil.

Additionally, after all of the garbage you throw at the people I follow/talk with, you expect me to be polite and understanding toward you? (Yes, I can see your replies to other people’s blogs. Yes, I know exactly what you’ve been up to.)

That’s pretty presumptuous.

“This blog would comment on every single innocuous tony stark post just to be a bitch.”

Oh, you mean the “innocuous Tony Stark posts” like these?

The one about Steve lifting the hammer

The one about Steve tearing off the helmet in Siberia to save Tony

The one about Steve and his friends being there for one another

This one attacking Steve for “lying to Tony”

This one about how team Cap need to fuck off because they mooch off of Tony

This one about how Steve is a liar and traitor and Tony was right all along but nobody listened to him

This one attacking all of team Cap

This one that started as a generic Civil War gif set

This one that started as a generic Avengers gif set

This one that attacks Wanda and specifically asks for an argument

This one asking why tony stans feel the need to attack Wanda constantly

Or maybe you’re getting confused with what is an “innocuous Tony Stark post” and what is a hijacked Steve-positive post or an anti-team-Cap post.

Most of the posts on this blog are either original content or replies to arguments on anti-team-cap posts and hijacked team-cap-positive posts.

The post in question is the only one that’s been mostly just “pro Tony” (although I would argue the “innocuous,” as it’s heavily implying that Team Cap was lazing about doing nothing while Tony was the only one prepping for Thanos) and even then I merely pointed out that the Avengers weren’t likely going to be surprised by a new suit because that’s what Tony does.

He makes suits.

He spends his spare time upgrading the Iron Man suit. He’s constantly building more, better, bigger suits. He tinkers constantly. He can’t seem to stop himself from building suits.

Hell, the Avengers would probably be more surprised if he showed up two years later and didn’t have some kind of an improvement.

But clearly, pointing this out is enough to warrant an entire call-out post from you attacking my friend.

(Keep in mind, everyone - no poking fun is allowed when it comes to Tony Stark or his fans.)

Honestly, she’s still willing to concede a lot when it comes to Tony. Me, a little less so.

But nobody ever goes for the realistic arguments. It’s all just attacking any character that’s not Tony in an attempt to make him look better.

Even you seem to be right back to “Captain Asshole and that Nazi Wanda” like the rest of them.

Honestly, she’s been surprisingly polite considering some of the comments she’s responding to.

“Before when I went to their blog? An actual whole person used it. There was agents of SHIELD shit and, like, actual content that wasn’t awful.“

Um....I don’t actually have any Agents of SHIELD posts on this blog. At all. I mostly posted Gravity Falls comics and Snape or Draco callouts before deciding to stay on my literary blog and annoy Cassandra Clare fans. So I really am not sure where you got the impression that this discourse thing is recent or new...

And we’ve actually been alternating posts and replies for the past couple months. You apparently just can’t tell us apart.

And no, neither of us plan on stopping this anytime soon.

We know that we can take the garbage and abuse that most of the stans throw around and just brush it off without a problem. And we’d much rather have it directed at us than at the other fans who are just here to like Steve or Wanda or Clint or Sam or Scott or Natasha or Bucky, and who shouldn’t have to constantly put up with with their posts being hijacked by Tony stans who are desperate to make sure that nothing positive can be said about any character who isn’t Tony Stark.

If this bothers you, I strongly suggest you start asking other Tony Stans to stop harassing people who don’t like their fav, or you simply block me, because so long as there are still tony stans that feel the need to harass anyone who doesn’t like their fav or who will attack any other character just to make Tony look good, we’re both going to keep on replying.

Why?

And if you’re going to start in on that “defending people who leave anon abuse for people who don’t like Tony” garbage as well, then we’ll fight you too.

[fair-fae]

As much as I don’t want to bring this up again (though the drama is still going strong on Twitter, so still relevant enough, I guess)... As tempting as it is to point all the fingers at Oz and blame them for everything that happened, to make them the one and only big bad guy, take a step back and look at how the community failed Oz’s victims, and how you and the people around you may have contributed to that.

Oz alone didn’t terrify anyone into submission, hiding, and harm. Oz alone did not alienate anyone and make them feel unwelcome in the community as a whole. Oz alone did not flood anyone’s inbox with hatemail, death threats, and nasty anons. Oz alone did not spread lies and rumors about people through the community and give them traction. Oz was the catalyst, but it was their friends and the community who did the real dirty work in so many cases. When the secrets blogs started to get bombarded with demands for “evidence” about the “The Crusader” and their misdeeds, all I and I’m sure many more of their victims could do was laugh. A lot of the evidence was public. Painfully public, in front of everyone’s eyes, and so many people didn’t care. It was not secret, it was not hidden, it was just ignored, or even lauded on as some form of righteous justice. I wonder how many people now acting outraged and disgusted with Oz aided in the harassment of Oz’s victims and believed the lies about them? How many of you reblogged callouts and gossiped with friends, blocked and avoided people, denied them from your FC’s and linkshells, even sent them nasty anons or treated them rudely when you encountered them? How many of you had your own beef with a victim, and used the claims Oz had created to harass them, even perhaps knowing they were untrue? How many of you already hated a victim and were just so bent on having them burned at the stake in the community that you were eager to jump onto the crusade bandwagon Oz had created against them despite it being total bullshit? You may think this makes you a victim as well, that you were misled and deceived. And perhaps that’s true in a way. But you’re adults with your own decisions and agency over your own actions. You hurt people, be it with your own malice, or carelessness, or misplaced, zealot-like sense of justice. The venom of Oz’s crusades, the lengths they went to for “justice,” the lack of proof, the wild and baseless claims, they were right in front of you. You chose not to see. That’s on no one but you. You’re more perpetrator than victim. I hope you will be more considerate and careful of your actions in the future. I’ve had several people people apologize to me, some anonymously and some not, and I appreciate it and hope Oz’s other victims have been receiving similar apologies from those who believed the lies about them and wronged them. But the community as a whole needs to examine our own behavior and not fall into the same mistakes, not enable and encourage another abuser. When you see a “callout post,” look for evidence. See if the evidence matches the claims, or if they seem to be exaggerated or taken out of context. Look at the tone of the post and if it seems rational and reasonable, or if it’s laden with personal insults, hyped up SJW buzzwords, and unnecessary jabs at the person. Think about what you know of the accused’s behavior and personality and if it seems to match up. Ask yourself what the OP could have to gain for making these claims about this person and how trustworthy you believe them to be. Ask yourself if the alleged behavior is something you deem concerning and relevant or not (i.e. I’ve seen a lot of people “called out” for RL relationship drama which is not something we can know or that I care to boost on my FFXIV blog; you, of course, are welcome to feel differently on that matter). Keep in mind that even if there is “evidence,” anything can be faked. Conversations and quotes can be taken out of context, cropped, and cherry-picked. The /echo function can be used to fake in game conversations. Screenshots and photos can be photoshopped. Copy/pasted logs can be edited or fabricated entirely. Editing web pages can be used (no, that’s not even getting into “hacking”--a longshot, but I guess also always a possibility) to alter any web page or conversation there upon. Fake accounts can be made using the same handle or similar handles and matching icons to impersonate another person.  Use your own brain. Be a grown ass adult with your own thoughts who makes your own decisions. Find the careful balance to protect yourself/your friends/your FC yet not potentially contribute to the slander and alienation of an innocent person. Don’t gossip. Don’t spread the rumors. Give the accused a chance if the claims against them seem shaky and you can find it within yourself without jeopardizing your own stability and safety. Think twice before you leave a comment, like, or reblog on vague posts and look into things a little bit. A post that says “Kill all Nazis” may seem innocuous enough and worthy of a “like.” But then, maybe it’s not when you scroll down the OP’s blog a little and see the post was directly following them making an entirely false accusation about someone else being a Nazi. Maybe someone’s “like this to piss off a homophobe” post was made directly after someone politely asked them to tag their risque posts (that happened to feature a same sex couple) and now the person who didn’t want to see psuedo-porn on their dash is getting bombarded with anons calling them a homophobe. I’m not pulling these out of my ass btw; these are real examples I’ve seen. What might seem like a generic “bad thing is bad” post becomes something else when someone has just been wrongfully accused of that “bad thing.” Instead, it’s a tactic of intimidation and alienation. The OP is making this post knowing that well-meaning people are going to like it, and their the victim will see the notes and think “all these people believe that about me, all these people hate me.” Don’t fall into their trap, don’t become an accessory in their harassment. And, for the love of god, don’t believe you read.

[deadinsidedressage]

honestly i love how you act like you’re the only one with basic rights here. when people ask you to provide evidence for your claims you laugh them off and add hashtags like “it’s 2018 i can say what i want.” while making it seem like them asking you to provide evidence is in the wrong and they can’t ask a few simple questions. the hypocrisy is real. i used to like your blog and what you posted until i saw how you acted towards your followers and anyone who visits your blog. honestly grow up.

my tags were   #I just think this was really funny#like no just my response but the ask in general#it’s 2018 I’m allowed to say I don’t like someone/something without hosting a virtual lecture on the subject 😂 so I think you need to work on both your reading comprehension and ability to make inferences from material, but sure. asking me to drag someone around on the internet publicly who a) obviously doesn’t appreciate that because she materialized on my blog very quickly after a fairly innocuous comment ((on the grand scheme of things)) and who b) I do not like for mostly “personal” reasons and am not trying to drag that around publicly those reasons for precisely this reason: y’all get uppity as fuck about it. If someone wants to come to me “in-person” and talk to me about where my disagreements in her riding, training, etc. that’s awesome but I’m not playing this game of “hey can you write me a 5 page paper with citations based on the thesis Shelby is awful”. 

And, asking me to publicly provide “evidence” (aka, make some kind of callout post) IS wrong. Doing so literally encourages public shit talking and honestly if you don’t like seeing that kind of content DON’T FUCKING COME ON MY BLOG AND ASK FOR ME TO DO IT. I’m not saying I don’t do it or wouldn’t do it— but yeah it actually is wrong to dissect people’s riding and character publicly. 

Wow, fucking rocket science! Also, I don’t give a shit if you like the content on my blog because I don’t create it for you.

[sarscov2imagery]

Museum of Covid-19: the story of the crisis told through everyday objects

Lockdown culture

Scrawled signs, neon rainbows, flour mania … the V&A’s collectors are creating a show for our times, targeting the everyday objects taking on new meaning in the coronavirus age

Oliver Wainwright

@ollywainwright

Mon 4 May 2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 1 Jul 2020 17.32 BST

Before my world was reduced to a two-mile radius from my house, I never realised how interesting other people’s front gardens could be. When your life is confined to the same four walls, with each journey to the kitchen an odyssey, the world outside takes on a whole new allure. I now find myself entranced by all the different varieties of privet hedge, intrigued by people’s choice of gravel size and paving pattern, captivated by the clusters of cacti perched on windowsills. Front doors have become a new form of entertainment, as have the subtleties of window-mouldings and architraves. Who knew there could be so many varieties of mortar on a single street?

There’s nothing like six weeks of house arrest to give you an elevated awareness of your surroundings. And it’s a phenomenon that hasn’t gone unnoticed at the nation’s grand repository of objects, the Victoria and Albert. “The pandemic has this weird way of bringing to the fore objects you would never have thought about,” says Brendan Cormier, senior design curator at the London museum. “Everything becomes heightened.”

With future exhibitions on hold and collecting in limbo, Cormier has turned his team’s attention to thinking about how the coronavirus has reframed the everyday, casting familiar objects in a very different light. Which is why the V&A is just about to launch Pandemic Objects, an online series examining how a range of unremarkable items have become charged with new meaning and purpose.

“There are so many designed objects and inventions coming out of the pandemic,” says Cormier, citing all the hands-free door openers and 3D-printed face visors. “But it’s going to take time to work out which ones are actually useful.” He thinks there’s a danger that some much-touted innovations might end up being “vapourware” – flashy concepts that catch the attention of design blogs, but never come to fruition.

The V&A design department has made headlines with its Rapid Response Collecting, an initiative that has snapped up such zeitgeisty objects as the Liberator 3D-printed handgun, the plans for which were released online in 2013, and one of pink knitted pussyhats worn by half a million attendees at the Women’s March in Washington DC in 2017. But with everything now changing so rapidly, curators have decided there’s some value in slowing down. Instead of rushing out to collect Covid ephemera, Cormier thinks the museum’s time would be better spent looking afresh at what’s right under our noses. “Is the pandemic revealing anything new,” he asks, “about things we take for granted?” One of the first things to catch his attention was the wealth of hastily drawn homemade signs cropping up in shop windows around the world, explaining new delivery services and warning people to keep 2m apart. It seemed to say something about our relationship with technology and public messaging: the 1990s craze for inkjet printers promised everyone the professional finish of a publishing house in the comfort of their own home. Yet, three decades on, most of us seem to have thrown out our printers, sick of clogged-up, eye-wateringly expensive cartridges, and have embraced the paperless society. “In the moment of need, when the situation is changing so rapidly,” says Cormier, “we’ve gone back to pen and paper.”

Putting signs in windows quickly spread to the home, too, as a means of both expressing community solidarity and keeping the kids occupied. Headteachers encouraged pupils to paint hopeful rainbows and stick them in windows, fuelling neighbourly rivalry with evermore elaborate formations, ranging from chalk to neon paint and Lego bricks. It wasn’t long before this homespun movement was co-opted by the art world, with Damien Hirst offering his own butterfly-wing rainbow to download.

Catherine Flood, co-curator of the V&A’s Food exhibition last year, will examine how the pandemic has changed perceptions of certain kitchen-cupboard staples. Flour and yeast, more used to being spilled on surfaces and swept into bins, have become sought-after luxuries, as we all try to channel our inner bakers. Instagram has become the Sourdough Olympics, awash with competitive posts, while flour mills are working around the clock to fulfil demand as wheat prices surge and well-stocked shelves become a rarity.

Traffic to the BBC’s basic bread recipe has risen faster than a cob in a 250-degree oven, with numbers up by 875%. But need does not seem to be what’s driving demand, as bread is still readily available in shops. It’s the therapeutic quality of baking that’s the attraction, Cormier thinks, the tactile and meditative quality of the process, along with a desire to feel self-sufficient.

“Flour is now a privilege,” he says, and he doesn’t just mean being able to find it in shops. “To bake bread, you need to be able to work at home, and have time to invest. It’s probably not frontline key workers who have the pleasure of rediscovering the miracles of baking.”

As research for a potential future exhibition on accessibility in design, curator Natalie Kane has been looking at the door handle – a seemingly innocuous part of the built environment that has become a villain in the age of coronavirus. Since early March, when it was first announced that the virus could survive on surfaces for up to three days, we’ve been elbowing and toeing our way through doors, suddenly aware of just how often we use our hands to navigate through the world. Could the pandemic finally force society to accept what disability groups have been campaigning about for decades – that such things are obstacles rather than aids?

Meanwhile, as travel has been curtailed, the online realm has offered one of the few options for escapism. Some have turned to Google Street View to sate their wanderlust, whiling away hours touring the side streets of far-flung locations or panning through 3D cityscapes. The Canadian artist Jon Rafman has revived his project The Nine Eyes of Google Street View. Begun in 2008 when the medium was still novel, the projects trawls the globe’s virtual streets for alarming scenes – from a moose careering down a highway to a gun-toting gang caught mid-heist, to naked bodies sprawled across the pavement.

Now, these unruly snapshots seem like glimpses of another time, glitches in the lockdown matrix. V&A curator Ella Kilgallon will examine the Street View phenomenon, putting it in the context of such earlier documentary initiatives as the National Photographic Record Association), established in 1897 in an attempt to create a comprehensive record of British life. Taking advantage of the expansion of photography as an increasingly popular hobby at the turn of the century, the association planned to form a countrywide “memory bank” to foster “national pride”. It culminated in 5,883 photographs by 1910. In the last 12 years, Google has captured 10 million miles of the Earth’s surface in 360-degree images, equivalent to circling the planet more than 400 times. Further entries in the Pandemic Objects series will shine a spotlight on toilet paper, streaming services, cardboard packaging, balconies and more, one of the more triumphant stories being the revival of the sewing machine. “Despite all the hype around distributed manufacturing and downloadable customised designs, not many of us have a 3D-printer at home,” says Cormier. “Yet the great 19th-century invention of the sewing machine is still a ubiquitous household item.”

Sales of sewing machines have rocketed in the pandemic, recalling the Make Do and Mend movement of the second world war, as people join the effort to mass-produce face masks. One of the chief obstacles to such community craftivism, says Cormier, is managing production and distribution. After the recent bush fires in Australia, an international callout for people to knit koala mittens and wombat pouches triggered a tidal wave of marsupial mitts, far more than could possibly be used. As thousands of companies and hobbyists have sign up to produce face-shields in the great national struggle for PPE, it remains to be seen how effectively they can be distributed to where they are needed most. Whether it’s a newfound respect for loo roll, a growing suspicion of excessive cardboard packaging, or a phobia of door handles, when the pandemic finally subsides, we may never look at everyday objects in the same way again.

• Pandemic Objects is at vam.ac.uk/blog/

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 

[decomprosed]

alright, after dealing with this nagging headache for three days straight, i figured it’s time to make a conclusive, non-joking post as a matter of public record 

UnsettlingStories posted a meme of jesus trying to clap a fly, and not being able to because of stigmata. dumb? hell yeah. but end of the world? nah, not really. 

from this post, a user named stillmyguitar took offense, which is fine. what is decidedly not fine, is the response “fuck you and the christianphobe horse you rode in on, christianphobe piece of shit, good thing no one will hunt you down and kill you”. to me, and a lot of other people, this sounded pretty damn threatening, but it turns out it’s just their way of being extremely islamophobic (cause if UnsettlingStories had made a post about islam/muslims, he would’ve been hunted down and slaughtered––that was the reasoning). people say things, things get out of hand. i made a dumb, crude response criticizing this person’s viewpoints and stating that this is why ignorant people hate modern christians; that whole loud voice of the few outweighs the many thing. 

since then, stillmyguitar has conclusively stalked myself and many other people in the horror community on tumblr for three days straight. nonstop. morning, day, and night. dozens and dozens of comments left on posts that have nothing to do with them, spanning the gamut of horrendous bullshit. 

i––and many others––have been called every foul name in the book, been told we have no lives, been called stalkers, saying that we’re harassing them. i’ve been called a nazi (which is hilarious; hello, very-much-supportive-of-nazi-punching queer jew here, nice to meetcha) and a leader of a “cult of children” (despite almost every single person involved in this being an adult), and have been told to do a numerous amount of things to myself and others that usually involve genitals. 

i just want to state that i am neither a nazi nor a cult leader, i have been trying to get this person away from myself and my friends for three days straight, have not purposefully initiated contact with them a single time except for the first post, which was a public comment on a public forum in response to public ignorance, and that this is the last time i will be remarking on this subject. i do not engage in callout posts. this is not a callout post. this is just so that i can state all of this in one place, without anything in-between, and have a reference point if need be.

i apologize to anyone who’s currently still being inundated with replies and messages (along with the ones they’re sending on anon), and anyone whose completely random, innocuous, and wholly unrelated posts have been attacked by this beatles-obsessed human virus. 

this user is a racist, homophobic, islamophobic, “stop hating on hetero white america” Trump-supporting menace, and, beyond this post, i will engage no further (and i implore anyone else involved to do the same, along with reporting what you can; hopefully staff takes notice and care, but i doubt anything will come of that).

either way, fuck the world, stay strong, #horror fam is amazing, and beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster; for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss calls you a conceited disgraceful cow and falls out of your closet in the middle of the night screaming hateful phobic vitriol

[the-perfect-film-blog]

How To Fix RWBY Volume 4

With the existence of trains and steampunk airships, there's really no reason for team RNJR to have to walk all the way to Haven.

Rather than have an entire season of our heroes in transit to do something interesting, I propose that Volume 4 could be condensed into 6 or 7 episodes without losing anything of value. 

Spoilers below the cut.

Before I begin I just want to say that I could have done without Blake's storyline for much of this season, as it hasn't tied into the main plot or directed Blake towards the rest of the cast yet. I would have instead ended Volume 3 with Sun running off after Blake and come back to her when she is likely to become relevant. (None of this Blake didn't even notice Sun following her nonsense.)

So with that in mind, let's cut fix Volume 4's pacing.

Episode 1. The Next Step

We can still open on WTCH I guess. But instead of Tyrian laughing for no goddamn reason just have him quietly suggest, "Hey Cinder u want me to cut that girl's eye out for u since you're indisposed? ;)"

Instead of the Geist fight, cut between the grimm being born in the opening and show RRNJ pushing a group of grimm into a pit or funneling them through a something that would actually display strategy. for a nearby village to fund the next leg of their journey.

Either Jaune has already upgraded his weapon or he uses his share to have his upgrades done after the fight, not before it like a tool. No need for this scene to last 8 minutes either, just have him see the armory and be like "can you modify this?" then cut to his new weapon.

Team RWBY moves on to the next village where they can board a ferry to Haven. It's destroyed and everyone is dead. Ruby and suggests waiting for an incoming ferry so RRNJ can explain what happen but Ren and Nora object. Eventually they get going. As they move on, we zoom out to Qrow cutting down some Grimm and watching them progress.

No Oscar for now.

Episode 2. Rememberance

Ruby wakes up from a nightmare and walks in on Jaune either practicing with his new sword while watching Pyrrha's tape or trying to figure out his semblance. Pyrrha's tape is also just actually training drills and any "btw love u babe <3" is condensed to one sentence. Ruby comforts Jaune and says, "I know. I miss my partner too." Bonus points if Jaune's training has nothing to do with Pyrrha's instructions and he just wanted to hear the sound of her voice.

And then we cut to Weiss and Jaque after Ironwood storms out. Can reduce the altercation to Ironwood vaguely saying he needs to secure Atlas and Jaques objecting because his monopoly-man mustache needs as much Dust money as it can make.

Weiss reluctantly agrees to sing a song that would be likely to be sung at a banquet for rich people. Maybe Whitley walks in on Weiss being all buddy-buddy with Klein and kind of casually noses in like "lol whatcha doing sis?" breaking up the conversation. Maybe Weiss buys it but Klein doesn't.

Yang can get her arm but neglect to actually try it on for a while, or she tries it on and can't move it the way she wants, gets frustrated and takes it off. (Because irritability is a symptom of PTSD! Why not use it!)

We can have Port and Oobleck drop in, reminding everyone of Ozpin and asking when Tai is going to come help and be useful, since he's an actual huntsman, and he rejects because Yang. Instead of the OMG SHOCKING "callout" from Taiyang about Yang losing a few brain cells with her arm, maybe Yang gets frustrated that Taiyang is never around to help and decides to push herself. Either way she tries the arm again and challenges her dad for not being any more willing to help than he was the past three seasons.

Episode 3. Runaways and Stowaways Family

Salem and Cinder have their little "Is Ozpin really dead?" moment.

Cut to Oscar doing a little bit of his farm work and then going to wash up for the night only to hear, "Hello! I'm professor Ozpin!"

RRNJ reaches Higanbana where they hope to wait for an airship. Except there is not an airship to catch; they're currently in use by some huntsman searching for bandits. RRNJ shrug their shoulders and stay in an inn.

Raven and Qrow have their little, "Hey you asshole you gonna go help your kid?" spat and ask each other about the relics and spring maiden.

Taiyang and Yang spar, during which at some point Taiyang literally disarms Yang (frustrating her) but instead of all the vaguetalk about Raven Taiyang offers an anecdote that reveals more about Raven's character and demonstrates a parallel between Yang and Raven. Instead of his problem with Yang's overuse of her semblance being "it will make you weaker" (which it obviously does not), it should be that a semblance wherin she has to damage herself to use is not viable in every situation. (Also she shouldn't have been 100% powered up vs Adam in Volume 3).

Tyrian does his "Have you seen a girl with Silver Eyes" schtick but instead of laughing maniacally his eyes flash purple.

Episode 4 - Tipping Pont

Not really all that different from Actual! Tipping point. Start off with Weiss at the concert singing some sick Atlas Opera about Grimm and a Princess instead of "Let me live my life, DAD!"

Gala. Weiss has her meltdown. Instead of accidentally summoning a boar maybe she does something innocuous like knock a glass out of a lady's hand out of spite and all these hoidy-toity rich people are aghast and ready to call security. Ironwood intervenes and walks Weiss out, complete with his, "She's the only one around here making sense" line. We see Whitley whispering to Jaques and Jaques ruffling his mustache.

Instead of having both Oniyuri and Kuroyuri we could instead have them come across a sign with the name crossed off, where Ren explains why Kuroyuri was to be built and explains there's no point in going, it's already destroyed.

"But Ren how do you know that--"

And oh shit it's Tyrian!

Maybe Tyrian confronts them in an open space initially - team RRNJ clearly has the advantage because of course they do, it's four on one. Maybe Jaune says as much.

"Hey, it's four against one! We're not looking for a fight, just walk away!"

And then Tyrian, who doesn't really give a crap, goes for Ruby and RRNJ uses powered-up Nora to push Tyrian back. With some distance between them we get the dialogue exchange minus the "the rose has thorns!" line because Ruby’s comeback was weaksauce. Any laughter is going to be used strictly when Team RRNJ thinks they can scare Tyrian off. Tyrian proceeds to wipe the floor with RRNJ until we see a Qrow flying in overhead. We watch from Qrow's perspective as Ruby's aura breaks and Tyrian goes in for the kill incapacitation. At the last moment Qrow blocks Tyrian and pushes him back.

Episode 5 - Punished

Tyrian fights Qrow. Ruby attempts to help despite Qrow warning her numerous times not to get involved. RRNJ attempts to offer fire support, but Qrow warns them to stop.

Tyrian chases Qrow into the forest and Ruby pursues despite Qrow's protests. When she and RRNJ catch up their auras are broken and she rushes in in an attempt to help. Qrow's semblance causes her to trip, drop things on herself, and almost get stabbed. In his rush to stop Ruby from getting hurt, Qrow gets stabbed by Tyrian's tail, which Ruby then cuts off.

Tyrian flees and either Ren or Nora starts to chase him, until Qrow nearly collapses and his injuries are made apparent. He promises to explain everything.

Weiss gets told she's not the heiress anymore, Whitley is, and she resolves to pack her things and hit the road. She asks Klein for help in getting out and he agrees - and he brings her weapon so she can train. Whitley mocks Weiss because “you’re grounded what are you gonna do with that” and she slams the door in his face with zero fucks given.

Oscar and Ozpin have a brief moment in which Ozpin explains what he wants Oscar to do, and it's for the greater good so you gotta, and Oscar kind of vaguely says, "I gotta talk to my aunt."

Qrow gives some exposition to RRNJ and starts to lose feeling in his limbs. This is a slow-acting poison, not a wake up and keel over poison. RRNJ argue about what they should do next and against Ren and Nora's wishes they go to Kuroyuri, because it's the closest place they can actually get to.

Nucklavee tease.

Episode 6 - Kuroyuri

Not too much is different but this time it is clear from Ren's behavior that he is certain of some danger in the village and he warns the team that they need to get what they're looking for and get out fast.

Ren's flashback (condensed into just the part about meeting Nora and finding her once the village has been destroyed) is played as a way of him explaining the danger to Ruby and Jaune, and though they hurry up the Grimm blocks them as they're preparing to leave.

Qrow collapses and there's no choice but to fight.

RRNJ fights the Nucklavee but this time instead of "Run in a circle, team who are already running in a circle!" we see the team overwhelmed at first, trying to charge for perceived weak points like its knees and firing at the head only to be brushed aside.

With the pressure put on, maybe the beast disarms Nora, Ren loses his cool and tries to go for the head. Big mistake. It screams/spews some sort of sludge and Ren is injured. His Aura breaks. Nora is injured getting him out of there.

It is at this point that Nora runs to yell at him for losing his cool and Jaune and Ruby realize that the only way they're taking this thing down is by turning the whole thing sideways (it's a horse, horses are really bad with taking a fall). When Ren and Nora return, Jaune uses Ruby and Nora to use their respective powers to flip the horse over so Ren can slip in and stab it.

Jaune acts as a distraction and tanks a few hits for the rest of the team to do this. As they're fighting we see the first sign of the airships over the horizon, it's almost over. They just need to hold out.

Once the grimm is killed the team goes. Ruby writes a letter to Yang and sends it by drone. Taiyang warns Yang that she isn't ready, but says it's ultimately her choice and he won't stop her. Maybe Yang calls him out on not going to help and tries to rush off on her own again, leaving Taiyang concerned.

Meanwhile we see Weiss sneaking out with Klein to board an airship. Weiss overhears just "Based on information your daughter gave me, I'm closing the border!" and Weiss gasps and hurries the fuck out of there.

Blake arrives at Menagerie where she and Sun are aghast to see Adam Tauras's White Fang flag flying, not the White Fang flag one would typically see in Menagerie.

Tyrian returns to Salem while Cinder is doing whatever it is that Cinder does these days, admits he couldn't take Ruby and says he poisoned Qrow so they're very likely dead.

Salem says, "Yeah whatever you useless turd" and Tyrian has his little meltdown.

Episode (7???) - (Anything to do with Blake)

Rather than Blake and Sun being surprised by the White Fang presence, this trip is about Blake returning to her family for closure, because she knows she did the wrong thing.

And rather than a drawn out sequence in which Blake and her father talk it out we need only a long scene of Blake not wanting to enter.

Maybe she explains to Sun that she left home to be part of Adam's White Fang, that she thought her father's leadership was weak, and that she has done terrible things.

With some consolation and encouragement from Sun, she knocks on the door and her parents accept her. She has her cry with her family, and from there I really don't know where Blake's story is supposed to go yet so I can't go into much more detail about how to rework it.

Oscar meeting Hazel and getting on the train can go here too; it would be easier to make it clear he's not traveling a huge distance but maybe only about 100 km or so if we can easily recognize Haven just on the horizon.

I hope I've more or less demonstrated the ways that the pacing in this season could have been adjusted. Since there are fewer unnecessary fight scenes, this leg of the season should be overall easier to animate, and the finale can instead head towards the team getting back together.

[yotou-archive]

hey read this

UNRELATED but this is a new policy I’m going to enact in the light of the reception of the bk psas:

IF YOU’RE NOT A MUTUAL AND YOU TRY TO INTERACT WITH ME IN CHARACTER OR OTHERWISE SOLICIT IC INTERACTIONS (MAINLY LIKING STARTER POSTS)

YOU WILL BE BLOCKED. 

SIMPLE AS THAT. 

As you’re probably aware by now my name has been at the near center of the howl brynhildrking callouts. My name is front and center because he did not read my rules, attempted to repeatedly interact with me or solicit ic interactions that I was not seeking, and proceeded to vague me even after everything was said and done. And since this community thinks that defending howl for this is fine and dandy I’m going to have zero tolerance with this for the sake of my protection. How the hell am I supposed to be lenient when newer rpers are being shown this behavior is totally ok to replicate?

If you’re gonna defend such a childish person’s disrespect for boundaries I’m going to have to have no choice but to be harsh with you, for the sake of my enjoyment on this blog. 

Stop. read my rules. Private is defined as mutuals-only.

I really don’t mind making new friends and if there’s ooc memes I reblog (like about muse hcs or me as a mun) that’s okay to respond to. You’re more than welcome to just talk to me about my muse, or me, or heck, I might just start asking people how their day was b/c little innocuous ooc interactions like that are fine. But when I’ve had people vague me for politely telling them I wasn’t interested in an interaction at the time after explicitly saying I was seeking something else, or having people passive-aggressively bemoan to me I didn’t interact with ocs while talking to me (howl didn’t do this but back before I was oc friendly this was an actual thing I’ve had happen) I get just a little fucking tired.

again please don’t be further intimidated by me because of this this is only for my own safety. If you’re uncertain about anything, ask.