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hms-no-fun · 3 months ago

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you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?

cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.

first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.

cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.

but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!

the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.

i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.

all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!

what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!

like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.

uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao

#sarahposts #cohost #social media #politics #long post #political diatribe #i miss cohost #this is what happens when my ritalin kicks in mid-stream #i promise i didn't MEAN to make this a whole Thing #but i've been thinking a lot about this stuff and cohost is a big part of why

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duckirubb3r · 2 months ago

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To Be Hero X theory time

Disclaimer: I'm watching To Be Hero X in Japanese because it was the automatic option for the site I'm watching on. Because of this, anime-specific information will be using Japanese casting and English subtitles paired with the Japanese dubbing.

Okay so I never do this but I've become a deranged, obsessive fangirl who has been overanalysing everything for the past week and I have a major theory I need the world to hear before the second episode airs so it's apparent down the line that I'm either absolutely delusional, a giga genius, or some sort of mix of the two. There's only one episode so far and I want my 4D chess to pay off so I need as little canon evidence to go off of as possible to be more impressive.

I have more than one theory, but I'm going to focus on my biggest one. If you don't want to be spoiled or don't want to do a lot of reading, stop here. This post will be long.

Without further ado, my theory:

Ghostblade is the original Nice. The very first one to ever exist.

We know from episode 1 that anyone can replace a hero so long as people believe in them. Because no one was aware of Nice's suicide, everyone believed that Lin Ling, with his hair styled and painted white, was the real Nice. Thus, he became the real Nice. His hair became naturally white, his eyes turned blue, and his voice adjusted to sound like the former Nice's. Knowing this, it makes sense that even the Nice who killed himself probably wasn't the first Nice. Possibly not even the second or the third or even the tenth. There's a chance that a lot of former-Nices have existed.

After watching episode 1, I was desperate for more content which led me to this Tumblr post with character sheets for the top 10 heroes. When looking through each profile, I noticed something that felt way too strange to be just a coincidence: 4/10 of them, Nice included, have white hair, and all of those white-haired characters are 180cm tall. There's no way that's just a coincidence, right? So I ended up thinking about it more and more. I watched all of the character concept and character story movies (which I will henceforth refer to as CC and CS respectively) to look for more information and, before I knew it, I became a crazy theorist. My theories center around the white-haired heroes, but almost all of what I've thought of so far is exclusively about Nice and Ghostblade.

I saw the following promotional image that pictures the ten heroes focused on during the series.

Aside from the white hair and heights, I took particular notice of how Nice and Ghostblade look awfully similar in this image. This was when things really spiraled out of control for me.

Like dude, come on. Their hairstyle in particular is practically the same. It even parts on the same side.

Ghostblade's Character Concept and Character Story Movies

So I watched every character's CCs and CSs, but I really watched Ghostblades after coming up with this theory—and when I say I watched them, I mean I studied them. I analysed every frame I could, over and over. In doing so, I either became completely delusional or I found some very compelling evidence to support my theory that Ghostblade is the original Nice. I'm not sure how best to explain everything, so I'm just going to run through the videos themselves and do my best.

At the beginning of Ghostblade's CS, it shows him as a child—twelve years old, to be precise—in a dreary room with a mysterious man preparing to perform a surgical procedure on him. We're shown various screens with medical information on them. The text on these screens read:

“The cerebrum is not only the center of senses and voluntary movements, but also the center of mental activities such as memory and judgement. The cerebrum consists of two cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus collosum, and the connection by the corpus collosum plays an important role in the signal transmission and interaction between the two cerebral hemispheres."

and

"The parietal lobe is located between the central sulcus and parieto-occipital sulcus, above the outer fissure, and contains the motor center that issues motor commands to the [...] somatosensory cortex [...] which are involved in processing [...] sensations such as touch, pressure, and pain, and are responsible for the sensory [...]"

All other text is unfortunately either unimportant or too blurry to read.

Using the text from these images, we can essentially determine that the surgeon was operating on twelve-year-old Ghostblade in an attempt to alter his voluntary movements, memory, judgement, sensations such as touch, pressure, and pain, and probably a lot more we aren't able to see.

Following this, we have a scene of Ghostblade standing in front of a mirror in what appears to be a restroom with smiley faces painted on the stall doors behind him. He takes a knife to the mirror and carves the Chinese character for “smile” before inspecting his teeth, leading us to believe the surgeon operated on them as well as his brain. But his teeth are perfect. Nothing is wrong with them. This means that the surgeon was probably correcting a flaw so that Ghostblade would have a better smile, hence the encouragement to smile with smiley faces painted on the walls.

So it seems to be the case that, whoever this surgeon is or whoever he's working for—whoever ordered these procedures to be conducted on twelve-year-old Ghostblade—was trying to make him a perfect person who's always shining a charming smile. Doesn't that sound familiar?

OH YEAH. IT'S HIM. "Mr. Perfect" a.k.a. Nice.

So, if Ghostblade's upbringing was an effort to turn him into the OG Nice, what other evidence is there for this? What are his parallels to Nice's character? How would Ghostblade fit into the Nice backstory? Don't worry, I've got you covered. Let's switch over to Ghostblade's CC for a bit. It's considerably shorter, but contains valuable insights.

It starts with Ghostblade in some sort of open structure where a field of what looks to be daisies is blossoming and moonlight is spilling through. There's a bit of action, but the sequence of scenes that follow paint a grim picture. First, Ghostblade raises a hand. which transitions into the hand of a man (presumably him) and a woman in wedding attire with the groom slipping a ring onto the bride's finger.

Afterward, Ghostblade is looking up at the moon as its light engulfs him and it enters what appears to be a sequence of memories and daydreams where he's holding out his hand as the scenery changes. It cycles from the current moment

to the image of a girl's hand in his,

rain collecting on his palm,

his bloodied hand in the room of a child,

and his dirty/scratched up hand clenching into a fist above rubble where a single flower grows.

After the sequence, it returns to the flower field where Ghostblade is reaching out to the moon as what appears to be blood splatters begin to obscure the image.

That's basically it in terms of the visuals for his CC. The only thing left to mention is his theme song, because the lyrics are very notably about love which seems bizarre for a character who appears so dark, mysterious, and badass. The lyrics (chopped for the CC) are as follows:

And even if I have to start again It's all because of you If you don't know it by now My love for you will grow Know that this is true

So, what sort of story does his CC seem to tell? I think a good place to start is the flower field. The flowers appear to be daisies. If we assume they were deliberately selected, then if we look at flower language, in most cultures daisies apparently represent innocence, purity, loyal love, cheerfulness, childbirth, and new beginnings. Which lines up a lot with what I've observed so far! Ghostblade wears prayer beads around his wrist, so I'm assuming he's probably a religious man. That could easily align with ideals of purity and innocence. Loyal love/loyalty and love could obviously refer to a lover. Cheerfulness ties back to all the smiley faces and encouragement to smile. Childbirth is rather straightforward and will be relevant in a moment, and new beginnings... we'll come back to that in a bit, but for now, the lyric "and even if I have to start again" sort of speaks for itself.

To me, it seems to be a story about about a future Ghostblade could have had. The girl's hand in his was a lover he dreamed of marrying. The child's bedroom was one he hoped to one day have a child of his own occupy. The rain and the blood and the rubble were a memory, not a dream. His dreams died with his lover.

But who was his lover?

Well, he appears to have a fixation with the moon. When he's staring at the moon, the lyric that plays is "my love for you will grow" so is it possible that the moon might symbolise something? Yeah, sure. I can already think of at least one character who loves a moon—Nice lmao.

Does this mean that Moon died? Yeah. I mean, she died in episode 1 too and we know there's been at least two Nices now—Lin Ling and the Nice before him. There have probably been more Moons too! Whether the Moon I reckon Ghostblade loved in my theory was the OG Moon or not, I'm not sure... but probably? Either way, that detail isn't very important.

So! If we suppose that Ghostblade's CC is about him losing his lover, Moon, and, in turn, the future he dreamed of with her, then how does that tie back in to his CS? Let's pick up where we left off.

After the scene of child-Ghostblade checking his teeth in the mirror, there are various visuals of people smiling and more smiley faces. We're met again with Ghostblade in front of the same mirror he carved on as a child, albeit as an adult now. Looking into the mirror, Ghostblade puts on his signature metallic mask and a frowning face flashes on the screen, contrasting the smile that was so prevalent in his childhood. We then see a sequence of a slaughterhouse. Inside the slaughterhouse, there's a close-up of Ghostblade's eye as he looks at slaughtered animals, followed by a shot of what appears to be a difficult to distinguish image of a cow(?) giving birth. After that, it switches to Ghostblade fighting people in suits rather than your typical villain dressed as uniquely as the heroes are.

A birthing cow seems rather out of place, but we've already encountered the theme of birth. Previously, I mentioned that daisies can represent childbirth. Additionally, Ghostblade appeared to dream of a future where he'd have a child with his lover. This is also where I'd like to come back to the idea of new beginnings. Once again, the lyric that plays during this slaughterhouse/birthing cow/beginning of the fight scene is "and even if I have to start again." From this, it seems as though the birthing cow symbolises a rebirth of sorts when he engages in the slaughter of his enemies, comparing them to animals. This rebirth is also implied by the shot of him putting on his metal mask in front of the mirror with the sad face showing up after. It was likely the first time he donned the mask, as well as the moment he threw away his identity as Nice and was reborn as Ghostblade.

It transitions from the fighting to a scene where Ghostblade is standing by the ocean in civilian clothes without a mask. There are various things littered and washed up on the shore, such as empty soda cans, a shoe, a cigarette, a keyring, and a still-breathing fish. The items left abandoned in the sand, specifically the keyring, could symbolise him discarding things from his life as Nice, and the beached fish—the fish out of water—could represent how he's gone from spending his entire life up to that point playing the role of someone he was forced to be and now being out of his depths as he tries to become someone else, whether it's the real him or not, and start again from scratch.

There's another short fight scene where Ghostblade is curiously wearing sunglasses, a plain cloth face mask, and a normal jacket instead of his hero outfit and metal mask.

It's possible that, in this particular scene, the concept of "Ghostblade" didn't exist yet and this was the OG Nice disguising himself to commit these killings. If people recognised him as Nice doing something like this, his Trust Value would go down and he'd lose power. His reputation would be shattered. But who is he killing, anyway? Who are these people in suits who don't look anything like the villains that show up in the other CCs and CSs, aside from perhaps X's? Well, maybe they're the ones behind the death of his lover, the OG Moon. But what group of shady, well-dressed individuals would want to kill Moon, a hero? Well, how about Spotlight Organisation, the group that, in episode 1, was responsible for attacking Nice/Lin Ling (and Moon because she was there too...)? That checks out, surely.

Finally, at the end of Ghostblade's CS, we see him by the ocean again. A stuffed rabbit is caught in the tide and washes up to him. Maybe it's another one of the things he discarded from his life as Nice. But he reaches down to grab it. Before he can get ahold of it, it's pulled further away again. He begins walking into the water to chase after the rabbit.

Why is this significant? Why is he chasing the stuffed rabbit into the ocean? Well, there's a Chinese folklore story about a rabbit on the moon. Known as the Jade Rabbit, it lives with the moon goddess, Chang-e, and creates elixirs for immortality. During his miserable life being experimented on and forced to smile and be perfect, the only thing that allowed him to keep pushing on was Moon. The only thing that gave him life, just like the Jade Rabbit, was Moon. Perhaps the stuffed rabbit represents Moon, how she was swept away from him, and how he's still chasing after her.

Aw. How sad.

Okay, time for some nitty gritty details! In episode 1, after Nice killed himself and Lin Ling became the new Nice, Lin Ling was the one everyone was seeing and therefore interpreting as being Nice. Because of that, the former Nice was no longer "Nice"—Lin Ling was. Thus, Lin Ling's appearance started to change, physically turning him into the new Nice. Using this same logic, we can reason that it probably works the other way around too! The former Nice probably would have had his appearance start to revert to what he looked like before, had he not died, because he was no longer the person everyone thought was Nice.

We can apply this same sort of logic to Ghostblade with his transition from being Nice to being Ghostblade. We know that Ghostblade already had white hair as a kid so it would make sense for his hair colour and style to stay relatively the same when reverting from being Nice and becoming what is now Ghostblade. After all, if he was the OG Nice, then "Nice"'s appearance probably would have stemmed from his. Nice and Ghostblade have different eye colours and voices, though. This is a little harder to explain away, but eye colour is a feature that's harder to notice without close scrutiny. Even still, both Nice and Ghostblade have light coloured eyes and it's plausible that his Trust Value affected his eye colour either gradually or before anyone actually noticed, because being packaged and advertised as "the perfect hero" immediately evokes a certain image from people. His voice could have potentially undergone a similar sort of process, but we also know that the experiments on Ghostblade started when he was twelve years old. If he became a hero while he was still young, it's plausible that his voice hadn't properly matured yet by the time he publicly became Nice so it was higher and had already made an impression upon his public debut. After abandoning his identity as Nice, someone else probably took over and replaced him. When the replacement became known as the new Nice, it's possible that Ghostblade's eye colour and his voice reverted, but his hair colour never had to change to begin with. Because of him no longer being Nice and his features changing back to what they used to be, he could now be seen as a different person, therefore opening the door for him to become a different hero altogether—Ghostblade.

So, how delusional am I on a scale from 1-10? Did I cook or did this shit come out burned to a crisp? I can't wait for this theory to get ripped apart effortlessly despite all the hours of intense pondering I've spent on it. It's gonna hurt if not one single element of this was even remotely close to being right. If it's wrong? I'll probably just turn it into a fanfiction lmao.

Edit: I forgot to add this, but on his character sheet linked to at the start of this horrendously long post, Ghostblades interests and skills include homemaking and cooking!! Bro was already training to be a housewife, I'm telling you.

#to be hero x #to be hero x spoilers #tbhx #tbhx spoilers #to be hero x nice #to be hero x ghostblade #tbhx nice #tbhx ghostblade #tbhx theories #to be hero x theories

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