#don’t get me started on ??? had to delete so many tags talking about the entity

[percyouinhell]

Barbie, James and Reese taking pictures in the park~!

James and Reese from @lacunafiction

[florencesmachine]

tell me what's going on

Why tumblr user donottearmedown/luciequeenofelfame/luciehvrondaie is an embarrassment: a Masterpost

Hi if you’re here it’s because you’ve heard that tumblr user donottearmedown is an embarrassment and you’d like to know all the details! Let me break it down. It all started with this post by @minacarstairs (Tessa (yes @minacarstairs’s name is Tessa sorry if that makes this post confusing)), in which donottearmedown originally reached out to Tessa by sending her something along the lines of “Do you ship heronstairs/herongraystairs?” And Tessa replied with something along the lines of “Yeah lmao herongraystairs rights!”

(I wanna note that Tessa was being very polite, and continues to be very polite to people who disagree with her opinions on heronstairs/herongraystairs. She even began her original conversation with dont tear me down by saying it’s a matter of personal interpretation :) it’s donottearmedown who made the conversation mean-spirited)

(Also Tessa pls correct next if I’m wrong on any of this thnx)

And then sometime later, the conversation above ensues in which donottearmedown, seemingly perfectly reasonable at first, disagrees with the ship and offers a link to look at. (She throws this link around any chance she gets. She really fucking loves this link.) I got involved because in her answer, Tessa replies back with a link from a post I made from my own blog starting back in 2018, and then continued to add to it until my account got terminated (long story). You can read through both posts and check out all the replies! But basically we realized during this interaction that donottearmedown wasn’t looking to have a friendly conversation and was, in fact, batshit crazy. They were saying some absolute brain dead shit like that people shipping heronstairs is the same as people shipping Alec x Clary. Here’s the screenshot:

donottearmedown came back the next day to reply on several of Tessa and mine’s post which she wasn’t even tagged in, such as this one, and this one that had absolutely nothing to do with her because I make that same post every year. Here’s a screenshot from my old account last year via Instagram:

(there are more posts she replied to but I can’t be bothered to look for them, I’m sure you can find them on their blog if you can spare the braincells)

Racism by donottearmedown:

So, Tessa received this anon which tipped us off to some of the other tomfoolery on donottearmedown’s blog. We decided to look for ourselves and lo and behold, here’s the post of donottearmedown accusing Cassandra Clare of having a “Chinese kink” for writing Jessa:

Which, first of all, makes no sense because there’s like 2 Chinese characters in TSC total. If anything CC has a straight white boy kink lmao. But by saying this she was basically implying that the ONLY way Tessa (book!Tessa), or anybody who loves Jem, can love him is if they have a “Chinese kink”. Which donottearmedown can’t seem to be able to understand is an incredibly racist thing to say and think.

They also reblogged this BLM link and proceeded to tag it with absolute nonsense like “#smoke weed #lose weight #wessa”. I don’t know if her intentions were to mock the BLM movement but I still found this to be so incredibly disrespectful and tone deaf.

I also feel like I should mention this ask sent to Tessa in which donottearmedown implies she ~could be~ Asian, but it’s “none of her business anyways” (as if being Asian would absolve anyone of being racist akjsksjsj), but based on the fact that she has a track record of lying and pretending to be a person she’s not (as you will soon see :)) I call bullshit lmao:

I think that was the last of our interactions until today? Tessa and I were distracted because we have, you know, real lives.

But anyway, that brings us to today.

donottearmedown started replying to posts from mine and Tessa’s blogs which she wasn’t tagged in, again, and made several days ago. This one literally wasn’t even about her, it was about someone else that had engaged with one of Tessa’s posts. I made that post over a week ago and had already forgotten about it, but clearly donottearmedown never stops thinking about us 😳

NOW I WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THIS POST SPECIFICALLY.

Why? Because donottearmedown and luciequeenofelfame (now luciehervndaie) interacted on this post, as 2 seperate entities. luciequeenofelfame had also interacted with Tessa and I’s original posts at the beginning of June (you can check the replies on the posts!) coming to donottearmedown’s defense, and praising her for her opinions and other shit like that.

Here’s the screenshot. As you can see here, luciehervndaie reblogs from donottearmedown and adds on to their opinion:

Now here’s the kicker: donottearmedown and luciehervndaie are the same person.

As in, this bitch literally made up a second blog so that she can pretend to be someone else agreeing with her own opinions and cheering herself on.

Here’s the proof:

I made this post calling out donottearmedown on their racism. I didn’t bother tagging her in the original post because I knew she was stalking my blog and would see it eventually anyway. 😌 And they took the bait, as you can see.

AND THEN I got the notification that luciequeenofelfame had replied to my post. Here’s the reply:

Now here’s where donottearmedown/luciequeenofelfame made an oopsie! 😳

Notice where luciequeenofelfame says “1. I didn’t delete it lmao”. She’s responding to my tags on this post where I’m calling out donottearmedown on her racist post, and my tags read:

“#the fact you went and deleted this post because you KNEW you were about to get slammed #comedy”

(context: @wilhelminacarstairs looked on donottearmedown’s blog recently looking for the post I screenshotted in the link above, and he couldn’t find it so I assumed she deleted it so that I wouldn’t call her out on it. Although she claims she didn’t delete it, so! Maybe it’s still up! Feel free to look for it and let me know lmao)

Now, in the tags I am obviously talking to donottearmedown, correct? So then why is luciequeenofelfame replying that she didn’t delete anything? 🤔 AND JUST AS IM ABOUT TO REPLY-

Wow, looks like I can’t reblog the post. Why? Because luciequeenofelfame has deleted it, and then IMMEDITALY changed her url to luciehvrondaie, hoping it would cover her tracks. Little does she know, tumblr notifications are forever:

As you can see, donottearmedown/luciequeenofelfame/luciehervndaie realized they made an oopsie, so she deleted her first response and posted it again from the blog she actually MEANT to post it from. Damn if only she knew that @minacarstairs @wilhelminacarstairs and I keep screenshots of e v e r y t h i n g :/ Then she might have gotten away with it! 😩

But yeah lmao here are the posts I made about it immeditaly afterwards calling her out on it because I thought it was funny: X X X X

She defends herself on some of them saying shit like “wow so I’m just making up blogs for support wessa? The majority of the fandom supports Wessa so I’m all of those blogs according to you? I’m thousands of people?!” Or just trying to change the topic back to heronstairs and ignoring the allegations altogether. Like, no luv we’re not saying you’re every single Wessa blog ever. We’re just saying you’re these 2, and we’re right lmao. If you look through both their blogs they also post about the same fandoms, and more damning, make a lot of the same spelling errors. Seriously their speech pattern is exactly the same. Feel free to look through them if you want, and if they don’t start mass-deleting post trying to cover their tracks.

BONUS:

I don’t know how true this is, but according to @fair-but-wilde-child on this ask, donottearmedown is ALSO the infamous twitter stan that complained to CC about TLH having too many gay characters.

EXTRA BONUS:

luciequeenofelfame/luciehvrondaie (donottearmedown’s second account 😌) is the account responsible for that wessa vs jessa comparison chart that went around a while ago LMAOOOOOOOO embarrassing

tl;dr: donottearmedown/luciequeenofelfame/luciehvrondaie is a biphobic racist who’s opinions are so bad she has to make a second account to agree with herself

🥺 tragic

Also I wanna say for the record, as @minacarstairs ans @wilhelminacarstairs will testify, I guessed a while ago these accounts were the same person when I noticed their speech patterns were eerily similar, and how luciequeenofelfame always seemed to reply to donottearmedown’s posts IMMEDITATELY after they were posted. 

So the lesson for today? Cinthia is always right. 😤

[owls-hive]

A story time/rant? This one goes out to the hardcore Karen's especially ngl...:

People (Christians mostly) spreading false truths and speaking horribly about Lucifer just... Riles me up so MUCH. It makes me so sad. Especially because I was one of them (not necessarily Christian, but I prayed to the Christian God and angels when I was young). I grew up in a semi-Christian family; my mothers told me to pray to my angels and God everyday and that because I was a "gifted" child, The Devil and his "demons/followers" would want me more than anything else. They had convinced me that anything bad that came for me (for example: when lights flickered, I saw figures or had sleep paralysis) that it was a demon or Satan. Now I'm not saying these things were not evil (in no way implying demons are inherently evil here, or The Devil/his counterparts), but I'm so ashamed to have been tricked into believing they were Lucifer/Satan. Lucifer/Satan/The Devil (whichever/whoever idc) would NEVER FUCKING TRAUMATIZE A CHILD LIKE THAT. He knows what that fucking feels like. And I never even felt their presence until I decided to invite them (Lucifer/Satan) in!

Also the whole "The Devil" has "evil" in his name is literally the sorriest most pathetic argument I have ever heard. Lucifer especially has helped and wants to help and teach humans more than I have ever experienced coming from the Christian/etc's God. Lucifer has such a kind and gentle demeanor; something I never felt from angels. They always felt so...Wrong to me? Like even they knew I was on the wrong path. I'm really not sure on this one so take it with a grain of salt, but I think they knew I belonged to the old Gods and Lucifer from the start...

What I'm trying to say is... no path is wrong. The way you practice/teach/learn the path you want to take though? Absolutely, it can be. Like, no decent person wants to trust a baby-sacrificer or pedophile Priest. The people within the practice of religion or spirituality have been proven to, more times than not, be the true source of evil. And while this was originally directed toward Chritians, it really applies to anyone.

Some people feel uncomfortable with angels, some around demons, and some Satanists don't believe in the old Gods (Norse/Greek/Etc)... Etc. But DO NOT speak for, against or about any God, Goddess, Spirit, Deity, or ANY entity for that matter until you have spoken to them. With respect. No apologies, but if Lucifer does not like you and you are a God/angel (God-abiding angel that is? Idk how else to say it lmao) worshiping person, okay, big deal. But he would not attack you over the path you have chosen. So much information and knowledge is out there and whatever path (if any) you choose is yours, not his. Believe me, he wouldn't bother with you. However, if you are actively speaking against him and tearing him down over some false, twisted biblical pretense... I ( and Lucifer) will have reason to believe you are a disrespectful person. And all jokes aside; talk shit, get hit. He has done nothing to you so be careful what leaves your mouth, especially when you've only cared to research and hear the "truth" that supports your own beliefs. The fact alone so many refer to The Devil, Satan and Lucifer as one in the same already tells me how little they actually know about them.

Anyways. If you've made it this far you are a trooper lmao. But I tried to word this the best I can. Satanism/Luciferianism/Religions/Spirituality in general is just... Hard to understand and even more so to put into words. Especially when they start blending together into such a shit show. I hope I did a good job explaining my feelings/etc and if anyone wants to add something feel free, but no clownery. You'll just get your comment deleted and blocked.

Further, I won't be adding this to any Christian tags out of respect for their space. Let's hope they will return that same respect...

-Jett 🌑

[dandelionpath]

I feel bad about not contacting my spirit guides or families in a while but I’ve also been quite low on energy recently. Would you be able to help me figure out what I could do with them? I don’t want to fall out of touch with them and I worry ;-;

howdy! so i recorded a podcast episode to answer ur question but im a fool and forgot that i cant upload them very well, so I'm going to write out an answer for u in the meantime!

Number 1 thing to remember here: This shit is difficult!! It's difficult to keep up with physical humans for many people - now add on that these entities are noncorporeal and also oftentimes not human??? That's so many more layers of difficulty!

So don't beat yourself up if this has happened to you. It happens to many of us, even the most advanced and experienced practicioners 💙

That being said, I do want to emphasize that completely dropping out of contact with your entity friends for long periods of time without explanation or warning is not exactly acceptable in many situations. It's unacceptable in my family, and it's the same with many other people's. (But if this is fine in your situation and family, then don't let me stop you! As long as you're doing what works for both you and your spirit friends, then by all means keep that up!) This isn't to shame you or wag a finger at you, anon, this is just so that no one is going to walk away from this post thinking it's okay to abandon their spirit family 😅

Now, what /can/ you do to make sure you keep up with the fam? Well, what I've done in my personal situation is set aside one day a week where it's MANDATORY to talk to them and at least acknowledge their existence. We had a "family meeting" (these can also be quite helpful!) where we all set aside one day of the week - Thursday, in my case - where I am required to talk to them and do something with them. Otherwise, I do fall into the trap of thinking, "Oh I'll do something big for them tomorrow," "I'll set aside a half hour later," etc etc. This isn't to say that I don't want to talk to my companions and spend time with them; this is just how my brain works. It happens with my blood family, my best friend, and things I really look forward to.

Anyways, what I'd suggest is to start out with one day a week that works for your entire (or as close to the whole fam as u can get) entity group, and then have that day as your metaphysical day. You can still talk to them throughout the week, but it's MANDATORY that you at least acknowledge their existence and maybe say hello on that one day. If that goes well, try upping it to two days. Right now, I'm only able to handle one day, and even sometimes I mess that up.

Spirit work is often about give and take and finding compromises and what is going to realistically work for both you and the entities. It takes time, it takes frustration, it takes trial and error, and most of all it takes WORK. After all, we do call it spirit /work/, lol!

As for ideas for what activities to do with them, literally anything! Ask them for ideas if you want!

Here's a little list if you're really at a loss:

-Clean your room together

-Do art together

-Share and swap stories

-Have them teach you a song

-Go thru old photos on your device and delete ones you don't need anymore. My companions often help me decide which ones I actually should keep and which ones to get rid of!

-Cuddle!

-Dance around your room like maniacs

-Sing along to your favourite songs

-Make a playlist for them

-Make a moodboard or a Pinterest board or even a sideblog for them (or just a tag on your tumblr for their stuff!)

-Share a cup of tea or a snack

-Scroll through social media together

-Watch some tv or YouTube together

-Meditate together

-Light some incense or a candle for them or put on their favourite essential oil

-Go for a walk around the neighborhood

-Play hide and seek

-Do one of those tumblr ask games either on tumblr or just between yall

Hopefully that helps! Let me know how things go! My ask box and DMs are always open 😊💙

[thehollowprince]

I've been debating on whether or not to make this post for a couple of weeks now, but thankfully, earlier this morning, someone ctosstagging finally pushed me over the edge and I'll address the issue.

That crosstagging demon is none other than @gay-buchanan-barnes. This little hobgoblin came into the anti tony tag for no other reason than to start drama, because by their own admission, they "enjoy being a troll", which works out for the best because they're the one that gave me the motivation to do this. So here's to you, you obnoxious little shit, I couldn’t have done it without you!

Well, I could have, but it’s more fun this way.

Recently, I’ve seen a big trend sweeping through Tumblr about how T*ny St*rk is bisexual, or, as our friend above said, pansexual.  I’m here to discuss said issue, and explain how T*ny being either of those things is offensive, and why so many of us are against it.  In this essay I will...

...

Yes, there is an actual essay.

For starters, I would like to point out something that isn’t talked about much on this website, particularly in the whole pro t*ny/anti t*ny debates, and that is that MCU T*ny is different than comic T*ny, of which there are many, many versions.  For this, I’ll be discussing MCU T*ny and 616 (mainstream marvel) T*ny.  Keep in mind, before we delve too deeply in this, that I don’t read the Iron Man comics, so when I discuss that, it’ll be based off of his appearances in other comics that I’ve read and the quick Google Search I just did.

Now let’s just get into the meat of this.

T*ny St*rk is not, in any way, any kind of good representation for bisexual/pansexual persons.  Now, I am a gay man, so please take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, but I stand by that opinion.  One of the biggest issues that bisexual and pansexual persons face, aside from justifying their own sexualities (that’s a separate post in and of itself) is the harmful stereotype that they’re just greedy and that they’re playing both sides, which is where my distaste for people claiming T*ny is good bi rep comes in.

Anyone who knows me or has been on my blog, know that I try to promote bisexuality and asexuality awareness.  In regards to LGBT issues, that’s the hill I’ll chose to die on, if I have to.

Apparently, in a recent comic, T*ny takes himself off the market and announces that he’s no longer single, deleting his dating profile with a “sorry ladies and gents” so that he can date.... I believe it’s Janet van Dyne, but I could be wrong.

Well, that right there, the “ladies and gents” thing is just a giant spotlight in the sky signalling that T*ny is bixesual and blah blah blah.

Very quickly, as I said above, I don’t read the Iron Man comics, but I know that he’s been around for 55 years, and I understand that he’s just now getting a new series after he died originally (it’s so hard to keep up with Marvel’s timelines anymore), but one thing I do know is that T*ny never had a “permanent” love interest the way the other heroes did.  Like, I don’t read much outside of the X-Men comics, but I know that Betty Ross was Bruce Banner’s girl, and that Sharon Carter was in a relationship with Steve Rogers, Thor and Jane, etc.  Those are all iconic relationships from the comics that transitioned over to the MCU, but I don’t recall one for T*ny.  If it is Pepper like in the movies, that’s a whole “yikes” situation for me, but it’s not something I recall.

He is, as he referred to himself in The Avengers (2012), a playboy.  He sleeps around.  His promiscuity is one of his defining character traits, so much so that when I think of T*ny, one of the first things that pops into my head is “manslut”, which, no slut shaming because I believe in sexual liberation, but in regards to him being bisexual, it’s harmful.  Bisexual persons fight over and over, with both heterosexuals, and those in the Lesbian and Gay communities, trying to validate their sexuality and make it abundantly clear that they’re not trying to date/fuck more than one person at a time.  That’s not what bisexual means.

By claiming T*ny as positive bisexual representation, you’re just reinforcing that stereotype, and more often than not, it’s so that you can claim your headcanons and fanfictions regarding T*ny fucking half of the male Avengers as canon, because it gets your rocks off.

And when called out on this bullshit, I’ve seen plenty of people pull out the “representation” card.  I’m here to tell you all that there are actual, canonically bisexual characters in the Marvel Comics.  If you’d like to inspect them, or know who they are so that you can look them up, here is a list of them.  Here is a list of the few pansexual characters, too.

As you can see, there are actual characters that identify as bisexual and pansexual in the Marvel universe without you having to cram your headcanons down, usually for no other reason that (aside from it turns you on) than to claim that he’s oppressed in some way, or that he represents an oppressed minority in some way.  I ranted about this the other day.

All of this brings me to MCU T*ny, who, as I said before but will repeat again, is not comic T*ny.  One may be based on the other, but they are two separate entities.  Even if - if - T*ny St*rk was canonically bisexual (which he’s not) in the comics, that doesn’t mean he would be in the MCU.  We’ve had several things about characters from the comics either erased or altered altogether for the movies, because what is good in comic form doesn’t always translate well to film. That being said, T*ny still refers to himself as a playboy, even after he’s in a relationship with Pepper, which is really telling about him as a character. Keep in mind, that I’m just putting this in here as a What If scenario, because unless Marvel confirms or denies that T*ny is bisexual, he’s strictly a straight.  

Before anyone jumps down my throat about how “straight isn’t the default” keep in mind, that T*ny has only been shown in relationships (sexual or otherwise) with women, and while it isn’t nice to assume that he couldn’t be anything other than straight, keep in mind that there aren’t a lot of bisexual characters in comics.  They don’t need to rely on innuendo and subtle references, they need direct statements.  

To quote one Eleanor Shellstrop, “It’s 2018.  It’s like, get over yourselves already.”

At the end of the day, T*ny St*rk is not bisexual, or pansexual, and if you don’t understand how promoting him as such is harmful to the actual bisexual and pansexual communities and if you don’t understand that, than I can’t help you.

Granted, there is nothing to stop you from promoting this, which you’re fully entitled to do, even if it is a bit disturbing, but maybe, don’t be like the person that caused this entire rant and don’t crosstag because you wanna start trouble.

[naradreamscape]

God, as the year ends, I realize I might’ve finally gotten Zach off my back for good

So, the year is 2015, and I was doing some dub vs. sub analyses for the Astroboy-Online forum. I randomly get a private message from an Uno10, AKA xUno10x, AKA Zach, who said he was fond of my analyses, and wanted to know if I wanted to help with his interview with Marc Hansen, an AB2003 dub director. I was specifically asked if I had any suggestions on what to ask him, and after a long while of me meditating on it (I just wanted to help another fan but felt kinda overwhelmed), I shot him some normal-ey questions. Zach then wanted to know my Tumblr and Skype, and because I was a dumbass, I gave them to him

I would usually get bizarre, complicated political anons from him. It was really weird because, if he wanted to know something, why couldn’t he just ask me directly through Skype? I suppose he thought the anon filter would add a bit of distance when asking things like, “What are your thoughts on the modern use of the word “zealot”, given its original historical connotations?” while I’m just trying to post on my blog about Disney villains. He also began to tell me about his passion project, a novel called “Enemy Zero” or something...it was about a biracial guy in the future (based on himself) who feels like a Divergent because the entire world is split into divisions of SJW Cult and The Rebellion. The SJW Cult is led by a snake woman (based on Riley from Arkh Project), and he was SO paranoid about his distaste for them, that he would refuse to discuss them publicly and even freaked out if I accidentally reblogged something posted by one of their friends. I eventually worked up the courage to unfriend him in Skype because his behaviour was too much to deal with anymore. I moved on, while he continued to stalk all my public accounts for THREE FUCKING YEARS, convinced that I would act upon his previously-vocalized fear of getting A Callout™. Obviously, I didn’t give a shit; I just wanted to carry on with my life, but he decided to put on multiple personalities through the anon function. I was always afraid to publicly name him only because of how many times he threatened his own life (for some reason?? Great debate tactic, jackass)

I guess I’d posted about his bizarre conversations to my Twitter in 2015, which was locked at the time...but two years later, he found these tweets (presumably after looking through my entire archive) and led me on a bizarre revenge plot that played out exactly like this:

Send me a Twitter DM request, saying only, “I want to talk.” When I don’t reply within an hour, he blocks me

Send me a two part anon message lamenting an “ex-friend” who tried to frame him as “CUHRAYZEE”, clearly playing upon how I’d been falsely accused of something from a former friend a year prior

Send me Messenger messages via a sock account, asking for help. When I become uncomfortable with how clingy this assumed stranger is, he advances to the next step

“This ex friend...” “It’s you.” [link dump to all 4-5 tweets about him] “Why the fuck would you think this is okay”

In the middle of sputtering about how fucking insane a plot this was, I deleted the tweets, hoping this was finally over. He then deletes the sock account mid-conversation

Sometimes, people don’t want to talk to you, so you give them space and move on. If you’re Zach, you follow them around online for three years, pretending to be at least three different entities through an anonymous messaging tool, objectively performing psychological manipulation because you’re trying to threaten them into NOT writing a post about you. Obviously, this failed horribly, because look what I’m posting now

About a month ago, he started to do this exact same garbage, again, and upon putting a name to his messages, he pulled back. I looked at his old message in my Twitter DM requests, and found he’d changed it to @blackslate_ before deleting the account. I also got this, and responded accordingly:

The fucked up thing is, I cannot be for sure how much of Fuckhands was Trip/their friends, and how much was Zach. I’ve been slowly combing through Fuckhands’s messages and my regular anons, trying to identify his typing patterns so I can tag them for sure. He seemed fixated on Fuckhands as well, at one point assuming it was a general tag about him, and messaged my friend Cookie as “Free Heist”, taking the same initials as Fuckhands. I know for sure that I had a person viciously angry about alleged aphobia, and Zach, and the blurriness between the two throws me for a loop to this day. He kept tabs on who I was mutuals with on Tumblr and Twitter alike, instead of...maybe...getting a real hobby and leaving his house

TL;DR paranoid dude I tried to befriend out of pity became convinced that I had joined a secret Evil SJW Cult led by Riley from Arkh Project to defame him, and i hate this fucking website

[zenonaa]

Chapters: 4/? Fandom: Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Fukawa Touko/Togami Byakuya, Fukawa Touko/Togami Byakuya/Kirigiri Kyouko, Fukawa Touko/Kirigiri Kyouko, Kirigiri Kyouko/Togami Byakuya (Dangan Ronpa) Characters: Togami Byakuya, Fukawa Touko, Kirigiri Kyouko Additional Tags: Togami Kijou, Togami Shinobu - Freeform, Naegi Makoto - Freeform, Yukizome Chisa - Freeform, past Maizono Sayaka/Kirigiri Kyouko, Later chapters are e-rated, mentions of csa, au where despair didn't happen and junko was content, with leaving the fridge open and moving things slightly everyday, Genocider Syo - Freeform, Chisa Yukizome - Freeform

Summary: Togami hires Kirigiri to solve a mass murder that occurred at his wedding anniversary party. One hitman was apprehended, but he refuses to say a single word, while the other got away. The mastermind could be anyone, but the list of suspects is getting shorter, and Kirigiri finds herself learning more about the Togamis than she anticipated.

“Hello?”

“Is this Anastazja Togami?”

“Who is this?”

“I’m Kyouko Kirigiri.”

“Who?”

Kyouko, sitting on the short edge of her bed with her notebook and pen on her lap, shifted her position a little, but she didn’t become much more comfortable on the soft mattress.

“First, please confirm your identity,” said Kyouko, holding her phone to her ear.

The voice on the other end of the phone huffed.

“I am Anastazja Togami. You got through to my personal phone, somehow.”

“Thank you.” Kyouko carded her hair with her fingers. “A member of staff gave it to me. I’m the detective assigned to the case of the mass murder at your son and daughter-in-law’s anniversary party.”

“What is it that you want?” Anastazja clicked her tongue. “I sent you a witness statement via email. Did you delete it without reading it?”

“I read it,” said Kyouko with professional patience, “but that’s not exactly what I’m calling about.”

A pause.

“How well did you know the victims?” asked Kyouko.

The next pause was longer.

“I’ve met them,” stated Anastazja tersely.

“Enough to talk about the sort of people they were like?”

“Hm.”

Kyouko didn’t know what that meant.

“Is that a yes or a no?” she asked Anastazja.

A third pause.

“I could talk about them,” said Anastazja.

“Is now a good time?” asked Kyouko. She picked up her pen from between the exposed pages in her notebook and readied it to write. “Also, if you have any photographs of them, I would like to see them too.”

“I don’t understand how this is meant to help you with your investigation. Didn’t these dead people have families? They’d be able to provide you with more information.”

“I have spoken to them, but I was hoping to get another perspective, as well as ask you more about what happened at the party,” said Kyouko. She rolled her shoulders and her neck. “And there is another reason I wish to talk to you - I have a request. Would you be able to send me any photographs of the victims?”

“Look,” said Anastazja, raising her voice a bit, “I tell you what. This Thursday, I can come over in person, and we can talk face-to-face and I’ll bring what I have.”

Kyouko blinked. “Really?”

“What do you mean, ‘really’? I just said I would. If we’re going to have an interview, I don’t want to do it over the phone, and I don’t want to send anything else in text where who knows who can read it. Besides, I think I would like to examine you. So, this Thursday at noon, all right?”

“That’s fine. Tha-”

Anastazja hung up. Kyouko lowered her phone and stared at the screen. Evening was a tired blue outside.

***

“Kyouko Kirigiri...”

The word slushed around between Anastazja’s cheeks as she tasted it.

“Yes,” said Kyouko, seated at Byakuya’s desk but interviewing a different Togami this time. “That’s me.”

Blonde hair, blue eyes, a sharp nose and dressed formally, in appearance, Anastazja resembled her son greatly. She lacked his staple white glasses though, and her makeup consisted of a lot of nude tones with the exception of her lips. Those were pink.

“So you’re that woman,” said Anastazja, whatever she meant by that. “The former Super High School Level Detective.”

Anastazja’s frown deepened, and she drummed a finger against her armrest.

“Please stand up,” said Anastazja.

“Pardon?” asked Kyouko.

“Stand up. Just for a few moments.”

Kyouko gave her a puzzled look but complied.

“Spin,” said Anastazja, twirling her finger, and Kyouko allowed Anastazja a complete view of herself. Anastazja’s finger became still with the rest of her as she seemingly studied Kyouko, who only completed one circle. Some seconds later, Anastazja said, “You may sit now.”

So Kyouko did.

“167 centimetres, about 50 kilograms. Your chest is about 80 centimetres,” said Anastazja.

“That’s all correct,” said Kyouko with a slight nod of her head, keeping her eyes on Anastazja.

“Your body mass index is roughly the same as Byakuya’s wife. Far too low.” Anastazja curled her lips. Kyouko pulled a faint grimace that Anastazja paid no notice of. “So, anyway, Detective, if you’re supposedly the very best in your field, why is it that more than a month and a half has passed yet you haven’t made any real progress?”

“I was assigned to this case less than three weeks ago,” Kyouko pointed out. In that time, she had gone through countless witness statements, examined the crime scene and evidence, requested and carried out interviews and visited where the conglomerate were keeping the captured gunman, though she hadn’t been able to extract any information out of him as he refused to say a single word.

Anastazja clucked her tongue.

“If I had been contacted earlier,” started Kyouko, only for Anastazja to raise a hand and interrupt.

“That’s nothing to do with me. Kijou had certain criteria in mind for who he would allow to take charge of the case, and after everyone involved was paid off, Byakuya needed to form a convincing argument to persuade the conglomerate to authorise your employment.” Anastazja dropped her elevated hand to her lap. “That takes time.”

Kijou was the name of Byakuya’s father.

Kyouko quirked her brow. “Paid off?”

“You know, the families of the victims, members of the press, guests...” Anastazja lifted her hand again and waved it. “They all needed to be persuaded to keep hushed about what happened.”

“Why?”

“Why? What sort of message would this send out?” snapped Anastazja. “People getting assassinated... Bad publicity. Bad reputation. Bad image. Too much attention. There are some unrelated things that we wouldn’t want unearthed during an investigation.”

“Like what?” asked Kyouko.

Anastazja crossed one leg over the other, laying eye contact on thick.

“Secret documents... Certain police reports... Certain ledgers... Top secret projects...” None which Kyouko saw while in the storage room. Those must have been kept elsewhere. “The Togami Conglomerate is one of the entities that control the world. Everyone, people like you, are puppets. Not just anyone can breeze in here. They’ll happen upon things that ordinary people are not ready for.”

She leaned forward and laced her fingers together into a ball over her chest. At no point had Anastazija smiled, and she didn’t smile now either. The smell of her perfume became stronger, honey mixed with various flowers accords. Maybe powdery iris. Most of the time, Kyouko didn’t bother with perfume, but Sayaka had been an expert.

“Now, Kirigiri, as you ought to know, the shooter who they caught had someone else’s ID on him,” said Anastazja. “A trusted supplier who couldn’t attend because he was in America at the time. What sort of people would hire hitmen to infiltrate a party?”

Kyouko focused. “A rival company?”

“Maybe,” said Anastazja. Her eyes narrowed above her aquiline nose. “Maybe they weren’t hitmen, but came of their own accord, with their own agenda.”

“That’s a possibility,” admitted Kyouko, glancing away. She dragged her gaze back. “However, he doesn’t have any fingerprints, he’s underweight and his behaviour under interrogation has been unshakeable, so I’m inclined to think this is his profession, rather than that he was brought here by his own motives.”

Anastazja nodded, the highest praise given out so far.

“If we go with them being hitmen, with someone else’s ID, a hitman could have gone in another person’s place, which he did,” said Anastazja.

Kyouko cupped her chin. “And no one noticed that they weren’t who they claimed to be?”

“Why do you think that happened?” asked Anastazja. She reclined, settling into her seat, and folded her arms over her chest.

“There were a lot of guests. And with a clever enough disguise...” Kyouko rubbed her chin and trailed off.

“Finally, the gears in your brain seem to be whirring. Yes, there were a lot of guests, many whom Byakuya invited just to build good work relations,” Anastazja chipped in. She examined her nails. “Wives, husbands, children, bodyguards... It was a very publicised event. There were bound to be unrecognisable people, and all these hitmen had to do was fool the guards to get in. You can imagine how much work it required for everything to be smoothed over after.”

“Was this Togami-kun’s idea? The bribing?”

“Byakuya? Not just his. Everyone agreed this would be the best course of action.”

“... Right.” Kyouko cleared her throat. “Anyway, let us get to the matter at hand. I assume you brought what I asked for.”

Anastazja ducked down and snatched up a canvas bag by her feet. She placed it onto the desk. An envelope could be seen through the opening and when Kyouko pulled it out, she found that it was the only thing in there.

“Is this it?” asked Kyouko, prompting Anastazja to turn up her nose.

“You said you wanted photographs for the investigations. These are all I have of people who died,” retorted Anastazja.

It would have to do. Kyouko opened the envelope and flicked through the contents. She had seen most of them before, but there were photographs from the party and two group photographs that she hadn’t seen yet. Nothing about the photographs taken at the party stood out, though there was one of Byakuya giving a speech of some kind while Touko smiled fondly at him, which Kyouko thought was sort of sweet. In regards to the photographs prior to the party, one depicted Kijou and the victims, and another showed a younger Byakuya alone with Osamu, where Byakuya was holding a violin.

Osamu smiled with his hand on Byakuya’s shoulder. Byakuya didn’t smile and stared right at the camera.

Even at what must have been about ten years old, he had perfected his stony countenance.

“What was Sugawara-san like?” asked Kyouko, examining the photograph.

“Oh, I don’t know... He liked music,” said Anastazja, which would imply she did know something. “Whenever we had guests over, Byakuya would perform a few pieces for everyone to enjoy. I liked to show him off. Sugawara often asked for an encore, and he would visit Byakuya backstage to ask him questions and compliment him... not that that’s strange. My son is very talented. I didn’t talk much to the man myself, but he came here somewhat regularly.”

Kyouko flicked back to a photograph that included Ikari and Shiba. She pointed. “And them?”

Anastazja leaned forward and peered at the photograph, which Kyouko rotated and held out toward her. While Anastazja studied it, Kyouko used her phone to take photos of the photographs.

“Hm? Them? Oh, I recognise them,” said Anastazja, touching a manicured nail to it. “I saw them even less. Ikari-san was a family man and Shiba-san smelled of cigarettes most of the time. I know Sugawara-san better. He saw potential in my son so would stop by to visit, years before Byakuya became the heir.”

“Became the heir?” Kyouko’s gaze darted to her face. “Isn’t that something someone is born...?”

For whatever reason, Anastazja tensed and almost cracked some emotion, but it was like a door opening up to a dark room.

“Don’t worry about that. Now, is that all?” asked Anastazja, her voice failing to hit the same note as the smile that she slapped on. Kyouko didn’t get a chance to reply. Anastazja nodded, took back her photos, got to her feet and turned away, already walking off as she said, “Good. I’ll let you get back to work.”

She glided across the room, at the door within seconds.

Kyouko reached out a hand.

“One last thing,” she said.

Anastazja lingered in the doorway.

“How did Togami-kun seem after the ordeal?” asked Kyouko.

“Shaken,” replied Anastazja, not bothering to turn around or look at her. “That’s what I was told, anyway.”

Kyouko wanted to discuss the events at the party, but she gained some interesting information regardless. After Anastazja left the office, Kyouko read through her notebook. The first word on the first page was ‘Byakuya Togami’.

***

Less than an hour after her interview with Anastazja, if one could call it that, Kyouko left the manor. But unlike Anastazja, who slipped into a limousine, Kyouko sat at the back of a black car with tinted windows, driven by one of Byakuya’s chauffeurs. She had expected to get into a limousine as well, but on further thought, doing so would draw attention to them. Still, that wasn’t to say that Kyouko disliked the hour long journey in the more modest car. The seats were soft and the back was roomier than most cars, with a minibar that she poured one drink at as Beethoven played on a radio station which she selected on a remote. Time didn’t pass too slowly.

As intended, no one paid the car more than a glance by the time it parked in the driveway of someone’s house. Kyouko didn’t know who the house belonged to, but the owner didn’t matter. She put her coat back on and gravel mumbled underfoot as they left the car, and she and the chauffeur walked half a mile in midday warmth to their destination.

Stone walls awaited them, surrounded by an outer wall of barbed wire fencing. They arrived at a set of gates built into the fencing, and Kyouko pressed a button on the intercom beside it.

“Name?” came a voice.

“Kyouko Kirigiri,” she replied.

“Purpose?”

“I’m here to speak to the nameless assassin,” she recited, not looking at any of the bug-eyed cameras around her.

Only five seconds could have passed before three security guards waltzed up to them, coming out through the door of a security guard cabin next to the gates. After they showed the security guard their passports, one of the guards held up a bulky, handheld device to their faces, scanning their retina. While this happened, the two other security guards searched them. A woman with a stubby ponytail dealt with Kyouko.

Satisfied by what they found, or rather what they didn’t find, one of the guards barked, “Clear,” into a walkie-talkie. The gates screeched open and Kyouko and the chauffeur were marched in. As soon as they passed through, the gates shut behind them. Kyouko reminded herself of the sections of grass either side of the pavement that they walked across, seen during earlier visits, and she saw no one else as the guards escorted her and the chauffeur through.

At the stone walls, they underwent another check by different guards, and then they were let inside. Security guards patrolled around them and after several twists, turns and stretches of dreary corridors, Kyouko strode into a small room occupied not by a guard but a man in a suit. The room was dimly lit, and a one-way mirror built into a wall revealed another room tinged green. Kyouko reached under her jacket and pulled out her notebook, then a pen. Her heels clicked as she approached the glass.

“He might as well have cut his tongue off,” said the man in the suit, standing next to Kyouko.

She continued peering through the one way mirror. The eyes of the bald man sat on a chair in there drilled into the wall opposite him. Over the past few weeks, she had seen him several times, and not as many times, she had spoken to him. During those occasions they had sat in the same room, with her staring at him from across a desk while he stared through her. He never uttered a single word.

“It’s good that he was apprehended at the scene,” the man in the suit told her. “No fingerprints. No anything. The only ID he had was a forged one of a guest who couldn’t attend. It’s no one that we know or the Togami Conglomerate know. If his accomplice, or accomplices, are anything like him, it’ll be hell to track them down.”

Kyouko didn’t reply. The man in a suit turned his head toward her.

“We might get some information out of him if we’re given permission to deploy certain methods,” he said.

“No,” replied Kyouko without missing a beat.

He glowered, straightened up and held his hands behind his back.

“Then I look forward to seeing if Togami-sama chose the right person to lead this investigation,” he said with his chin high, and he faced forward again.

Kyouko narrowed her eyes.

“I would like some time with him,” she said.

“Go ahead,” said the man in the suit, looking at the bald man.

Two guards accompanied her into the interrogation room, where the air was stale. The prisoner ignored her, as usual. She sat on the chair opposite him, a guard either side of her. He had two guards behind him. At first, she didn’t talk, watching him, though he didn’t move much, blinking occasionally.

“On 4th April this year, you entered a party thrown by Byakuya and Touko Togami, and you killed five people in the main hall, where the party was taking place,” said Kyouko. “Correct?”

She gave him the opportunity to respond, but as with their previous encounters, he didn’t reply.

“Who do you work for?” Kyouko asked.

Nothing.

“After you were let in, you managed to sneak away from the celebrations and get above the ceiling, and from there, by moving panels aside, you were able to shoot down at the victims. Security incapacitated you after you killed five people, and your comrade killed another in a side room before escaping.”

Still nothing.

“Up to now, you haven’t been tortured or humiliated,” she said. The prisoner gave no indication that he heard her. “It is not because they don’t intend on doing so. I have requested that they don’t... for the time being.”

Again. Nothing. The room buzzed, louder than him.

“Don’t think of me as a good cop. I’m not a cop. It’s just that I’m sure you’ve done this before so torture would be a waste of time,” she said. “Your fingerprints have been shaved off. You would have undergone different techniques in your training, such as hooding, deprivation of basic necessities, time disorientation and more. Many of them are illegal, but then again, you’re in an illegal line of work, and you are in the hands of the Togami Conglomerate, not the police.”

Her lashes fluttered.

“Not that it matters. The police are under the conglomerate’s thumb,” she added quietly.

Kyouko waited again. He helped her try to fill the room with silence. She sighed and rose to her feet. Her chair screeched as it was pushed back.

“This isn’t a matter of trying to prove that you’re guilty. You are guilty,” she told him. “You better hope that your training has prepared you for when I lose my patience. I’m human. So are you. Remember that.”

His silence followed her out of the room.

***

On Friday, Kyouko returned to the storage room and browsed through the files. On her first visit, she had been focused on finding photographs, but now she skimmed through the other documents there. Like Byakuya and his mother suggested, there were a lot of private files, though none of them could ruin the Togami Conglomerate to the best of her knowledge. Kyouko recognised a few case files. Even worked on some of them in the past.

They weren’t what she was interested in at the moment, however.

Byakuya arrived back at the manor in time for dinner, but he didn’t come alone. Kyouko first sighted him in the dining room, already seated, and with him wasn’t just Touko, but a slim woman with long, black hair who Kyouko recognised.

“Shinobu Togami,” said Kyouko.

“I know you,” said Shinobu, monotone but smiling politely. She was covered in old scars. “We’ve met. You interviewed me a week ago and we were in the same school, yeah? You’re the headmaster’s daughter.”

Kyouko’s lips flattened together. Shinobu blinked her left eye. Her right eye remained open, the blue iris giving off a glow. The eye was mechanical, had been during their time at Hope’s Peak, and Kyouko had never found out why.

That wasn’t the only robotic body part that Shinobu had. In addition to her eye, her right hand was silver, metal. She raised it and offered it to Kyouko.

“I’m here for my detective status, not as a daughter,” said Kyouko, her face still stiff with annoyance, but she still shook Shinobu’s hand. The dining table could seat ten people, but the other three had sat together, with Byakuya beside Touko and Shinobu opposite them, so Kyouko sat beside Shinobu. Dinner hadn’t been served yet, but they each possessed a cup of tea. No one thought to get Kyouko one, but a maid dashed into the kitchen after Kyouko claimed a chair for herself.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” said Shinobu.

She pressed a finger against her right temple. The pupil in Shinobu’s right eye shrunk and the iris spun, the pale streaks in it whirling around, and she waited quietly, giving Kyouko the chance to guess, but Kyouko remained quiet.

“It’s just a family call,” Shinobu revealed. Her robotic eye stopped spinning. “Did you know that I’m writing my baby brother’s biography?”

Byakuya glared at her, about to take a sip of tea. “I’m hardly younger than you.”

“We all used to call him the runt,” said Shinobu.

Touko shot Shinobu an icy look.

“Who is ‘we’, exactly?” asked Kyouko.

“Me and our former siblings,” said Shinobu, motioning to herself and Byakuya, her shoulders low and loose. Casual.

“Former?” said Kyouko. “What does that mean?”

Byakuya lowered his cup and heaved a sigh.

“I suppose I may as well inform you of the system in place for selecting the heir to the conglomerate,” Byakuya drawled. He gave a pause, maybe for dramatic effect. “My father has over one hundred children.”

Kyouko’s eyebrows raised.

“All of us were conceived in private fertility clinics, and only women deemed to be of high enough quality by my father, his father and advisors were allowed to be fertilised with his seed. Then, after a few decades, my father decided to select the new heir. I was the youngest,” said Byakuya.

“And the youngest never ever wins,” Shinobu piped up, wagging a finger. “First, we did a series of challenges, and after each round, a certain number of competitors - ”

Siblings.

“ - were eliminated.” Shinobu cast her eyes down to her cup. “They were stripped of their identity and status, and forced to live as nobodies. Unknowns.”

“Basically killed,” remarked Byakuya.

Both spoke like it was a minor inevitability.

Kyouko didn’t say anything, frowning into space as a maid placed a cup and saucer in front of her.

“The last round involved sixteen competitors,” said Byakuya and when she glanced up, he had a bitter twist to his mouth. “I lost in the previous round despite my success in every challenge. With a bit of digging around, I discovered that one competitor had bribed by father with a cow that could supposedly bring good luck, and he took my place. I found out where the last round would be held and flew there in disguise.”

“As Polaris P Polanski,” Shinobu interrupted without raising her voice. “A mute girl, the assistant of the late elite detective, Suisei Nanamura.”

That might have explained the photographs of Byakuya with long hair. Kyouko paid it little thought, however, and homed in on another detail.

“Suisei Nanamura?” Kyouko said. Her heart skipped, just for a moment. “I knew him. He specialised in homicides and committed suicide at thirty-seven years of age.”

More words made their way up to her mouth but she shut her lips tight and blocked their path just before they could come out. They bounced around until they disintegrated, forming a crust. She didn’t mention that Suisei killed himself after murdering several people. His work with Byakuya couldn’t have been that long before she met Suisei when she was a young teenager. Suisei would have been useful to have on this case, able to read people by their expressions, posture and wrinkles like no other human could, but he was dead.

“I was one of the last people in the competition,” Shinobu carried on. “We were kidnapped from our homes, dropped off on an island and told to survive. Cameras everywhere watched our performance. But then...”

Her face and voice didn’t change, but when she moved her head, where the light hit her face and where shadows resided shifted.

“... people started getting murdered. Corpses, found charred. Stabbed. Bludgeoned. Poisoned. Our number dwindled. Soon, I realised that we were killing each other, and a set of twin sisters drugged me and tortured me. Then, they were shot...”

“Kirigiri doesn’t have to know this,” Byakuya cut in.

Kyouko was about to be annoyed.

Shinobu shook her head. “It’s fine. They amputated my left arm and my right hand, and gouged out my eye.”

Touko shuddered. Kyouko realised that Byakuya told Shinobu that she didn’t have to continue for Shinobu’s sake. Her brow creased.

“I thought I was going to die but then, right there in front of me, they were sliced up, and I was face-to-face with my adopted brother, Kazuo, who had followed me there, somehow.” Shinobu clenched a fist and her eye clouded vacant. “He rambled, saying how I would win and we would work together, becoming one, and he called me beautiful...”

She stared into space, her eye dry. No one rushed her.

“Sorry,” said Shinobu, making herself grin slightly. Her eye didn’t match. “If I could, I would cry, but after what he did to me, I haven’t been able to shed a single tear. I don’t feel hope or despair. I don’t feel anything... Just a numbness. I’m like a plastic bag being tossed about on a windy day.”

Byakuya turned his head to the side, arms folded over his chest. Touko fidgeted.

“But then, I was saved.” Shinobu placed a hand over her heart and bowed her head. “Nanamura and Polaris burst into my room. They fought Kazuo and Nanamura became injured, but then Pennyworth swooped in and with a katana, he sliced Kazuo in half, totally fulfilling the badass grandpa trope. It’s unfortunate that he’s not at the manor today.”

All that, said with no lilt, no inflection.

Kyouko cupped an elbow with one hand and balled the other into a loose fist under her chin. “Are you okay with that?”

“I don’t feel anything about it,” said Shinobu, meeting her gaze. “I was ready to be disowned. Polaris revealed herself to be Byakuya and became winner of the competition, but he let me stay his sibling and become his secretary. But I think it’s because I’m his sister too. I haven’t done secretary work for him in ages.”

Byakuya kept his face blank, unreadable.

Touko clasped her hands together on the table. Her face quivered. “She’s also writing his biography, even though I’m more than qualified.”

Shinobu shook a finger.

“Nope, it has to be me. I already started it, and you’ve got other things to write, like this I-Novel of yours,” said Shinobu. She tapped Touko on the nose. Touko flinched and Shinobu withdrew. “I’m very good at seeing things from the background and reporting on what I see, seeing people for who they are. And with my scars and Borges, people like to stay way back and act like I’m the Sun. Too blinding to look at directly.”

“Borges?” asked Kyouko. Shinobu pointed at her robotic eye.

“I could have got a regular-looking eye, but I like this one. I get to keep one eye open at all times. I know to many people, I appear ugly, but I don’t care,” said Shinobu. She set her arm down. “I don’t care about being beautiful. I don’t want to be beautiful.”

Touko perked up and waved a fist energetically. “Wear your ugliness with pride!”

A maid brought out their dinner and for the first half of the meal, no one said anything. Cutlery spoke in its secret language of clinks and scrapes. Touko cooed and tried to feed Byakuya a mussel from a bowl of creamy soup, but he batted away Touko’s hand. Her shoulders sank and she sucked on the flesh in the shell, pouting a bit.

“Togami-kun,” said Kyouko when she was someway through her grilled mackerel.

Byakuya didn’t look at her. “What is it?”

“Would you obtain something for me?”

“It depends what it is.”

“Personal phones. Personal email addresses and passwords.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“I will get them for you,” he replied.

Touko tried to feed him again. This time, she succeeded, and she beamed. Shinobu continued eating but slower than before, obviously listening in. Byakuya swallowed.

“Do you think you will find something on those?” he asked Kyouko.

“Perhaps,” said Kyouko. “I’ve been through the victims’ work phones and emails, but I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.”

He pushed his glasses up and said, “You suspect that you might find something there instead? Blackmail?”

Kyouko tilted her head to one side. “If this has crossed your mind, I wonder why you didn’t do this yourself already.”

Touko glowered.

“B-Byakuya has been busy! You’re the one supposed to be looking for leads,” snapped Touko, then falling silent as Byakuya steepled his fingers and inclined his head forward.

“I have read through all of the personal addresses that I know about,” he told Kyouko. “I didn’t find anything suspicious on them, but perhaps you will miraculously find something on them that I missed. For all I know, there are other emails that weren’t supplied to me. I encourage you to sleuth for them. However, I do wonder...”

He paused to show his teeth in a humourless grin.

“... It sounds like you’re treating them less like victims and more like suspects now, Kirigiri.”

Kyouko gave him a level look. “I’m keeping my mind open.”

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  10 minutes (2,569 words)

“Can I talk to you in private?” No one wants to hear those words. The impulse is to assume you’ve done something egregiously wrong. The expectation is that you are about to be punished. The conviction is so strong that the only good thing about it is that, at least initially, you can suffer without anyone else knowing about it. You might even thank the punisher for coming to you directly, for keeping it between just the two of you. It’s the least someone can do when they are about to theoretically ruin your life.

A lot has been written about privacy online, in terms of information, in terms of being policed. Ecuador is currently rushing to pass a data protection law after a breach affected as many as 20 million people — more than the country’s population. A lot has also been written about callout and cancel culture, about people being targeted and cast off (if only temporarily), their entire history dredged up and subjected to ex post facto judgement; Caroline Flack, the British television presenter who recently committed suicide while being hounded in the press and online amid allegations she had assaulted her on-again, off-again boyfriend, was seen as its latest casualty. But there hasn’t been a lot of talk about the hazier in-between, about interpersonal privacy online, about missteps once dealt with confidentially by a friend or a colleague or a boss, about the discrete errors we make that teach equally discrete lessons so as not to be repeated in public. That’s not how it is anymore, not in a world tied together by social media. Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep. We’re all primed — and able — to admonish institutions and individuals: “Because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before,” Sarah Hagi wrote in Time last year. “That means racist, sexist, and bigoted behavior or remarks don’t fly like they used to.” 

Which is to say that a lot of white people are fucking up, as usual, but now everyone, including white people and people of color, are publicly vilifying them for it as tech’s unicorn herders cash in on the eternal flames. And it’s even worse than in the scarlet letter days: the more attention the worse the punishment, and humiliation online has the capacity for infinite reach. As Sarah John tweeted after one particular incident that left a person hospitalized, “No one knows how to handle cancel culture versus accountability.”

* * *

“Is that blood?” That was my first question after a friend of mine sent me a message with a link to a few tweets by a person I’d never heard of, the editor-in-chief of a small site. The majority of the site’s staff had just resigned, the impetus being a semi-viral tweet, since deleted, of a DM the editor had sent a Twitter chat in 2016: “I was gonna reply to this with ‘nigga say what?’ Then I was like holy shite that’s racist, I can’t say that on twitter.” According to Robert Daniels at the Balder and Dash blog on rogerebert.com, tweeters, mostly white, piled on — some even called the EIC’s workplace demanding they be fired — before the office-wide resignation. Videos embedded in the tweets I saw showed the editor crying through an apology. (Longreads contacted the editor for comment; they’ve asked to remain anonymous for their health and safety.)

Initially I thought the videos were just a mea culpa, but then I saw a flash of red. Though the details are muddied by a scrubbed social media history, the editor appeared to have harmed themselves. Ex-colleagues rushed to their aid, however, and they were eventually hospitalized. If that wasn’t horrible enough, a filmmaker named Jason Lei Howden decided to avenge the EIC. With scant information, apparently, he targeted individuals on Twitter who weren’t involved in the initial pile-on, specifically blaming two people of color for the crisis — Valerie Complex and Dark Sky Lady, who had not in fact bullied anyone but had blogged about Howden. The official Twitter account of Howden’s new film, Guns Akimbo, got mixed up in the targeted attacks, threatening the release of the film.

There are multiple levels to this that I don’t understand. First, why that DM was released; why didn’t the person simply confront the EIC directly? Second, why did the editor’s staff, people who knew them personally, each issue individual public statements about their resignations into an already-growing pile-on? (I don’t so much wonder about the pile-on itself because I know about the online disinhibition effect, about how the less you know a person online, the more you are willing to destroy them.) Third, why the hell did that filmmaker get involved, and without any information? Why did the white man with all the clout attack a nebulous entity he called “woke twitter” — presumably code for “people of color” — and point a finger at specific individuals while also denying their response to one of the most inflammatory words in the English language (didn’t they realize it was an “ironic joke,” he scoffed)? As Daniels wrote, “This became a cycle of blindspots, and a constant blockage of discussing race, suicide, and alliance.” Why, at no point, did anyone stop to think about the actual people involved, about maybe taking this private, to a place where everything wasn’t telegraphed and distorted? 

Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep.

I had the same question after the BFI/Thirst Aid Kit controversy. In mid-February, the British Film Institute officially announced the monthlong film series THIRST: Female Desire on Screen, curated by film critic Christina Newland and timed to coincide with the release of her first book, She Found It at the Movies (full disclosure: I was asked to participate, but my pitch was not accepted). The promotional image included an illustration of a woman biting her lip, artwork similar to that of three-year-old podcast Thirst Aid Kit (TAK), a show that covers the intersection of pop culture and thirst. Newland later told The Guardian she wondered about the “optics,” but as a freelancer with no say on the final design, she deferred to the BFI. She had in fact twice approached TAK cohost Nichole Perkins to contribute to her book (the podcast’s other cohost is Bim Adewunmi). Perkins told me in an email that she wanted to, but her work load eventually prevented her. And while TAK did share the book’s preorder link, the BFI ultimately failed to include the podcasters in the film series as speakers, or even just as shout-outs in the publicity notes — doubly odd, given that Adewunmi is London-based. Quote-tweeting the BFI’s announcement and tagging both the institute and Newland, TAK responded, “Wow! This sounds great. Hope our invitation arrives soon!”

The predictable result was a Newland pile-on in which she was accused of erasing black women’s work, followed by a TAK pile-on — though Perkins told me her personal account was “full of support and kindness” — for claiming ownership over a term that preceded them. All three women ended up taking time away from Twitter (which is a sacrifice for journalists whose audience depends on social media) though Newland has since returned. I asked Perkins if she had thought about dealing with the situation privately at first. “I did consider reaching out to Christina before quote-tweeting, yes,” she wrote. “I wonder if she considered reaching out to us, especially after she saw the artwork for the season and admittedly noticed ‘something going on with the optics,’ as she is quoted as saying in The Guardian.” Eventually, the BFI contacted Perkins and Adewunmi and released a statement apologizing “for their erasure from the conversation we are hoping to create from this season” and announcing a change of imagery. They also noted that Newland, as a guest programmer, was not responsible for their marketing mistake, though no reason was given for their omission. “I have no idea why the BFI or Ms Newland didn’t include Thirst Aid Kit in the literature about the Thirst season,” Adewunmi wrote to me. “I was glad, however, to see the institution acknowledge that initial erasure, as well as issue an apology, in their released statement.”

At around the same time, a similar situation was unravelling in the food industry. Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices, an anthology edited by former Food Network VP Katherine Alford and NPR’s Kathy Gunst, was published in early February. The collection of more than 50 recipes and essays presents baking as “a way to defend, resist, and protest” and was supposedly inspired by the 2016 election. The hashtag #ragebaking was used to promote the book on social media in January, which brought it to the attention of a woman named Tangerine Jones, whose Instagram followers believed the idea had been stolen from her and alerted her — and the rest of the world. Unprompted by Jones, Alford and Gunst DM’d her to say they had learned the term elsewhere and that the book was “a celebration of this movement.” Jones called them out publicly, publishing their DMs in a Medium essay entitled “The Privilege of Rage,” in which she described how she came up with the concept of rage baking — using the #ragebaking hashtag and the ragebaking.com URL — five years ago, as an outlet for racial injustice. “In my kitchen, I was reminded that I wasn’t powerless in the face of f**kery,” she wrote. Jones’s supporters started a pile-on, her article shared by big names like Rebecca Traister, who had contributed to the collection and requested that her contribution be removed from future editions. 

In an abrupt turn of events, the Jones advocates were promptly confronted with advocates of the book, who redirected the pile-on back at Jones for kicking up a fuss. “It is beyond f**ked up that my questioning the authors’ intentions and actions is being framed as detrimental to the success of other black women,” she tweeted. Their silence resounding, the Simon and Schuster imprint ultimately issued a statement that failed to acknowledge their mistake and instead proposed “in the spirit of communal activism” to include Jones in subsequent printings. Unappeased, the baker called out the “apology” she received privately from Alford and Gunst, who told her they were donating a portion of the proceeds to the causes she included in her post (though their public apology didn’t mention that), and asked if she would be interviewed as part of the reprint. “Throwing black women under the bus is part of White Feminist legacy,” Jones tweeted. “That is not the legacy I stand in, nor will I step in that trap.”

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According to Lisa Nakamura, a University of Michigan professor who studies digital media, race, and intersectionality, cancel culture comes from trying to wrest control in a context in which there is little. It’s almost become a running joke the way Twitter protects right-wing zealots while everyone else gets pummeled by them. It follows then that marginalized populations, the worst hit, would attempt to use the platform to reclaim the power they have so often been denied. But as much as social media may sometimes seem like the only place to claim accountability, it is also the worst place to do it. In a Medium post following their Howden hounding, Dark Sky Lady argued that calling out is not bullying, which is true — but the effects on Twitter are often the same. “The goal of bullying is to destroy,” they wrote. “The goal of calling out and criticizing is to improve.” Online, there appears to be no improvement without destruction in every direction, including the destruction of those seeking change. On one end, a group of white people — the EIC, Newland, Alford, Gunst — was destroyed professionally for erring; on the other were the POC — Perkins, Adewunmi, Jones — who were personally destroyed, whose pain was minimized, whose sympathy was expected when they got none. The anger was undoubtedly justified. Less justified was the lack of responsibility for how it was deployed — publicly, disproportionately, with countless people’s hurt revisited on specific individuals, all at once. 

We know how pile-ons work now; it’s no defense to claim good intentions (or lack of bad intentions). There were few gains for either side in any of these cases, with the biggest going to the social media machine that feeds on public shame and provides no solution, gorging on the pain of everyone involved without actually providing constructive way forward, creating an ever-renewing cycle of suffering. A former intern for the ousted EIC tweeted that she understood the impulse to critique cancel culture and support the editor, but noted that “there is something sad about the fact that my boss used a racial slur, and I am not allowed to criticize.”

* * *

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed author Jon Ronson told Maclean’s in 2015 that one of his biggest fears is being defined by one mistake, and that a number of journalists had basically told him, “I live in terror.” I am no exception. Just recently I experienced a comparatively tame callout on Twitter, and even that moderate critique made me drop an entire book project, wonder about a job opportunity that subsequently dissolved, and second-guess every story idea I’ve had since. The situation was somewhat helpful in making me a more considerate person but was exponentially more helpful in making me anxious and in inspiring hateful fantasies about people I had never met. I am 100 percent certain that the first gain would have been made just as successfully had people spoken to me privately and would have saved me from the second part becoming so extreme that I had to leave social media to recalibrate. The overwhelming sense I’m left with is that if I say something that someone doesn’t like, even something justifiable, my detractors will counter with disproportionate force to make whatever point it is they want to make about an issue that’s larger than just me. What kind of discourse is that which mutes from the start, which turns every disagreement into a fight to the death, which provides no opportunity for anyone to learn from their failures? How do we progress with no space to do it?

“I think we need to remember democracy. When somebody transgresses in a democracy, other people give them their points of view, they tell them what they’ve done wrong, there’s a debate, people listen to each other. That’s how democracy should be,” Ronson told Vox five years ago. “Whereas, on social media, it’s not a democracy. Everybody’s agreeing with each other and approving each other, and then, if somebody transgresses, we disproportionately punish them. We tear them apart, and we don’t want to listen to them.” The payment for us is huge — almost as big as the payout for the tech bros who feign impartiality when their priority is clearly capital and nothing else. This is a punitive environment in which we are treating one another like dogs, shoving each other’s noses into the messes we have made. Offline, people are not defined by the errors they make, but by the changes they make when they are confronted with those errors, a kind of long game that contradicts the very definition of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. The irony of public shaming on social media is that social media itself is the only thing that deserves it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[thecoroutfitters]

Written by Guest Contributor on The Prepper Journal.

Editors Note: An article from Dave Henly to The Prepper Journal. Reality if you really want to get off the grid. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share then enter into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies!

“The Next Three Days” is a nail-biting movie. It is one of the only movies that I have had to pause and take a break before the end of the film. It was so intense. In it, Russell Crowe is rescuing his wife (Elizabeth Banks) from wrongful imprisonment. I doubt that I would ever have the guts to fight for my family in this manner.

But it does make me think: “Am I too trusting? What would I need to do if (fill in the blank) happened and my family and I needed to run?”

I already practice my survivalist skills on a regular basis. My friends and I often do survival hunts where we hike into the woods and live for 2-3 days off of roots and the creatures we kill. There are few groups (outside of military men) as prepared as my friends and I when it comes to wilderness training. Being able to “go on the run” from an invading country or a personal threat needs some forethought.

Recently, I’ve been prepping my go-to-ground strategy. How could I stay off the grid and go “dark.” I won’t share everything, but here are a few thoughts that I am working through.

Erasing My Online Footprint

This one is the hardest for me. I use the internet to keep track of my friend’s and families’ lives. Granted, the cynic will say “the government already knows everything about me.” But the truth is, they haven’t carefully organized that information until you become a person of interest. Deleting your entire footprints such as images your friends put up, old photos you stored on Picasa (which has been purchased by Google and now they know everything) or Amazon Photos and your old blogs, takes a lot of dedication.

There are no guarantees that it will help, but if there is no digital footprint, you will be harder to trace. It makes it harder for them to find you. If you own a home, it will be difficult to hide your address and be removed from every online database. However, if you are persistent in your removal requests — and you don’t opt-in to email addresses and and other requests for information you will create less to be deleted should the need arise.

Create a Fake Online Persona

Creating a fake online persona is getting easier to do. The first thing is to get a prepaid cell phone number so that you can sign up for email and social media accounts if needed. Then, you can tag photos of your face with this fake name — or hire a photographer on Upwork to take pictures of a model for you. These custom photos won’t flag as being “stock images” and will serve as the persona for your account.

Finally, you need an address. A fake address from fakenamegenerator.com will work. Enter this name and address in as many sweepstakes as you can find. Applying for sweepstakes will help establish your phony persona in Lexis Nexis as a “real” entity. There is nothing illegal about using a pseudonym and fake address for an added layer of anonymity.

Ditch The Smart Phone

Smartphones track everything. We’re pretty sure they listen to everything as well. The smartphone, smart TV and any other “smart” device need to be unceremoniously removed from the house. Ditching the smart devices will help to hide your daily routine and keep you “off the grid.”

Mask Your IP

Your phone is traceable. Your car with the tire pressure sensors? Yeah, those use Bluetooth. They also communicate with the signboards around your town that tell you how far it is to the next road. (You know what I am talking about? The signs that give you travel estimates?) You’ll need to ditch the car.

The challenging thing is that most of our numbers, credit cards and way of life requires digital access. Pay attention to your life and consider what it would take to function without that technology. And then, starting now, you want to begin eliminating everything digital that you can: your laptop, your social media, your smartphone.

Right now, you are leaving a footprint that could be used years later. Little hints, like the sites you frequent and how frequently you go to them. All of those things are being logged in case they need that information in the future. Kept under the guise of “tailoring the user experience”, increasing Google Analytics by more targeted advertising based on a users preferences.

Minimize that Footprint. Go Amish.

You will likely still need internet access, so using something like a TOR browser and a VPN can help you create layers between you and the rest of the world. Many websites — such as CNN and Facebook — track your IP. Once your IP has been identified, your natural browsing habits can be used to unmask your other, cloaked, “identities”.

Keeping a low profile is key. There is little to be gained by pontificating online about politics or our favorite survival secrets. Remember that the things we share online today are likely being recorded and will still be accessible 50 years into the future as part of our digital record.

Go Cash

This goes without saying, but cash is about the only thing you can use that is untraceable. Or, mostly untraceable. It wouldn’t hurt to get a side-hustle, now, that pays in cash. That way you can get used to working in cash-only.

You can keep your day job for now, but you’ll have the skill on how to find and retain cash-generating jobs down the road, which will be essential if you end up in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Prep Alternate Transport

If the crap hits the fan (SHTF) and the country gets overrun by commies or something, you’ll likely want a vehicle — any vehicle — that can get you south of the border. Running is one of my favorite sports. I get up, put my shoes on, and take off running. Every morning. Like clockwork. It’s the one way that I can guarantee myself a baseline of fitness.

At a minimum, you should be able to run 3 miles non-stop. Walking 4 miles per hour is another excellent skill to practice as a long-distance strategy. Now, if someone did not know about my running habit, I could move pretty quickly in that first 5 miles or so. This gives me a major head-start on getting out of an area, even if I have been reduced to moving by foot. The next level of escape might be a bicycle. I only ride about once a week, but I find that my cardiovascular conditioning translates well into cycling.

Leaving a cheap bike chained up at work or a nearby apartment complex can be a great way to create an “escape” route, should the car no longer be a feasible option. Mountain bikes — while slower in the urban environment — are an excellent choice for their robust off-road handling.  You can get cheap bikes from pawn shops or buy something online from a store like Dave’s Cheap Bikes.

This creates a scenario where I could outrun my aggressors to one of several bikes inside my 2-mile “escape radius”. From there, I can grab one of my bikes, and pick up my escape pace.

Create Cache’s

This is a major step in my escape plan. Remember to not bring along any cellular devices when hiding your cache (no trace!). My caches are cash-rich and well-hidden, deep in the wilderness. You’d need a GPS and exact coordinates to find them.

You might add disguises and some power bars in your cache. 6,000 calories would be the minimum I’d put in there. Backup cell phones and bad weather gear are also essential. I also keep some backup inner tubes and CO2 inflators in case my bike has experienced a flat.

There are two caches within a 10-mile radius of my place. These are smaller, and designed to assist me should I be escaping by bike. Then, there are larger caches at the 50, 200, 350 and 500-mile distances from my location.

This creates a logical path for me to “leap-frog” out of town. Ideally, I would be able to purchase a car for my getaway (or hitchhike), but, even if forced to pedal, I could theoretically get from one cache to the next within about 20 hours. Bicycles are powerful escape vehicles. Even when out of shape, it is fairly easy to maintain 8-10 miles per hour. In a week’s time, that could move you 2-3 states away from the folks that want your capture.

Hide Rural

Cameras are everywhere, and Amazon is selling facial recognition technology to the cops, which makes it almost impossible to hide in the urban environment. Living rural is hard. You can’t dumpster dive for what you need, and you risk everyone learning your name. It requires some solid survivalist skills. However, rural hideouts have a good track record. Folks have had success hiding on the Appalachian trail and in communes.

Finding an abandoned farm that you can squat in that isn’t too far from a McDonald’s or Panera’s dumpster that you can dive in would be an ideal plan. Or integrating with a religious sect that is fearful of outsiders. Once you gain their trust, it can give autonomy and community. Heading out west where you can work the crops with the other illegal immigrants and migrant workers can provide you with a source of cash as well as some camaraderie.

Prepare To Be Lonely

If it is just you escaping you can say goodbye to your wife, your kids and anyone you love for at least the next seven years. Ideally, you will want them to declare you to be dead. The authorities — including a scenario of invading authorities — know that heartstrings are the hardest thing to cut. They will be watching those channels for you to surface. You’ve got to let your trail stay cold if you want your freedom.

Hope To Never Need Your Escape Plan

As you prep your escape plan, it is easy to see all of the holes. Ideally, you will never be in a scenario where you need it. But if things ever do go south, a robust plan gives you the ability to take off at a run, and scale yourself into a defensible position that gives you a fighting chance.

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[mnefaulkerson]

Why I Deleted My Twitter Account with 7,000 Followers

Hi everyone! About two months ago (April I think?), I deleted my Twitter account. I thought I should write a post explaining this as some of you have been asking me about it.

My Issues with Social Media

First off you guys know my stance with regards to social media. While social media used to be a great place for authentic conversations, it has become a very “noisy” commercial ground now. When I use social media as a content publisher, I feel like I’m just one drop in a very large ocean, where my comments have no impact whatsoever. There are just way too many — think hundreds of millions of — content creators on social media these days, with many using bots, digital assistants, and agencies to tweak every aspect of their social media messaging, so that they can get the best engagement and ROI for their posts.

This is vastly different than years ago, say in 2011, when I was having many authentic interactions with readers on Facebook and social media has not become the monster that it is now.

These days though, the notifications on my FB and Twitter are either spam, some commercialized plug, or some pointless alert. It has become very tiring to log into my social media accounts each day with a bright red alert showing XX notifications, only to sieve through them and see that they are pointless updates. I have talked about these issues in these posts: Why I Deleted My Facebook Page, Challenges that I’m Facing Today, and The Fear of Missing Out (I’ve since reinstated my Facebook page after deleting it in 2016, but I no longer actively maintain it).

This is legitimately how I feel when I log onto social media and my inbox every day for the past few years (Screencap from Detroit Become Human; Image: theRadBrad)

My Issues with Twitter

In the same vein, Twitter has become a frustrating and unrewarding experience for me in the past few years.

To begin with, most readers of PE do not follow me there. Many readers here don’t use Twitter, while those who do don’t connect with me using that channel. I think Twitter has a specific demographic and most PE readers are just not active Twitter users. Users who want to get my updates sign up for my mailing list (which is the official channel to get my updates btw — I post stuff that I don’t post here, including new courses and special messages). For anyone wants to send me a message, the contact form is the way to go.

Next, when I looked at my Twitter followers — about 7,000 of them — I realized that (a) this number has not been growing for the past two years, and (b) 99.9% of them are inactive or “dead.” “Dead” followers because the people no longer use their accounts, or people are following so many accounts that users like me who believe in tweeting less, not more, can no longer be heard anymore. Out of these 7,000, maybe only three people actively read and reply to my tweets (hi Charles, Ted, and Rick!). It became clear that my Twitter follower count has become a vacant number. While I was meticulously maintaining my Twitter account every day for the past few years and thinking that I was reaching 7,000 followers with every tweet, I was really shouting into a black hole.

Following this, I then looked at my Twitter messages. Over the years, I began to receive a high proportion of empty alerts, such as notifications of some company bot tweeting out my articles and tagging me, usually done to increase exposure of their account/business. Messages from content creators trying to network, expressing manufactured interest in what I wrote — but the reality is they are just trying to network to spread the word about their service. Nothing wrong with what they are doing, but when I check Twitter, I’m looking for authentic conversations with people who really read PE, not networking requests and solicitation. These are things that I’ve dealt with immensely for the past ten years, and I feel like I’m at a stage of my life (mid-30s) where I just want to move on and focus on creating content and live my life, not battle the same things that I had been dealing with in my 20s.

Note that this issue is specific to me rather than most Twitter users. Running a very large front-facing website has made me the target of an enormous amount of spam and solicitation requests. When I looked at my issues with Facebook, blog comments, contact form, and now Twitter, it’s the same thing — an enormous amount of spam, noise, and empty comments because of my blog’s visibility. While I used to get a ratio of 100% authentic to 0% noise in my messages, now it’s more like 99.9% noise.

Frustration vs. Inspiration

After thinking about this, I realize the fundamental problem is that the social media landscape and internet landscape has changed enormously since I started my website. Conversations online used to be authentic because most users were using the internet in an authentic way. These days, the internet has become massively commercialized, while abusers have a huge amount of power due to the democratization of technology and automation tools.

The answer is then to change the way I use social media. I asked myself: If this platform is making me feel so frustrated when using it, should I continue using it then? The answer was clearly, a “no.”

To be honest, I felt a little surprised by my answer. Because having a Twitter account feels so basic, so essential in today’s world, something that every business owner must have. Every time you sign up for a new service, you will invariably be asked for your Twitter handle (and Facebook page ID). Not having a Twitter account is unheard of. It feels blasphemous. It feels like you are some backward, outdated business owner who is not in touch with his/her audience.

But is it true though? Because even when I was managing a Twitter account with “7,000 followers,” I didn’t feel like I was reaching anyone. Every time I tweeted something, I felt like I was throwing a coin into an abyss. I didn’t feel this way in the early years of Twitter — it’s only so in the recent years as social media morphed into some giant, monster entity. These days, I feel like everyone is shouting at the top of their lungs and commercial businesses have unlimited resources to micro-optimize every aspect of their presence, and social media is no longer the right place for me to connect with my audience: everyday people without a voice, people whom I want to speak out to and help.

Facebook and Twitter were good ways for me to connect with my audience in the late 2000s to early 2010s, but not anymore as they have morphed into totally different beasts that favor quick engagement and short-form conversation. What I’m interested in is creating long-form, deep content on important life topics, and these are just not well-suited for Facebook and Twitter’s algorithm and landscape today.

“Death by a Thousand Cuts”

In retrospect, I should have considered deleting Twitter two years ago. I feel like this is a case of “death by a thousand cuts,” something which I feel is very common in today’s social media world. When something is unpleasant, if the unpleasantness is on a very small level, you will usually tolerate it. What social media giants have done today is that they are delivering many little cuts slowly, over a long period of time. Tweaking the platform little by little, changing the rules every other day, altering the algorithm in a way that builds stickiness for them (but creates user fatigue), inserting little ads everywhere (having some ads is okay, but overoptimizing ad placement creates a very negative user experience), and just making changes that maximize profit rather than create value.

Since these cuts are delivered little by little, most people don’t observe this. They continue to use the platform every day, addicted to it (an addiction that is carefully engineered by growth hacker teams). At the same time, the users start to experience other changes in their life: decreased productivity, mental fatigue, a general feeling of emptiness, but they have no idea that these are linked to their use of such platforms. So they stay on, getting sucked deeper and deeper. Remember, with regards to social media, when there is no actual product being sold, you are the product. Your information, your mental energy, your happiness — these get twisted and manipulated to fit the platform’s needs. Figure out your needs and use social media in a way that supports your needs, rather than the other way round where you change your life to fit social media platforms’ ever-changing rules and algorithms.

I find this issue with Netflix as well (even though they have an active product which is video subscriptions) — I tried using it for the past month as part of a free trial from another service, and I find that it employs highly negative, dark design patterns meant to suck the user deeply into the platform. Not surprising since this is what many modern-day giants are doing. It could be a neutral platform that provides videos for user’s entertainment and relaxation, but instead, it decides to swing the other way and use all kinds of design hacks to get users to watch video after video as part of shareholder value maximization. As the Netflix CEO himself declared before (and I paraphrase), they regard sleep as their competitor. And they are winning.

End Note

At the end of the day, I guess I’ve spent the past few years trying to make sense of my relationship with social media and online communication tools. And I’m happy to say that I think I’m starting to reach a good place regarding this. I have my Facebook page but I don’t actively maintain it anymore because of the reasons stated here. I no longer have Twitter and I’m happy to have gotten rid of it. I have my growing newsletter list where I can connect authentically with you guys, where I get authentic replies to what I send out (thank you to all of you who have been participating in my surveys and sending kind messages through the contact form!). There are still negative bad eggs every here and there, but I’ve come up with tools and ways to manage and minimize them to a near-zero instance.

In the meantime, I’ve been busy working on my first self-paced course (on how to discover your life purpose), based on your feedback to my email survey sent out a few months ago. I’ve been running online courses since 2012, way before the explosion of online courses, but this will be my first video course created for a self-paced experience. I’ll be sharing updates via my email list when it’s ready, so stay tuned! 😀

Check out:

How Social Media Creates a Fear of Missing Out (And What To Do About It)

Why I Deleted My Facebook Page with 20,800 Likes

Closing Blog Comments at PE

Closure of PE Forums

6 Tips to Deal with Digital Burnout

The post Why I Deleted My Twitter Account with 7,000 Followers appeared first on Personal Excellence.

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[lodelss]

A Crying Public Shame

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  10 minutes (2,569 words)

“Can I talk to you in private?” No one wants to hear those words. The impulse is to assume you’ve done something egregiously wrong. The expectation is that you are about to be punished. The conviction is so strong that the only good thing about it is that, at least initially, you can suffer without anyone else knowing about it. You might even thank the punisher for coming to you directly, for keeping it between just the two of you. It’s the least someone can do when they are about to theoretically ruin your life.

A lot has been written about privacy online, in terms of information, in terms of being policed. Ecuador is currently rushing to pass a data protection law after a breach affected as many as 20 million people — more than the country’s population. A lot has also been written about callout and cancel culture, about people being targeted and cast off (if only temporarily), their entire history dredged up and subjected to ex post facto judgement; Caroline Flack, the British television presenter who recently committed suicide while being hounded in the press and online amid allegations she had assaulted her on-again, off-again boyfriend, was seen as its latest casualty. But there hasn’t been a lot of talk about the hazier in-between, about interpersonal privacy online, about missteps once dealt with confidentially by a friend or a colleague or a boss, about the discrete errors we make that teach equally discrete lessons so as not to be repeated in public. That’s not how it is anymore, not in a world tied together by social media. Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep. We’re all primed — and able — to admonish institutions and individuals: “Because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before,” Sarah Hagi wrote in Time last year. “That means racist, sexist, and bigoted behavior or remarks don’t fly like they used to.” 

Which is to say that a lot of white people are fucking up, as usual, but now everyone, including white people and people of color, are publicly vilifying them for it as tech’s unicorn herders cash in on the eternal flames. And it’s even worse than in the scarlet letter days: the more attention the worse the punishment, and humiliation online has the capacity for infinite reach. As Sarah John tweeted after one particular incident that left a person hospitalized, “No one knows how to handle cancel culture versus accountability.”

* * *

“Is that blood?” That was my first question after a friend of mine sent me a message with a link to a few tweets by a person I’d never heard of, the editor-in-chief of a small site. The majority of the site’s staff had just resigned, the impetus being a semi-viral tweet, since deleted, of a DM the editor had sent a Twitter chat in 2016: “I was gonna reply to this with ‘nigga say what?’ Then I was like holy shite that’s racist, I can’t say that on twitter.” According to Robert Daniels at the Balder and Dash blog on rogerebert.com, tweeters, mostly white, piled on — some even called the EIC’s workplace demanding they be fired — before the office-wide resignation. Videos embedded in the tweets I saw showed the editor crying through an apology. (Longreads contacted the editor for comment; they’ve asked to remain anonymous for their health and safety.)

Initially I thought the videos were just a mea culpa, but then I saw a flash of red. Though the details are muddied by a scrubbed social media history, the editor appeared to have harmed themselves. Ex-colleagues rushed to their aid, however, and they were eventually hospitalized. If that wasn’t horrible enough, a filmmaker named Jason Lei Howden decided to avenge the EIC. With scant information, apparently, he targeted individuals on Twitter who weren’t involved in the initial pile-on, specifically blaming two people of color for the crisis — Valerie Complex and Dark Sky Lady, who had not in fact bullied anyone but had blogged about Howden. The official Twitter account of Howden’s new film, Guns Akimbo, got mixed up in the targeted attacks, threatening the release of the film.

There are multiple levels to this that I don’t understand. First, why that DM was released; why didn’t the person simply confront the EIC directly? Second, why did the editor’s staff, people who knew them personally, each issue individual public statements about their resignations into an already-growing pile-on? (I don’t so much wonder about the pile-on itself because I know about the online disinhibition effect, about how the less you know a person online, the more you are willing to destroy them.) Third, why the hell did that filmmaker get involved, and without any information? Why did the white man with all the clout attack a nebulous entity he called “woke twitter” — presumably code for “people of color” — and point a finger at specific individuals while also denying their response to one of the most inflammatory words in the English language (didn’t they realize it was an “ironic joke,” he scoffed)? As Daniels wrote, “This became a cycle of blindspots, and a constant blockage of discussing race, suicide, and alliance.” Why, at no point, did anyone stop to think about the actual people involved, about maybe taking this private, to a place where everything wasn’t telegraphed and distorted? 

Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep.

I had the same question after the BFI/Thirst Aid Kit controversy. In mid-February, the British Film Institute officially announced the monthlong film series THIRST: Female Desire on Screen, curated by film critic Christina Newland and timed to coincide with the release of her first book, She Found It at the Movies (full disclosure: I was asked to participate, but my pitch was not accepted). The promotional image included an illustration of a woman biting her lip, artwork similar to that of three-year-old podcast Thirst Aid Kit (TAK), a show that covers the intersection of pop culture and thirst. Newland later told The Guardian she wondered about the “optics,” but as a freelancer with no say on the final design, she deferred to the BFI. She had in fact twice approached TAK cohost Nichole Perkins to contribute to her book (the podcast’s other cohost is Bim Adewunmi). Perkins told me in an email that she wanted to, but her work load eventually prevented her. And while TAK did share the book’s preorder link, the BFI ultimately failed to include the podcasters in the film series as speakers, or even just as shout-outs in the publicity notes — doubly odd, given that Adewunmi is London-based. Quote-tweeting the BFI’s announcement and tagging both the institute and Newland, TAK responded, “Wow! This sounds great. Hope our invitation arrives soon!”

The predictable result was a Newland pile-on in which she was accused of erasing black women’s work, followed by a TAK pile-on — though Perkins told me her personal account was “full of support and kindness” — for claiming ownership over a term that preceded them. All three women ended up taking time away from Twitter (which is a sacrifice for journalists whose audience depends on social media) though Newland has since returned. I asked Perkins if she had thought about dealing with the situation privately at first. “I did consider reaching out to Christina before quote-tweeting, yes,” she wrote. “I wonder if she considered reaching out to us, especially after she saw the artwork for the season and admittedly noticed ‘something going on with the optics,’ as she is quoted as saying in The Guardian.” Eventually, the BFI contacted Perkins and Adewunmi and released a statement apologizing “for their erasure from the conversation we are hoping to create from this season” and announcing a change of imagery. They also noted that Newland, as a guest programmer, was not responsible for their marketing mistake, though no reason was given for their omission. “I have no idea why the BFI or Ms Newland didn’t include Thirst Aid Kit in the literature about the Thirst season,” Adewunmi wrote to me. “I was glad, however, to see the institution acknowledge that initial erasure, as well as issue an apology, in their released statement.”

At around the same time, a similar situation was unravelling in the food industry. Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices, an anthology edited by former Food Network VP Katherine Alford and NPR’s Kathy Gunst, was published in early February. The collection of more than 50 recipes and essays presents baking as “a way to defend, resist, and protest” and was supposedly inspired by the 2016 election. The hashtag #ragebaking was used to promote the book on social media in January, which brought it to the attention of a woman named Tangerine Jones, whose Instagram followers believed the idea had been stolen from her and alerted her — and the rest of the world. Unprompted by Jones, Alford and Gunst DM’d her to say they had learned the term elsewhere and that the book was “a celebration of this movement.” Jones called them out publicly, publishing their DMs in a Medium essay entitled “The Privilege of Rage,” in which she described how she came up with the concept of rage baking — using the #ragebaking hashtag and the ragebaking.com URL — five years ago, as an outlet for racial injustice. “In my kitchen, I was reminded that I wasn’t powerless in the face of f**kery,” she wrote. Jones’s supporters started a pile-on, her article shared by big names like Rebecca Traister, who had contributed to the collection and requested that her contribution be removed from future editions. 

In an abrupt turn of events, the Jones advocates were promptly confronted with advocates of the book, who redirected the pile-on back at Jones for kicking up a fuss. “It is beyond f**ked up that my questioning the authors’ intentions and actions is being framed as detrimental to the success of other black women,” she tweeted. Their silence resounding, the Simon and Schuster imprint ultimately issued a statement that failed to acknowledge their mistake and instead proposed “in the spirit of communal activism” to include Jones in subsequent printings. Unappeased, the baker called out the “apology” she received privately from Alford and Gunst, who told her they were donating a portion of the proceeds to the causes she included in her post (though their public apology didn’t mention that), and asked if she would be interviewed as part of the reprint. “Throwing black women under the bus is part of White Feminist legacy,” Jones tweeted. “That is not the legacy I stand in, nor will I step in that trap.”

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According to Lisa Nakamura, a University of Michigan professor who studies digital media, race, and intersectionality, cancel culture comes from trying to wrest control in a context in which there is little. It’s almost become a running joke the way Twitter protects right-wing zealots while everyone else gets pummeled by them. It follows then that marginalized populations, the worst hit, would attempt to use the platform to reclaim the power they have so often been denied. But as much as social media may sometimes seem like the only place to claim accountability, it is also the worst place to do it. In a Medium post following their Howden hounding, Dark Sky Lady argued that calling out is not bullying, which is true — but the effects on Twitter are often the same. “The goal of bullying is to destroy,” they wrote. “The goal of calling out and criticizing is to improve.” Online, there appears to be no improvement without destruction in every direction, including the destruction of those seeking change. On one end, a group of white people — the EIC, Newland, Alford, Gunst — was destroyed professionally for erring; on the other were the POC — Perkins, Adewunmi, Jones — who were personally destroyed, whose pain was minimized, whose sympathy was expected when they got none. The anger was undoubtedly justified. Less justified was the lack of responsibility for how it was deployed — publicly, disproportionately, with countless people’s hurt revisited on specific individuals, all at once. 

We know how pile-ons work now; it’s no defense to claim good intentions (or lack of bad intentions). There were few gains for either side in any of these cases, with the biggest going to the social media machine that feeds on public shame and provides no solution, gorging on the pain of everyone involved without actually providing constructive way forward, creating an ever-renewing cycle of suffering. A former intern for the ousted EIC tweeted that she understood the impulse to critique cancel culture and support the editor, but noted that “there is something sad about the fact that my boss used a racial slur, and I am not allowed to criticize.”

* * *

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed author Jon Ronson told Maclean’s in 2015 that one of his biggest fears is being defined by one mistake, and that a number of journalists had basically told him, “I live in terror.” I am no exception. Just recently I experienced a comparatively tame callout on Twitter, and even that moderate critique made me drop an entire book project, wonder about a job opportunity that subsequently dissolved, and second-guess every story idea I’ve had since. The situation was somewhat helpful in making me a more considerate person but was exponentially more helpful in making me anxious and in inspiring hateful fantasies about people I had never met. I am 100 percent certain that the first gain would have been made just as successfully had people spoken to me privately and would have saved me from the second part becoming so extreme that I had to leave social media to recalibrate. The overwhelming sense I’m left with is that if I say something that someone doesn’t like, even something justifiable, my detractors will counter with disproportionate force to make whatever point it is they want to make about an issue that’s larger than just me. What kind of discourse is that which mutes from the start, which turns every disagreement into a fight to the death, which provides no opportunity for anyone to learn from their failures? How do we progress with no space to do it?

“I think we need to remember democracy. When somebody transgresses in a democracy, other people give them their points of view, they tell them what they’ve done wrong, there’s a debate, people listen to each other. That’s how democracy should be,” Ronson told Vox five years ago. “Whereas, on social media, it’s not a democracy. Everybody’s agreeing with each other and approving each other, and then, if somebody transgresses, we disproportionately punish them. We tear them apart, and we don’t want to listen to them.” The payment for us is huge — almost as big as the payout for the tech bros who feign impartiality when their priority is clearly capital and nothing else. This is a punitive environment in which we are treating one another like dogs, shoving each other’s noses into the messes we have made. Offline, people are not defined by the errors they make, but by the changes they make when they are confronted with those errors, a kind of long game that contradicts the very definition of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. The irony of public shaming on social media is that social media itself is the only thing that deserves it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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