#fen is the one who is Actually most likely to have a social media account. not that it would be used much anyway.

[epicfirestormer]

[gilded-green]

In celebration of the 10th anniversary, I’ll probably reread GG and send updates/highlight areas and as for commentary. Probably XD

But first. What aspect of Gilded Green was your favorite? What was something you put in a lot of world building for but never got to show either in fic or on tumblr. Who is your favorite character and why, what makes them special in your eyes? Which character has turned into a completely different one as soon as you started writing them? Which part of the fic did you like most when you finished it, do you still like it? Similarly, which part do you dislike most?

Lasty, anything about gg2’s story you want to share/talk about/rant?

-love, the dai li fangirl

Haha, no pressure! But at the same time yes if you do feel free to send me passages for commentary here! <3

What aspect was my favorite? Hmmm. *thinking face* I think, when I first came up with it, I was just thrilled to have these two small things - minor character Lu Ten, overlooked villain organization Dai Li - that I was able to combine into something so big. That was pretty nifty!

As I started developing the story, I think what really caught my attention was the fact that “Wow, all these characters are awful people!” Like. The Dai Li aren’t good.The Fire Nation aren’t good. Lu Ten is a victim but also an oppressor. All off these people have extremely different beliefs and worldviews - Fire supremacist, police state enforcers, classist academic gatekeepers - and all of them think THEY’RE in the right here and none of them are. I think Tien and Hoang might be the only people with a decent, non-oppressive worldview in the story so far. XD I was growing out of the storytelling trope of black-and-white morality at the time, so it was really fun to start experimenting with writing awful people as enjoyable, sympathetic characters.

World building? Hmm. I was just learning how to use my worldbuilding muscles back then. I seem to remember reading up a lot on how brainwashing actually works in the real world and going “I don’t think this is compatible with what we have in ATLA” and just kinda tossing that whole thing out. XD I also recall looking up a lot of stuff for the bits about Jouin, some of which - kalua pig! - has since shown up again in WFFD. I also recall someone on FFdotnet at the time saying “All this chapter did was tell us more about a dead character than the living one” and I was just kinda like -_- yes because he is DEAD and this is your chance to feel sorry about that, we’ll get plenty more of the living one later on account of him still being, y’know, alive. XD

Oh, and Shirong’s personal side projects. I finally got into that a bit in A Meeting of Minds, but the dude DOES have his own stuff going on, which Delun so rudely interrupted to drag him off to see Long Feng about brainwashing a Firebender.

I also did a bunch of research for the birthday party interlude, I think. Mostly appropriate alcohol for such an occasion? And....okay, this’ll sound funny, but.....food containers. I wanted Fen to pack up leftovers for Suyin and Shirong. That’s what my Italian family does after get-togethers, and I assumed that a Chinese family/friend group would do the same! But I also had, like, zero exposure to everyday Chinese life, let alone everyday Chinese life in the 1800s, and I just didn’t have the...idk, cultural osmosis? to figure it out. Like, if you asked me how Victorians would transfer food I’d probably come up with “Idk, wrap it in cloth and stuff it in a basket?” and I assumed people living in modern China would also be able to explain what their people did for food storage/transport 150 years ago but I didn’t have that cultural background, now, did I??? Also this was 10-12 years ago I was looking this up, mind you, the internet was still very different, there was plenty of information on Chinese historical events but not on everyday life objects, CDramas weren’t easy to find if they were translated at all and I certainly didn’t know they existed, and no one was posting beautiful aesthetic videos of life in a rural Chinese mountain village to youtube yet. Eventually I learned that bamboo baskets were a thing, but there wasn’t much info on THOSE either and I wasn’t sure how to describe them, so I just tentatively typed “basket” and called it a day. XD

YOU CANNOT ASK ME TO CHOOSE MY FAVORITE CHARACTER THAT’S LIKE ASKING ME TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MY CHILDREN!!! *shoves Yong off a cliff*

I’m very fond of the Dai family, along with the Trungs and Sais. I’m very proud of how Tuan turned out. I adore Yuan, who you’ve barely met, and Xun, who you haven’t. Huang and Wu Sheng are also definite faves and I can’t wait for y’all to get to know them better.

Characters do usually behave for me in terms of personality development. They surprise me, but they never really turn out to be the complete OPPOSITE of what I was expecting? They just kinda develop organically. Huang and Wu Sheng surprised me, tho, those boys got deep. I knew they had the potential, but developing their backstory actually caused Stingrae and I to develop Ba Sing Se’s socio-political backstory and Long Feng’s rise to power, all because of an inkling I had. That was a very satisfying few years of worldbuilding and story development.

Um, favorite part of the fic....idk, I’m very fond of the final scene, with Azula and her wall chunk from Lu Ten. I’m doubly fond of it because of how it always resonates with readers. Heck, during Azula week last year, I used that chunk of rock as an ongoing theme in Sandstone, and someone commented like “I DIDN’T REALIZE YOU’RE THE ONE WHO WROTE GILDED GREEN” and that made me really happy!

Lu Ten’s time stuck underground - I used the seven stages of grief to get through that one and it was very helpful in structuring that part of the story, and I figured it was deep or something because PSYCHOLOGY.

I’m also proud of myself for getting through the dark brainwashing scenes. So, like, FYI, fanfiction could get...very dark, back in the 00s. People love to play purity police these days and complain about how nasty people get can, but listen. Listen. Do you have any idea how dark FFdotnet got back in the day? Legolas And Aragorn Get Captured By Orcs And Brutally Tortured was an entire genre. I feel like torture fic was actually a lot more common back then, and darkfic in general - I’m sure someone could write a whole thesis on why it’s not so prevalent anymore, I’m gonna guess the fact that fandom is less-insulated and more public now could be part of it, maybe also the fact that the internet is more social media/influencer culture based so people care about their image, and also the purity police which is its own kettle of worms, but I also think that the Bush Administration had something to do with it? You have all these kids who were pre-teens when 9/11 happened, growing up during the Iraq War with an awful presidential administration while everyone was scared and conservative Christianity started to realize that their control over the nation’s “morality” might be slipping and reacted accordingly......yeah there was a lot of darkfic back then.

And I read a lot of darkfic too, but, uh....well, statistically speaking, a lot of writing is bad, okay? A lot of those fics were just weird; you could see where the writer had this idea, and also where they failed to execute it in a way that resonated or made sense. And whatever, writers were young and just wanted to pound out some catharsis, it’s cool, but it still just felt narratively awkward when you could tell how the writer was more focused on LET’S MAKE THIS AS DARK AS POSSIBLE instead of “Let’s tell this as well as possible.”

So the first several attempts at writing the brainwashing scenes, I was nervous because I didn’t want to get TOO dark, and when I finally decided “eff it” and said to Stingrae “I think I need to let this be as dark as it needs to be” I was still nervous because I didn’t want it to end up WEIRD. Idk if that makes sense, but anyway I seem to have done a decent job at it!

As for parts I dislike the most, uhhhhh Iroh’s retreat (I didn’t care, I just wanted to get it over with), Enlai might’ve been promoted too fast? idk, the fact that I came up with Nanyue AFTER I finished publishing GG so I couldn’t work that into the Quy bits, the fact that I was young and innocent and didn’t understand sexual slang or innuendo and randomly chose Dong as the name of the court physician which could lead to some awful puns except no one ever seemed to pick up on that and maybe I’ll regret pointing it out but the man IS going to appear again so I might as well get the first shot in myself. XD

I might have GG2 stuff to talk about but not sure, if I do I’ll make another post on that!

<3

[gotatext]

TASK OO1 / OOC SURVEY.

[kermit voice] hallo.... its me 

YOUR ALIAS & NICKNAMES — nora

AGE — 23

TIMEZONE — gmt

PREFERRED PRONOUNS — she/her

MBTI — enfp-infp border cos im an introvert who Masquerades as an extrovert :)

HP HOUSE — i spent 10 yrs of my life thinkin i was gryffindor.... to find out.... huffle....puff...... 

ARE YOU A STUDENT? WHAT DO YOU STUDY? — i fuckin wish! being a student was dope af i got stressed about essays like once a month and apart from that i was just chillin, surrounded by really intelligent people every day n livin it up on the party scene. adult life fucking sucks no one wants to have fun cos we all work fuckin tonnes of hours so we can afford to eat and get paid peanuts xx

ARE YOU ENJOYING IT? — im really afraid of bein one of those jock types who peaked in high school but i deff peaked in uni like 100% i was way more interesting 2 years ago

LINKS TO OTHER ACCOUNTS & SOCIAL MEDIA — im not showin u my instagram bc im a fuckin embarassment but this is pinterest , this is my personal blog, this is my writing / 1x1 blog i never use any more n this is my trash talking twitter where i mostly just cry about timothee chalamet and bash the tories. 

DISCORD USER — kristine’s forehead vein#8664

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FICTION GENRE? — i dont read fanfiction much but when i do u can be sure it’s slow burn angsty enemies to lovers mutual pining heart attack every time one of them accidentally brushes the other’s hand

TOP FIVE FAVOURITE FILMS — suspiria (2018 luca guadagnino version rogue i kno but i prefer the remake), the lobster, before sunrise, baz luhrmann romeo + juliet, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,  thoroughbreds (REC!! so underwatched pls watch it. compelling female characters), hunt for the wilderpeople (also so underwatched), swiss army man, call me by your name, atonement, moonrise kingdom, trainspotting, the florida project. i rlly like films ok

A BOOK YOU FEEL “CHANGED” YOU? — the song of achilles by madeline miller n also fen by daisy johnson

A MOVIE YOU THINK ABOUT OFTEN? — booksmart cos its fuckin dope

WHAT IS YOUR SIGN? — libra

ARE YOU INTO ASTROLOGY? —  i like to pretend im super invested in it mostly to anger my friends but tbh.... i just use it as a rough guide for character creation.... its fun but i dnt .... fully invest in what it has to say..... altho i am the most unbalanced n indecisive bitch on earth so i guess they got that right !! i just live to please baybeyy!

WHAT PLATFORMS HAVE YOU ROLEPLAYED ON? — tumblr for about 8 year (omg) n before tht facebook..... i was very embarassingly in a twilight rp..... i wrote jane..... i also rped as a scene kid oc n when i was like 12 i was on some weird forum harry potter roleplay where i basically played a self insert with georgie henley as the fc......

WHAT OTHER HOBBIES DO YOU HAVE? — i used to have so many hobbies but now i jst lie in my bed staring at the ceiling. but before i was workin like a dog i loved reading, writing, acting in theatre productions..... going out on the town getting bevved..... big druggy EDM nights in warehouses tht probably weren’t liscenced for tht many ppl..... gigs... costume-design and making, spoken word poetry, acrylic painting n rollerskating but my sister broke my skates abt two years ago in vengeance and i’ll never forgive her that fuckin bitch

HAVE ANY PETS? IF SO, TALK ABOUT THEM! — no my landlord is a fascist

IS THERE A TV SHOW YOU RECOMMEND A LOT? — i’ll never stop reccing euphoria!! also i was pleasantly surprised by looking for alaska!! but i also rlly like bob’s burgers, parks and rec, good omens.... black mirror, n sharp objects. lovesick on bbciplayer (n netflix i think) is also rlly fun

ANY SHOWS YOU LIKE SOME MIGHT BE SURPRISED TO HEAR THAT YOU DO? — maybe love island, idk if i talk abt that much bc i am ashamed but i am so obsessed with it. i even got the love island game n got so invested in my fictional relationship w bobby tht i had to delete it

WHAT WAS THE LAST BOOK YOU READ? WOULD YOU RECOMMEND IT? — god god... i haven’t finished a book in ages.... i recently started reading milkman by anna burns, the bees by laline paull and everything under by daisy johnson.... bt the last book i read cover to cover was probs circe. defs read it. feminist and witchy

CURRENTLY READING? — i jst said this but the bees, everything under and less so milkman cos im finding milkman a bit tough

LAST FILM? REC IT? — i watched ladyworld the lord of the flies all-female remake n even maya hawke could not save it.... dnt get me wrong from an art film point of view i loved it but it felt a bit underdeveloped n a level media studies for me..... apart from tht?? the runaways (yorkshire film not released yet at a preview screening) and threads (also a yorkshire film from the 80s about nuclear apocalypse)

THREE MOVIES YOU NEED TO WATCH — portrait of a lady on fire, i work at an independent cinema n we recently had a preview screening and everyone said it was SICK, uhhhh short term 12, n the new eliza scanlen movie babyteeth

WHAT MOVIE DO YOU THINK YOU’VE SEEN THE MOST TIMES? — madagascar because when i was 12 my parents bought me a little television with a dvd player in it for my birthday and madagascar was the only dvd i owned for like..... the first two years of havin the absolute luxury of a tv in my room so i just used to watch it all the time n i now basically know the script inside out

WHAT ALWAYS PUTS YOU IN A GOOD MOOD? — nothing, life is pointless n i hate fun, let me rot in peace

WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE MUSICIAN / BAND? LIST IF THERE ARE MORE THAN ONE. — ughhh god probably lcd soundsystem. gorillaz, the streets, tame impala, talking heads, soft hair, i also love lizz tho n also angry twangy guitar girl bands like girlpool, courtney barnett, best coast, cherry glazerr,

WILD NIGHT OUT OR QUIET NIGHT IN? — quiet night in my party days are over i cant even be bothered to go to the shops if its past 4.30pm and dark these days

ANY PHOBIAS? — clowns n rats

DO YOU LIKE BUGS? — absolutely not

BIRDS? — yes but not if they fly in my face

ARE YOU A CAT OR DOG PERSON? BOTH? — i love both i want one 

BIGGEST PET PEEVE? — tory middle aged boomers who treat me like actual shit on their shoe because i work in the service industry like thats my choice and their poor economic decisions didnt mean i have to do a shitty job to afford to live bcos of austerity n cuts to arts funding meaning i cant get a job writing unless i self-fund :)))

FAVOURITE THING ABOUT THE RPC? — that everyone ive met through rp is a fuckin LAFF

TOP TEN FAVE FCS TO USE? — god .... diana silvers, timothee chalamet, margaret qualley, kristine froseth, froy gutierrez, zendaya, elle fanning, astrid berges frisbey, hunter schafer, leonardo dicaprio

FIVE YOU LIKE WRITING AGAINST? — herman tomeraas, hunter schafer, saoirse ronan, timothee chalamet, froy gutierrez

FAVOURITE TYPE OF FOOD? — linda mccartney 1/2pounder mozzarella veggie burgers, sweet potato wedges, tomato soup, mozzarella sticks, brownies

WORST FOOD? — green things like broccoli n sprouts gross. baked beans cos as a kid ppl used to do baked bean baths for comic relief / red nosed day a lot n i thought when they were finished in the baked bean bath they just put all the cold beans back in the tin. actually anything small that moves around on your plate. peas. spaghetti. sweetcorn. i dont like small things i cant control.

DO YOU PLAY VIDEOGAMES? IF SO, WHAT ONES AND ON WHAT PLATFORM DO YOU PREFER? — last year my housemate had an xbox n i went through a phase of obsessively playin fable 3 it was amazing. i had like 5 husbands and 3 wives and loads of kids but they all ended up leavin me cos i spent so much time out doing quests neglecting them

ANYTHING ELSE YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE WITH THE TAG? — this

LASTLY, HOW DID YOU FIND US? — im one of those bitches who was in this grp all the way back when it was swipe... so quirky and original!! i knew the band before u! anyway im goin now this has been sufficiently embarassing..... i am lame

[theinvinciblenoob]

Fen Zhao Contributor

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Fen Zhao is an early stage investor at Alpha Edison who previously developed public private partnerships at the National Science Foundation in the areas of data science and cybersecurity.

For most people, the thought of a smart device sharing their intimate conversations and sending those recordings along to their acquaintances is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. And for one family in Portland, it’s a nightmare that became all too real when their Amazon Echo sent a recording of a private conversation to a random contact in their phone book.

Mercifully, the recorded conversation was fairly banal — a chat about home renovations. But as smart home technology is swiftly being integrated into our daily lives and private spaces, it’s not difficult to imagine far worse scenarios.

Smart speakers record residents’ conversations. Thermostats equipped with motion sensors track the whereabouts of each household member, and when they leave the house. Refrigerators remember grocery lists and spending habits. One thing is clear: when residents invite smart technology into their homes, they are gambling with their privacy.

Ironically, the smart home may turn out to  be the salvation of online privacy itself. Internet companies have gotten away with hoarding people’s personal data for so long in part because of what experts call “the privacy paradox”: while most people claim to care deeply about online privacy, very few of them take action to protect it. Just look at the recent furor over Facebook’s lack of data privacy protections, which resulted in the compromise of 87 million users’ personal information. Though plenty of people tweeted they would #DeleteFacebook, how many actually permanently closed their accounts? Certainly far fewer than 87 million.

While experts disagree about why this paradox exists, at least some of the problem seems rooted in the fact that online space is virtual, whereas our privacy instincts evolved in physical space. By bringing virtual privacy incursions into the physical world—particularly into the protected private space of the home—smart home technology could short-circuit that dynamic.

The internet is intangible, and so its privacy risks appear to be too. It’s one thing to know, in the back of your mind, that Facebook has the ability to comb through your private messages. But when devices in your home are recording your spoken conversations and physical movements, it’s harder to ignore the looming threat of potentially disastrous privacy violations.

If smart fridges and smart locks get people to take online privacy as seriously as physical privacy, they could do what the Equifax hack and other high-profile data breaches could not: actually get people to change their behavior. If users vote for privacy with their feet—or their wallets—they could spur a wholesale rethinking of the online economy, away from one-sided exploitation and toward greater trust and transparency.

Privacy in virtual space

In Western culture, the home has long been recognized as a protected zone; the Talmud includes prohibitions against putting in windows in a house that directly look into a neighbor’s. When a stranger peeps through our window or listens at our door, millennia-old norms tell us we should chase them away. This desire for isolation may stem from a fundamental biological need; whether you’re a human or a possum, physical withdrawal means concealment and protection from predation, making privacy an evolutionary life-or-death matter.

But websites and apps have no physical presence in our lives. A software algorithm, no matter how malicious, doesn’t have the visceral menace of an unknown face at the glass. The internet disarms us by making our interactions feel abstract, even unreal. One 2016 study posited that this sense of unreality leads to contradictory attitudes about online privacy: while people know rationally that they should be concerned about virtual incursions, they simply don’t have a strong “gut feeling” about it intuitively. And when making decisions in the moment, gut feeling often wins out.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that online, there is less of a clear distinction between private and public space. We use social media to communicate simultaneously with hundreds or thousands of anonymous followers and with our closest friends. Email inboxes, Slack channels, and the like are more obviously “closed” spaces, but even there it’s often unclear to users which algorithms might be listening in. Even Snapchat—known for auto-deleting users’ photos, videos, and chats to protect their privacy—announced it would allow retargeted ads in fall 2017, to relatively little backlash. It’s hard to think about protecting ourselves from the stranger peeping in the window when we’re not even sure if it’s a public or private space he or she is looking into. What’s more, many users tend to imagine online “walls” that aren’t really there.

Multiple studies have shown that the mere existence of a privacy policy on a website makes users feel more secure, even though a policy in itself is no guarantee that their data won’t be sold to third parties.

“How secure are your light bulbs?”

When the internet enters the clearly private space of the home, some of that ambiguity will to disappear. It’s telling that a November 2017 survey by Deloitte found that consumers are more cautious in general about smart home devices compared to general online activities or even other categories of IoT. Forty percent of respondents said that they felt smart home technology “reveals too much about their personal lives,” while another 40 percent said they were worried about their usage being tracked. By comparison, they were less mistrustful of other IoT applications like autonomous vehicles and smart car technology, even though they have similar tracking capabilities.

And that survey only considers peoples’ reaction to fairly abstract privacy risks. The reality is that in a smart home, security vulnerabilities and data breaches can have much more dramatic real-world impacts. On his blog Charged, developer and journalist Owen Williams recently detailed his experience trying to figure out who or what kept overriding his brightness settings for his Phillips Hue smart light bulbs. It turned out that an app he’d enabled to dim his office lights at night had taken over all the bulbs hooked up to Williams’ Hue system and was keeping them at one uniform brightness.

As Williams points out, if a malicious app accomplished the same feat, it could extort money from the user by “randomly changing the brightness or color of lights until they pay.” When a cyberattack results in lights that won’t stop flashing—or doors that won’t lock, windows that won’t close, or a fridge turns itself off and melts all your ice cream—it’s logical that people’s reactions to digital privacy incursions will become that much more extreme.

Image courtesy of RamCreativ

Trust is the antidote

How can internet companies thrive in the privacy-sensitive space of the home? If privacy behavior is mostly about gut feelings, they’ll need to reinforce positive ones by winning consumers’ trust.

Trust has not historically been a major factor in the adoption of complex new technologies—research into technology acceptance models on both virtual and IOT systems shows that usability has been much more important. Even heavy users of Google and Facebook probably wouldn’t say that they trust either company very deeply.

However, a look at another internet giant, Airbnb, shows how this calculus changes when users’ homes and not just their online identities are involved. Airbnb puts trust at the core of its business model. Hosts are only willing to open their homes to strangers because the company empowers them with access to information about potential guests (which the guests themselves choose to provide), including their bio, reviews, and public Facebook profile.

By focusing on forging connections between hosts and guests, Airbnb builds community and reduces the uncertainty that pervades users’ relationships with so many internet companies. Airbnb is also relatively transparent about how it collects and analyzes user data, and often puts it to use in ways that increase users’ control over how they use the platform—for instance, to generate more accurate pricing suggestions for hosts. The result: it pushes users’ concerns about opening their homes or staying in others’ spaces out of the realm of gut feeling into that of a more considered, rational (and easy to ignore) concern.

If they want to thrive amid rising privacy concerns in the long term, manufacturers of smart home products, would be wise to take a page from Airbnb’s book. They should find ways to forge trust through absolute transparency, sharing with customers what data is being collected and how it’s being used. They should create new business models that don’t rely on collecting terabytes and terabytes of personal data, but on building trust – and even community – with customers.=

Companies should not only implement best practices for personal data encryption, storage, sharing, and deletion, but design their products around the customer’s ability to control their own data. If the development of IoT follows this path, the next 10 to 15 years won’t bring an inevitable erosion of privacy, but its renaissance.

via TechCrunch

[industriousmind]

In the Maze

Must history have losers?

By: Dayna Tortorici

One of the purposes of this section is to provide a testimony of a moment — to recognize and record, as C. L. R. James said — the questions and debates that preoccupy us. But sometimes life furnishes situations that cannot be approached intellectually. None of the usual keys fits the lock. An intellectual situation grades into an emotional situation and becomes untouchable. How do you write a history of the present, then? Sublimate, sublimate — until that stops getting you anywhere.

Two years ago, in January 2016, I wrote to my coeditors with a proposal for an Intellectual Situation about what I felt was an impending male backlash. One colleague asked, “What backlash?” Another worried it was too close to the bone. In the end I abandoned the essay because I couldn’t find a way in. I couldn’t figure it out.

What was happening was that the men I knew were beginning to feel persecuted as a class. They remarked on it obliquely, with jokes that didn’t quite sound like jokes, in emails or in offhand remarks at parties. Irritation and annoyance were souring into something worse. Men said they felt like they were living in Soviet Russia. The culture was being hijacked by college students, humorless young people who knew nothing of real life, its paradoxes and disappointments. Soon intellectuals would not be able to sneeze without being sent to the gulag.

Women, too, felt the pressure. “Your generation is so moral,” a celebrated novelist said to an editor my age. Another friend, a journalist in her fifties, described the heat she got from online feminists for expressing skepticism toward safe spaces. “I’m conservative now,” she said, meaning to the kids. But the most persistent and least logical complaint came from men — men I knew and men in the media. They could not speak. And yet they were speaking. Near the end of 2014, I remember, the right to free speech under the First Amendment had been recast in popular discourse as the right to free speech without consequence, without reaction.

The examples in the press could be innocent and sinister. A Princeton undergraduate, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, could not argue he was not privileged in Time magazine without facing ridicule on Twitter. A tech executive could hardly make a joke without being fired, a young tech executive told me. “Take Mahbod Moghadam,” he said. Moghadam was one of the founders of Genius, and had been dismissed for his annotations of the shooter Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. (“This is an artful sentence, beautifully written” he wrote. Of Rodger’s sister, he added, “Maddy will go on to attend USC and turn into a spoiled hottie.”) Once, on my way to work, I heard a story on NPR about a Pennsylvania man named Anthony Elonis who was taking a First Amendment case to the Supreme Court. He was defending his right to make jokes about murdering his ex-wife on Facebook, in the form of non-rhyming, rhythmless rap lyrics. “I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, / soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts,” he posted. When she filed a restraining order, Elonis posted again. “I’ve got enough explosives / to take care of the state police and the sheriff’s department.” Posts about shooting up an elementary school and slitting the throat of a female FBI agent followed. When he was convicted for transmitting intent to injure another person across state lines, via the internet, he argued he was just doing what Eminem did on his albums: joking. Venting, creatively. Under the First Amendment, the government had to prove he had “subjective intent.” His initial forty-four month prison sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court but was ultimately reinstated by an appeals court. I learned later that he had been fired from his job for multiple sexual harassment complaints, just after his wife left him.

How did I feel about all this? Too many ways to say. The aggregate effect of white male resentment across culture disturbed me, as did the confusion of freedom of speech with freedom to ridicule, threaten, harass, and abuse. When it came to the more benign expressions of resentment, in the academy and in the fiefdoms of high culture, I was less sure. On the one hand, I was a person of my generation and generally thought the students to be right. Show me a teenager who isn’t a fundamentalist, I thought; what matters is they’re pushing for progress. The theorist Sara Ahmed’s diagnosis of teachers’ reactions to sensitive students as “a moral panic about moral panics” struck me as right. (Her defense of trigger warnings and safe spaces in “Against Students” remains one of the best I know: trigger warnings are “a partial and necessarily inadequate measure to enable some people to stay in the room so that ‘difficult issues’ can be discussed” and safe spaces, a “technique for dealing with the consequences of histories that are not over. . . . We have safe spaces so we can talk about racism not so we can avoid talking about racism!”) I also agreed with my colleague Elizabeth Gumport when she observed, speaking to a man in mind but also to me, “It’s not that you can’t speak. It’s that other people can hear you. And they’re telling you what you’re saying is crazy.”

Still, I had sympathy for what I recognized in some peers as professional anxiety and fear. The way they had learned to live in the world — to write novels, to make art, to teach, to argue about ideas, to conduct themselves in sexual and romantic relationships — no longer fit the time in which they were living. Especially the men. Their novels, art, teaching methods, ideas, and relationship paradigms were all being condemned as unenlightened or violent. Many of these condemnations issued from social media, where they multiplied and took on the character of a mounting threat: a mob at the gate. But repudiations of the old ways were also turning up in outlets that mattered to them: in reviews, on teaching evaluations, on hiring committees. Authors and artists whose work was celebrated as “thoughtful” or “political” not eight years ago were now being singled out as chauvinists and bigots. One might expect this in old age, but to be cast out as a political dinosaur by 52, by 40, by 36? They hadn’t even peaked! And with the political right — the actual right — getting away with murder, theft, and exploitation worldwide . . . ? That, at least, was how I gathered they felt. Sometimes I thought they were right. Sometimes I thought they needed to grow up.

The outlet of choice for this cultural moment within my extended circle was Facebook. More and more adults were gathering there, particularly academics, and reactions to campus scandals ruled my feed. A mild vertigo attends my memory of this time, which I think of, now, as The Long 2016. It began at least two years prior. There were reactions to Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance, to Laura Kipnis’s essay in the Chronicle Review, to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Michael Brown poem, to Joe Scanlan’s Donelle Woolford character in the Whitney Biennial, to Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out as trans, to Rachel Dolezal’s getting outed as white, to the Yale Halloween letter, to Michael Derrick Hudson writing under the name Yi-Fen Chou to get into a Best American Poetry anthology, to the phenomenon of Hollywood whitewashing, to sexual abuse allegations against Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes. Meanwhile, in the background, headline after headline about police murders of black people and the upcoming presidential election. Many of these Facebook reactions were “bad” — meaning, in my personal shorthand, in bad faith (willful misunderstanding of the issue at hand), a bad look (unflattering to he or she who thought it brave to defend a dominant, conservative belief), or bad politics (reactionary). Yet even the bad takes augured something good. A shift was taking place in the elite institutions. The good that came of it didn’t have to trickle down further for me to find value in it. This was my corner of the world. I thought it ought to be better.

The question was at whose expense. It was easy enough to say, “white men,” harder to say which ones and how. Class — often the most important dimension — tended to be absent from the calculus. It may once have been a mark of a first-rate intelligence to hold two opposing ideas in mind, but it was now a political necessity to hold three, at least. And what of the difference between the cultural elite and the power elite, the Harold Blooms and the Koch Brothers of the world? While we debated who should be the first to move over, pipe down, or give back, we seemed to understand that the most obvious candidates were beyond our reach. What good would it do, for us, to say that Donald Trump had a bigger “problem” with black voters than Bernie Sanders did, or that Donald Trump would be kinder to Wall Street than Hillary Clinton would? To do so would be to allow a lesser man to set the standard for acceptable behavior. We would tend to our own precincts, hold our own to account.

This may have been bad strategy, in retrospect. Perhaps we lost track of the real enemy. Still, I understand why we pursued it. It’s easy to forget how few people anticipated what was coming, and had we not attempted to achieve some kind of equality within our ranks, the finger of blame would have pointed infinitely outward, cueing infinite paralysis. Shouldn’t that domino, further down the line, be the first to fall? Yes, but we’d played this game before. Women of color couldn’t be asked to wait for the white male capitalist class to fall before addressing the blight of racism or sexism on their lives — nor, for that matter, could men of color or white women. It was not solidarity to sweep internal issues under the rug until the real enemy’s defeat. Nor was achieving a state of purity before doing politics. But a middle ground was possible. Feminism and antiracism shouldn’t have to wait.

Only they would have to wait. By summer 2016, Trump, the echt white-male-resentment and “free-speech” candidate, had proven all kinds of discriminatory speech acceptable by voicing it and nevertheless winning the Republican nomination. A low bar, to be sure, but even his party was horrified when the Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before voting day. Trump’s remarks crossed a boundary his apologists didn’t expect: the GOP’s standing benevolent-patriarch attitude toward white women and sex. How depressing it would be, I remember thinking, to muster a win on so pathetic a norm as the purity of white femininity. But I was desperate. I’d take just about anything.

And then, despite the outrage, we didn’t win. Although it matters that Trump won the election unfairly, it shouldn’t have even been close. Perhaps I’d forgotten what country we lived in, what world. Sexual harassment was by and large accepted as an unfortunate consequence of male biology, and joking or bragging about sexual harassment was a comparably minor offense. Months later, I walked down the street in Manhattan and saw a row of the artist Marilyn Minter’s posters wheat-pasted to a wooden construction fence. Gold letters on black read DONALD J. TRUMP above a two-tone image of his smiling face, and across the bottom, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. In between was a prose poem of Trump’s words captured on the hot mic, iterated across the span of wall:

I did try and fuck her. She was married.

I moved on her like a bitch,

But I couldn’t get there.

And she was married.

You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful.

I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss.

I don’t even wait.

And when you’re a star they let you do it.

You can do anything . . .

Grab them by the pussy.

You can do anything.

You can do anything was the refrain of my childhood. I was a daughter of the Title-IX generation, a lucky girl in a decade when lucky girls of lucky parents were encouraged to play sports, be leaders, wear pants, believe themselves good at math, and aspire to become the first female President of the United States. The culture validated this norm. Politicians and advertisers loved girls. Girls, before they became women, could do anything. (Women were too old to save, an unspoken rule behind all kinds of policy. Need an abortion? Better to keep the kid, who has not yet been ground down by life.) But if girls were taught to be winners, boys were not taught to be losers. On the contrary, to lose was a man’s worst fate — especially if he was straight — because winning meant access to sex (a belief held most firmly by the involuntarily celibate). Even then I understood that someone’s gain was bound to be perceived as someone else’s loss, and over time, I learned not to be too brazen. I maintained a prudent fear of the falling class. Even when men weren’t dangerous, they weren’t defenseless. Some still had the resources to bring you down, should you be unlucky enough to be crossed by one.

Combine male fragility with white fragility and the perennial fear of falling and you end up with something lethal, potentially. Plenty of men make it through life just fine, but a wealthy white man with a stockpile of arms and a persecution complex is a truly terrifying figure. Elliot Rodger, Stephen Paddock: both these men had money. This is not to say that men punishing women for their pain is a rich thing or a white thing or even a gun thing. It occurs across cultures, eras, and classes, and the experience of being on the receiving end of it varies accordingly. As Houria Bouteldja writes in “We, Indigenous Women”:

In Europe, prisons are brimming with black people and Arabs. Racial profiling almost only concerns men, who are the police’s main target . It is in our eyes that they are diminished. And yet they try desperately to reconquer us, often through violence. In a society that is castrating, patriarchal, and racist (or subjected to imperialism), to live is to live with virility. “The cops are killing the men and the men are killing the women. I’m talking about rape. I’m talking about murder,” says Audre Lorde. A decolonial feminism must take into account this masculine, indigenous “gender trouble” because the oppression of men reflects directly on us. Yes, we are subjected with full force to the humiliation that is done to them. Male castration, a consequence of racism, is a humiliation for which men make us pay a steep price.

Women pay the price for other humiliations as well. The indignity of downward mobility, real or perceived, is a painful one to suffer, and a man takes it out where he can (Silvia Federici: “The more the man serves and is bossed around, the more he bosses around”). Whatever else it may be, sexual harassment in the “workplace context” is a check on a person’s autonomy, a threat to one’s means of self-support. It can feel like being put in place, chastised, challenged, or dared. Sure, you can do anything, it says. But don’t forget that I can still do this. The dare comes from winners and losers alike. Either you accept it and pay one price or you don’t and pay another. All of it always feels bad.

I imagine that some people feel good about bringing perpetrators to justice, such as it is under the system we have. But I imagine just as many do not want to be responsible for their offender’s punishment. They might say: Please don’t make it my decision whether you lose your job, are shunned by your peers, or get sent to prison. Prison, unemployment, and social exile are not what I want for men. I’m not here to be the police. I don’t want to be responsible for you.

There are many obstacles to honesty in conversations about sexual assault. Loyalty and pity, fear of judgment or retaliation, feelings of complicity or ambivalence — all are good enough reasons not to talk. Alleging sexual misconduct also tends to involve turning one’s life upside down and shaking out the contents for public scrutiny. It’s rarely done for fun.

When victims do want to talk, however, the litigiousness of men proves an obstacle to honesty. It is not unusual for women who speak too liberally about men to be threatened with legal action. Of all the striking things in Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker articles about Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes, what struck me most were the allusions to Weinstein’s lawyers. “He drags your name through the mud, and he’ll come after you hard with his legal team,” said one woman who asked not to be named. Another chose to pull her allegation from the record. “I’m so sorry,” she told Farrow. “The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse.”

In the weeks after Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey first reported the story in the New York Times, as colleagues and strangers on the internet moved to identify the Weinsteins within their own industries, I felt uneasy. Behind every brave outing I saw a legal liability. I suppose that’s what happens when you know enough men with money. Such men are minor kings among us, men with lawyer-soldiers at their employ who can curtail certain kinds of talk. While I do believe in false allegations, and I do believe that women can be bullies, it’s hard, sometimes, not to be cynical about the defense. Some men love free speech almost as much as they love libel lawyers.

“Smart or reckless or both??” I texted my friends when I first saw the Google spreadsheet, titled “Shitty Media Men,” that compiled the names, affiliations, and alleged misconduct of men in my field: writers and editors of books, magazines, newspapers, and websites. The document had been started anonymously, and though intended for circulation among women only, it was visible (and editable) to anyone with the link. I saw the names of men I knew and men I didn’t, stories I’d heard before and a few I hadn’t. “The List,” as it came to be called, didn’t upset me, but neither did it give me comfort. Mostly I worried about retaliation: the contributors getting sued or worse. “Reckless,” a friend texted back. “Not sure how but definitely reckless.”

By then I was once again preoccupied by backlash. The day the Weinstein story broke in the Times and five days before Farrow’s first article, an investigative piece on BuzzFeed had described the range of people who’d sustained an email correspondence with Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor who’d once been the face of the company. In addition to the usual alt-right characters, there were “accomplished people in predominantly liberal industries — entertainment, tech, academia, fashion, and media — who resented what they felt was a censorious coastal cultural orthodoxy.” Named among them were two writers I knew, both men, who according to the article had tipped off Milo for stories. One of them was a Facebook friend. He vehemently denied the allegations and said he hadn’t written the emails provided by BuzzFeed as proof. The other, as far as I know, said nothing. He was the managing editor of Vice’s feminist vertical (he once profiled Ann Coulter) who emailed Yiannopoulos with the request, “Please mock this fat feminist,” linking to a story by Lindy West.

The article had made me feel naive. These were the people I’d given the benefit of the doubt, the professional acquaintances who adopted such strong anti-identitarian poses that I often couldn’t discern their true sympathies. I figured that like the liberal professionals in the throes of a moral panic about moral panics, they shared the goal of collective liberation but disagreed about how to reach it, and in their disagreement came off as more resistant to change than they were. But what if some of them were not just acting like reactionaries? What if they didn’t share the goal?

In the case of Milo’s pen pals, their connection to the right was far from abstract: they talked, griped, shared notes. The lesson was that if someone sounds like an enemy and acts like an enemy, he may in fact be an enemy. I wasn’t sure what this meant for the men on the List. These were men I’d known to say “woke” in a funny voice, to make intellectual arguments against the redistributive efforts within their control — who they published or how they assigned. They lamented the intrusion of politics on quality art and warned of the perils of hysteria, witch hunts, and sex panics. To prove myself worthy of their confidence I tried not to leap to conclusions. But the allegations against men like this were damning: rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, choking, punching, physical intimidation, and stalking; “verbal intimidation of female colleagues”; “sexual harassment, inappropriate comments and pranks (especially to young women).” Even if half of it was false, I knew at least some of it to be true. At some point it’s irresponsible not to connect what a man says with what he does. In the days following the BuzzFeed article, “Who Goes Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson’s famous Harper’s piece from 1941, sprang to the collective mind:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times — in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

And so I talked to men. Men on the List, men not on the List, men secretly half-disappointed that they’d been left off the List, mistaking it for some kind of virility ranking. In the past I’d argued that it shouldn’t be women’s job to educate men about sexism, and I sympathized with the women who said so now. But reality isn’t always how it should be.

Perhaps it was just time for my shift. People take turns in the effort to explain collective pain, and I’d tapped out plenty of times before, pleading exhaustion, depression, and rage. The fact that I had the emotional reserves to discuss harassment at all implied that it was my responsibility to do so. (“It is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes,” Audre Lorde wrote in 1980 — “a constant drain of energy.”) This is not to say I was good at it: I overestimated the length of my fuse, listening, talking, reasoning, feeling more or less levelheaded — then abruptly shutting down or crying. It was nevertheless more than some friends could muster. From each according to her ability, et cetera.

If my approach was too much about men, my defense is that the situation was about men from the beginning. The shared experience of sexism is not the same thing as feminism, even if the recognition of shared experience is where some people’s feminism begins. It was to be expected that the discussion turned to men’s fates and feelings. How could guilty men be rehabilitated or justly punished? Under what circumstances could we continue to appreciate their art? As think pieces pondered these questions, other men leapt at the opportunity to make their political enemies’ sexual crimes an argument for the superiority of their side. It might have been funny if it weren’t so expected, so dark. When a friend and former colleague mentioned the “male-feminist” journalist who had choked her at the foot of his stairs, right-wing outlets rushed to “amplify” her voice. The pro-Trump website Gateway Pundit quoted her without permission; the Men’s Rights activist and alt-right personality Mike Cernovich retweeted the blog post to his 379,000 followers; Breitbart followed up with its own story. “My therapist said that I should sign every tweet with ‘also the alt right sucks’ so they can’t use my tweets in any more articles,” she joked.

Leftist men celebrated the fall of liberal male hypocrites, liberals the fall of conservative ones, conservatives and alt-rightists the fall of the liberals and leftists. Happiest were the antisemites, who applauded the feminist takedown of powerful Jewish men. It seemed not to occur to them — or maybe just not to matter? — that any person, any woman, had suffered. Outrage for the victims was just another weapon in an eternal battle between men. I remembered the emergency panel Trump assembled in response to the Access Hollywood tape with Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones — women who had accused Bill Clinton of harassment or rape. A fourth woman, Kathy Shelton, had been raped by a man Hillary Clinton defended in court as a young lawyer. As the adage goes: in the game of patriarchy, women aren’t the other team, they’re the ball.

All this posturing made optimism difficult and clarity imperative. Patiently, my peers and I explained to men that we understood the difference between a touch and a grope, a bad time and rape, and mass online feminist retribution and a right-wing conspiracy (how credulous did they think we were?). Meanwhile, we wrung as much change as we could from this news peg. We called meetings, revised workplace policies, resumed difficult conversations we’d have preferred not to. As we learned during the Long 2016, the self-evident harm of sexual assault is not self-evident at all: no automatic mechanism delivers justice the moment “awareness” is “raised.” Donald Trump remains the President. Social media, the staging ground for much of this reckoning, remains easy to manipulate. Our enemies pose as allies, and our allies act like enemies, suspicious that our gain will be their loss.

Must history have losers? The record suggests yes. Redistribution is a tricky business. Even simple metaphors for making the world more equitable — leveling a playing field, shifting the balance — can correspond to complex or labor-intensive processes. What freedoms might one have to surrender in order for others to be free? And how to figure it when those freedoms are not symmetrical? A little more power for you might mean a lot less power for me in practice, an exchange that will not feel fair in the short term even if it is in the long term. There is a reason, presumably, that we call it an ethical calculus and not an ethical algebra.

Some things are zero sum — perhaps more things than one cares to admit. To say that feminism is good for boys, that diversity makes a stronger team, or that collective liberation promises a greater, deeper freedom than the individual freedoms we know is comforting and true enough. But just as true, and significantly less consoling, is the guarantee that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others. It would be easier to give up some privileges if it weren’t so traumatic to lose, as it is in our ruthlessly competitive and frequently undemocratic country. Changing the rules of the game might begin with revising what it means to win. I once heard a story about a friend who’d said, offhand at a book group, that he’d throw women under the bus if it meant achieving social democracy in the United States. The story was meant to be chilling — this from a friend? — but it made me laugh. As if you could do it without us, I thought, we who do all the work on the group project. I wondered what his idea of social democracy was.

As for how men might think about their role in a habitable future — or how anyone might, from a position of having something to lose — a visual metaphor may be useful. Imagine walking through a maze, for years and years, to find that your path has dead-ended near the exit. There’s an illusion of proximity, of closeness to the goal: you can see the light through the brush, hear the traffic just outside. It’s difficult, in that moment, to accept that you’re not in fact close — that you can’t jump the hedge, and that to turn around would not be to regress but to proceed. You turn around not because it is morally superior or because it will get you into heaven, but because it is your best and only option. Perhaps redistribution is like that. To attempt it is not to guarantee that the future will be better than the past, only to admit that it can be.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/the-intellectual-situation/in-the-maze/

[eternaltchotchke]

Aight and here's all the shit I got plus all the badges I could find for the years I've been to Sabo. 

I'll put a read more about like. Everything because I admittedly wanna talk about it, like Sabo as a whole because like I said in my last post, I think that's gonna be the last Saboten I'm going to...at least unless I do a booth. But that's besides the point. So yeah read more if you wanna read all my nostalgia shit. Stop here if you're good, lol. I’m warning you, it’s fucking long AF.

2009: My second ever convention. I actually got to go because a friend of mine got tickets for her birthday and she invited me to go with her. I was, like, the kind of person I think her parents wanted her to be like? ‘Cause at the time I was a nerd, but I was introverted and I think they were under the impression that I was a good christian straight girl(™) and well. Lol, neither of us were. This was way before I ever tried doing cosplay, and well, technically I did a really shitty Misty at PCC that same year, but like. OMG. It was terrible. I think this was the year I did a ‘lolita?’ outfit? But really it was just me trying to be edgy. It was kind of cute, but man, I would never wear it today.

2010: So this was senior year of high school and the con was actually at the Hilton just down the street from my school. It was my third convention and I got tickets for my friend and I invited my cousin, but he got food poisoning on one of the days he was going to go, so I ended up soloing it for the rest of the weekend. I went as Miki from Shugo Chara and...it was...bad, lol. I tried making the hat, and well, it was a craftfoam hat and everything else I just kind of found around the house. I don’t remember much else from this con to be honest, just that...I went as Miki for at least one day.

2011: This was the year that I got a lot more into Hetalia. I had just graduated from high school and was still kind of...figuring myself out. I dragged an, at the time, friend there with me to a Hetalia cafe and that was fun. I think that was the first time I’d had a con squish? Crush??? The America was mega cool and ooh, I know that was also the year I went to the Eyeshine concert! I was really into Johnny Yong Bosch’s voice ‘cause I was watching Code Geass and Bleach at the time, and well. I like voice actors a whole bunch? And the concert was really cool and I still have the video I saved from it...and yeah. Good times. Actually, p great times, heh.

2012: This was the year I finally went with con friends! God, it was such a good time because for once I had people to hang out with the whole weekend. I’d met a good majority of them at the last PCC and one of the main people I remember is Maddi who’s still one of my best of best friends. There’s also Sabby and again, one of the best friends a person can ever have. We weren’t close at the time, but I do have a pic with her in it? So. She was there. And I think one of the people in it is Hanna who is an awesome person and I love her so much. She’s great like, the coolest person and dang it all, I love my friends?

And then there are a lot of people that I hung out with at the time that...admittedly, I want to forget. One of them, I hate so very very much. Because they were a toxic person and terrible to my best friends and fuck, I wish I had actually stood up for my friends when I was younger and called out some of the shit they pulled because I should have. But. Well. Hindsight...and then the other? Well, I don’t hate but...I guess thinking back on things? It’s awkward and I was awkward and man, that was a...time. I see ‘em sometimes and it’s like, sweet bajeebus you haven’t changed at all.

There was a lot of shit that happened on the last day and like, one of it was there was a panel that didn’t go well and then the other was someone was kinda mega rude to a friend? And while yeah I understand their stance on things, they said things in a rude way that just...could’ve been said a lot better or at least in a kinder way.

But as a sidenote, that was the year I got Laboon! And I still have him, and I still love him. He’s a good whale.

2013: ...this was...the year of kind of an end to some things. But, the beginning of some really REALLY great things. This was the year I became really good friends with Jed, who is like, one of the best of best friends a person could have. He’s such a cool dude, and nerd, but also cool and I might not say it often enough but I’m really lucky to have become his friend. I gotta say that for all my friends, especially Sabby, Maddi, and Jed. I love y’all so much and really, I can’t imagine what my life would be like without y’all?

Anyway, this was the most stressful con I had ever been to. Admittedly? The first day was p good, I went as Cecil (here we go, Cecil version 1 lol) and Jed was Carlos and we had a good time all around. Theeeen Twitter ‘cause at the time, there was a lot of like...sonas for the websites and I was like, I have all that, I’ll be twitter! ...but I ended up having to wait a….long time for my friends to arrive and god, there was just...nothing but drama that day. It was not good.

Day 3 was 1000% better because me and Jed went back to Cecil and Carlos and all around that was just a dang good time. I think someone had actually told me that I was their headcanon Cecil? Which like. Literally made everything that weekend so much better because I was using my real hair (which at the time was sort of long) and I played up my brown skin. There were quite a few other Cecils, but from what I could remember, most of them were the blond white ones and that kind of helped me stand out.

Oh, and that was the first year we attempted flower crowns! Well, I tried, I literally got two garlands of roses and wrapped them around each other. We lost them on the first day, but another Carlos and Cecil found them, which was hilarious to me and I was really glad that happened actually, hah.

2014: HELL.

2015: --god no do you really wanna know about 2014? Okay one sec.

2014: So. I didn’t wanna pay for a ticket. I REALLY didn’t wanna pay for a ticket because also I was flat broke and honestly cons were so far out my price range at the time I shouldn’t have done it.

I did it anyway.

So 2014 was the year of volunteering and doing panels. It was also the first year we did a photo shoot, which was really fun and Maddi’s and Sabby’s were great. I still do love the ones we did for me and Jed, but there was something really nice and bright about the X-Ray and Vav stuff. To be completely honest? I don’t remember much like, for specifics of the con, just that we did panels and that I met a p cool Garrus cosplayer (who still cosplayed the same Garrus at PCC this year, and from the looks of it, it didn’t seem he made it at all more comfortable and I was like, DUDE. MAKE IT SO YOU CAN FREAKING SIT HOLY FUCK).

I’ve admittedly been going back through all my social media accounts to see if anything could jog my memory, and the only thing I remember clearly was that someone thought I was master chef in my Geoff cosplay and that was funny to me.

...I was also apparently America for a day. Which was p alright because I was admittedly a dang great America. Funny story, the only reason I know I was America was because someone from my past recognized us and snapped a pic. I’m like, looking at it and it’s just so funny to me that it turned out as good as it was for like, a really quick throw together thing.

2015: SHIT I HAD TO GO BACK TO MY OLD SHIT TO SEE WHAT THE HELL I WAS AND I FORGOT I THREW TOGETHER A CASUAL!DORIAN FOR THAT. Good fucking god, that’s hilarious, I was always somehow left tiddy commitee...even though it was a v casual Dorian, I guess I just had the right amount of hair for it, lol.

Also, it was the year that we did a panel for the Ladies of Hetalia and then we also did a Youtuber Let’s Players panel with prizes and I only remember spending the night before making those prizes, but the one that everyone really loved was the Geoff picture, which also was a fucking pain in the ass to make because would you be surprised that that picture was really hard to find a good enough quality one to print out? The best thing was though, that I kept running into the people who won the picture and I think some sort of cult formed around it. I’m not sure. I worry for that picture frame sometimes…

I think that was also the last time I cosplayed Cecil. Sabby was my Dana, which I mega appreciate her for, and I took a lot of liberties on my outfit...and based it much more heavily on the weirdness of Cec rather than the button up and tie version that was really popular. It was more fun just to do a Cecil cosplay TBH, and I actually can’t tell if Jed was there or not? I’m also not sure if Maddi was either...uhhh, most of the stuff I can find are selfies of me and Sabby which...I’m not sure of a lot of details actually.

2016: Man, that was the year of Undertale, Dragon Age, and Hamsteak. Er. Homestook. HOMESTUCK. Also the year I got a really nice camera to take pictures with. It was really fun because I got some great pics of our God Tier outfits and I’m still p happy with my Dave cape. Special thanks to Jed for making 99% of that hood. I still owe him a fuck ton.

This was also the year that me and Sabby went to a really fun quiz panel with an awesome Mettaton who is still p dang cool. I wasn’t sure if there was another this year? I don’t think I was able to make it to it, and I know that there was just so much work put into it, I was super blown away.

I also brought back Fen one last time, and that was fun. I dabbed for a dude and that made him super happy, then I just fucked around for the rest of the con. Ooh, also there was Naruto running. Late at night because also, sometimes you just gotta be a fucking loser with your friends. We...kind of started a whole thing? And I feel a little bad looking back on it? But it was at least, at first, just me and Hanna that Naruto ran down the empty hallway to Haruka Kanata and that was just. Such a fun time.

We did another photoshoot that year too, got some legit pics for hamsteak cosplays which was awesome. Then I had a lot of fun editing them. I’d say there’s more to say for this con, but...not really. Oh, but we did spend a lot of time in the activity lounge? Which I love the activity lounge ‘cause they have crayons and hang up your drawings on the walls and I did a ‘great’ drawing of Dave and Karkat that someone took home.

2017: So here we are, eight years later. To be honest? I was actually sort of dreading this con. There was so much just...not happening and I was feeling kind of eh...and I should’ve definitely gotten more done on Gabe but I didn’t. So instead I did Boxerwatch which was still fun, and my armor actually held up really fucking well. Which I was mega happy abound.

Saturday was kind of...a time. Like, I wanted to have fun, and I know I looked cool AF? But it was so hot and humid and I was in like, three layers of clothes and craftfoam and I didn’t bring a change of clothes. Which was stupid on my part. But! Jenny lent me her hot dog costume? Which literally made my day and it turned the whole thing from an /eh day to a THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER sort of time. I’m not gonna lie, I love wearing those mascot sort of costumes because the shenanigans you can have while wearing them. It’s just so good.

Sunday was awesome because I got to hang out with Clyde, Sam, Ray, and I met Keyboard who is p dang cool. Also, I met my hello new person quota of one, so, double accomplishment. On top of that? My armor held up ridiculously well that day and so did my shitty painted on beard and I was literally. So fucking comfortable. I know I was missing a fuck ton of things for Gabe but it worked out alright since I went with a mega casual version. I’m definitely gonna make sure I can wear that jacket anywhere I go though because I love it a bunch? And it was mega comfy. Plus I’m thinking of making the shoulder pads something permanent to the jacket so I could have my own Gabriel Reyes jacket to just. Wear and feel cool in. Well, not cool. More like fucking sweltering because also I live in AZ.

Monday was just a casual day. I think I’m coming down with something and I wasn’t gonna kill myself by wearing Hanzo so, I edged it up. I was kind of really bummed because the Eyeshine concert was cancelled and it was sort of the main thing I was looking forward to all weekend? But I think Sabo might have messed it up p badly because on the website they set it for Sunday at night, which would’ve been perfect ‘cause then all three of us could’ve gone. But the schedule moved it to Monday and I was sad ‘cause it was their farewell tour...and I kind of felt like it’d be just...one of the perfect ways to end my time going to Sabo.

And so yeah, that’s kind of it? Like, I definitely did have fun over the years, there was stress AF during some parts, but then there were some really really great times. I’ve sort of...lost a lot of interest in anime since I started going, and while I will admit, I do still enjoy watching it, I’m so choosy about what I like and what I’ll watch that a lot of the main things available at Sabo don’t interest me nearly as much. There’s one more anime cosplay I wanna do, and admittedly it’d be really freaking easy to pull off...just gotta get the stuff. But other than that single cosplay, I just...I would like to focus on different things. Plus, it’s just so hard to get stuff together because of the timing of it all. Working as a teaching assistant means that I have very little time during those weeks leading up to the con to do anything. The week before was kind of hell, as I had to stay on campus until at least 5:30 most days and god, I couldn’t work on really anything. That and I didn’t have the mental capacity to work on Gabe over the summer, plus I’d planned to have Cyberninja!Hanzo at least started but that just couldn’t happen.

But anyway, that’s it really! This turned out a lot longer than I meant for it to be and I’m probably going to cross post this onto my DeviantArt. So thank you Saboten-Con, it’s been one helluva ride. There were some ups, downs, turns, and spins and while some of those times really really sucked...there were many others that were just so great and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.