#gin and roxytonic

[roxytonic]

this is precisely what feeds into the issue of public relations. talk shit get hit yeah yadda yadda yadda. but this isn't getting hit. this is getting harassed. this is an attempt to give necessary criticism, only to have it brought back and thrown back in your face with 100x more force.

the regular Dream alt account also mentions that his lack of PR is intentional. to have a PR manager "would be the worst mistake [he] could ever make". ok. i think it's interesting that Dream ties this into PR or whatever because yeah, actually, this behavior is all on him. the problem is that it's avoidable, unnecessary, and unprofessional.

is he in control of his stans? no.

but why couldn't he be?

his deontology has seeped into his fandom. all he needs is to make it official.

why doesn't have have a PR manager?

and the wheel spins madly on.

[roxytonic]

@nachosforfree

thank you for the speedy clarification/reassertion of priorities. i've moved this post off-thread to try and protect the original post's topic.

i apologize if my attempt to provide additional context seemed to be flippant or even disregarding--again, i'm a Birdwatch tester. my priorities on social media are more about information and clarity right now. though of course with this latest incident, i'll have to rebalance some things on roxytonic central.

i still don't agree that the truthing is as toxic as you're implying it to be. between truthing and mcyttwt vigilantism, i'll take the former. certainly mcyttwt vigilanism is going to incur psychological duress much more frequently than assuming a CC is secretly queer in an obscure corner of a site presumed to be dead since 2018.

but i do agree that it's a bizarre choice to include the claims in the post at all.

to describe ranboo in that way has little (axiomatic) truth, little relevance, and just barely-mezzo measures of essentiality. the post would certainly benefit without it. perhaps it would even be reblogged with vigor.

have a good night.

[roxytonic]

Yeah about dnf, I remember being on tumblr when dream did the are you in love with your best friend quiz and everybody stood still for a solid 10 minutes and then slowly was like hmmmmm maybe I DONT wanna talk about dnf anymore cause suddenly it felt very icky and too real but ultimately it ended up being worse to feel icky about something they both feed into and expect a reaction from than simply continuing to treat it as something cute and fun but that moment taught me that a shocking amount of people were willing to drop everything the moment shipping felt off and that actually put me at ease for some reason.. like you can tell nobody has made dnf jokes about the recent statement and nobody is making serious statements about it in relation to dnf either because there’s somewhat of an understanding that we do not mix that shit with real human emotions and stories that they tell tell us and that’s honestly pretty rare and I appreciate it very much (obviously you can find somebody who does but I have not seen it once in the circles i run in)

once fiction bleeds away, reality comes roaring back in place.

[roxytonic]

what is the mangoball "cheater cheater" fanfiction? (a personal overview)

hi everyone,

lately a very specific social media AU DreamNotFound fanfiction on Twitter has been making the rounds. i'd like to make an introduction to the work based on my observations--i don't think we've seen anything like it so far, barring highly textual chatfics and the like.

at the time of this writing, i've caught up to entry #108. the author is prolific!

so what is this fanfiction?

the fanfiction is called "Cheater, Cheater" and is written by the ostensibly single author, mangoball (mangobaii in typing). it revolves around George as he breaks up with Sapnap and hits a rebound and potential relationship with Dream. it includes plenty of side characters, including but not limited to, Karl Jacobs, Quackity, Corpse, Wilbur Soot, and Tommyinnit.

you can find it on twitter here, but i highly recommend using the ThreadReaderApp page instead for full-size images:

what works about the fanfiction?

unofficially categorized, the story itself is a comedy-satire slice of life with a few blips of absurdity. off the top of my head, mangoball writes in references to DreamSMP and surrounding MCYT, and there are some fourth wall breaks, which are all framed in an absurd way.

in the story, the side plots corresponding to the side characters are just as vibrant as the one around George's fallout with Sapnap and his later rebound to Dream. not spoiling them, but they're fun. the story events themselves are moderately simple--the bulk of the work is made up of character interactions, which, as we find, range from globally yassified characters to complete divergence from individual personalities.

i think the reason why the mangoball fic works is because it's a nice convergence of comfy things under a very thin, easy-to-read format. if we actually go to the thread, we see that it's 100% composed of phone-sized screenshots of messages. there's not much text with each tweet in the thread, so it's short and digestible.

therefore, both the form and the function of the story work together to create a double-whammy of a very light read.

what does it's potential categorization as a light read pose for it as a work?

i don't think there is any problem with light reads in the fandom. it's optional reading, and if you do wind up reading it, you'll blitz through it easily. stan twitter will obviously take well to it since the characters are yassified, though budding readers might find it accessible too.

however, there are a few flaws i want to point out:

1. it's vaguely formulaic and/or familiar to me. i mean, given enough time and effort, i could deconstruct the humor (absurd claim to another person + agreement from the other person? further OOC-ness?) but generally speaking it's content and tropes don't "feel" new. i don't know what specifically i've read that would cause this familiarity, though. (on the other hand, this means that it's going to be a safe read.)

2. i feel like i have to suspend my disbelief a bit higher. this is more of a personal issue, so you might fare better than i have, but generally i feel like i'm a fly on the wall looking in. i haven't felt that in a while so it took me a few minutes to settle into the groove of it and start rolling.

3. this somewhat ties into point #2: the author needs to be very judicious about how they use the fourth wall break and self-references to absurdity. off-hand jokes are super obvious, because there is such limited text/narrative bandwidth to the individual screenshots. fourth wall jokes can tire out quickly, and at worst, fail to suspend the reader's disbelief.

i remember seeing one character call attention to their collective habit of narrating what they're doing ATM (because there's no italicized text or stage text in the work, it's all dialogue). it's funny for sure, but it drags me out of the story because it's too true. suddenly i'm thinking, "wait. why isn't there flavor text and italicized descriptions and videos of things happening IRL?" (there is some audio and a few pictures but that is not the bulk of the work.) if the characters know their narratological limitations, it becomes uncanny.

4. you're probably not going to find powerful themes and motifs. we have no idea what's intended or not. on the other hand, if you're going by "Death of the Author", then all bets are off.

note that i said "themes and motifs"--things we can extract and synthesize from the text. the wonderful @bothersome-edgar has made some great strides on identifying and categorizing key aspects of the characters, and i highly commend him for doing so. check out his work here: https://bothersome-edgar.tumblr.com/post/669498983742324736/putting-this-here-so-i-know-what-to-write-tomorrow

what other thoughts do i have?

i really love BadBoyHalo and Quackity in this story. i totally relate to BadBoyHalo's awkwardness when interacting with people online (i don't sound like i'm 50 years old though!!!) and his latent craziness, though i'm not violent. Quackity is the anchor that keeps the story and character interactions from flying apart from the absurdity of it. he's realistic, and reacts to the craziness in the story realistically.

Karl is growing on me and George is just really fluttering around. like a moth. and Dream is a lit Ruben's tube matched to dubstep. love is in the air, i suppose :]

[roxytonic]

when it comes to the irreducibly complex, thinking about them and feeling them become the same

baby girl i can get melancholic and sentimental over things you can't even imagine

[roxytonic]

in other news...

[roxytonic]

The death of the trifecta god of perception: Cumulative information overload

This is an abstract of a future, planned, or unwritten essay.

The human brain is not optimized for the near-infinite ocean of information on the internet. Yet humans constantly consume information every hour of every day, filtering reality through digital substrate. Every so often, individuals get acute information overload and forcibly have to stop consuming digital information to recover.

I propose that modern humans with conventional access to the internet also face chronic information overload over time, where the masses of junk data bypassing the senses straight to the mind "acidify" the mental substrate. Certainly the human brain has tolerances and circuit breaks, but it it is still more overloaded than not. To replace the concrete world of reality with the airier, more abstract, and unpredictable world of pure information must negatively affect human perception.

Therefore, I also propose that chronic information overload warps and dilutes an individual's feeling of time, an awareness of self, and efficacy of experiences.

Related (transcripts below):

QiaochuYuan on Twitter, part of a thread:

i’ve watched thousands of hours of TV, played thousands of hours of video games, surfed thousands of hours of internet, and i think a shockingly large amount of that stuff is still in there and god knows what it’s been doing

i think the way it’s supposed to go is my experiences were supposed to add up to a cohesive picture of the world and my place in it but instead i feel like i grew up as shards of personhood for disconnected worlds - school, home, friends, internet - that never came together

PrinceVogel on Twitter, first tweet in the thread:

Modern man has had too many experiences.

[roxytonic]

what app/website is that astro web thing?

it's the graph view in Obsidian.md, a networked note-taking app: https://https://obsidian.md/

don't get too sucked up in the productivity/PKM culture! lol

[roxytonic]

this is me when it comes to actual mcyt or DreamSMP content

normalize being out of the loop...... like what is even going on lol

[roxytonic]

how do i write brain ghost people ?

[roxytonic]

I dont have proof or the exact stream of it, but I remember a whiiiiiile ago dteam were arguing about their fanbase percentages and dream was so sure that his demographic was mostly young boys but then on youtube he saw that it was actually more girls (he was a bit put out but he got over it). And then he did a twitch poll and there was the whole thing with no option for nb (💀) but it was still like predominantly girls but the poll was like 70-80% in that direction.

wow! audience moment tbh

[roxytonic]

[Transcript: as someone who lurked as someone who lurked on mcytblr (and specifically followed most members of dreamlying) from july 2020 - the present, i would love to see someone analyze the history of it and how it changed? ive been sitting on a few observations/theories as to how and why the fandom landscape changed so much (truthing has gotten significantly more fringe/is looked down upon, multiple ... cont.]

anon, it only took 9 months. but 9 months later, you're in luck. i'm actively working on this now. if we're lucky, we might also be able to sketch out the future of (fringe) mcytblr.

[roxytonic]

this is the second time i've seen this post. i still don't know what to make of it. i feel jealous that i don't understand what you're talking about. however, i also feel relieved for this lack of experience. i think i take well to tumblr, but i don't want to be a tumblr native. (frankly speaking i'm not very good at social media, even though i'm a digital native.)

i can’t even quite articulate what it’s like to be socialized on tumblr from a teenager to adulthood without sounding insane…. it did a lot of damage to me unquestionably but also i genuinely feel like I Am Built Different than my peers who did not have that same experience. actually you know what it’s literally just the blade runner ‘i’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, moments lost in time like tears in rain’ speech….i am cringe but i am free

[roxytonic]

sad dnf fics for Roxy coming right up: The Night Window by backtopluto (old timey racing au, financial concerns, major injuries), revelation by ffonippop (nsfw, religious guilt, cheating), zero by saintaches (abo but dnf are BOTH omegas, nsfw but not super present from ch1-3, "wtf am i doing w my life")

thank you anon :) gotta unwind this weekend 🌀

[roxytonic]

still thinking about that one iterative Wikipedia webweaving post does anyone have it

basically it was a wikipedia paragraph about a specific topic, but as you kept reading the post, the meaning of the topic changes and changes. super profound to me and i adored it's medium essentialism. does anyone know what it was?

[roxytonic]

do you guys have sad DNF fanfiction recommendations? still thinking about the anon at mcytblr-confessions that said they read sad DNF to feel something. (or maybe they were a DNF anti. hm)