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lesbianakaashi · 3 years

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The Forgotten Shounen: Katekyo Hitman Reborn

This is not a “Why you should watch/read khr” or anything like that. This is just me going into the deep dive and throwing my findings at you. I’m making this because khr used to be my favourite series when I was 15 (I had plushees, posters, tradingcards, the art book etc) and now as an adult I constantly find myself baffled at how unknow it seems to be.

1. Okay first what is khr?

Katekyo Hitman Reborn! or just Reborn! is a series by Akira Amano which was published in Weekly Shounen Jump from 2004 to 2012 (with 42 volumes) and got an anime adaption which run from 2006 to 2010 on Tv Tokyo (with 202 episodes and one OVA).

2. What’s it about?

Khr is a parody of the italian mafia and plays in a world where the mafia is heavily influencial. The protagonist is the japanese middle schooler Sawada Tsunayoshi who is known as “No good Tsuna” because of his failing grades, general weak and cowardly personality and weak physics.

He becomes aware of the mafia world when a 2 year old baby called Reborn arrives at his house claiming to be the greatest hitman and declaring himself his home tutor. Reborn was send by the 9th head of the Vongola famiglia who is ready to retire and looking for a new heir. Which of course, is supposed to be Tsuna and now it's Reborns job to shape him into a worthy sucessor.

Tsuna rejects the violence of the mafia world and refuses the position as the 10th. Thanks to Reborn and his general craziness Tsuna meets different people and starts to make real friendships. Reborn wants 6 of those friends to be Tsuna's future guardians, basically a group of people which will be closest to him in the vongola famiglia. Tsuna might have no interest in those positions but the friendships he builds with them become really precious to him.

Reborns arrivial also brings in the enemies of the Vongola family which leads to Tsuna being forced to engage in battles. Generally Tsuna openly avoids fights and prefers to run away but will put himself in danger for his friends' sake or because of something Reborn did.

Through out the series Tsuna matures and gains strenght but he never becomes a power fantasy. He's just a guy with many flaws who grows through the human connections he makes.

Personally I think the relationship between Reborn and Tsuna is one of the best student teacher reltaionships in all of manga only topped by Mob and Reigen from Mob Psycho 100. Especially the last arc really underlines their unique relationship to me.

Furthermore, khr offers a new and unique battle system: The flames. I'm not gonna go into to too much detail but the general idea is that one fights with their dying will flame which basically turns off your the savety switch so you can fight with everything you have. The flames are seperated into different categories such as: sky, storm, mist, rain, sun, lightning and cloud and have different attributes asigned to each one. Tsuna's use of the sky flame and his transformation when using it is still one of my favourite shounen transformations to this day.

3. What happened?

The series did really well and then not so well over the course of its serialisation. After the manga got an anime adaption it increased in populairty and video games, light novels, and other products such as CDs were created based on the series. Reborn is one of the best selling series of Weekly Shōnen Jump and has sold around 30 Million volumes overall. It was and still is very popular in Japan but rather unknown in the west.

According to the article "The Rise and Fall of Weekly Shonen Jump: A Look at the Circulation of Weekly Jump" khr was the 10th bestselling series in Weekly Shōnen Jump, with a total of 7 million copies sold in 2007.

This number increasing to 15 milion in 2008. Which placed khr into the 4th best selling series of 2008 in Japan.

Between 2008 and 2010 those sales declined but still kept strong with khr as the 6th top selling manga in 2009, 8th best selling in 2010 and then 24th best selling in 2012.

In November 2014, readers of the Da Vinci magazine voted khr number 17 on a list of Weekly Shōnen Jump's greatest manga series of all time.

After the anime came to an apprupt stop in 2010 for unknown reasons the manga sells took a visible hit. (Apparently the studio wanted to put the anime on halt because they were busy with other projects and give Akira Amano time to develop her story but I couldn't find any source for this claim) Furthermore, the rushed last chapters of the manga in 2012 declined the popularity of the series even more. There's no offical statement as to why the manga was ended in such a way but it's reasonable to assume that Jump either cut it considering the decreasing sales or Akira Amano choose to end it for personal reasons.

Nontheless, Tsuna not being included in Jump Force (a fighting game where you can play as different characters from Jump) in 2019 even tho he made it in earlier Jump Stars games also underlines the decreased interest in the series.

Rumors on a reboot or anime adaption of the last two arcs surface from time to time but are genereally unlikely. Artland the studio which made khr has gone bankrupt around 2015-2016. It might be taken on by another studio but rather uncommen especially with such an old series.

4. Art style

The khr anime ended over 10 years ago and the old art style might not be appealing to newer audiences.

Especailly because the anime adaption follows Akira Amanos old art style which heavily developed within the years. Here a picture comparing characters in the new art style:

A modern anime adaption in the new art style would be aesthetically pleasing. It would probably look similiar to Psycho Pass since Akira Amano did the concept art for this series.

(My personal art student hot take is that both art styles are unique and fun. Up to this day Akira Amano still has my favourite art style and even if the amount folds in the characters clothing is a little extreme I love it dearly.)

5. Criticism

The show is not without flaws and even if I greatly enjoy it it wouldn't be right not to adress them.

Daily Life Arc:

A lot of people view the first 20 to 25 episodes as fillers and quickly lose intererst in the series. This is due to the fact that Akira Amano inteded the series to be a gag manga and focuses the first chapters on world building, character introduction and comical narratives. It's rumored that the decision to develop the story into a battle shounen was made because the sales weren't doing well enough at first. So the first chapters/episodes may seem titidious but are necessary for the story and the development of the characters. The tonal shift from a more gintama like gag manga to a darker battle focused story can also be offputting to some viewers.

Either way a lot of people blame this arc when discussing why khr never got an english dub or didn't end up on Toonami. I've also read that the manga never finished serializing in the north america. However, it finished in other western languages like german and spanish.

Censoring:

The anime censors A LOT. From Gokudera's smoking habit, Yamamoto's whole character arc which deals with heavy themes such as depression and suicidal thoughts. The general bloodiness of the manga was censored and sometimes whole chapters and characters were left out even if those were important to the devolopment of others.

Filler episodes:

Out of the 202 episodes the anime has around 29 filler episodes which makes roughly 14 %.

Sexism:

Even if Reborn was written by a woman most female characters are rather flat and their storylines often tied to a male character in one way or another.

Genereal things:

Khr, like many other long running series, is sometimes criticised for a lack of world building or unpopular narrative choices.

6. Hope?

Khr isn't exactly dead. As stated before the series is still very popular in Japan and still gets new merch pretty regulary. There are also petitions floating around for a reboot or a new anime season but those never get a lot of traction. Furthermore #Reborn2期アニメ化 (#Reborn2ndAnimation) used to get some traction on twitter not too long ago. Last year the Anime News Network did a poll on which anime the readers would like to see a rebooot of and khr placed second.

Either way here's a collection of recent khr things I could find.

- In 2018 a new bluray set was released in north america

- The khr stage play reached yet another new season

- A mobile game was released last year

- Currently ongoing anime cafe event called "Concerto di Vongola"

- Last month there was an event with the former VAs and stage play actors where they discussed their favourite khr episodes.

- There has been an increase in blind reacts to the openings on youtube which might bring in a new fan base. The biggest one I could find had around 90k views and was made in 2019. On this note check out the soundtrack. The first openeing Drawing Days by SPLAY still makes me go insane (but I'm biased of course)

There also renewed hope for a new season/reboot because Shaman King, Inuyasha and Bleach got anounced for new seasons after a long hiatus. It's important to keep in mind that the circumstances for those series are differnt tho. For example bleachs new anime is often tied to the immense success of the gatcha game.

7. Conclusion

Khr is a series which used to be a flagship for Weekly Shounen Jump and is deeply beloved by it's fans, especially in Japan. It influenced other shounen series like bnha. It would be nice to see it gaining a bigger fanbase in the west :)

#khr #khr meta #anime analysis #shounen jump #katekyo hitman reborn #mirytalks #long post #manga

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snarkesthour · 3 years

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#NotMyOBONDay

I hope you like the title. It was an attempt to be funny and light-hearted, but I'm afraid that is as good as it’s going to get for the rest of this post, because the British government has been At It Again.

I’m sure some of you at least will have seen/heard of this idea of “OBON” day, or “One Britain One Nation” day. It is an idea endorsed by the British government to “celebrate the values we [the British people] share: tolerance, kindness, pride, respect and a tremendous desire to help others.”

Because we’ve seen so much of that from the government recently.

Also problematic, taken from their website, is the idea that “our diverse cultures are inextricably linked by the sole fact that we are British”, which is a disgusting sentiment. Not only does it mask the struggle of our minority communities, it erases their culture by implying that British culture takes centre stage, and is somehow better. This is dangerously racist. I will argue that our diverse cultures are inextricably linked by the sole fact that we are British - but not in the way they want to believe. They are linked because Britain once owned a quarter of the world. One quarter. 25%. That’s what links these cultures to Britain, and it is not a link that should be celebrated. Which makes the next sentence “it is this fact that has prompted OBON to reinforce and revive what collectively unites us” particularly distasteful, and offensive.

Let’s not get into the bit where they say that “OBON aims to give new impetus for the creation of a harmonised society”, (harmonised in the particularly “British” way they want), in order “to make Britain an international model of moral rectitude.” (Just… no.)

There are a number of issues with this first point, about “British values”. There is no mention of how conditional these values really are to the British people, or the times in history we have not extended the merits of these values to others. The day includes clapping and singing songs which are very nationalistic and contain worrying lyrics, which we will touch upon in a minute. All of these are serious problems, but the one that angers me the most is the existence of an Obon Day already.

The aforementioned song gained some traction online, but did not make main news in Britain. It is a song supposedly written by a class of schoolchildren in

the city of Bradford, a multicultural hub in the north of England. It contains such lyrics as: “we have one dream to unite all people in one great team”, which is uncomfortable when you think of the UKs history of colonisation and forced assimilation of indigenous peoples; “we’ve opened our doors, and widened our islands shores”, which is uncomfortable weighed against the UKs history of slavery (and more recently, its rejection of many boatfuls of refugees and asylum seekers; “we celebrate our differences with love in our hearts.” This one is just laughable given the recent protests over the rampant racism within our government, political landscape, and country at large. Protests over women’s mistreatment in British society, the horrific abuse of the transgender community, the rampant Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism, particularly within our major political parties, and the treatment of the autistic community. All of this is worsened by the government’s refusal to acknowledge the atrocities and crimes of Britain’s past. Nay, they actively take steps to censor them by refusing to allow this part of history to be taught in schools. The rhetoric of “so many races, standing in the same place” comes with no mention of just why so many different races of people reside in the UK (once again, because we invaded 90% of the world), making the seemingly unproblematic line “united forever, never apart” abruptly ominous. The song finishes with the repeated phrase “Strong Britain, Great Nation, which is the sort of fetishistically nationalistic thing you’d expect to be sung in a country such as North Korea.

All of these points disgust and disturb me. Yet the thing that personally angers me the most is that Obon Day already exists. If you are a reader of manga/watcher of anime, you may have already heard of it. Obon is Buddhist festival in Japan for honouring one’s ancestors. It is the Japanese Buddhist version of the Buddhist festival Ullambana and is celebrated in August, when the gap between the human world and the spirit world is smaller, or weakened, and the spirits of ancestors can cross over in ghost form.

While Obon is a Japanese Buddhist festival, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect those of us in Britain. As of October 2019, there were around 66,000 Japanese people living in the UK. Given that nearly 70% of Japanese people are Buddhist, we can assume a fair number of them will be practitioners. Not only that, it will affect non-Japanese people following Japanese branches of Buddhism, such as Nichiren Shu Buddhism, founded in the 13th century. It will impact the wider Buddhist community that does not celebrate Obon too, because, as said above, Obon is the Japanese Buddhist version of the Buddhist festival of Ullambana, observed by a wider array of Buddhists.

All of this infuriates me. Buddhism is a religion of peace, tolerance, love, and everything the British government seems determined to stand against. Buddhism does not look at people and see division. It sees unity, and it certainly does not see hatred. The British government’s “OBON Day” is insensitive and tone-deaf to Britain’s minority communities at best, and divisive and quietly hate-fuelled at worst. Either way, it amounts to another act in a repeated pattern of behaviour seeking to destroy cultures already existing within the UK to assimilate them all into one perfect “British” society, and Buddhism does not tolerate those qualities one single bit.

Find another name for your day of fascistic pride.

This one is taken.

#obon #buddhism #uk politics #one britain one nation

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raptured-night · 4 years

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Hello, I have two questions this time. Why do you think we can’t really compare Death Eaters to Nazis? Why can’t we really compare purism with racism? Oh and do you think Death Eaters are more like nowadays’ terrorists or not?

So, it's no secret that I have drawn attention to the issue of Death Eaters being treated as literal stand-ins for Nazis or blood purism as a literal example of racism. Importantly, there is a difference between acknowledging the ways that Death Eaters or blood purity might work as semi-functional allegories for the Nazis and their ideology, white supremacy, racism, etc., and treating fictional representations of invented prejudices as if they were comparable or on par with non-fictional Nazi ideology, white supremacy, or systemic racism.

An article for Medium makes this point very well:

Silent resisters and ‘I don’t really care about politics’ people deserve our contempt. But what makes those who filter life through fiction and historical revisionism worse is that they are performing a soggy simulacrum of political engagement.

As a woman of colour watching, all I can do here is amplify the call to step away from your bookshelf. Let go of The Ring. My humanity exists independently of whether I am good or bad, and regardless of where the invented-fictional-not-real Sorting Hat puts me.

Realise that people are in danger right now, with real world actions needed in response, and not just because you want to live out your dreams of being Katniss Everdeen.

The problem with discussing Harry Potter’s fictional examples of prejudice as if they were literal or completely comparable with real-life prejudices is that it does lead to an oversimplification of the reality of prejudice (whether white supremacy, racism, homophobia, transphobia --looking at you Jo-- or otherwise) and the very real people who experience these prejudices every day. The fantasy of being Harry Potter up against Umbridge or Voldemort in a YA series where the line between the good and bad guys is almost clearly denoted by the narrator is a far cry from the reality of what activism is or what living under oppression is like for many marginalized people.

I would argue that this is also a leading reason why the “social justice” (yes, in many cases I believe that deserves to be enclosed in dubious quotations) discourse in Harry Potter fandom trends more towards performative than it does sincere (one need only look at the defense posts for Rowling in response to real marginalized groups criticizing her for things ranging from her offensive representation of Asian people, Indigenous and Native peoples, or her failures in representing the lgbtq+ community particularly in light of her coming out as an open TERF and they can get an idea of how those “I’m an intersectional feminist/social justice ally and that’s why I read HP!” fans quickly shift gears to throw the bulk of their allyship behind Rowling instead) because when you spend all of your time debating fictional prejudices it’s much easier to detach oneself from the reality of non-fictional prejudice and its impact on real people.

Fiction has no stakes. There is a beginning, middle, and end. In Rowling’s fictional world, Harry Potter ends with Harry and “the side of light” the victor over her allegorical representation of evil and he gets his happily-ever-after in a world we are led to believe is at peace and made a better place. In the real world, decades after the fall of Hitler, there are still Nazis and white supremacists who believe in the glory of an Aryan/pure-white race and are responsible for acts of violence towards marginalized groups; even after the fall of the Confederacy in the U.S. we are still debating the removal of monuments erected in their honor (and the honor of former slave owners and colonialists like Christopher Columbus) while the nation continues mass protests over the systemic police brutality Black people and other people of color have long faced (not to mention the fact the KKK are still allowed to gather while the FBI conspired to destroy the Black Panther Party and discredit them as a dangerous extremist organization).

As a professor in literature, I’ve often argued that fiction can be a reflection of reality and vice versa. Indeed, it can be a subversive tool for social change and resistance (e.g. Harlem Renaissance) or be abused for the purposes of propaganda and misrepresentation (e.g. Jim Crow era racism in cartoons). So, I am not underscoring the influencing power of fiction but I do believe it is important that when attempting to apply fictional representations to real-world issues we do so with a certain awareness of the limitations of fiction. As I have already observed, there is an absence of real-world stakes for fiction. Fictional stories operate under a narrative structure that clearly delineates the course they will take, which is not the case for real life. In addition, the author’s own limitations can greatly affect the way their fiction may reflect certain non-fictional issues. Notably, a close reading of Harry Potter does reveal the way Rowling’s own transphobic prejudices influenced her writing, not least in the character of Rita Skeeter (but arguably even in her failed allegory for werewolves, which are supposed to reflect HIV prejudices, but she essentially presented us with two examples of werewolves that are either openly predatory towards children or accidentally predatory because they canonically can’t control themselves when their bodies undergo “transformations” that make them more dangerous and no surprise her most predatory example, Fenrir Greyback, seems to have embraced his transformation entirely versus Lupin who could be said to suffer more from body dysmorphia/shame).

Ultimately, fiction is often a reflection of our non-fictional reality but it is not always an exact reflection. It can be a simplification of a more complex reality; a funhouse mirror that distorts that reality entirely, or the mirror might be a bit cracked or smudged and only reflecting a partial image. Because fiction does have its limits (as do authors of fiction), writers have certain story-telling conventions on hand through which they can examine certain aspects of reality through a more vague fictional lens, such as metaphor, symbolism, and allegory. Thus, the Death Eaters can function on an allegorical level without being problematic where they cannot when we treat them as literal comparisons to Nazis or white supremacist groups (particularly when we show a greater capacity for empathy and outrage over Rowling’s fictional prejudice, to the extent we’ll willingly censor fictional slurs like Mudblood, than we do real-world examples of racism and racial microaggressions). As an allegory, Voldemort and his Death Eaters can stand in for quite a few examples of extremism and prejudice that provoke readers to reflect more on the issue of how prejudice is developed and how extremist hate-groups and organizations may be able to rise and gain traction. Likewise, blood prejudice looked at as a fictional allegory goes a lot further than when we treat it as a literal comparison to racism, wherein it becomes a lot more problematic.

I’ve discussed this before at length, along with others, and I will share some of those posts to give a better idea of some of the issues that arise when we try to argue that Voldemort was a literal comparison to Hitler, the Death Eaters were literal comparisons to Nazi, or that blood purity is a literal comparison to racism.

On the issue of blood prejudice as racism and Death Eaters as Nazis, per @idealistic-realism00.

On the issue of blood prejudice as racism, my own thoughts.

On the issue of Death Eaters and literal Nazi comparisons, per @deathdaydungeon and myself.

Finally, as I have already argued, the extent to which fiction can function as a reflection of non-fictional realities can be limited by the author’s own perceptions. In the above links, you will note that I and others have critiqued Rowling’s portrayal of prejudice quite thoroughly and identified many of the flaws inherent in her representations of what prejudice looks like in a real-world context. The very binary (i.e. good/bad, right/wrong, dark/light) way that she presents prejudice and the fact that her villains are always clearly delineated and more broadly rejected by the larger society undermines any idea of a realistic representation of prejudice as systemic (we could make a case for an effort being made but as her narrative fails to ever properly address prejudice as systemic in any sort of conclusive way when taken along with her epilogue one can argue her representation of systemic prejudice and its impact fell far short of the mark, intended or otherwise). In addition to that, the two most notable protagonists that are part of her marginalized class (i.e. Muggle-born) are two comfortably middle-class girls, one of whom is clearly meant to be white (i.e. Lily) and the other who is most widely associated with the white actress (Emma Watson) who played her for over a decade before Rowling even hinted to the possibility Hermione could also be read as Black due to the casting of Noma Dumezweni for Cursed Child.

Overall, Rowling is clearly heavily influenced by second-wave feminist thought (although I would personally characterize her as anti-feminist having read her recent “essay,” and I use the term loosely as it was primarily a polemic of TERF propaganda, defending her transphobia, and reexamined the Harry Potter series and her gender dichotomy in light of her thoughts on “womanhood”) and as far as we are willing to call her a feminist, she is a white feminist. As a result, the representation of prejudice in Harry Potter is a distorted reflection of reality through the lens of a white feminist whose own understanding of prejudice is limited. Others, such as @somuchanxietysolittletime and @ankkaneito have done well to point out inconsistencies with Rowling’s intended allegories and the way the Harry Potter series overall can be read as a colonialist fantasy. So, for all of these reasons, I don’t think we should attempt to make literal comparisons between Rowling’s fictional examples of prejudice to non-fictional prejudice or hate groups. The Death Eaters and Voldemort are better examined as more of a catch-all allegory for prejudice when taken to it’s most extreme. Aicha Marhfour makes an important point in her article when she observes:

Trump isn’t himself, or even Hitler. He is Lord Voldemort. He is Darth Vader, or Dolores Umbridge — a role sometimes shared by Betsy DeVos or Tomi Lahren, depending on who you’re talking to. Obama is Dumbledore, and Bernie Sanders is Dobby the goddamn house elf. Republicans are Slytherins, Democrats are Gryffindors.

The cost of making these literal comparisons between Voldemort or the Death Eaters to other forms of extremism, perceived evil, or hate is that we impose a fictional concept over a non-fictional reality and unintentionally strip the individual or individuals perpetrating real acts of prejudice or oppression of some of their accountability. I can appreciate how such associations may help some people cope and for the readers of the intended age category of Harry Potter (i.e. YA readers) it might even be a decent primer to understanding real-world issues. However, there comes a point where we must resist the impulse to draw these comparisons and go deeper. Let Voldemort and the Death Eaters exist as allegories but I think it is important we all listen to what many fans of color, Jewish fans, lgbtq+ fans, etc. are saying and stop trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by treating these fictional characters and their fictional prejudices as if they were just as real, just as impactful, and just as deserving of our empathy and outrage as the very real people who are living daily with very real prejudices --because they’re not equal and they shouldn’t be.

#anti-rowling #systemic racism #nazi mention: cw #white supremacy #godwins law #allegory #harry potter #harry potter meta

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collaborationandresearchproposal · 3 years

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Thursday 29th April, Research Report: Lycanthropy and the hays code

Notable points * lycanthropy seems to be synonymous with homosexuality- parallels between Teen Wolf and Buffy The Vampire Slayer's respective coming out scenes. * The Queer-ness of the character Remus Lupin from the Harry Potter books and film series. Many fans head cannon and write slash fics about Remus and Sirius' romance and relationship, reading the characters as queer. The ship, named 'Wolf Star' is quite popular and well known within the fandom. Many fans feel there is enough evidence to build this relationship on; Remus and Sirius' ghosts stood next to each other in the resurrection stone, mirroring Harry's parents, a canonically married couple. They also bought Harry a joint present for his birthday and know the intricacies of each others personalities. Dumbledore also infamously told Sirius to 'lie low at Lupins.' But the problem here, as the article points out, is that Rowling doesn't acknowledge Lupin as queer, despite the homoerotic cues in the writings, and instead gives him a female love interest and admits that Lupins Lycantrhopy is a metaphor for AIDS/HIV. She has further dismissed any alternative readings of the character, disappointing fans' hopes of there being a shred of representation in a queer monster who is actually queer. This sort of behaviour from authors and creators is what turns Queer-coding into the more harmful and frustrating Queer-baiting. A large majority of queer representation comes from connotations and interpretations. the clues are there and queer audiences do pick them up. However this grey area allows allows straight culture to use queerness for pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting to it. Modern examples of this are CW's Supernatural and BBC's Sherlock. I can't personally speak for Supernatural but having watched Sherlock with the advantage of a queer eye, I can say with confidence that it is a prime example of queer-baiting. there is clear homoerotic subtext between Sherlock and John and even Sherlock and Moriarty. I Personally think it's entirely romantic as I head cannon Sherlock to be Asexual or at least on that spectrum but the point is, it is not just wishful thinking or pushing of a narrative. It's manipulation. Queer-baiting takes advantage of an already vulnerable group of people by preying on their desire for representation in the media.

In modern media werewolf's are often portrayed as having chiselled bodies and looming over each other. The 1985 Teen Wolf received a television reboot and it's fair to say it got reasonably more progressive. It seemed interested in queering the werewolf narrative and in a sly moment of gender-bending the traditional Little Red Riding Hood narrative, protagonist Scott receives the Bite from a male werewolf while wearing a Little Red Hoodie (‘Wolf Moon’). Additionally, the show features LGBTQ characters while Scott’s human best friend Stiles visits a gay bar and makes friends with a group of drag queens in startling contrast to the gay panic of the 1985 film’s version of Stiles. By midway through the show’s second season, the slash pairing that had proved dominant in the fandom was Stiles and wannabe-Alpha Derek Hale. The two characters, who operate in the narrative as belligerent and begrudging allies, rapidly became a slash phenomenon, due, in part, to the chemistry and comic timing between actors Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien. The narrative is further subverted when Derek is raped by an adult human woman.

The pair 'Sterek' gained so much traction that it caught the attention of MTV and the cast and crew behind the show. So much so that they released a video of Hoechlin and O'Brien cuddling on a boat, asking fans to vote for Teen Wolf for this years Choice Summer TV Show at the Teen Choice Awards. This was big as it acknowledged fans and slash flics and the pairing itself as a possibility and many queer voices who watched the show felt heard and validated. However this didn't last long. MTV released a video on the official Teen Wolf Facebook, this time featuring O’Brien asking fans to vote for Teen Wolf in a TV Guide Poll. O’Brien joked that if fans did not vote, then the show would kill off its sole remaining gay character and one of the few remaining non-white characters on the show, Danny. The Teen Wolf Facebook released the video with the following caption: ‘Keep #TeenWolf in first place! Heed Dylan and Linden’s advice or we might have to. #KillDanny’ (Teen Wolf). The show’s social media team then attempted to make the #KillDanny tag go viral on Facebook and twitter, but fans, understandably, were not amused, primarily using the tag for outraged tweets to MTV (Baker-Whitelaw).Such blatant disregard for fans’ concerns about queer representation on the show alienated a large number of fans, especially when coupled with Jeff Davis’ more frequently dismissive and condescending comments about the Sterek pairing where he had been enthusiastic and even encouraging of the ship. As seasons wore on without any indication that Sterek would indeed become canon, it became clear that MTV and Jeff Davis had been queer-baiting Sterek fans as a marketing technique and that the unique interplay that fans had enjoyed with Davis, which offered a new kind of truly interactive fandom had, in fact, been something of an illusion. ' serial killer Hannibal Lecter and his love interest Will Graham in Hannibal, and reanimated gay corpses Kieren, Simon, and Rick in In the Flesh. Notably, both series have received an overwhelmingly positive response from fans and critics who have applauded the series for taking their queer monsters beyond mere coding and into explicit text. The warm reception of Hannibal and In the Flesh’s handling of queer representation by fans, and the continuing frustration with Teen Wolf’s queer-baiting and the appropriative nature of Remus Lupin’s narrative in Harry Potter, belie a desire not only for better queer representation, but also for more complex re-articulations of queer monstrosity' the symbolic and narrative trappings of monsters are often used as metaphors for queerness without actually acknowledging the positive behind that queer identity or even confirming the queer identity at all. Another positive example is the miniseries Good Omens. Based on the book of the same name, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Pretty much the whole fandom believe That the two leads, Crowley and Aziraphale are in a romantic relationship. They've known each other for centuries and perhaps what was the main fuel to this ships fire was the episode 3 cold open. Even fans who have only read the book seem to support these two as a couple and what's perhaps even more amazing is Gaiman’s response on twitter. "I wrote it as a love story. They acted it as a love story. You saw it as a love story. How much more proof do you need?" and "I wouldn't exclude the ideas that they are ace, or aromantic, or trans. They are an angel and a demon, not as make humans, per the book. Occult/Ethereal beings don't have sexes, something we tried to reflect in the casting. Whatever Crowley and Aziraphale are, it's a love story." It's beautiful because not only does it confirm that they are in love but it also leaves room for interpretations of what kind of relationship they have together.

https://dialogues.rutgers.edu/images/Journals_PDF/2017-18-dialogues-web_e6db3.pdf#page=164

In the year 1922, when cinema was gaining traction and popularity, The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) hired a devout Presbyterian, Will H. Hays as its head. Eight years later, in 1930, the MPPDA ratified the Motion Picture Production Code. Also known as the Hays Code, these guidelines were set up as “a list of rules that studios could follow to avoid the censors’ wrath” one specific line read “sexual perversion or any inference to it is forbidden” This era in censorship set the stage for a culture in which the stereotypical behaviour of homosexuals, or any behaviour deviating from the traditional gender roles, is seen as dangerous, evil, and even fatal. By representing coded homosexual characters as depressed, perverse, and succumbing to punishing ends, it shifted social subconscious beliefs of LGBT individuals in real life to those represented on screen. Media often teaches us how to feel about others and ourselves – e.g., it promotes specific body types and clothing styles. In the same way, by promoting gendered behaviour and banning homosexuality, it spread a message that homosexuality was not fit to be viewed openly. Although themes of homosexuality were banned they were definitely alluded to and that continues today.

#researchproposal

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tlbodine · 4 years

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Why Isn’t “Mass Shooter” a Modern Horror Monster?

Horror reflects the anxieties of the culture that produces it. In the 1950s, we got monster movies about radiation-mutated creatures and invaders from beyond the stars, mirroring our Cold War Science fears.

In the 1970s, as “Women’s Liberation” and birth control went mainstream, we see an influx of horrors settled on childbirth and children and family dysfunction.

And as the 70s bled into the 80s, while real-world serial killers were leaving behind trails of victims, the masked psycho was dominating the field with countless slashers.

But now -- throughout the 2010s -- mass shootings loom large our our collective American consciousness. Hardly a week goes by without hearing of one somewhere, and they inspire fear and terror. Yet we haven’t seen them show up to dominate horror media in the way serial killers do -- what’s up with that?

Horror-media discussion about gun violence under the cut!

Before we get started, a caveat: There is media about school shootings. It’s just not usually horror. Most, as you can see from IMDB, is family drama: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls070532039/

And none of them are really particularly mainstream, not in the way we associate with slasher films.

So what’s the difference? Why is a killer with an axe more compelling as a film monster than a killer with a gun?

Some hypotheses:

Primacy: Because mass shootings are frequently in the news/public discussion, it’s always “too soon” - the real-life horror is too horrifying for entertainment. Sounds good on paper, but why isn’t that true for slashers? Those movies were popular when serial killers were at their most active.

Politics: Perhaps political motives are influencing the market. Since gun control is a contentious topic, maybe some powers are motivated toward censorship. But wouldn’t that also censor the family drama type movies? Why would it focus on horror especially?

Logistics: It’s just really hard to make a good horror movie about a mass shooting. Guns kill people pretty quickly and indiscriminately, so you lose the mounting suspense and intimacy of a killer with a knife and other similar horror/slasher conventions.

This last point, I think, bears some further consideration. The more I think on it, the more it seems that the things that make gun violence especially horrifying in real life are also things that make it very hard to put in a horror story:

Mass shootings happen, obviously, in mass. Most horror formulas require characters to be isolated and picked off one by one.

Guns kill people in ways that are impersonal and swift. If you’re killing a stadium of people with an automatic weapon, it’ll take just a few minutes. You can’t stretch that out into a long, lingering torture sequence or whatever.

Gun violence is indiscriminate. Wherever a crowd gathers, a shooter can start killing people. There’s no space for, say, the “horror rules” re: jock, slut, virgin, etc. because morality doesn’t play into it.

A killer methodically making his way through a sorority house, killing its members one by one lends itself more naturally to suspenseful storytelling than a gunman opening fire on a crowd. A killer leaving clues and taunting detectives lends its own narrative structure.

In that regard, it’s pretty obvious: We cannot make a slasher-style film or a torture-porn film about a gunman. It just won’t work.

But perhaps we’re looking at it all wrong. What if we viewed the mass shooter not as a serial killer, but as a force of nature? The disaster movie genre has ample cross-over with horror, and the general formula would work well for a mass shooter:

Introduction to a wide cast of characters as they maneuver into a vulnerable position

The disaster hits, and we move between individuals affected by the calamity, watching their initial reactions

In the ensuing chaos, characters attempt to escape further danger

The danger passed (for now?) some characters manage to survive, now irrevocably changed

Whether the disaster in question is an earthquake, a sharknado, or a school shooting, that formula should work. The key to success lies in the pacing and the large cast, allowing you to stretch out a relatively brief event into a detailed and tense narrative.

So why haven’t we seen that? Outside of, like, one made-for-TV movie I recall watching in the 90s, this presumably straightforward premise hasn’t gained much traction.

The Making of Monsters: Signs and Signifiers

Perhaps the real reason we haven’t seen a lot of horror stories about mass shootings is because there is already so much mythology and symbolism tied to these sorts of narratives, and that symbolism is at odds with the creation of movie monsters.

Guns carry a tremendous amount of cultural significance and baggage, at least in the United States. It’s why they’re so politically contentious. And when something is already heavily laden with symbolic meaning, it’s hard to turn that symbolism into something else in a way that will stick.

Point #1: Guns are a great equalizer. Unlike a knife or sword, skill doesn’t matter all that much when it comes to killing somebody with a gun. You don’t have to be strong or fast or have a ton of training. You just have to point it and pull the trigger -- if you do that enough times, and at a big enough target, you’ll probably hit something. This means that anyone can kill someone with a gun: a skinny nerd, a young child, a petite woman. Guns are the thing that give you, the underdog, a way to compete against them, the big strong enemy.

This leads to Point #2: Good Guys With Guns(tm). As absolutely anyone who has been on the internet for five minutes after Any Sort Of Bad Event will tell you, Bad Things can be stopped by Good Guys With Guns(tm). And while you can debate the merits of armed civilians protecting a group from harm against an active shooter, it’s impossible to deny that, historically, good guys have been armed. Police, military, armed militias, frontiersmen, etc. carry weapons. Which means that “guy with a gun” does not immediately translate, visually or thematically, as “threat” in the same way as wielding a butcher knife in a non-culinary context. A guy with a gun could, at a glance, be a good guy. A guy with a big knife is obviously a villain. Similarly, the Good Guys With Guns(tm) bleeds over into the horror genre. What would the zombie apocalypse be without headshots? How many horror franchises could have been cut short if someone had just shot the killer?

Finally, Point #3: Guns in media have special powers. Gun mythology in film and television is well-developed, with its own set of tropes and expectations. In movies, pointing a gun at someone will automatically make that person comply with whatever you ask them to do -- we even have vernacular about this, “nobody put a gun to your head” -- as if the gun were somehow more powerful than a simple threat and could in fact control behavior. Often, people who are shot in television politely fall over and die quietly; it’s a civilized end, without all of the screaming and thrashing (never mind where they’re shot or what that would would do in real life). And there are so many types of gun. We have a whole video game genre dedicated to it -- collecting guns, learning their various abilities, applying them situationally to achieve various goals. With so many established tropes, writing anything with new tropes and rules runs the risk of generating confusion, disbelief and even hostility in an audience.

So, with all of that in mind, it starts to become clear:

Writing a horror story about gun violence is difficult because guns carry so much mythic significance, and it’s impossible to write about them metaphorically while keeping it clear what that metaphor is.

If I write a story about an atomic-powered lizard who destroys a Japanese town with radiation, it’s easy enough to see that it’s a metaphor for nuclear warfare. But there is no similarly straightforward metaphor for gun violence readily apparent.

But it’s tougher even than that -- because guns themselves aren’t the only thing to have been mythologized.

The Myth of the Lone Gunman

Remember: Guns are the great equalizer.

This knowledge sits in the foundation of storytelling, not just in the fiction we make up but in the way we build narratives around mass shootings in the real world. There are certain tacit assumptions we make about gunmen that may or may not be accurate.

We have a certain narrative framework in place to explain school shootings, for example: The awkward, isolated young man who is bullied until he finally snaps and goes on a killing rampage.

Never mind that this narrative is not wholly supported by facts. It may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. And yet, go back up to that list of mass shooter movies on IMDB and look again at what the majority of them have in common.

This is problematic because, from a mythic perspective, people who are bullied and then stand up to their oppressors are heroes.

In Carrie, when Carrie White destroys the school after being humiliated on prom night, we’re on her side. It feels good to watch her kill all those people who were awful to her. It feels just and righteous and imminently satisfying.

When Spartacus leads a slave revolt, we cheer. When Daenerys Targaryen kills all the masters and uses their heads as mile-markers, we feel triumphant. When Arthur Fleck shoots the smug talk-show host on live television, we think, Well, he had it coming.

Oh, sure. We pay lip service to being horrified. And these dark heroes might die at the end, receiving some karmic retribution for the price of their revenge. But can you say, truthfully, that you have ever once watched a story about an underdog killing his bullies and felt sorriest for the bullies?

So: This is the problem with our cultural narrative about the school shooter. Purposely or not, it puts the shooter in the role of hero.

And not only is that irresponsible, it’s just downright inaccurate.

When Stephen Paddock opened fire on a concert and killed 58 people, he was not firing back at his oppressors.

When Omar Mateen shot up a night club in Florida, he wasn’t getting revenge against his bullies.

When Adam Lanza slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school -- 20 of them young children -- he obviously was not giving his victims what they deserved.

In the real world, mass shooters might be motivated by political ideology and a desire to promote fear -- ie, terrorism. They might be unhappy with some aspect of their lives and decide to “punch down” at a vulnerable group in the worst possible way. They might be looking to become the heroes of certain media narratives, to secure some kind of fame or notoriety. They might want to kill themselves in a way that hurts a lot of other people at the same time. There are lots of reasons why people might commit mass murder.

But the important thing is that the victims are, overwhelmingly, not bullies and oppressors. They are people. Just innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because mass shootings aren’t really about personal vendettas; they’re about mowing down a bunch of strangers in a few minutes at an impersonal long range.

So here’s my final thought on the topic: We SHOULD tell horror stories about mass shootings.

It’s a topic that’s timely, and it’s a scenario that’s frightening. There’s no reason not to tell these stories. But to make it work -- on a logistic and socially responsible basis -- we need to change our treatment.

Going back to the “disaster movie” idea: It’s time to treat mass shooters in fiction as forces of nature, as oblivious and blindly destructive as a hurricane. It’s time to center the focus on the victims. Never mind the killer and what led him to this moment. Let’s take a minute to think about the people caught in that situation -- the people who fear for their lives, who try to help one another, who fight or flee or hide once the first shot is fired. Let’s write about the moments of humanity shared by two strangers crouched behind something while shots fire all around them. Let’s write about the horror of having your perfectly normal, mundane day suddenly and irrevocably shattered by a stranger with a gun.

There is horror there, real horror, that can be mined and cultivated and turned to art. And it seems to me that embracing that, and shifting the cultural narrative away from valorizing the lone gunman, would be good for art and society.

Are you ready to tell that story?

I am.

#horror #horror media #horror movies #how to write horror #horror stories #gun violence #mass shootings #trigger warnings #long post #Deep dive #horror analysis

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periakman · 4 years

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26. What sorts of art exist in your world? Art, like all things, goes through movements and trends, so while I Can explain this, I really can only speak of what is absurdly influential, or trendy now. Kesterline art is not inherently tied to its religion, but to the outsider all art would appear to be religious, due to the use of symbols and language to convey concepts that are born in the Rite of Self. It is very focused on the idea of meaning, but specifically not stating it. The meaning and importance of the art should be tangibly felt, but to spell it out would be seen as unintelligent, and evident of a hand unable to truly produce any emotion without merely reciting it like a child reciting their day. To have to state the meaning of the art plainly, or have to have it explained to you, means either the art is a failure or you are a failure. In other words “show don’t tell”, while not coined in Kesterline, would absolutely be adored as a phrase if not for the fact it’s a little too concise in how it explains it. Story telling, song and dance, sculpture, weaving, painting, theatre, and more, all exist in Kesterline to some extent. It’s a big country, and there are plenty of materials to turn into art. Kesterline also doesn’t really discourage art--not inherently. Art in a demesne is incredibly common, and it is seen as immensely therapeutic. There also isn’t much attempt to largely censor art either. Censoring art isn’t really needed when you can rely on the fact that travel times and resources are scarce enough that you could just discover a controversial artist has died of mysterious causes, instead of trying to make a hubub about it not being allowed. It’s not like it would even put a dent in the population statistics. Books are not dominant as entertainment in Kesterline, due to uneven literacy, even amongst the nobility, but it is quite widespread. There was a huge revolution in the world of books, led by noble women who wanted it to be more accessible. What this resulted in is that now ten new books a year are published and distributed to major cities, and noble women are allowed to submit their works, as opposed to before, where only 1-3 books would be published, based on perceived merit. This has been going on for few years now and has led to books being seen more and more as nothing but erotica (re: there is kissing) and nonsense for women. It has also made it more profitable, and if it keeps course, Kesterline might have its first pulp movement, which could go horribly wrong as if printing became that cheap and accessible, it would be possible for the working class to start getting skin in the game. Oral traditions, as opposed to books, do not often gain much traction in Kesterline, for a variety of reasons. There are some fable-like stories and sayings, but they rarely travel very far. Song and dance is not so easily gatekept, but not for lack of trying. Music by the working class (as stereotyped), is a bit of a gothic-country hybrid, often about stories of the monster in the woods, or raunchy jokes told in music form. The big fancy funded music is often played by live orchestra, often with string based instruments. The record player was a very controversial invention as it was seen as a way to bastardize the purity of music and turn it into a mere, perverse shadow of what it once was. Dancing is as much of a social etiquette as conversation or eating right, and thus is more of a skill than a way to engage. There is a new trend, amongst the lower class nobles and the working class in cities, to use record players as an instrument, where there might be a recording of say, a violin solo, that will then be sung over, or even accompanied by live instruments. Some have even taken to taking famous songs (usually recorded in secret), and playing over it, sometimes emphasizing the discordance. Because explicit meaning is for the uncultured, the idea of something that could not be understood at all is slowly becoming the next logical step. It has yet to be fully attacked by those in power, as it’s not seen as a full on movement, and more of a type of vandalism. But of course, that’s because it hasn’t become truly public yet. Theatre is quite similar to song and dance and story telling. Most theatre troupes have a Rites Giver that travels along with them, as acting is one of the most dangerous careers someone can have. Acting and performing is a rare breed of “job” so to say that’s not really acceptable to be as a noble or as a working class individual, and is one of the only places you might see a truly mixed class environment, which cannot be found anywhere else on Kesterline so systemically. Often with things like music, those in the working class who have a “ chance” to participate in these things are chisels a rare and specific core. This often results in them apprenticing to a musician, for example. Acting and performance can be full of pillars, and while it will be seen as an absolute waste of a human being, it is simply accepted. Theatre performances in the upper class will often have a narrator and silent actors, who will mime the story as it’s being told. This is seen as healthier, and also, classier. It is sometimes praised as the art of chaos--the actors cannot know what the narrator will say, and the narrator, who is always facing the audience, cannot control the actors. they act in sync, bringing their own power to the performance, in a way that cannot be consistently replicated. This has led to a current trend in the upper class of plays that are only two people on stage--the actor and the narrator, both playing as many roles as possible. Because these are often private, intimate showings, it will sometimes take on very controversial themes and tones, and the single actor is expected to cry or be visibly, emotionally shaken from all the roles they are expected to take on. Afterwards the Rites Giver will come out and embrace the actor and the narrator. Theatre for the working class is often a bit more communal, and might just be the locals putting on a show. Travelling troupes will also tell tales and occasionally share news. Those that exist in the city will often put on adaptations of popular books with the names changed, in order to spread the stories that not everyone can read. Sculpting and weaving, while definitely expressions of art, have not really reached a high point in most of Kesterline. Carving and whittling is a common hobby, and making clothes and blankets pretty are expected and loved, but it is an undervalued labor. The only exception is if one were to weave a tapestry or sculpt a statue, aka something purely for decoration. Both of these are influenced by the trends of painting (Which I will explain shortly), as well as what material is available. Aniline dyes (aka not derived from natural means) exist in Kesterline, but are artificially withheld to create scarcity, and thus most dyes are still derived from natural means. This makes most tapestries still very expensive, or not very vibrant. Sculpting, meanwhile, has gone in a bit of a weird direction--at first they were very vibrantly painted, but many of the paints used were easily accessible to the working class, and worked just as well. As a result the sculptures were painted with colors that were incredibly rare and hard to get Unfortunately, that means that after many decades, those paints are running out, especially since the nobility decided the best place to put statues were outside, with the elements and thus there’s been a move to just have bare statues, with the idea that it’s so perfectly made, there are no flaws to hide with paint. Painting and Portraits have always been popular amongst Kesterline’s elite, but it’s recently gone through two concurrent movements that are only beginning to become passe, as opposed to new and raw. There were two concepts on how best to depict the world, hyper realistic, or more abstract (in this case meaning “not entirely realistic”). Some saw realism as a way to fake experiences, as a shallow representation, and a way to state something too plainly. Others saw more abstract art as full on lies--if someone commissioned a painting and had three pets, and you drew ten, each one large and shaped majestically, that was a lie, one born of irrationality and delusion. The fervor of these debates are a few generations old now, and it is not uncommon for factors of either to play into paintings, sculptures or tapestries. It also helps there is a new art form to cause controversy. Photography is new, amazing, and is slowly spreading across the world. It takes an hour for it to get done, and it has become one of the most debated artistic platforms. It started off with a very positive history--namely, nobles would create elaborate backdrops and attempt to take large, detailed photos of it, some of which they’d even paint over to add color, and it was seen as a new Style of painting. This conflation was quickly lost once people started taking photographs of themselves. Some just classified this as a terrible deed straight out, something to be confessed to a Rites Giver. Others became deeply worried it would capture an individuals miasma and be corrupting to anyone who gazed upon it for years to come. This has previously been a worry with all art, but was seen as more of an issue with the creator than the depicted. Photographs put a living person front and center. There were health scares that someone gazing upon a direct person’s visage would have untold spiritual toll on them, as potentially thousands of individuals would have an effect on their ruminations without their knowledge. For now, due to its long posing time, while a hot new topic, it has yet to truly become a crisis or a phenomenon. It is due to the portability of a photo, that has led to it being able to spread, but it would take a drastic shift in how photos are developed to truly make an impact. Finally, with all these ways to express art, I want to talk briefly on what art actually looks like in Kesterline. It’s often highly individualistic, and the idea of a rich person getting a large portrait of themselves to hang in their house is alive and well. There is both an abundance and a lack of art that expects you to insert yourself into it. An abundance because due to individualist desires and more, most art is created around that assumption. A lack because such a thing would never be spoken outloud, it’s just quietly assumed. Like the emperor wearing no clothes, it is something that does not get spoken, lest the illusion of ethics be shattered. This is done the same way we sort of see it in the real world. There’s a focus on masculinity, on those in power. The names of the characters and the designs will be distinct, be it in art or theatre or music, but the focus will always rely on those ingrained assumptions of what is Correct to desire and what is not. For instance, noble men are expected t obe the main character of every story, or the centerpiece of most humancentric art. They are the focus because that is the role of men--focus, precision. When there is a challenging of this from nobility, it is often not from the perspective of radical change, but a desire for a piece of the pie. Thus when noble women do get to be front and center, they will often be an ensemble piece of 2-4 women. There are a lot of artistic movements and counter movements in Kesterline, but none rarely hit the actual core problem, and often the ones most likely to succeed, that of noble women who are otherwise perfectly suited for such a society, do not actually fight in such a way to get rid of toxic notions, but instead merely give the roles they hold more power, within the rigid framework they were already defined by. Some are truly radical, but often they do not spread past a certain area. Information moves slowly in Kesterline, and the military can unfortunately teleport.

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whitehotharlots · 5 years

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Cancel culture is real. And it’s conservative.

Osita Enwanevu has a rather baffling piece up The New Republic that’s garnering a lot of responses. Titled “The Cancel Culture Con,” the essay makes a few points:

1. Cancel culture doesn’t seem to accomplish anything, since all the higher-profile instances of cancellation haven’t led to anyone’s career actually being ruined.

2. Cancel culture should be understood simply as newly empowered groups seeking to express their righteous anger.

3. Conservatives do cancel culture-isms all the time, even though they’re not commonly regarded as such (Berri Weiss’ work demonizing BDS is held up as a fitting example).

4. The only people who complain about cancel culture is just jealous hypocrites and therefore Dave Chappelle is the same as Berri Weiss. (Also even though Dave Chappelle is making tons of money and beloved by millions he is actually unfunny and no longer relevant.)

5. In spite of not being a big deal, cancel culture is good because marginalized groups still suffer in today’s America (to prove this point, he ends with a graphic description of the beating of Muhlaysia Booker, a transwoman whose assault was livestreamed by rednecks and who was later found murdered).

Now what makes this baffling is the pace of Enwanevu’s self-contradictions. As others have pointed out repeatedly, this argument just doesn’t make sense. If cancelling really doesn’t work--which its advocates proudly insist is the case--and if cancel culture is actually so bad at what it’s purported to do that cancelled people seem to benefit from cancellation, then why bother defending it? Is this defeatism, or something more sinister?

Enwanevu gets to the verge of admitting that something more sinister is afoot, but he pulls back before coming to grips with such a realization. This comes with his criticism of the contemptible Berri Weiss. Berri’s a whiner and an idiot, and, notably, a huge fucking hypocrite. She’ll oink sadly about celebrity cancellation, but then demand punitive censorship against those who dare support actions protesting Israel’s apartheid.

The point here--obvious, but somehow unacknowledged--is that cancel culture actually does hurt people and censor thoughts, but such harm is inflicted almost entirely upon leftists or others who seek to materially disrupt the status quo. Efforts are underway to formally criminalize participation in BDS. The Obama administration viciously prosecuted drone pilots who attempted to whistleblow US war crimes, going so far as to freeze their bank accounts to prevent them access to legal defense. That is literal, direct government censorship. And, no surprise, it was initiated by a putatively woke politician, the sort of cool liberal who would never use bad words in public.

The widespread embrace of cancel culture is the natural result of the rightward slide of mainstream liberalism. It provides catharsis for its purveyors, a sense of doing something, anything in the face of abject of hopelessness (or, more cynically, gaining momentary satisfaction by censuring someone you don’t like, larger goals be damned). It’s been allowed to thrive precisely because the powerful are insulated from its effects. And it’s come with the added bonus of providing the powers that be a new means of selectively silencing anyone who gets a little too close to actually changing stuff.

Consider three examples: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. Trump was subjected to the process of cancellation approximately forty five thousand times during the 2016 campaign. He suffered nothing. Even if he had lost, he’d still be a billionaire, still exist above the rule of law, and still be regular fixture in American media. Hillary Clinton had an appalling civil rights record and repeatedly worked to cover up sexual assaults committed by her husband--precisely the sort of once-tolerated behaviors cancellers claim to seek to de-normalize. But outside of a few hard-left attempts that gained zero mainstream traction, no efforts were made to cancel Clinton. Indeed, those who attempted to bring up her shameful past were themselves subject to cancellation. Sanders, meanwhile, has about the best civil rights record imaginable for an American man in his 70’s. He and his supporters are nonetheless popularly compared to Trump--cancelled via the transitive property of wokeness--not because of anything Sanders has done or said, but because of his tone and posture.

This is how things work because it’s how the system is designed to work. This is why cancel culture has become so pervasive so quickly: because it is conservative.

We can argue as to whether cancel culture is reactionary or simply nihilistic. (I think it can be both, depending on its particular iteration). The effect, however, is always the same: an abandonment of left-material goals in favor of a superficial “politics” which views language policing as a means and an end. This is why Enwanevu can blithely dismiss criticisms of the ineffectiveness of cancelling, even as his essay is centered upon delineating examples of such ineffectiveness: he is simply unconcerned with the actual effects of cancelling. He therefore sees fit to end his piece with a description of the brutal beating of a trans woman--not because he wishes to advocate for policies that would make such violence occur less frequently, but to appropriate the woman’s pain and eventual death to serve as a backdrop validating the righteous anger of those who seek to cancel others. It’s not about effects. It’s not about winning. It’s about feeling right. And when the only option liberals have for political engagement is to join a movement based upon the embrace of defeat… well, that’s conservatism.

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godshideouscreation · 4 years

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How does one start becoming a sex worker? What equipment is used for photos and making videos? What sites can one use to start up?

create a social media following, create porn, create porn profiles to sell. it really is about how much work you are willing to put into it. a lot of people assume they will get rich quick from doing porn and that’s just not the case. it takes time to build a profile. i spend between 30-40 hours a week on advertising, creating, editing, organizing, getting ready, it is time consuming to be constantly cute for sure lol.

there is tons of programs you can use, the free one i use to stitch my cam videos together is windows movie maker. as for tripods and lights, there are lots of affordable options on amazon. ring lights, phone tripods if you don’t have a camera. there is no specific camera you need, some people only use their phone and others have a more expensive set up. it really depends on how much time and energy you plan on putting into porn. its pointless to spend lots of money on stuff if you’re not going to do it for more than 6 months because realistically, it takes about that amount of time to get some kind of following.

sites for social media: tumblr, insta, twitter, reddit - all have different levels of censoring that is required i know some people use dating sites as well to gain traction.

there are tons of sites. i use onlyfans and manyvids bc they are the most well known/trusted and easiest to use. some alternatives are myfreecams, chaturbate, streamate, iwantclips, clipsforsale, fancentro

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blue-shaded · 3 years

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Hi Dolphin anon! It’s me again. Thanks for reading the whole long message, I did not realize how long it was while I was typing it out LMAO. Yeah I’ll concede a lot of your points as well, when I spoke on the reputation of the MC speedrunning community, I was more so speaking about it in terms of just the Minecraft community itself, I hadn’t really considered the perspective of those in other speedrunning categories, so fair enough! As for the moderating team, yeah, their legitimacy and fairness did get called into question but like I said in my last submission, I think this questioning was a little deserved. Geosquare was the one who was heading (or seemed to be taking the lead) on the Dream situation so most looked to him as the figurehead of the mod team, and I think by allowing his bias to affect how he handled the situation initially, I think he shot himself as well as the other moderators in the foot. So on that end, I think the bias deserved to be called out, but you’re, as always, welcome to disagree!

I also agree that he needs to say it more publicly on his twitter. He has a tendency to say it on his private account and in replies because he tends to be very reactionary. Usually if he makes a separate tweet on his alt or main twitter account, it’s after he’s already seriously replied to people or made a serious thread on his private, so he just starts making lighthearted jokes about the situation to try to get both sides to stop taking it seriously in hopes that they’ll stop sending hate and move on.

To his credit, I think he likes to more explicitly say that stuff on livestream. I don’t know how closely you saw or if you saw the Kaceytron situation at all, but when he went on her stream to discuss with her, he explicitly states “I do not condone any death threats or doxxing or any sort of hate” and I know he’s shared similar sentiments on other livestreams. But he definitely needs to have it somewhere on his main Twitter accounts where it’s easily accessible.

And yes I agree that things get trended way too easily, but I think people are too focused on the wrong thing (not you, just people with this argument in general). There have been multiple instances where POC fans try to get people to shut up or to stop livetweeting or to go private (so that their tweets don’t add to trending phrases) whenever important things are happening and while there are many people who listen, it’s unfortunately just not possible to stop it from trending. Because of how fans recieve the content (typically live, all reactions are immediate, whether it be in response to a content creator’s tweet or talking about a stream), there’s a tendency for a word or name or phrase to get repeated amongst several tweets. The Twitter trending algorithm tends to favor sudden influx of tweets over longevity. This is why you’ll sometimes see something MCYT-related at the top of the trending page despite the fact that it says it only has around 1,000-2,000 tweets, whereas other phrases and trends will have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of tweets and still sit lower on the trending tab because those tweets slowly came in over throughout the course of the whole day rather than all at once.

If we’re focusing specifically on Dream and not MCYTs as a whole, he himself can average around a good 130K watchers, if not more, while streaming. Say that an important real world issue is being talked about on Twitter, and most people who are watching, aren’t tweeting about the livestream (either because they don’t use Twitter or they’re someone who knows of the situation and is being conscious and respectful to the community being affected by that situation) and that only 1% of the people watching that stream are still tweeting (whether bc they’re ignorant or bigoted or just don’t know of the situation. regardless, definitely a low-balled percentage). That’s still a sudden influx of 1.3K tweets and is still enough to put it near the top and if not the very top of the trending page. And it sucks and it’s dumb and people have tried to find ways around it. Many people in the community censor names if they’re livetweeting while something else is going on, the last time this happened, people censored karl as “k4rl” and k4rl got tweeted so much that it ended up trending anyways. So 100% get what you’re saying and I get the criticisms of the fanbase surrounding that, but I think it’s just a thing of Twitter needing to fix its algorithm because it should not favor sudden influxes over longevity like that.

If you want an upcoming example of this problem, I’d suggest for you to keep an eye on the trending tab on the 19th! Many black people within the community have been speaking up about Juneteenth and it’s importance to them as a community and that fans should try not to trend anything that day. Specifically they’ve asked Karl Jacob’s community (known as honktwt) to not post for honktwtselfieday, which happens every month on the 19th. These tweets have gained a lot of traction and have been seen by Karl Jacobs himself and he replied and said that he wouldn’t be posting for his selfie day and that he discouraged all of his fans from posting for this month’s selfie day either. Despite this, I’m almost entirely sure that a few people are going to be posting for the selfie day anyway (whether it be bc they’re ignorant n don’t care or they somehow don’t know), though it’s going to be much much less than the amount of people who would usually be postijgnfornthebselfiebday, but I’m sure you’ll see honktwtselfieday trending at some point on the 19th regardless.

Also! as for the shooters4dream tag, yeah, as an Asian, that was disgusting to see. I will say that it wasn’t the antis, though antis did boost it further by posting on it later on and saying to not use the tag (very. counterintuitive, but I digress). That tag came from inside the community as a joke (an incredibly poorly timed one). It’s a borrowed joke from the kpop community to say that you’re a shooter for ___, as in a defender of them, and some people were just being senseless when making the joke and it was really disheartening to see that people weren’t really thinking before using it. I think it’s since been widely addressed that shooters4___ probably isn’t a good joke to make at any time, so I think a lot of people have taken to saying shields for ___ instead.

I also don’t get the hate around the merch. I personally haven’t gotten any, but I don’t think it should come as a surprise to anyone that it’s just a smiley face when that’s his whole brand— the dream smile blob. People are obviously allowed to have their own tastes in clothes but the hate on that front seemed excessive. I think there are plenty of valid criticisms towards Dream, but I don’t think the topic of merch design is one of them.

As for your friend! Yeah I get that, and it’s sucks that she’s not practicing what she preaches. I think it’s very easy to get caught up on the toxicity of social media and it’s sounds like that’s what’s happened to her. Hope you do what’s best for you and your mental health! Like last time, this isn’t any hate towards you (in case any of it seemed like it was) and thank you to Blue for putting up with the longass submissions and for being a conduit for the conversation 💀

sdlkfjslkd don't worry about the long posts Passing on to dolphin anon.

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deadcactuswalking · 3 years

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BRIT Awards 2021: Observations, Comments & Review

I don’t have a commentary post on the BRIT Awards like I usually do because be honest: nobody wants to read that, but regardless I do feel the need to keep up with the tradition of the event and post some comments about the awards since, well, it’s going to impact the chart. It would make a hell of a lot more sense to broadcast the show on a Friday as a result of that so it makes the biggest possible impact and doesn’t leave me with confusing left-overs and assorted gains that only picked up traction in the mid-week... but I digress. You should get the gist but I’ll do some explaining prior for the sake of it. Regardless, I guess welcome to REVIEWING THE CHARTS?

So, how do the BRIT Awards work? Well, every year, the BPI – the British Phonographic Industry – holds the BRITs to celebrate pop music in the most high-profile ceremony for popular music in the United Kingdom. Back in the 1990s, it used to feature some of the craziest, most unexpected moments in the history of British pop music, with this anarchic reputation that has since been sanitised and refined to where it is now: a high-budget award ceremony hosted by some idiot, probably, and recorded live for broadcast on ITV. This year, it’s hosted by Jack Whitehall – as it has consistently been in recent years – and was delayed as a result of the global pandemic, but regardless, it’s back and we’ll see how the show copes with restrictions and social distancing... okay, well, it does involve Dua Lipa so I don’t think much of that will be going on but regardless, the show will naturally be affected by COVID-19, even if our response is going better than it was this time last year with all the vaccines coming out. What has not changed is our host and, oh, my God, I wish it did because Jack Whitehall is an annoying void of personality who’s never not been unfunny and awkward, especially on such an improvisational show like the BRITs. I think the only host who can live up to the flamboyancy of the show is Graham Norton, but he’s got his work cut out for him as the Eurovision narrator and he does a damn good job at that too.

Most awards are announced on the night but some, like the Global Icon and Rising Star award, were already decided – it’s Taylor Swift and Griff, by the way. I do play a little game every year where I have a scorecard, and that’ll be posted right now. After that scorecard is posted, you’ll come back to me from after the awards have finished with some of my comments – nothing of a gret deal of detail, probably, but definitely observational. See you in a tad.

Well, that was a nice slice of rainbow capitalism, if a bit too refined for what it is. I’ve felt this for years now but the BRITs do feel so factory-processed to go perfectly now that some of the charm is lost. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the ceremony as that would be largely untrue – a lot of the performances for one were great. Some highlights included Olivia Rodrigo’s performance which in my eyes certified her as a popstar to watch, especially with that husky, imperfect vocal delivery towards the end that really sold it for me. The Weeknd delivered the most consistently and aesthetically high-quality performance with a “Save Your Tears” Zoomed straight from I assume Canada. Years & Years paraded around with Elton John on a technicolour stage pretty befitting for the gay anthem they performed, Headie One and AJ Tracey traded some new politically-charged verses with less impact than Dave but pretty fitting of the entire aesthetic of the show. The last BRIT Awards felt perhaps too serious, not that I’m offended by social messages being placed into award shows, but the fun just wasn’t there and was actually here in spades, especially with the vibrant Y2K choice of aesthetic that made perfect sense for a lot of these performers, especially the Dua Lipa medley that basically started the show off with some high-energy girl-group nostalgia.

In fact, a lot of that was there this evening, with Little Mix becoming the first all-female group to win Best British Group, to my surprise, and HAIM of all people winning Best International Group, although it seems clear to me that the awards were just given to whoever was there as a result of certain restrictions. Said restrictions in fact made the show arguably smoother and more refined than ever, and I’m actually happy for it. There were barely any noticeable mistakes either, other than an indecipherable few verses from Headie One in which he performed gestures that made it quickly obvious what was being rapped anyway, and Lewis Capaldi commanding everyone in the audience, including key workers, to shut up before his quickly-censored profanity, long after the watershed, bled out through emergency mute functions.

The whole “key workers” bit has annoyed me since the pandemic started – if the government is going to be this performance, at least provide them adequate pay and mental welfare for all of the arduous work you put NHS frontline workers through long before and including the pandemic. I’m saying that not because I wanted to spew my own diatribe but because that’s pretty much what Dua Lipa said as the Queen herself made sure to not only have one of the best performances of the night but also deliver some of the longest and most meaningful victory speeches, in which she dedicated her awards to individuals you may not have even heard about who have served their local and national community on a certain scale. Charities were often brought up, whether it’s Boy George blessing the rains down in Africa much like he patronisingly did on the at-best misguided, at-worst maliciously ignorant “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” all those years ago. Proceeds from Years & Years and Elton John’s performance will go to charity, as will those of Rag’n’Bone Man and P!nk’s “Anywhere Away from Here” (which is actually a genuinely good song live rather than on studio recording). Rag’n’Bone Man may have the biggest impact next week on the charts because he had both the closing performance and the album boost, so watch out for that on Friday.

Speaking of that, this awards show was on a Tuesday, meaning its chart impact will be muted or at least split between two tracking weeks – although I do think this is the type of event that can help a song have some mid-week rebound. The impact of the BRIT Awards as a whole intrigues me – I mean, it has much less prestige than the GRAMMYs and was known for its campy chaos. It’s never been about awarding credibility or artistic reputation, even if Taylor Swift may have thought it was in her semi-inspiring speech, it’s always just about putting on a fun, extravagant show. Money should probably be pumped into something more representative of Britain – the only Scottish man who spoke was Lewis Capaldi – but as we have this tradition, we might as well engage and enjoy the mindlessness of it all. The cynic in me says it’s fake-woke circle-jerks for millionaire popstars but I can never watch it and conclude that it’s anything as deep as that. I mean, it started with Coldplay sounding like hand gel and featured a sea shanty acting as a roast of the guests but still had some serves and looks from everyone on the red carpet and somehow managed to get Michelle Obama to big up The Weeknd for two minutes straight, so it’s doing something right. In the nicest way possible, the BRITs this year were very lame and very gay, but that’s the purpose they will always need to fill in pop culture. See you on Saturday!

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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‘Building the Cockchain:’ How NSFW Artists Are Shaping the Future of NFTs

A few months ago, Jen Stein entered a room in the voice chat app Clubhouse called "Decentralized Systems," looking for conversations about censorship solutions on social media. She creates sculptural art using colorful dildos as the medium, and had recently been kicked off of Instagram. To her surprise, she found a group of people in the middle of a conversation about cryptocurrency.

"I was like, 'I'm so sorry, I think I came to the wrong room… I did not realize this was about Bitcoin,'" she told me. "I'd heard about Bitcoin like once before, through all these memes about money… I hate money, I hate capitalism, I don't care," she recalled. But the people in that room told her to stay and learn about non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. "It just opened my eyes to what this technology could actually do."

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are visual, cryptographic assets on the blockchain that are unique from one another and can represent ownership of an associated digital item. Stein listed images of her sculptures on Rarible, a digital marketplace for NFTs, and calls it "building the cockchain." She's since personally taught more than 100 people the ins and outs of NFTs and cryptocurrency, and written guides on how to get into it. "I've never been more inspired by anything in a really long time—especially after this year, I was feeling very just not hopeful about the world," she said.

NFTs have gained traction in the world of art and collectors' items. Each token points to a digital work in some way, and because they're minted on the blockchain, they're harder to defraud and impossible to duplicate. This means one can track where they're transferred and sold. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, you can't pay for things with them like money; they're more like receipts than dollar bills. It would be like trying to buy a coffee with a printed picture of Nyan Cat. But they're useful for artists who want to build a community of collectors, and invest in art that could increase in value over time.

NFTs have gotten a lot of attention lately, both for successes such as art sales in the millions, and for criticisms around the environmental cost of cryptocurrency mining and issues such as theft. But the technology isn't new. They've been around for years—at least as far back as Rare Pepes in 2017—and the basic idea stretches back farther, with "Colored Coins'' issued on the Bitcoin blockchain in 2012.

In the last month, several well-known artists—including rapper Azealia Banks, who sold the rights to an audio sex tape for $17,000, and Russian rock group Pussy Riot, which released a new video as series of protest-art tokens to benefit women's shelters—seem to be paving the way for works that push the boundaries way beyond Cryptokitties. There’s even an NFT-based streaming alternative to Spotify. But is the same success attainable for smaller, independent erotic artists?

THE BENEFITS

Multidisciplinary artist PolyAnnie started minting NFTs in September 2020. She does performance art, erotic physical and digital art, and is a content creator on OnlyFans. "NFTs allow me to set the conditions of my work and provide me the ability to gamify my entire body of work in ways that one day I can take my hands off the 'wheel' and let my brand run itself," she said.

To her, the benefits of getting into the NFT world include a more direct relationship with fans and those fans become investors, as well as the financial: she's made more income from crypto-art in five months than she usually would in an entire year. Now, she runs a weekly conference call that's open to anyone who wants to learn more about getting into adult NFTs.

"Self-Love," by Cryptonatrix. Image courtesy Cryptonatrix

For erotic artists and sex workers, who are constantly dogged by payment processors' prudish rules and risk having their Venmo, Cashapp, and Paypal accounts closed for selling sexy content, the decentralized nature of NFTs is appealing. Unlike with these services, which are moderated by a central authority, digital receipts published to the blockchain are permanent and there will always be methods of transferring cryptocurrency without the use of middlemen who might take issue with the transaction. For some, this looks like the future of the adult industry.

Cryptoempress, a professional dancer and nude model as well as cryptocurrency enthusiast, mostly creates NFTs from her own nude photos. She saw the combination of crypto and modeling as a natural fit.

"I think the future for NFT’s, crypto-art and NSFW artists is bright, because the world is changing to a direction where nudity is not a taboo anymore," she said. "You can create nude art on the blockchain with the actual opportunity to earn money." She also likes that NFTs can bring in royalties—if someone buys her work and then resells it, she can receive the royalties she sets as a term of the sale.

"I think that NFTs are a great 'gateway drug' to bring anyone into crypto," Cryptonatrix, who works as a dominatrix, told me. "However, I imagine it will take time for adult content creators and buyers to become familiar with what’s going on in this space, just as it will take time for new adult specific NFT platforms to develop and test themselves."

THE RISKS

As excited as she was about cryptocurrency's potential for art, it took Stein a few weeks after learning about cryptocurrency to start her own wallet. "It was the PTSD of being on other platforms where [sex is] the first thing that gets regulated," she said. "Something's gonna happen with sex, sexuality and kids, or with kids money."

Even if cryptocurrency infrastructure is fairly agnostic, markets represent a possible bottleneck for content creators. Rarible's terms of use prohibit users to "publish, post, distribute or disseminate any profane, obscene, pornographic indecent or unlawful content, pictures, topic, name, material or information," for example, but at the same time, has a dedicated NSFW category. OpenSea, another listing marketplace, is more lenient. Its terms of use state that it allows the sale of NSFW content, but that content is "subject to being marked NSFW and handled differently than non-NSFW content in navigation menus and search results," and the site bans "asset names, listings and their descriptions, smart contract names, and collections including profanity, sexually explicit, or overtly sexual content." SuperRare, another marketplace, does not allow minting pornographic or obscene content—but a quick search on the platform shows that this rule is pretty loose. Foundation similarly forbids vulgar, obscene or pornographic content.

Image courtesy Cryptoempress

All of this surfaces age-old questions about what constitutes art, porn, and erotica—and what makes each of these distinct from the others. What might be considered acceptably NSFW without crossing the line into “obscene” on these platforms?

"The very notion of erotica as 'good,' clean, non-explicit representations of sexual pleasure in opposition to dirty, explicit pornographic ones is false," porn scholar Linda Williams wrote in Hard Core. "The one emphasizes desire, the other satisfaction. Depending on who is looking, both can appear dirty, perverse, or too explicit." And as pornographic legend Gloria Leonard, once put it bluntly: “The difference between porn and erotica is the lighting."

"Just as what is considered 'art' is infinitely debated and in the eyes of the beholder, what is considered inappropriate, varies greatly amongst individuals," Cryptoempress said. In these cases, the beholder is the platforms themselves.

"Obscenity" at least has a legal definition, but it's subject to jurisdiction. "What jurisdiction is the metaverse?" Stein said.

Cryptonatrix said she had one of her first NFTs removed by Rarible, without explanation. "Terms of Service are never written so clearly, which allows platforms to censor selectively," she said. "As with any social platform, there are definitely double standards in the way their ToS are applied, and in who they choose to promote. For example, a GIF of me wearing a strap-on silicone toy was removed while others sell uncensored nudes, men have minted dick pics, and there is other art involving dildos not actually being worn." There's also a double standard on platforms about erotic content when it's made by a someone who is openly a sex worker, versus someone without that stigma attached to them and their art, she said. But there's still less risk of deplatforming in crypto-art so far than there is on Facebook or Instagram.

There's also the usual security risks that anyone connecting their credit care to a relatively new platform take on: earlier this week, several users on token marketplace Nifty Gateway had thousands of dollars stolen from their accounts, because the site doesn't require two-factor authentication. And there's always the risk of copyright infringement and stolen art ending up on a marketplace—a problem pornographers have dealt with since the earliest days of putting images of sex on the internet, and one that's only expounded with the rise of independent sex work such as camming and clip sites.

Image courtesy PolyAnnie

Some sex workers are trying to stay a step ahead by minting their own works on the blockchain before someone else can: Allie Eve Knox told Motherboard that she's been minting her works before others can, and watermarking them with a "bid now" banner that stays on the image until it's purchased, to keep people from stealing the jpeg or screenshotting it.

A complication of NFTs (and a risk for sellers) is that most tokens give the purchaser the right to do what they want with it, including reselling it. "When I shoot for a company or whatever, I sign those rights away in a contract, but here, there is no contract. There is no law. There is no regulation, aside from moderation of the site—which is hella subjective," Knox said.

Re(Booty) by Caroline Dy. Image courtesy Caroline Dy

Stein and Cryptonatrix both brought up the fact that most marketplace platforms don't have age verification or consent agreements, for either the seller or the buyer. "I think it’s just like any new technology, in that with the endless amount of positive potential it may bring, there are also dangers that we cannot yet foresee," Cryptonatrix said. "I am moving cautiously, including with the projects that I am aligning myself with."

Some of these issues are the growing pains of a newly-popular medium, but mostly they're predictable questions within the adult content industry.

"Any fringe content will remain vulnerable to censorship as long as payment and computation hosting are in the hands of large tech companies," PolyAnnie said. "Blockchains are not evolved enough to host the content itself, only the proof of purchase and ownership. Therefore, blockchains can solve payment vulnerabilities, yet blockchains cannot address censorship in who gets hosted on the tech giant’s servers." Although there are ways to host images on the blockchain, they're very limited, and more like storing pixel art.

The NFT boom could also help illustrators who make more erotic-themed art in private expand that work into the public. Caroline Dy, who got into NFTs to supplement her income as a technical artist and game developer, creates digitally-painted portraits and pin-ups. "I'm exploring the idea of publishing more work that leans towards erotica as I believe we need to destigmatize and normalize talking about sex," Dy said.

"It’s extremely important to not get too drugged up on that 'hopium,'" Cryptonatrix said. "Neither sex work nor cryptoart is easy money, though that misconception is certainly prevalent in regards to both."

Even with the uncertainty of where this technology and art form will go, Stein said she'd still encourage anyone who's been shut out of other platforms to try making their own NFTs.

"There are so many people that have already lost their voices, and they're the ones that need this," she said. "I see this technology as a way to get voices to the people that have not been able to use them.”

‘Building the Cockchain:’ How NSFW Artists Are Shaping the Future of NFTs syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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orbemnews · 3 years

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They Found a Way to Limit Big Tech’s Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, publicly wrestled this month with the question of whether his social media service had exercised too much power by cutting off Donald J. Trump’s account. Mr. Dorsey wondered aloud if the solution to that power imbalance was new technology inspired by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. When YouTube and Facebook barred tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters and white supremacists this month, many flocked to alternative apps such as LBRY, Minds and Sessions. What those sites had in common was that they were also inspired by the design of Bitcoin. The twin developments were part of a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the internet’s fundamental building blocks in ways that would be harder for tech giants like Facebook and Google to control. To do so, they are increasingly focused on new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, which was built atop an online network designed, at the most basic level, to decentralize power. Unlike other types of digital money, Bitcoin are created and moved around not by a central bank or financial institution but by a broad and disparate network of computers. It’s similar to the way Wikipedia is edited by anyone who wants to help, rather than a single publishing house. That underlying technology is called the blockchain, a reference to the shared ledger on which all of Bitcoin’s records are kept. Companies are now finding ways to use blockchains, and similar technology inspired by it, to create social media networks, store online content and host websites without any central authority in charge. Doing so makes it much harder for any government or company to ban accounts or delete content. These experiments are newly relevant after the biggest tech companies recently exercised their clout in ways that have raised questions about their power. Facebook and Twitter prevented Mr. Trump from posting online after the Capitol rampage on Jan. 6, saying he had broken their rules against inciting violence. Amazon, Apple and Google stopped working with Parler, a social networking site that had become popular with the far right, saying the app had not done enough to limit violent content. While liberals and opponents of toxic content praised the companies’ actions, they were criticized by conservatives, First Amendment scholars and the American Civil Liberties Union for showing that private entities could decide who gets to stay online and who doesn’t. “Even if you agree with the specific decisions, I do not for a second trust the people who are making the decisions to make universally good decisions,” said Jeremy Kauffman, the founder of LBRY, which provides a decentralized service for streaming videos. That has prompted a scramble for other options. Dozens of start-ups now offer alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon’s web hosting services, all on top of decentralized networks and shared ledgers. Many have gained millions of new users over the past few weeks, according to the data company SimilarWeb. “This is the biggest wave I’ve ever seen,” said Emmi Bevensee, a data scientist and the author of “The Decentralized Web of Hate,” a publication about the move of right-wing groups to decentralized technology. “This has been discussed in niche communities, but now we are having a conversation with the broader world about how these emerging technologies may impact the world at quite large scales.” Bitcoin first emerged in 2009. Its creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said its central idea was to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate. Business & Economy Updated Jan. 25, 2021, 6:32 p.m. ET For several years, Bitcoin gained little traction beyond a small coterie of online admirers and people who wanted to pay for illegal drugs online. But as its price rose over time, more people in Silicon Valley took notice of the unusual technical qualities underlying the cryptocurrency. Some promised that the technology could be used to redesign everything from produce tracking to online games. The hype fell flat over the years as the underlying technology proved to be slow, prone to error and not easily accessible. But more investments and time have begun to result in software that people can actually use. Last year, Arweave, a blockchain-based project for permanently storing and displaying websites, created an archive of sites and documents from the protests in Hong Kong that angered the Chinese government. Minds, a blockchain-based replacement for Facebook founded in 2015, also became an online home to some of the right-wing personalities and neo-Nazis who were booted from mainstream social networks, along with fringe groups, in other countries, that have been targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar start-ups are funded by prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. One of the biggest proponents of the trend has been Mr. Dorsey, 44, who has talked about the promise of decentralized social networks through Twitter and has promoted Bitcoin through the other company he runs, Square, a financial technology provider. His public support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related designs dates to around 2017. In late 2019, Mr. Dorsey announced Blue Sky, a project to develop technology aimed at giving Twitter less influence over who could and could not use the service. After shutting down Mr. Trump’s account this month, Mr. Dorsey said he would hire a team for Blue Sky to address his discomfort with Twitter’s power by pursuing the vision set out by Bitcoin. On Thursday, Blue Sky published the findings of a task force that has been considering potential designs. Twitter declined to make Mr. Dorsey available for an interview but said it intended to “share more soon.” Blockchains are not the only solution for those in search of alternatives to Big Tech’s power. Many people have recently migrated to the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram, which have no need for a blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, has said decentralization made it hard to build good software. The experimentation with decentralized systems has nonetheless ramped up over the last month. Brave, a new browser, announced last week that it would begin integrating a blockchain-based system, known as IPFS, into its software to make web content more reliable in case big service providers went down or tried to ban sites. “The IPFS network gives access to content even if it has been censored by corporations and nation-states,” Brian Bondy, a co-founder of Brave, said. At LBRY, the blockchain-based alternative to YouTube, the number of people signing up daily has surged 250 percent from December, the company said. The newcomers appear to have largely been a motley crew of Trump fans, white supremacists and gun rights advocates who violated YouTube’s rules. When YouTube removed the latest videos from the white supremacist video blogger Way of the World last week, he tweeted: “Why do we waste our time on this globalist scum? Come to LBRY for all my videos in HD quality, censorship free!” Megan Squires, a professor at Elon University who studies new computer networks, said blockchain-based networks faced hurdles because the underlying technology made it hard to exercise any control over content. “As a technology it is very cool, but you can’t just sit there and be a Pollyanna and think that all information will be free,” she said. “There will be racists, and people will shoot each other. It’s going to be the total package.” Mr. Kauffman said LBRY had prepared for these situations. While anyone will be able to create an account and register content on the LBRY blockchain that the company cannot delete — similar to the way anyone can create an email address and send emails — most people will get access to videos through a site on top of it. That allows LBRY to enforce moderation policies, much as Google can filter out spam and illegal content in email, he said. Even so, Mr. Kauffman said, no one would lose basic access to online conversation. “I’d be proud of almost any kind of marginalized voice using it, no matter how much I disagreed with it,” he said. Source link Orbem News #Big #Bitcoin #Design #Limit #power #Techs

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adventures-in-poly · 7 years

Text

Pockets

I had a happy poly coincidence the other day. A thread started on my online poly forum about coming out at work – how to do it, who does it and why, etc. After reading post after post about people who are happily out, I found myself once again discouraged at the lack of varied viewpoints in the poly discourse. “I came out at work, everyone was fine with it/supportive.” (Someone mentioned later that all the posts about successful coming out stories had been, up until that point, written by men.) So I responded that I actually wasn’t out at work, mostly because of my own awkwardness.

A few posts later, someone else replied that she also wasn’t out at work, and I did a double-take when I saw who the poster was – someone else on my team! Someone who I had only just started to get to know, whose desk is very close to mine. It was such an amazing feeling finding out that someone I already knew through other circumstances just so happened to be poly (as opposed to knowing they were poly from the beginning, or getting to know them because they were poly). It was as casual and normal as finding out that someone else just so happened to go to the same college as you. She was also not out on our team, and she felt the same concerns about coming out as I do. Indeed, it wasn’t exactly a happy post, but I felt connected to someone, someone who I actually knew, in our hesitation. I felt so excited in that moment.

When I started this blog, I had clear goals and visions for where it would end up. It began as a series of personal posts on FetLife, hoping that I would get a few MeowMeowBeenz in the form of likes or comments. I later moved the posts to Tumblr, because I was bored one day, I preferred the medium for sharing writing, and I had started to censor myself on FetLife since my audience consisted entirely of people I knew. I didn’t expect in the slightest that this blog would ever get any traction.

But then, slowly enough over the course of a few months, the blog started to gain recognition. A more popular poly blog would occasionally reblog one of my posts, which pulled in over 100 notes (still a lot for me, even today). I can tell when someone is currently reading my stories as notifications appear on my phone in real-time, the same user liking posts in reverse-chronological order, engaging with my journey in the wrong direction. At that point, the goal of the blog shifted slightly, from a series of disjointed posts, to something with cohesion. I had been jaded by the lack of varied viewpoints in the poly discourse: how the famous authors and podcasters seemed to be pretty much fine with everything, empathetic towards the pain of first-poly only from an “in retrospect” perspective. I wanted to show people that it wasn’t always that simple. To be a voice for the rest of us, in real time.

But I had wanted this to be a story about coming to terms with poly. About going through the hardships, having the difficult conversations, feeling the revulsion of jealousy, even hating this lifestyle at times, but ultimately “breaking through” to the realization that this does make sense for me. And now, I’m not sure if that’s where this will end up. I’ve written about this before. I’m not sure if this blog has a light at the end of the tunnel. I have no idea what will come of my relationships or my writing. I write mostly when I have tangible problems and when I’m feeling just creative and awake enough. I don’t write when I can’t express my problems in a constructive way, when all I want to do is write about people and not ideas, or when I just have nothing poly-related to say. The latter has been the most common one recently. I feel I’ve hit a wall in my poly journey: not getting any more or less comfortable with it, not having enough new experiences to shake some inspiration from my head.

What’s perplexed me throughout writing on this blog is the amount of support I get from my readers. I get a lot of support. I’ve never gotten a single piece of hate mail, or even concern-mail. For almost every post, even the posts where I’m especially pessimistic, I expect people to reply saying Maybe it’s time you consider whether this is right for you, but instead I get replies saying, I feel this too. Thank you, and You’ll find peace some day. I’m so thankful for the support I get. And, of course, because I’m me, it makes me feel guilty as well. Because who am I, this introverted woman-child of the emo age, to foster a community or inspiration in anyone? These days, I worry that this space is more like an anti-poly blog masquerading as a pro-poly blog. I don’t want to let anyone down, or deceive anyone.

I recently attended a talk on cyberbullying. The talk, of course, addressed how the anonymity of the Internet can lead to a mass lack of compassion, fueled by our short attention span, our instantaneous access to breaking news, the millions of individual voices and beliefs on social media. Nothing I haven’t heard before. But towards the end, this same speaker who had connected the Internet anonymity factor to cyberbullying also connected it to a way out. Because in the multitude of voices, you can find pockets of all kinds of people all over the place, not hindered by geographic proximity to each other. The speaker encouraged the audience to find comfort in whatever small pocket of the Internet makes sense for you: whatever minority voice can consistently push against the flow of the majority and whisper, You’re okay. you’re safe.

And here’s where I’ve been trying to get, in very many rambling words. I feel a shift in the “point” of this blog again, back to something like its original purpose. This blog was always meant to be about me, and my inspiration, and my journey. If others find solace in my words, I feel joy, but that was never meant to be the reason why I write. I simply wanted to be a voice, one single voice for the currently-lived experience of navigating the shitstorm of breaking social norms. Because it’s not really poly, is it, that’s the thing of grief. It’s the isolation of it all. The lack of a guidebook to point us at all in the right direction when we’re fucking up royally. The very notion that we should have to decide whether we tell our coworkers about all our loved ones. The double-life that so many of us lead. The weirdness, and the newness, and the hiding, and the oscillations of despair and elation.

No matter how I am feeling about my poly journey, or whether poly is right for me, I will always support the idea of poly, and the people who pursue it. We are creating our own guidebooks, our own roadmaps, together as a group. We are paving the way towards social recognition, and eventually to acceptance, and hopefully, eventually, to codified laws. This is so much bigger than me, and my feelings, and my blog. Like gazing into the stars at night, I can find some peace in the relative unimportance of my problems in the face of something much, much bigger.

So if my voice, even my most negative voice, can do something positive for you, like my coworker’s post did something positive for me, then this blog may continue to have meaning. And maybe that will be enough for me, for now.

#poly #polyamory #non monogamy #nonmonogamy

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