#let my tweeters go

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Better failure for social media

Content moderation is fundamentally about making social media work better, but there are two other considerations that determine how social media fails: end-to-end (E2E), and freedom of exit. These are much neglected, and that’s a pity, because how a system fails is every bit as important as how it works.

Of course, commercial social media sites don’t want to be good, they want to be profitable. The unique dynamics of social media allow the companies to uncouple quality from profit, and more’s the pity.

Social media grows thanks to network effects — you join Twitter to hang out with the people who are there, and then other people join to hang out with you. The more users Twitter accumulates, the more users it can accumulate. But social media sites stay big thanks to high switching costs: the more you have to give up to leave a social media site, the harder it is to go:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Nature bequeaths some in-built switching costs on social media, primarily the coordination problem of reaching consensus on where you and the people in your community should go next. The more friends you share a social media platform with, the higher these costs are. If you’ve ever tried to get ten friends to agree on where to go for dinner, you know how this works. Now imagine trying to get all your friends to agree on where to go for dinner, for the rest of their lives!

But these costs aren’t insurmountable. Network effects, after all, are a double-edged sword. Some users are above-average draws for others, and if a critical mass of these important nodes in the network map depart for a new service — like, say, Mastodon — that service becomes the presumptive successor to the existing giants.

When that happens — when Mastodon becomes “the place we’ll all go when Twitter finally becomes unbearable” — the downsides of network effects kick in and the double-edged sword begins to carve away at a service’s user-base. It’s one thing to argue about which restaurant we should go to tonight, it’s another to ask whether we should join our friends at the new restaurant where they’re already eating.

Social media sites who want to keep their users’ business walk a fine line: they can simply treat those users well, showing them the things they ask to see, not spying on them, paying to police their service to reduce harassment, etc. But these are costly choices: if you show users the things they ask to see, you can’t charge businesses to show them things they don’t want to see. If you don’t spy on users, you can’t sell targeting services to people who want to force them to look at things they’re uninterested in. Every moderator you pay to reduce harassment draws a salary at the expense of your shareholders, and every catastrophe that moderator prevents is a catastrophe you can’t turn into monetizable attention as gawking users flock to it.

So social media sites are always trying to optimize their mistreatment of users, mistreating them (and thus profiting from them) right up to the point where they are ready to switch, but without actually pushing them over the edge.

One way to keep dissatisfied users from leaving is by extracting a penalty from them for their disloyalty. You can lock in their data, their social relationships, or, if they’re “creators” (and disproportionately likely to be key network nodes whose defection to a rival triggers mass departures from their fans), you can take their audiences hostage.

The dominant social media firms all practice a low-grade, tacit form of hostage-taking. Facebook downranks content that links to other sites on the internet. Instagram prohibits links in posts, limiting creators to “Links in bio.” Tiktok doesn’t even allow links. All of this serves as a brake on high-follower users who seek to migrate their audiences to better platforms.

But these strategies are unstable. When a platform becomes worse for users (say, because it mandates nonconsensual surveillance and ramps up advertising), they may actively seek out other places on which to follow each other, and the creators they enjoy. When a rival platform emerges as the presumptive successor to an incumbent, users no longer face the friction of knowing which rival they should resettle to.

When platforms’ enshittification strategies overshoot this way, users flee in droves, and then it’s time for the desperate platform managers to abandon the pretense of providing a public square. Yesterday, Elon Musk’s Twitter rolled out a policy prohibiting users from posting links to rival platforms:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy

This policy was explicitly aimed at preventing users from telling each other where they could be found after they leave Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221219015355/https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531261791522817

This, in turn, was a response to many users posting regular messages explaining why they were leaving Twitter and how they could be found on other platforms. In particular, Twitter management was concerned with departures by high-follower users like Taylor Lorenz, who was retroactively punished for violating the policy, though it didn’t exist when she violated it:

https://deadline.com/2022/12/washington-post-journalist-taylor-lorenz-suspended-twitter-1235202034/

As Elon Musk wrote last spring: “The acid test for two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!”

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176

This isn’t particularly insightful. It’s obvious that any system that requires high walls and punishments to stay in business isn’t serving its users, whose presence is attributable to coercion, not fulfillment. Of course, the people who operate these systems have all manner of rationalizations for them.

The Berlin Wall, we were told, wasn’t there to keep East Germans in — rather, it was there to keep the teeming hordes clamoring to live in the workers’ paradise out. In the same way, platforms will claim that they’re not blocking outlinks or sideloading because they want to prevent users from defecting to a competitor, but rather, to protect those users from external threats.

This rationalization quickly wears thin, and then new ones step in. For example, you might claim that telling your friends that you’re leaving and asking them to meet you elsewhere is like “giv[ing] a talk for a corporation [and] promot[ing] other corporations”:

https://mobile.twitter.com/mayemusk/status/1604550452447690752

Or you might claim that it’s like “running Wendy’s ads [on] McDonalds property,” rather than turning to your friends and saying, “The food at McDonalds sucks, let’s go eat at Wendy’s instead”:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1604559316237037568

The truth is that any service that won’t let you leave isn’t in the business of serving you, it’s in the business of harming you. The only reason to build a wall around your service — to impose any switching costs on users- is so that you can fuck them over without risking their departure.

The platforms want to be Anatevka, and we the villagers of Fiddler On the Roof, stuck plodding the muddy, Cossack-haunted roads by the threat of losing all our friends if we try to leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

That’s where freedom of exit comes in. The public should have the right to leave, and companies should not be permitted to make that departure burdensome. Any burdens we permit companies to impose is an invitation to abuse of their users.

This is why governments are handing down new interoperability mandates: the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces the largest companies to offer APIs so that smaller rivals can plug into them and let users walkaway from Big Tech into new kinds of platforms — small businesses, co-ops, nonprofits, hobby sites — that treat them better. These small players are overwhelmingly part of the fediverse: the federated social media sites that allow users to connect to one another irrespective of which server or service they use.

The creators of these platforms have pledged themselves to freedom of exit. Mastodon ships with a “Move Followers” and “Move Following” feature that lets you quit one server and set up shop on another, without losing any of the accounts you follow or the accounts that follow you:

https://codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-a-mastodon-account.html

This feature is as yet obscure, because the exodus to Mastodon is still young. Users who flocked to servers without knowing much about their managers have, by and large, not yet run into problems with the site operators. The early trickle of horror stories about petty authoritarianism from Mastodon sysops conspicuously fail to mention that if the management of a particular instance turns tyrant, you can click two links, export your whole social graph, sign up for a rival, click two more links and be back at it.

This feature will become more prominent, because there is nothing about running a Mastodon server that means that you are good at running a Mastodon server. Elon Musk isn’t an evil genius — he’s an ordinary mediocrity who lucked into a lot of power and very little accountability. Some Mastodon operators will have Musk-like tendencies that they will unleash on their users, and the difference will be that those users can click two links and move elsewhere. Bye-eee!

Freedom of exit isn’t just a matter of the human right of movement, it’s also a labor issue. Online creators constitute a serious draw for social media services. All things being equal, these services would rather coerce creators’ participation — by holding their audiences hostage — than persuade creators to remain by offering them an honest chance to ply their trade.

Platforms have a variety of strategies for chaining creators to their services: in addition to making it harder for creators to coordinate with their audiences in a mass departure, platforms can use DRM, as Audible does, to prevent creators’ customers from moving the media they purchase to a rival’s app or player.

Then there’s “freedom of reach”: platforms routinely and deceptively conflate recommending a creator’s work with showing that creator’s work to the people who explicitly asked to see it.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

When you follow or subscribe to a feed, that is not a “signal” to be mixed into the recommendation system. It’s an order: “Show me this.” Not “Show me things like this.”

Show.

Me.

This.

But there’s no money in showing people the things they tell you they want to see. If Amazon showed shoppers the products they searched for, they couldn’t earn $31b/year on an “ad business” that fills the first six screens of results with rival products who’ve paid to be displayed over the product you’re seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

If Spotify played you the albums you searched for, it couldn’t redirect you to playlists artists have to shell out payola to be included on:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

And if you only see what you ask for, then product managers whose KPI is whether they entice you to “discover” something else won’t get a bonus every time you fatfinger a part of your screen that navigates you away from the thing you specifically requested:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-fatfinger-economy-7c7b3b54925c

Musk, meanwhile, has announced that you won’t see messages from the people you follow unless they pay for Twitter Blue:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-twitter-blue/

And also that you will be nonconsensually opted into seeing more “recommended” content from people you don’t follow (but who can be extorted out of payola for the privilege):

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/Twitter-Expands-Content-Recommendations/637697/

Musk sees Twitter as a publisher, not a social media site:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604588904828600320

Which is why he’s so indifferent to the collateral damage from this payola/hostage scam. Yes, Twitter is a place where famous and semi-famous people talk to their audiences, but it is primarily a place where those audiences talk to each other — that is, a public square.

This is the Facebook death-spiral: charging to people to follow to reach you, and burying the things they say in a torrent of payola-funded spam. It’s the vision of someone who thinks of other people as things to use — to pump up your share price or market your goods to — not worthy of consideration.

As Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax put it: “Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

Mastodon isn’t perfect, but its flaws are neither fatal nor permanent. The idea that centralized media is “easier” surely reflects the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into refining social media Roach Motels (“users check in, but they don’t check out”).

Until a comparable sum has been spent refining decentralized, federated services, any claims about the impossibility of making the fediverse work for mass audiences should be treated as unfalsifiable, motivated reasoning.

Meanwhile, Mastodon has gotten two things right that no other social media giant has even seriously attempted:

I. If you follow someone on Mastodon, you’ll see everything they post; and

II. If you leave a Mastodon server, you can take both your followers and the people you follow with you.

The most common criticism of Mastodon is that you must rely on individual moderators who may be underresourced, incompetent on malicious. This is indeed a serious problem, but it isn’t the same serious problem that Twitter has. When Twitter is incompetent, malicious, or underresourced, your departure comes at a dear price.

On Mastodon, your choice is: tolerate bad moderation, or click two links and move somewhere else.

On Twitter, your choice is: tolerate moderation, or lose contact with all the people you care about and all the people who care about you.

The interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act (and in the US ACCESS Act, which seems unlikely to get a vote in this session of Congress) only force the largest platforms to open up, but Mastodon shows us the utility of interop for smaller services, too.

There are lots of domains in which “dominance” shouldn’t be the sole criteria for whether you are expected to treat your customers fairly.

A doctor with a small practice who leaks all ten patients’ data harms those patients as surely as a hospital system with a million patients would have. A small-time wedding photographer who refuses to turn over your pictures unless you pay a surprise bill is every bit as harmful to you as a giant chain that has the same practice.

As we move into the realm of smalltime, community-oriented social media servers, we should be looking to avoid the pitfalls of the social media bubble that’s bursting around us. No matter what the size of the service, let’s ensure that it lets us leave, and respects the end-to-end principle, that any two people who want to talk to each other should be allowed to do so, without interference from the people who operate their communications infrastructure.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Heisenberg Media (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_The_Summit_2013.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Moses confronting the Pharaoh, demanding that he release the Hebrews. Pharaoh’s face has been replaced with Elon Musk’s. Moses holds a Twitter logo in his outstretched hand. The faces embossed in the columns of Pharaoh’s audience hall have been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The wall over Pharaoh’s head has been replaced with a Matrix ‘code waterfall’ effect. Moses’s head has been replaced with that of the Mastodon mascot.]

[volbeast]

Friends, followers, and belovèd mutuals - I am alive ówò

[ryonello]

hiiiii everyone come in welcome it is nice to see u <3

i dont talk nearly as much on tumblr as i do on twitter bc i am intimidated and like to keep my blog clean and art only, not sure if thatll change but if this ends up being my main platform it might LMAO

anyways i have an art tag for general stuff, like to think im pretty consistent with tagging fandoms & characters if there’s specific stuff ur lookin to see (or avoid!), and my archive will let u speed thru my work over the past few years easier than scrollin page by page 💕

thank u for comin to find me or for bein here all along i appreciate u sm 😚

if u r new to tumblr make sure u have xkit installed <3 HAVE FUN

[demonsfate]

there's a way to properly depict pacifism and controlling your emotions.

bloodline failed this.

[hungwy]

I’ve seen many people reblog a post which contains tweets that, in my eyes, amount to a single complaint that is only half true (but that I agree with for the most part). But anyway, here’s a longpost:

(tweet in question)

I think it’s mostly wrong to say FPS multiplayer “peaked” ("was most fun for the playerbase"?) with Source games in the way presented. Believe it or not, you can still join a server with 30 people playing on a user map with fucked up assets everywhere, and some of the 30 people playing will be 14-year-olds with bad mics getting mad at being spawn killed by someone with 20,000 hours in the game. In fact, there are servers like this in most Source games, including Garry’s Mod, TF2, and CSS and CSGO (but honestly I think TF2 is most representative of the above scenario). I just launched Valve’s community server browser and have found an unending list of silly-sounding servers for TF2: Minecraft trade, Murder at the Mannor, Zombie Escape, Medieval Mode, all full or near-full. I checked Garry’s Mod: SCP-RP, Zombie Survival, Clone Wars Roleplay, “Swamp Cinema”, 1980’s Mafia Roleplay, DarkRP (x20), again, all well-populated. Admittedly CS2 was mostly deathmatch servers (due to it being Source 2 and not Source and so missing a lot of plugins that would allow for “fun” servers), but CSS still had surf, bhop, minigames, and jailbreak servers still going and full. My server browser won’t show CSGO for whatever reason, but up until CS2 released I know for a fact that these silly ass servers still exist there too. The implication that these servers and their conditions are gone is wrong. You don’t want a server with the exact same conditions though, I think you want to relive the specific memories you’re having and feel happiness again. But maybe I’m going too far there.

How about this. I’ll give it to you, Dusk developer, that for you FPS multiplayer peaked with insane TF2 trade servers, but you also make boomer shooters for a living, so I think you’re biased towards enjoying an older generation of games anyway. Modern FPS games are fantastic and in their own ways contain a lot of fun. Modern games in general fill the spaces that, for you, TF2 servers filled. Have you seen Roblox minigames and Minecraft server plugins? They’re actually crazy and decently well made. I’m excited that kids have grown up in such a good environment for games. They have tons of options that we didn’t have back then. It’s awesome! Like, don’t let your nostalgia blind you to the fact that kids are having just as much fun as you now. TF2 and Garry’s Mod are not the be-all, end-all of FPS multiplayer fun. That sentiment I completely disagree with and think people should get over.

But like, how the hell does competitive gaming play into this? I truly don’t buy the wording of “Esports and competitive ranking ruined multiplayer”. It’s just not true. Not only are the servers you’re mourning still exist, they’re still well-populated and their “golden age” coincided with some of the greatest heights in competitive FPS gaming. You know what’s funny? When CSGO released in 2012, TF2 saw a drop of almost 10,000 average players. It recovered basically the next year. Besides a small dip in 2018, TF2 had held around 50,000 average players since its release, until 2019 where its average player-count has risen to about 80,000 players. Garry’s Mod wouldn’t peak in total concurrent players until 2015 and has had a dedicated core of players averaging around 25,000 since like 2013. Seriously, these are incredibly consistent player-counts throughout the release of Overwatch, PUBG, Fortnite, Apex, and Valorant. In fact, contrary to the tweeter's implicit assumptions, it seems like nothing much has changed, and that competitive gaming did not, at all, ruin or depopulate these “fun” spaces.

So, again, how does competitive gaming and esports play into this? Only thing I think is valid is the fact that a few popular modern FPSes don’t do the whole “community-hosted server” thing: Apex, Fortnite, PUBG, Valorant, and Overwatch all do not have native community-hosted server support. Which, to be frank, is bad for their competitive gaming scene too! Esports has ALWAYS used self-hosted servers for practicing to get better. I don’t know the argument for not having these sorts of things, maybe not developing the toolkit for these things is easier than developing them. IDK. But I agree that it is bad that many popular games don’t support this sort of thing. The “self-hosted netizen” is a category of person that’s been declining for a long time regardless of the effect of competitive first-person shooter games on the casual first-person shooter games self-hosted server market. But again, for the topic of the post, I think this is a completely nonsensical implication. As far as I can tell ALL Valve-made Source engine games have active and popular community servers still, and the popular games ALL have very populated servers with “fun” gamemodes and atmospheres. Competitive has grown very popular, yes. It's true. It's fun to compete, everyone knows it. But esports has taken very little if anything away from the casual playerbase of Source games.

(Also, for the record, during the actual multiplayer FPS golden age of the time, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 shooters, there were no self-hosted servers for us, and it was still the most fun anyone ever had playing casually on console. It was the age of trickshotting and montages, man! For the intent of this post that exact restriction counts as “keeping players from interacting with one another” yet these games, especially COD, were, uh… infamously social. Not to mention these games had competitive scenes alongside the casual scene perfectly fine.)

I think, really, ignoring the actual content of the tweet, these tweets are just about nostalgia for your childhood. Which is fine! You can miss things you used to do for fun and no longer do. Probably every human that’s ever existed has gone through this. I mean, again, it is kind of popular in current culture to be nostalgic. The 90s aesthetic, early 2000s media, retro games, super hero movies, cartoons being consumed by adults to a greater degree than ever, et cetera. I think to some extent the complaint itself isn’t like, a completely unclouded judgement of the Decline of The Beauty of Multiplayer Gaming throughout the years. The concrete complaints in those tweets seem both a little rose-tinted and unnecessarily doomerpilled to me. But like, regardless, it’s kind of your fault for not returning to these things, man. Go join one of those servers if you’re not busy being an adult with a job and friends and other obligations that may keep you from doing things that you’re not used to and have fun like you did in childhood. Or is that what's actually the problem…? I don’t know. A suggestion. I just think in the end the complaint isn't valid.

This post is long and I had a LOT of thoughts that I may have missed or chopped off at the incorrect time. I think the picture I'm trying to build has probably been communicated, though? Maybe I’m not considering something, maybe I overinterpreted implications, maybe the fact that the playerbase of TF2 and Garry's Mod being highly consistent for ten years or whatever is not indicative of anything I've said, but I hope regardless you understand that like, at least part of this tweet is weird to say in the ways I've attempted to untease. People young and old are still having crazy times in video games and esports has done, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing to change at, ever.

Turning off reblogs because I have a feeling anyone who doesn't follow me might become annoying about this

[oizysian]

| INTRO |

All Eyes on Me masterlist

Word Count: 500

•

"I'll take care of you."

"It's rotten work."

"Not to me. Not if it's you. "

- Euripides

•

Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-seven, nine thousand nine hundred ninety-eight, nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine ...

I held my breath as I watched the counter go up. The chat was going wild, the comments pouring in about how close I was to ten thousand followers. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes as the number finally hit ten thousand, my heart pounding in my chest as the number went to ten thousand and one.

"We did it!" I cried, trying my hardest to keep up with the chat. "Thank you all so much!"

I had promised my viewers that once I hit ten thousand followers I would host a charity stream to raise money for The Trevor Project, an organization that helps LGBTQ+ youth. I couldn't even express how excited I was.

"Thanks to all of you, I can give back to my community by hosting this charity stream!" I clapped excitedly, returning my attention to the game I was currently playing. "And with every $100 raised, I'll put up $50 of my own money."

I looked from my game to the chat, smiling at their excitement. I had built this community from the ground up, creating a safe space for people like me; a place where everyone could be themselves and make friends while playing video games together. That's all I had ever wanted, and now, things could only go up from here.

"None of this would be possible without you guys." I sniffled, wiping the tears off my cheek with the back of my hand. "Now you're all making me cry." I laughed, overwhelmed by emotion.

This was one of the best days of my life. All the hard work had finally paid off and now I could finally give back to the people who helped me get to where I was today.

Y/N CHECK TWITTER

y/n twit rn

TWEETER

you've been twote

I noticed a lot of comments about Twitter and decided to check it out. I paused my game again and switched the screen to my browser. I brought up Twitter and noticed that I had some new mentions, likes, follows and comments. I clicked my notifications and nearly dropped dead at the sight.

@brielarson: hey @y/n_gaymergod I want in on that charity stream. hmu

Oh my god. My jaw went slack as I stared at the message. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Brie Larson, an actual celebrity, wanted to join in on my charity stream? If I could get her on board with my idea, I'd be able to raise so much money for The Trevor Project!

Without giving it a second thought, I replied:

@y/n_gaymergod: @brielarson HI! I would absolutely love it if you joined the stream! I'll DM you with the details! :D

This was the best day of my life so far.

•

【Ｐｌａｙｌｉｓｔ】

Boyfriend - Dove Cameron

Let Me Down Slowly - Alec Benjamin

blind - ROLE MODEL

Astronomy - Conan Gray

I Hear a Symphony - Cody Fry

Flaming Hot Cheetos - Clairo

Friends - Chase Atlantic

this is what falling in love feels like - JVKE

Infinity - James Young

Arcade - Duncan Laurence & FLETCHER

[lyriumcoloredskies]

Written in the Pages pt.1

Pairing: Bakugo x Villain!Reader WC: 2.8k Summary: In which Bakugo finds himself a little too attached to a certain public nuisance, much to the detriment of his own life. CW: angst, veiled mention of depression, burnout, maladaptive daydreaming, parasocial relationship, lots of cursing, pining, bakugo is a little delulu (but aren't we all?) AN: Also posted on my AO3 under the same name.

You were entirely too likeable.

Maybe it was your attitude – larger than life, with a witty comeback for everything, and that blasé way about you. Maybe was it the killer figure? Your fat fucking hips, a perky juicy little ass, and tig ol' biddies that Bakugo just wanted to smash his face into. 

Every time Bakugo thought about it, he could feel his left temple throb so deeply it threatened to end his entire life right then and there with an aneurysm.

Seven long and hard years grinding his way to the number 2 spot on the Pro-Hero list only for him to be pulled into this stupid cat and mouse game for the last five. You were a messy stain on his perfect record of putting even the most elusive criminals away in jail. Just like that, you managed to land yourself right in the thoughts of Bakugo Katsuki.

24/7, rent fucking free.

At first Katsuki assumed it was his quick temper, fragile ego, and perfectionist attitude rearing its ugly head. He was so sure the obsession would fade as soon as he slapped those cuffs on you and turned you over to the proper authorities. That thought was beaten out of him by the second year of chasing you only to be given the slip every time. Katsuki quickly found himself raging and roaring to go as if he was the same 15 year old boy at UA with a competitive streak a mile wide.

He poured over your files, rewatching clip after clip to see where he went wrong. How many late nights did he spend with Kirishima planning new strategies only to be outwitted yet again? Way too many for his ego to admit. When the third year rolled around, Katsuki tried his best to just move on.

This was fine. Totally fine.

If life had taught him anything it was that some things were not worth pouring energy over. It wasn’t like you were out there committing mass murder, just the occasional bank robbery and public nuisance charge. Determined to turn over a new leaf, and at Kirishima’s insistence, he neatly placed all the case files into a box and pawned it off to his sidekicks.

So, color Bakugo surprised when he found out that you didn’t leave his mind after his little desk clean out.

No, you fucking lingered because YOU were everywhere.

The internet was a disgusting and depraved place. Just like how there were fans dedicated to heroes, villain fans existed too. He was reminded of that fact every time he logged into his TigTog, Tweeter, or PicstaGram to "promote" his socials. Damn his PR manager.

He saw thousands of "thirst posts" from so called "villain simps", whatever the fuck that meant. Bakugo didn’t care and he sure as hell did not want to know. He had to begrudgingly admit that he somewhat understood how you became so infamous.

Though he would adamantly deny it, he wasn’t blind. Every altercation between the two of you meant he sometimes saw you more than his own friends and family. In fact, you were the only woman, aside from his mom and UA friends, that he saw regularly. Even though he was a hero, Bakugo is a hot-blooded man. His eyes wandered and lingered for a little too long to be considered “battle analysis”. He intimately knew the soft curves of your hips and the way you sounded as you panted for air. Images that were burned so deep in his brain that he had to will himself not to go there when he heard your name. 

If Bakugo let himself linger a little too long, his mind would escape from him. While his thoughts ran wild he couldn’t help but think of you. You were something Bakugou knew he would only see once in a lifetime. From your beautiful eyes, shining bright with wit and something of a naughtier nature, to your plump beautiful lips, full and shiny – FUCK.

He hated to admit it, but he loved the way your soft full breasts jiggled in your catsuit as you jumped, avoiding his explosions. How many times had he, like that fucking perverted grape boy, stared at your chest during fights? Only to get distracted just enough for you to slip beyond his grasp. It grated on his ego more than hearing that Deku kept his spot as number one at each Hero Awards Ceremony.

But holy fuck he would readily admit he would crawl on his knees to the gates of heaven if he could even hold you. To love you like you were everything because you were.

If only Bakugo thinks. If only he could hold you. If only he could bury himself deep in your thighs, happily leaving behind air for something sweeter. What Bakugo wouldn’t give to be with you. Sometimes after a hard day, when the dust of every fight was washed off and the night was quiet, the blond’s mind would race. Each thought raking and obsessing over what ifs. What if you had been a hero? What if you two had met in high school. Would you have been attracted to him? What would it be like to come home to you? His child on your hip and stomach round with his second.

Bakugo's thoughts ran through the night, often robbing him of what little sleep he could scrounge up in his busy schedule. He earnestly tried to close his eyes shut, meditating to clear his thoughts. He was desperate for a wink of sleep and yet he couldn’t stop himself from obsessing. 

Every.

Single.

Night.

***

The sleepless nights and long days had been taking a toll on Katsuki and he could tell. Everyone around him could tell. His sidekicks gave him a wide berth, hoping not to get caught in his hair trigger temper. Even understanding and sweet Kirishima had been keeping a distance. The tall red-head could tell something was wrong with his best friend but wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject. 

Every call on patrol was another battering to Katsuki’s already aching body. Coupled with the lack of sleep he knew he wasn’t at his best. The blonde’s forearms spasmed and burned when he used his quirk and his temples throbbed after every fight. The pro-hero was in no condition to continue to go out to the field and yet he continued, all in hopes of seeing you.

One day his prayer was answered. A bank robbery in Mustafu had been called in and for the first time in weeks Bakugo perked up. He knew he was utterly fucked when the bank robbery call was what got his blood racing. As he shot off his explosions to get to the 5th St. where the Central Mustafu Bank was located. His mind buzzing with the idea of seeing you again. The adrenaline of using his quirk coupled with the lack of sleep ultimately led to his mistake. The minute he landed at the bank entrance his vermillion eyes darted around the scene, mentally noting the best routes. The blond made a split-second decision and took a hard left to get to the vault. He knew you too well. Bakugo would bet his entire life on that decision.

His bet paid off when the sight of your catsuit clad body rapidly came into view. He was distracted by the way you stood in the bank vault surrounded by the chaos of vault boxes strewn about the marble floor. Your soft perky ass hugged by the unforgiving thick leather material of your catsuit. Your shiny hair framed your face and bounced when you turned to look at him. And fuck – if he could just relive that moment when you flashed him a flirty smile and blew him a kiss. Bakugou's pulse quickened, and it was like time just stopped. His brain turned numb and he momentarily forgot everything. He was fucking stunned. He could hear his pulse roar in his ears, heart threatening to escape his rib cage.

His crimson eyes drank in the sight of you with the ferocity of a man who hadn’t seen water in days. His brain was mush and though he willed his body to move, he found all his limbs were defiant to his will. The number 2 pro-hero was glued to his spot as he watched you stretch out your hands and snap.

He would only watch helplessly as you used your quirk to create a mirror which you slipped into. Outside of the vault the last of your crew executed a swift escape after overwhelming the other heroes that flocked to assist the situation. The blond knew it was all his fault. He was supposed to quickly eliminate the threat at the vault before turning back to offer support to the other heroes. It had all been because he faltered. 

Back at the MightRiot agency Bakugo poked his head into Kirishima’s office letting him know he would be taking the rest of the day off. His fellow pro-hero shot him a worried look which Bakugo pointedly ignored. He didn’t want to get into this. He just needed to get home, wash all the crap from today off him, and take a nice long fucking nap. Of course, was Bakugo given that reprieve? Nope. His failure mocked him when he got home.

He instinctively turned on the TV which had already been on the news station. 

“And it appears that we have some news about yesterday’s burglary. Takeshima, Daichi the board member of Hondo Motor Corporation was the victim of yesterday’s heist. The burglars have stolen just a little over 7 million yen’s worth of precious metals from a vault in Mustafu Central Bank. Pro-hero Dynamight responded to the burglary but was unsuccessful in apprehending the suspects. Let’s go to our official Hero Correspon-“

Bakugou turned off the T.V., and threw the defenseless remote on the coffee table. Hearing those words used to burn a deep ember within Bakugou’s stomach to become a better hero for his community. Now that smoldering ambition turned into hot flames of embarrassment that licked his cheeks and the top of his ears. He didn’t deserve to be called a hero.

His mind was plagued with the insecurities and doubt that had been deep embedded into his psyche since he was a child. He wanted nothing more than to go to sleep but Bakugo fucking knew what he would do. Because like clockwork, every day for the last year he had been doing it. He knew that instead of taking a shower and finally giving his body and mind the rest he needed, he would pick up the laptop on his mahogany coffee table. He would pick up from where he left off the other night. He could feel the ice cold feeling of shame settle like lead in his stomach. Despite the shame he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.

Bakugo wishes he could look back and say he was a better man but he wasn’t. Life after UA had been hard. He had kept his head down, nose to the wheel, grinding through the rankings to achieve his dream. The reality was, Bakugo felt empty. He had thrown away the potential for affection in lieu of achieving his lifelong dream. Now at the top he realized it was lonely. With his dream achieved, what did he have left? He watched as his friends, slowly but surely, find their life partners. Deku and Cheeks were one of the first, quickly confessing to each other right after graduating UA. Kyoka and Momo, Hagakure and Oijiro, the list went on and on. Even Icy-Hot managed to find someone. Then there was him, Dynamight, #2 pro-hero, and all alone. 

“What a fucking joke.” Bakugo thought to himself. His own ambition was his ultimate downfall. It was the reason he woke up every morning to an empty bed and came home to a quiet apartment.

It was too easy to pour himself into his work. It was all he had after all. That’s why he thought nothing of it when he took on the job of taking you down.

He remembers that day clearly. Bakugou received a dossier on the thief who had bested him just a few hours prior. It outlined the basics – your name, height, quirk, etc. and for a while that information was enough. It wasn’t until the 3rd encounter did, he decide to Moogle your villain moniker. The search turned up some promising leads. He skimmed through a couple of news articles before quickly X-ing out of all of them. He couldn’t bear to read another gimmicky copy paste low effort article by some two-bit writer for a pro hero gossip column. 

He soon began looking for alternative sources of information. He turned to social media, hoping to find citizen footage of incidents. Maybe there was an angle he had missed. He quickly fell down a rabbit hole. Bakugo tore through the threads on Readdit detailing your quirk, attacks, and motives. His brain voraciously consuming the content he could find. Like that the obsession switch had been turned on. Every fight and every failure were more fuel to the fire. Bakugo found himself heading home and searching up more and more he could about you. Soon combing over footage of fights to strategize on combat became watching your flexible body contort itself into positions that Bakugo would fucking die to have you in.

Before even the blond himself knew it he began daydreaming of you. Thinking of scenarios to beat you morphed into scenarios of you and him, blissful and in love. The what ifs had taken over Bakugos mind. 

Perhaps if Bakugo had been alone in his pining, he could have been okay. The fire would eventually have burned out. It’s very unfortunate that every time he opened his laptop he found more kindling. 

Since Bakugo was young, he had been a closet romantic. Though he would adamantly deny it, his years at UA had been spent staying up late to finish the latest chapter of Kiss Kiss Fall in Love, his favorite romance novel. His heart twisted and gripped in moments of beautifully written angst, and the teasing lead up to the first kiss had the blond biting his pillow to suppress his shouts of excitement. Bakugo loved love. Despite his prickly exterior he had always dreamed up fantasies about being loved in a way that didn’t need words. His soulmate would just know the right things to say to make him feel better after patrols. She would know what to do and what to say to soothe his raw emotions after everything went wrong. 

When Bakugo met his ideal woman that fateful day 5 years ago, it was the catalyst to his new daily habit. Wake up, work, come home, read fanfics about you. The one woman he couldn’t have was the woman he had built his entire life around. Each fanfic burned his pulse hotter. He found himself in too deep of a pit to climb out of. He found himself ensnared by the words on the page. Each paragraph detailing their love and the tribulations they faced to get there. He found with every word he read, the deeper he fell in love with you. He had already spent lifetimes with you. Some were tragic tales of two people who could never be.

Bakugo’s favorites were the mushy tooth rotting ones with meet cutes. He was utterly in love with the idea of meeting you organically. Colliding outside of a coffee shop only to lock eyes or maybe going into a floral shop only to fall in love with the girl selling the flowers. On hard days Bakugo would indulge himself in a Soulmate AU. Bakugo had experienced it all with you. The saddest thing was, Bakugo knew it wasn’t true. If the mere thought crossed his mind, he knew it would send him spiraling. He pushed it away in favor for his perfectly crafted fantasy. The blond knew this wasn’t healthy but quite frankly he didn’t care at this point.

He was in too deep.

Instead he spent his days teetering on the edge of his reality and the fantasy he built to escape, and on the days he was lucky enough, he would catch a glimpse of you. Boy, did it set his heart ablaze.

He tried to shake you out of his mind by burying himself in work and going on dates with attractive girls. It got old quickly. Because how was some random girl supposed to compare to you? You who was there to comfort Bakugo after the hardest days. You who smiled so brightly as you cheered him on, you who held him so lovingly even after Deku beat him out for the number one spot again. 

Deep down he knew.

[muppetsnoopy]

Hey just so you know, that tweet you posted about "queer labels from the 90s" is misinformation. Those labels are not from the 90s. They are from a 2013 twitter thread that was published in "My New Gender Workbook." The tweeter of the "90s" misinformation deliberately clipped out responses that included twitter handles so it would seem more 90s.

Why did someone do all this? They did this because there's a concerted effort among the postmodern sexual liberation movement to lie about LGBT history.

Hi Anon,

Not totally sure if this was meant as bait, but I'll assume good faith and let you know that you've been misinformed. Your message did get me curious so I tracked down the original twitter thread to see if the op had cited a source for this

Great! So I went and found this....

Published in 1998, so that checks out. I downloaded the eBook from Taylor & Francis (thank you institutional login!) and found the full piece on page 103: 101 Gender Outlaws Answer the Question, "Who Am I?"

So, there you go! These could not have appeared in a book published in 1998 if they were from 2013. The book you referenced was the second edition of The Gender Workbook which was published in 2013, but this edition clearly came first. Next time maybe don't try and start a misinformation conspiracy in the asks of an academic 😇

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Dynaco Repair Post No. 6: The Glow Renewed

Tuesday evening, 12-26-23

I was completely caught off guard by the box by the front door when I got back from Bunny Duty/Safeway/Post Office errands today. Things are supposed to be delivered starting tomorrow, three different packages, but nothing was scheduled to come today.

Busted out in a big grin as soon as I saw it was from my bud in SC: The EL34s got here two days early! So...I was completely (and delightedly) doing something much different this evening than I had planned!

In the box were five tubes, all of them "good spares" I had personally pulled out of working ST70s I had. I'd de-tubed them before I sold them on eBay. They went to afore-mentioned friend who was going to use them in HIS Dynaco, but hadn't yet. He sent 'em back to me, four of the square-bottled Mullards (three of 'em original Dynaco-branded actual Mullards), and one "Winged C" (the Russian iteration), and a JJ as a spare. These had been in one of the systems I'd set up for ANOTHER of our buddies (my bestie who died in 2021). Old, but good, solid tubes with lots of life left in 'em.

The 5AR4 I have is the original one. The silvering at the top is almost non-existent. It's a US-made Mullard clone:

Gorgeous, ain't it?

SO...I got the ST70 ready for relaunch. Put it on the bench and hooked it up to my trusty old Micronta variac, set to "Zero Volts", got the fuse in, and switched it on.

Started out slowly turning it up to 10V, and waiting 15 minutes, and then turned it up another 10V to 20V, and waiting 15 more minutes, lather, rinse, repeat, until I got it up to about 117V.

At about 40V I began to see the barest glow in all but one tube (that Winged C). At 50V, it began to glow as well. So far so good. After about an hour, I'd nursed it up to 70V, every tube glowing strong. I let it sit at 70V for about a half hour, and then just slowly turned the knob on the variac up to 117.

Every tube came up like a champ. The ST70 Glows once again!

I let it sit and burn for about an hour, and checked the bias voltages. I had set the two adjustment pots to their center point. The left channel needed the slightest of increase (probably due to the Winged C) to get it up to the correct voltage, but the right channel was dead-set-centered on 1.56V. Boom. Rock solid. Done.

Now that the repairs are done, and I know everything is working, I will start tomorrow on re-connecting and re-arranging all the components in the system. I'm kinda spent at the moment...it's been quite a day! I'll post more tomorrow, but for tonight I call it a victory. All of the thanks go to my buddies @misfitwashere (who got me the parts) and our old compadre "Harbourmaster" on the East Coast, who sent the tubes.

More tomorrow, and to all a bitchin' Good Night.

Wednesday Night, 12-27-23

Well, it took awhile, but I finally got things re-wired and in position. Got the turntable and the FM3 hooked up and both work splendidly. I found a super-shielded RCA cable for the turntable specifically, and it sounds better...there's almost no need for the turntable ground wire now!

First, tho', I have to show off my speakers. These started their lives as Pioneer boxes, Model CS-44, to be exact. I got them at the thrift store for $25.

BUT: the 8-inch woofers and tweeters in them were garbage, so I replaced them with new components: A pair of 8" butyl-rubber surround, poly-cone woofers (they will never need reconing), and a pair of genuine Danish SEAS Tweeters, salvaged from a working pair of Dynaco A-25s.

The result? The 8-Inch Dynaco Speaker That Never Was! The A-10s had 6-inch woofers, and all the others had 10-inch woofers.

And the sonic result? A pair of mid-sized bookshelf speakers with rock-solid bass and the clearest, most well-defined mids and highs you could ever want to hear! And they don't look bad, either!

Here is everything finally in place:

And that about wraps it up! I've finally got my music back. I'll finally be able to continue my vinyl transcribing, and won't have to worry about my equipment for another good long while.

Many thanks again to my bros @misfitwashere and Harbourmaster. I couldn't have gotten it accomplished without y'all's help.

[coochiequeens]

Personally, I don't want to live in a world where little boys playing with dolls and little girls who don't like wearing pink are subjected to lifelong medical intervention because lunatics think these kids are in the wrong body. If that's the right side of history, then history can go f**k itself." - Graham Linehan

Stretched out on a hospital trolley after a surgeon had removed my cancer-riddled testicle, waiting for a doctor to give me the all-clear to go home, I lazily opened Twitter.

This was five years ago and, at this point, I had not quite nailed my colours to the gender-critical mast. I had defended women being smeared with the slur 'Terf' (for 'trans-exclusionary radical feminist') and was being monitored by trans activists as a result. This made me nervous, though I wasn't quite sure why.

I'd had an inkling of what I was up against when my wife Helen and I played a small part in repealing Ireland's draconian abortion laws. Working with Amnesty International, we appeared in a video in which Helen spoke of terminating a pregnancy because the foetus she was carrying had an abnormality which would have resulted in death moments after birth.

We tried to attend every protest and, at one event, I remember some strange person with a bullhorn bellowing out this nonsense: 'We want the state to pay for abortions!' [general cheering] '...and surgeries for trans people' [puzzled mumbling].

I felt uneasy. Sure, let's talk about trans rights, but first things first. We hadn't yet won the fight on abortion.

In retrospect, this was the first sign I had of the sleight of hand that would allow a sinister movement to attach itself to progressive causes and wrap itself in their stolen banners.

Then, when Ireland voted to overturn the abortion ban, Amnesty Ireland tweeted that this was a victory for 'pregnant people'. I was enraged.

My wife wasn't a 'pregnant person'. She was a woman, and a mother.

But these were only the first ripples of a gathering tsunami of madness. Online, people had started to go dangerously insane. It was such a slow process that I didn't notice it at first, but now, as I lay in hospital, I was collecting my thoughts on the subject.

I knew my positions were thought-through and sound, and I was sure that once people saw I was arguing in good faith, they'd see the problems with gender ideology and we could have a sensible, grown-up conversation about it.

I also told myself that, as co-writer of well-loved television sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, I had an audience out there who would listen to me. So I sent a few tweets carefully outlining my argument.

Meanwhile, I was in intense pain from the wound under my bandage and, when I was finally told I could go home, I couldn't stand up. A bed was found for me and I lay there, enjoying a bit of peace until the morphine wore off.

The visitors had gone and all was quiet. I decided to have a look at Twitter (now X).

My careful explanation of my position had certainly had an impact.

A trans activist and journalist called Parker Molloy, who identifies as a woman and is enraged if anyone disagrees, had sent me a number of increasingly frenzied direct messages.

After the third or fourth time telling Molloy I was in hospital, I ended the conversation. Meanwhile, another tweeter hopped into my replies to say, 'I wish the cancer had won'.

My ordeal had begun. Cast adrift, I was about to lose everything — my career, my marriage, my reputation.

A little bit after my brush with cancer, I brushed with something almost worse. A biological male, now going by the name Stephanie Hayden, was determined to wreck the life of anyone who flouted trans dogma.

A woman was arrested at home in front of her two young children and put in a prison cell for seven hours after she referred to Hayden on Twitter as a man.

When I made a public accusation about Hayden on X, Hayden didn't challenge it.

Instead, I was accused of breaking confidentiality by publicising Hayden's former male identities.

Hayden reported me to the police. The Guardian, whose editors seemed to have given up any pretence of being even-handed on this issue, published an article headlined 'Graham Linehan given police warning after complaint by transgender activist'.

It claimed I had been given a 'verbal harassment warning' by police acting on Hayden's complaint. This was untrue. I'd been phoned by a policeman who seemed confused when I told him that I'd blocked Hayden on Twitter months ago, so could hardly be accused of harassment.

The policeman then said something like 'stay away from her, awright?' and rang off.

For a national newspaper to headline this as a 'harassment warning' — a formal document that needs to be delivered in writing — was disgraceful, but typical of how many journalists liked to frame things that involved feminists and their allies.

After seven months of wrangling, the paper eventually removed the word 'harassment', which was too little, too late.

By then, the 'police warning' had morphed on social media into 'police caution' — which is issued where a crime has been committed and requires an admission of guilt, neither of which had happened. The false claim that I received a police caution for transphobia is constantly repeated to friends and colleagues to justify my cancellation. It was even presented to my publisher as a reason not to publish this book from which you are reading an extract. I found it grimly funny that the police and media were acting as reputation managers for a character like Hayden, but my wife Helen was terrified at being targeted in this way.

Hayden and Adrian Harrop, a Liverpool-based GP who was temporarily suspended from practising medicine as punishment for his aggression towards women on Twitter, trolled a Catholic journalist called Caroline Farrow, live-tweeting a visit to her home in a way that seemed designed to frighten and intimidate her.

She was about to travel to the U.S., but her visa was withdrawn. Harrop tweeted that he'd just visited the U.S. embassy in London: 'Consular staff very efficient at dealing with my important diplomatic business,' he wrote, with a wink emoji.

In a tweet, I called Harrop 'Doctor Do-Much-Harm'. The next morning, the police turned up at my door. I told them I wouldn't be changing my online behaviour one iota, and that Harrop bullied women online.

The policeman nodded, said something about free speech, and left. However, that visit wore heavily on my wife.

But the likes of Hayden and Harrop could not have had such success without accomplices in the police and the Press. It was surreal how swiftly they gained such power over society.

As for my career as a successful television scriptwriter, that proved to be over before the stitches from my cancer operation had healed.

Around this time, I received a letter from Sonia Friedman, one of the biggest theatre producers in London's West End, about me writing a new companion piece for the late Peter Shaffer's classic one-act farce Black Comedy.

I was apparently 'top of our dream list' to pen it.

Black Comedy is possibly the most ingenious farce ever written. I'd seen it years before with David Tennant in the lead and it left me giddy and envious. Now, going from lowly sitcom writer to being considered worthy of pairing with Shaffer had me floating.

Not for long, though. Only a few days later, Shaffer's estate decided on the late playwright's behalf that they 'didn't want to get involved' by 'taking one side or the other'.

More jobs began to fall away. A tour to Australia to teach comedy was cancelled because the company claimed it 'wouldn't be able to afford the security'. I discovered later this was a standard excuse given to those of us declared unclean by the new sacred class.

I'm also the person who worked with comedians Steve Martin and Martin Short for the shortest period of time. Five minutes, I think it was. A producer invited me to develop a comedy-drama TV series in which both would star. I had a flat-out offer and then, within minutes, an email from the same producer rescinding it, I suspect after a Twitter user in his office told him I was a bigot.

Even what I thought would be my pension was taken away from me. There were plans to make a musical of Father Ted, written and directed by me, which I was certain would be a huge hit, perhaps even make my fortune if I could get it right.

I hadn't reckoned how resolute the forces against me actually were, and how quiet my colleagues would be in the face of their onslaught. Sonia Friedman, the producer, told me I was 'on the wrong side of history' and advised me to 'stop talking'.

I suddenly found myself in a raging argument with this powerful woman who held my musical in her hands. But hearing one of these copy-and-pasted, thought-terminating clichés from the mouth of a colleague was more than I could bear.

Personally, I don't want to live in a world where little boys playing with dolls and little girls who don't like wearing pink are subjected to lifelong medical intervention because lunatics think these kids are in the wrong body. If that's the right side of history, then history can go f**k itself.

The meeting ended with each of us trying not to catch the other's eye in case it kicked off again.

I thought at least that Jimmy Mulville, the head of Hat Trick Productions, was on my side.

As the original producer of Father Ted, the company had a big stake in this new venture. But now the Hat Trick people began to go the other way.

I had another meeting around the supposed problem of my defending women and girls, in which, as always, no one could locate the flaw in my analysis as I explained over and over again: 'Children are being hurt. Women are losing their sports, their language, their privacy.'

Finally, I referred to the violent, terroristic nature of trans rights activism. Casually, off-handedly, Jimmy said: 'Well, there's bad behaviour on both sides.'

'Both sides' is a poisonous smear. No one on my side of the argument insists that people should be shunned by polite society. No one on our side wears T-shirts with slogans such as 'Kill all Terfs' and 'Die Terf Scum'.

I was told by one acquaintance: 'Some of the things you've done have been questionable.' 'Give me an example,' I replied. Long pause. 'All right, well maybe not.'

The final act was a meeting in the Hat Trick offices in which Jimmy told me I was to remove my name from Father Ted The Musical or he would not make the show — my show, which I had been tending, rewriting and refining for the best part of half a decade.

Once again, I asked what I was being accused of.

Jimmy rolled his eyes, as if it was self- evident. Desperately, I tried to explain what was happening to women's rights, and to the young girls mutilating themselves because of — 'I DON'T CARE!' Jimmy shouted. I left.

Later, I heard from my agent that in return for declaring me an unperson, Hat Trick was suggesting an up-front payment of £200,000 as an advance on my royalties. Initially, I agreed to go along with it, because I needed the money. But then I changed my mind.

I saw an interview with the mother of one of the women competitors who found themselves up against the trans swimmer Lia Thomas.

Lia was still physically intact and all the girls worked out how many towels to take into the locker room to cover themselves up completely as they changed.

'I asked my daughter what she would do if Lia was changing in there,' said the mother. 'And she said resignedly, 'I'm not sure I'd have a choice.' I still can't believe I had to tell my adult-age daughter that you always have a choice about whether you undress in front of a man.'

What messages have these girls been receiving?

My heart was ripped apart. I closed the door for ever on making any kind of deal with Hat Trick. I was prepared to betray myself for £200,000, but I couldn't abandon my daughter.

BEFORE the gender hoopla, I only knew people in the media. Now I had been so effectively cancelled that virtually no one in the media would return my calls. But I began to count as friends social workers, police officers, solicitors, barristers, doctors, nurses and academics who sided with me or shared my experience.

One of the few people I still know in the creative arts is the choreographer Rosie Kay.

At a party at her home in Birmingham for her company of young dancers — some of whom went by 'preferred' pronouns — the conversation turned to her plan for an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending Orlando.

The discussion turned heated as she explained that she strongly believed in the reality of sex because she and her son had both almost died while she was in labour.

During that ordeal, her womanhood was literally a matter of life and death for her.

Her husband would never know that experience, and that difference between them meant something.

To the little sparrows of the Church of Gender, this was all high heresy, and could not be tolerated. The dancers harangued Rosie to such an extent that she hid in her own bathroom, then they formally complained about her to the company chiefs.

'They cancelled Orlando and then were making efforts to re-educate me, to stop me from centring women's rights in my future work,' Rosie told me. 'I had to resign from the company I founded.'

Then there's the children's author Rachel Rooney, who wrote a picture book called My Body Is Me. Its message was that children should be happy with their body.

But trans rights activists dislike any mention of being happy with your body as it undermines their message that being trans is a thrilling and transformative lifestyle choice.

Tweets called the book terrorist propaganda and likened Rachel to a white supremacist.

The author's 'trade union', the Society of Authors, declined to offer support. So devastating was the experience that Rachel stopped writing books for children and has now taken on a part-time care job.

But what did Rachel do to deserve cancellation? She wrote a beautiful, kind, responsible book for children, and she got the same treatment I received: they tried to destroy her life. Trans activists mostly target women for disagreeing with them, but I'm not the only man to have suffered. Some 30 years after we'd first worked together, I crossed paths once more with the comic actor James Dreyfus (Constable Kevin in The Thin Blue Line).

I persuaded him to sign a letter asking Stonewall, the former lesbian and gay rights charity which has altered its remit and done more than any other institution in the UK to promote extreme gender ideology, to reconsider its stance.

James agreed without hesitation. The letter argued that Stonewall was 'seeking to prevent public debate of these issues by branding as transphobic anyone who questions [its] current trans policies'. It asked the charity to 'commit to fostering an atmosphere of respectful debate'.

Stonewall refused. Even asking the question was painted as a moral failing. Five years later, James is still being hounded by trans rights activists and he has had difficulty finding work.

In 2021, the company Big Finish released Masterful, a celebration of 50 years of Doctor Who's arch-enemy, The Master, who James had played on its audio productions.

The credits featured every living actor who had taken the iconic role… except James. When the history of these years is written, it's not only the extremist activists who will be recalled with revulsion, but also the spineless corporate figures who never made an attempt to resist them. Their inaction contributed to the ruin of James's livelihood.

A brilliant comic actor, a gay man, was abandoned by the very people who should have had his back, because the celebrity class is more interested in looking like they're doing the right thing than actually doing it.

Meanwhile, a chasm was opening up between me and my wife as she watched me lose jobs and opportunities.

Helen was looking for normality, and I was perpetually dismayed and angry. She asked me to cease operations, which she was perfectly within her rights to do to protect our family.

But I couldn't do it. I knew what everyone who's in this fight knows — the Gender Stasi never forgive.

I could never be confident of a having a job again until the entire gender ideology movement, which has caused so much misery, was burnt to ashes.

Even if I had been prepared to recant or keep my mouth shut, it wouldn't do any good because my heresy was out there and would never be forgiven.

I could never be confident of a having a job again until the entire gender ideology movement, which has caused so much misery, was burnt to ashes.

Even if I had been prepared to recant or keep my mouth shut, it wouldn't do any good because my heresy was out there and would never be forgiven.

I was fighting for women and children, sure, but also for my reputation and my ability to make a living.

With my marriage now over, I left the family home and moved into a modest flat. It had a nursing home for old people to one side and an overgrown, neglected graveyard behind it — which is a little too symbolic of my situation for comfort.

Adapted from Tough Crowd by Graham Linehan (Eye Books, £19.99) to be published October 12. © Graham Linehan 2023. To order a copy for £17.99 (offer valid to 15/10/2023; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

[dumbasswhatever]

a democratically elected day in the life of klavier gavin, part one

Klavier loved mornings. He'd always been one to wake early--and one to lay down well into the night. Sleep wasn't something he seemed to need much of, and today was no different. Once he drank some liquid gold from his far-more-expensive-than-it-was-worth espresso machine, he was ready to take the day on. His morning routine was done in a blur. Dog walked, teeth brushed, face washed, makeup applied, hair styled. All that was left now was to get dressed. And that, unfortunately, was where he hit his first snag of the day.

Today was a special day. It was none other than the eighth anniversary of his very first album. A day that was met with glee by his fans, and terror by the rest of the world. Terror brought on by his fan's covering social media in his music, his face, and, most importantly, his outfit. He'd gone viral exactly seven years ago for wearing an outrageous outfit to court, much to the embarrassment of the prosecutor's office--and his older self. But it had become a tradition. No matter what he had planned for the day of this anniversary, he would wear something shocking in public, and then pretend that he had no idea his outfit was strange in any way. (Really, his younger self had been very immature.) This day was one recognized by music fans, members of the city's legal world, and anyone who ever so much as visited Tweeter on 2/9.

However.

There is always a "however."

Klavier was 95% sure that a certain popular culture-illiterate, greenhorn defense attorney had no idea of this tradition. And the two were sure to come face to face today. This tradition wasn't something Klavier thought he could explain without sounding idiotic or vapid, and he didn't want to drive Apollo Justice (the object of his desires) away from him, but he certainly couldn't let his fans down.

But this was no reason to panic. Klavier's wardrobe was vast enough that surely he could find an outfit that would satisfy his fans without disturbing Apollo. So he calmly and methodically worked through his closet until he had a few options to choose from.

First, he had his normal court outfit. His prosecuting uniform, as he liked to call it. This would be his "wimp out" outfit. In case he wimped out.

Next, he'd put together something a bit flashy, but not all that bad. High-heeled, knee length boots definitely stood out, but Apollo might not ever see those if Klavier stayed behind the bench. Then he had a bright fuchsia button-up shirt (with only two buttons buttoned) under a black jacket. And finally, black skinny jeans tucked into his boots and adorned with plenty of silver chains. ("A bunch of preps stared at me. I stuck my middle finger up at them" entered Klavier's mind, uninvited.) This would be a half-hearted effort at satisfying his fans.

The third outfit was something more for his fans. The smallest black dress he could wear without getting turned away from the courtroom (he'd memorized the courthouse dress code). Under that he would wear shimmery purple tights, and then there was a small, black hat with a feather in it, just to make it more interesting. Yeah, this was definitely just playing into sex appeal, but it was easier to justify to Justice than his next outfit.

Fourth was the kind of thing he'd normally wear on the anniversary. He had it made specially for an award show last year, but he ended up skipping it, so it was still unseen by the masses. A bodysuit of purple, glimmery scales underneath a crop top and high-rise jeans. The way a dragon might dress to go to the mall with her friends. Actually, there were several other dragon accessories (including wings), but just the scales were probably strange enough.

And fifth was perhaps even stranger than that. Red pants, a white button up shirt, and a red vest. Yes. He'd realized he had everything he needed to dress up as his courtroom opponent. Really, he wasn't even sure why he was considering it, but it was in the running, too, he supposed.

[reallyromealone]

On an episode of TWEETER PUT THIS THOUGHT IN MY HEAD!!! (THIS IMAGE HERE: XXX!!) OKAYOKAY the Sanzu son with matching scars tale. Just a normal day and with everything Sanzu got the boy. You can not tell me he would not dress him up like this and then bring the baby boy to Bonten HQ cause he would! Twinnies!!

Just give the boy fake piercings and everything too.

Like his mom hated him for looking like Sanzu not knowing Sanzu is gonna enjoy that shit! Maybe even put temporary pink dye in his hair for the full-on match. of Mini! Sanzu with a foam metal pipe to boot.

Cjcmcmcmcmcmcmcm

Okok so this is a part three to the sanzu x son reader, @pridefulnightskin and I regularly talk over tumblr and like just

The other parts are in my masterlist

BEEN WAITING TO WRITE THIS, OMG

Sanzu smiled as his toddler tried to button his vest like a big boy, styled top to bottom like his papa and God was Sanzu estatic about it!

He looked so cute!

(Name)s hair had grown a bit, allowing sanzu to style it not unlike how he did his hair as a teenager but braiding the longer ends to avoid them getting tangled. (Name) was getting more confident by the day and actually playing! Like outside and laughing!

"Looking sharp bud!" Sanzu said softly as he fixed the child's buttons and fake piercings and (name) smiled pridefully before saying excitedly "I'm papa!" That was also another development; (name) was excited to look like his papa.

It was slow but he was unlearning the hate his mother literally beat into him.

"Yeah you do! You ready to wow everyone today?"

"Yeah!"

The Akashi duo left the mansion, Sanzu kept his penthouse for when he was to tired to get home also mansion had space for (name) to play and stuff.

Not to mention gave sanzu more range to spoil his son with outdoor activities.

Bag packed with snacks and stuff to entertain the little Akashi like toys and a switch (parental controls and stuff on it so he didn't over play or play some messed up games) because he knew his work would be considered boring for a small child.

Also in the bag was a small child sized iron pipe.

When they got inside the elevator sanzu took out the pipe and handed it to his son "remember what to do bud?" Sanzu asked his son who nodded seriously and wandered out as sanzu like as his little toddler body could do, slight waddle to it.

"B-bring down the hamm'r of jusis on the taitors!" (Name) yelled out brandishing the pipe excitedly to the bonten men and God damn was it not adorable as hell "Damn sanzu! You got small!" Ran joked and crouched to the littlest Akashi who waddled towards him and whispered "uncle ran, it's me (name)" looking serious at the elder and it took everything in ran not to bust out laughing.

"Of course my bad bud"

Sanzu watched at a distance as his son copied him-- save for the drug use because he didn't do that shit around his son.

Mikey walked in and (name) was HYPE and ran/waddled towards the blond and giggled out "king!" And damn, it was fucking cute as shit.

Mikey looked down at the bot with a soft smile, patting his head and allowed the child to hold to his pant leg and follow him dutifully, the two going to the couch where sanzu had situated himself already and (name) went to the bag and searched through it, a small "aha!" Could be heard from the toddler as he pulled out some Taiyaki and offered it to the big boss with stars in his eyes, happy when Mikey accepted it.

The day was spent with Sanzu letting his son do light harmless tasks and (name) was more than happy to help his papa and uncle's and bring paperwork back and fourth to the men like a little errand boy.

By lunch the toddler was exhausted from being a helper, napping on the lounge couch and sanzu removed the piercings for easier napping.

Watching over the toddler he put his blazer over the toddler like a blanket and returned to his work, trusting Koko who was also in the room to watch the toddler while he went to bring the hammer of justice onto the fuckers who tried to sneak a peak at his kid.

[become-a-robot]

OH MY GOD YOU SHOULD TOTALLY LISTEN TO FURY OF THE AQUABATS BY THE AQUABATS!!!!!

ONE OF MY FAVE BANDS EVER!!! THEY'RE SUPER SILLY!!!!

The Fury Of The Aquabats! - The Aquabats! (1997)

We meet again, mormon ska homestar runner yo gabba gabba vigilante superhero gang.

I remember one post from twitter (I think?) where it said something like "ska music sounds like what plays in a 12 year olds head when they get cheese sticks for dinner", except The Aquabats are the type of band who would literally write a song about having cheese sticks for dinner.

I like their sprinkling in of style mashups they do in songs with no prompting whatsoever. Red sweater has 1950s doo-wop music, Magic Chicken has a random hip hop break, Lobster Bucket with a ragtime feel, etc.

So. The recurring themes of this album are people eating, people geting eaten, being down bad, and getting mauled to death. Cool. Anyway, my favorite tracks are The Story Of Nothing and Martian Girl. I enjoy the former for its imagery of literally disappearing as a result of feeling like a nobody after rejection, and the latter for something something. I'm Going To Kiss the Girl From Venus

The Aquabats have always had some interesting nerdy love songs, coming up with the strangest, most esoteric ways to be attracted to people, that somehow loop back around to being somewhat sincere. It's less "Hey girl I think you're pretty. want to go out?", and more "Hey girl, I saw how you knocked over the produce stand in the supermarket and started pelting people with tomatoes, and wanted to let you know we are happily married in the scenario I made up in my head".

Really fun album, very silly ass band. It's a little much sometimes tho, I don't personally think i can listen to more than one Aquabats album at a time lol.

Also, thanks for the reccomendation! You get: A Woofer In Tweeter's Clothing - Sparks (1973)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

On the Media on the enshittification (pt 1)

This afternoon (May 6), I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest for a 3:30PM event with Glynn Washington for my book Red Team Blues; tomorrow (May 7), it’s an 11AM event with Wendy Liu for my book Chokepoint Capitalism.

Weds (May 10), I’m in Vancouver for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and a book event at Heritage Hall and Thu (May 11), I’m in Calgary for Wordfest.

I'm many kinds of writer - novelist, journalist, activist, editorialist, screenwriter - but at core, I'm a blogger. Every bit of interesting stuff that crosses my path gets turned into a blog post, which gets lodged in both a WordPress database and my mind, where it rubs up against other interesting stuff and crystallizes into longer, more considered pieces:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/06/people-are-not-disposable/#otm

It's an iterative process, and it follows a predictable and often very exciting life-cycle. First, I encounter an idea in the wild that niggles at my attention and I try to capture what it is that's making it so interesting. The act of writing about some little fragment for strangers makes me think about it harder. That means that I end up making connections to other ideas that I've thought about, and things I continue to encounter in the wild.

As I write about the subject over and over again, over days, then weeks, then years, it gets sharper and more focused. I get better at talking about it, sure, but I also get better at thinking about it. This is an activity @brucesterling​ once called "advancing and demolishing potential political arguments that have never been made by anybody but me":

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

At a certain point, the idea "tips." The act of repeatedly writing about it, relating it to new stuff happening in the world, makes it clear enough to me that it becomes clear enough to explain it to other people, too. Then I'm no longer "advancing and demolishing arguments" for myself - everyone gets in on the act.

That's what happened with enshittification. I coined the term while on vacation last summer:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1550457808222552065

Though I was just tossing the idea off idly, it stuck with me. I dusted it off in November to talk about Amazon and ad-tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

Then in December to write about an aspect of online speech that is wildly important but rarely considered:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

A week later, the rapid-onset enshittification of Twitter got me thinking about the subject again:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

And again, just before Christmas, thanks to a magisterial essay by Cat Valente:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

The idea percolated over the holidays, and I revisited it in January:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

And then, in late January, I had a conceptual breakthrough, thanks to some excellent reporting on TikTok by Emily Baker-White:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

That was the essay that broke the idea out of my own endless argument with myself into the wider world. Wired reprinted it, using the Creative Commons license on the piece:

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

(All the essays on my Pluralistic blog are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-only - you can republish them, too, including in commercial forums, provided you follow the license terms!)

After that essay went viral, I started to hear from lots of people about the subject and it kicked into overdrive - you can see how it went after that by looking at the "enshittification" tag on my blog:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/

The best part of this phase of the process is the move from arguing with myself to having serious discussions with others. And I just got to spend a week doing just that, with some of the smartest, most challenging discussants I could ask for: the producers of On the Media, and its host, Brooke Gladstone.

I'm a giant On The Media fan. I don't think I've missed an episode in decades. And I loved Gladstone's graphic novel about media theory:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/07/influencing-machine-brook-gladstones-comic-about-media-theory-is-serious-but-never-dull/

So I went into this discussion with high hopes, but those hopes were met and exceeded in every way. My conversations with Rebecca Clark-Callender and Katya Rogers brought these ideas into a new focus for me, and then, over the course of many hours, Gladstone and I put them into an orderly progression that was transformative.

On The Media turned those discussions into an hour-long, three-act series. They've just aired part one, "Why Every Platform Goes Bad":

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/enshittification-part-1-where-did-it-all-go-wrong-on-the-media

It's a superb piece of radio (the FCC_mandated bleeps on the "shit" in "enshittification" are hilarious). Though I'm mostly a sole practitioner, it's a forceful example of the power of collaboration, from Gladstone's challenging questions to the superb editing.

The rest of the series will air in the coming weeks, and I'm told they're going to air it as a complete hour this summer. I hope you'll give it a listen!

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: Jean-Leon Gerome's painting Pollice Verso, 1872, depicting gladiators in an arena with noble onlookers giving a thumbs-down gesture. The tapestry before the nobles has been replaced with a US $100 bill in which Ben Franklin's mouth has been replaced by an Amazon smile logo.=

[captainsteveamericarogers]

Why are you so quiet? Everyone has gone insane and making up new facts every five minutes, you're usually the first one to lose your patience and lay it down. You're obviously on Chris' side yet you're letting people talk shit about him. You need to say something!!

I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted. You talk as if I'm some matriarch of the fandom when in fact I'm just a mediocre fanfic writer who is exhausted with this whole debacle and it's barely been two weeks. Nobody listens to me!

Today I saw a magnificent example of both Chinese whispers and alternative facts in this fandom. The person who alleged that CE was at her work for medical imaging, who I suspect was also the author of the now-deleted Reddit post, only tweeted that she had found out he was at her work. I appreciate that many people deleted the screenshots of the tweet as it was a gross invasion of his privacy and a HIPAA violation that, if true, would have very serious consequences for both the tweeter and her employer, and that a lot of people didn't see it. But suddenly people were talking about an actual x-ray or MRI image that had been posted and deleted. There was never an image. That didn't stop a few people from saying they knew someone who had seen it, which adds credence to the rumour despite being a lie due to there never being an image.

A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on - The Truth by Terry Pratchett

We are seeing this in action every single day since the People article. I've seen people make the most outlandish claims. Suddenly, everyone has a friend who knows his flight details or what he ate for dinner. It's utterly demented. It's beyond crazy.

Let's go through all of the utter horse shit I can recall from the past fortnight. Shall we have more bullet points?

It's all PR

They have a contract for two years (how could anyone possibly know this?)

Chris obviously cannot stand Alba anywhere near him

The girl in the park who was forced to delete her Twitter was in on it and planted there to record

Chris has been personally seeking out Tumblrinas to block on Twitter

Narrative PR wrote the deranged fan letters to make the fandom "look crazy" (lol) and garner sympathy for Chris

Literally anyone who sticks up for Chris or Alba is, in fact, Chris or Alba or their moms

Alba wore a halter to WDW to show off her tattoo and be recognised (Really? Who on earth is going to recognise her?)

She only flew into FL to record the video and then left immediately (y'all really don't like them spending time together, huh?)

They are reading every single post every single gossip blog writes and using the comments to make their fake PR relationship more convincing

There's more but this is so exhausting. If you take one thing from this post, let it be this. Take EVERYTHING with a pinch of salt, no matter who posts it and how sure they seem. Sometimes people are right and sometimes they are wrong. This fandom has a nasty habit of voicing their opinions as facts, then others take that and run with it, like today with the medical imaging business.

The fact is, nobody cares whether or not you believe it. But you are devoting hours of your life, every single day, dissecting everything and going around and around in circles and it is not healthy. It is not healthy at all. Take some time off or at least talk about something else.

Someone asked what I personally think is happening with Chris and Alba, so I'll leave you with my thoughts. It's serious. They are in love. I think they'll probably get married sooner rather than later. The laser focused comment was an FYI, telling the fandom that he's going to be taking his foot off the gas and concentrating on his private life for the foreseeable future. Take it with a pinch of salt. 🤷🏽‍♀️

[distortedwhite]

sits down. hello enstarries i'm here to let everyone know the worst experience i've ever had with game account recovery. literally even aichuu was easier than whatever this fuckery is

(tweeter thread)

let me provide a little backstory first. everyone here knows i Love enstars—jpstars specifically. i grew up playing !-era enbasic, am still playing !!-era enbasic, and play the japanese version of enmusic as well. when engstars first released i gave it a try, got bigbang subaru and conquest hiyori, somehow became a vice prez for the society i'm in (and still get to mod for even months after quitting engstars. if anyone here needs an active society, contact me or toribuns on tweeter :DDD), got link click kouchan and mika... i was pretty happy with my account.

however, i quickly lost interest in engstars, since jpstars is my one and only love LOL but i kept engstars on my phone in case i wanted to return to it. and i did return to it! i played the campaign that ran during the secret swan gacha just to see if i could get natsume (i didn't ftr www)

and back i went to ignoring engstars for 476534 years. and that's where my personal problem arises. you see, i never linked my account to a tweeter acc, or google acc, or email, or whatever. my thought process was like "why would i need to do that? i still have engstars on my phone, and it isn't gonna randomly kick me from my own account right. RIGHT???" but that's precisely what happened. i opened engstars because i needed some info from the new spotlight event for the wiki, only to see engstars just kicked me out.

ofc i go "OH SHIT. I never linked my acc to anything." so i check support and they don't have Anything on account recovery. but they Do have something on data transfer :D it requires me to have a new engstars account in order for them to do the transfer, so i make a new account. and let me just tell you. fuck the engstars tutorial. legitimately, fuck the engstars tutorial.

after 4753835 years i escape tutorial containment and fill out the rest of the support form, which included your typical "lost account" miseries. ("how the fuck am i supposed to know what my rank is. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW ANYTHING......") eventually i do manage to fill the form and send it off. waiting game.

(also i still cannot believe engstars is an Official thing. it feels so fanmade and unprofessional. typos and spacing issues, And the app won't even let me scroll down further to read whatever it says on the second screenshot. i assume it says "Problem solving in progress" but me not able to scroll down in order to read it is bad design)

a day later—which, kudos to engstars support team, i did not expect them to only take a day—i receive a response saying they did find my account! but they also said my account was linked to a tweeter account that doesn't match the one my new engstars account—yknow, the one that they needed me to make to transfer data—is linked to.

i was pretty surprised because damn i had no idea my account was actually connected to something but okay! engstars support wanted me to switch tweeter accounts in order for me to do some.... authorization... things... seriously i can't read their response. revoking my kudos because i'd rather have a legible response than a quick one

ANYWAY i try...??? to log in with a different tweeter account, but engstars won't let me, so i go directly into tweeter and revoke engstars access permissions. and after that? i expected to get back to the tweeter log in screen, but instead engstars won't even give me that, telling me that the login failed after tapping the "Login with Twitter" button.

guys i'm so tired. but i'm doing my best. link click kouchan. i go clear app data for engstars, and after opening the app again, the support ticket i got was still there which is nice. i also get the tweeter log in screen again, nice. i also don't even get to log in because whatever browser engstars is using, it doesn't have javascript enabled so tweeter doesn't do anything :)))) i have to back out of the page, bringing me back to engstars and the, by now, very familiar "login failed" pop-up

that's where the story more or less ends? pauses? someone on the wiki server suggested to try login on the pc version so i let it do its downloading thing while i sat here writing this LOL it's done now. time to try that.

forgot the password for the account i was trying to get into DSGHSJDG anyway tweeter blocked my attempts because i had too many wrong ones. how long does it take until i can try again. whatever i'll end this post here... tell all your friends to keep your accounts safe because this is an absolute shitshow.