#small exception caveat;

[gailynovelry]

Two things can be true at once. Firstly, it's not "cringe" or shallow of you to like popular media properties. Secondly, deriving all of your media intake from well-known mega franchises will cause you to miss a wealth of excellent stories from the indie scene.

[maximumzombiecreator]

I've seen a lot of posts recently where people say they can't find players to play non-5e TTRPGs with. As someone who moves countries every few years, I've had to rebuild my roster of local TTRPG players from scratch a number of times. Here's how I do it.

Caveats first: while I've done this in small cities, I have always done it in cities. If you're in, like, a rural environment, you might just not have enough interested people around. You can always do it online in that case. I'm not really going to cover finding players online, except to say you should probably look for communities for the specific system you want to play. Most of them are enthusiastically looking for new participants. Especially game masters.

Okay, first things first, you gotta find people. I generally find I get better results if the search is location first. That is, rather than using city-wide or regional Looking For Group type internet groups, I look for physical locations that host gaming groups. Local game stores, public libraries, gaming cafes/bars, etc.

Being location first helps avoid some common bad behaviours. Online LFG groups often have a few shitty people hanging around who can't find long term groups because they're shitty. They'll jump at the opportunity to join new groups where people don't know them, because everyone else knows better than to game with them. But location-based groups are better at filtering this. Someone who harasses people at an LGS can be banned from the store, but decentralized online groups struggle to handle these situations in my personal experience.

Being location first also solves the next problem, which is giving you a location to play. Eventually, when I have a long term group, I'll host games in my home. But there needs to be a level of trust before that feels safe, and we're looking for randoms, so for now we need a public gaming venue. If, for whatever reason, there aren't dedicated gaming spaces where you can do this, I've had the most success gaming in cafes or restaurants during off peak hours. I've run a bunch of games in restaurants from, like, 2pm-5pm on a Saturday, and as long as you're buying drinks and some snacks or something, and being polite and non-disruptive, it's typically not too hard to get permission.

Now, if that local group has enough interest in a non-5e system that I'm interested in running, I'll happily do that, and it's pretty free from there. Most people who are willing to play one other system will gladly try others if they find they like playing with you. But even in big cities, I feel it's pretty often the case that postings for local games of other systems don't wind up actually finding successful groups.

So, here is the bit where, unfortunately, finding people to play non-5e games with involves playing some 5e. Community groups are always looking for more GMs to run games, so I will set out to run a number of short 5e adventures, each with different groups. These are typically oneshots that I have the option of extending for another 1 or 2 sessions.

I always run adventures that I've written myself for these, because I want my particular GMing style to really come through. Looking for players is a two way street. I'm looking for people I like GMing for, but I'm also looking to make sure they know what they're getting. Especially if I'm going to ask them to play a system they've never tried, they should know that there's going to be something they enjoy. So, these short adventures are full of the types of silly but sincere NPCs I tend to run, the open-ended scenarios I prefer, the tropes I favour, etc. If someone isn't going to enjoy playing with me, I want them to know it from this adventure.

I structure the adventures to give me a lot of flexibility in terms of how long they run. They're nearly always mysteries, but with some active component to the mystery, so that if things drag or dawdle I can have the villain show up and force a final confrontation. They're also structured to have a natural "next thing." You find and defeat the villain, but there's an implied next villain you'll be going after. That way, if the group is working well and I want to continue, it's easy to present the option to the group. But if I'm not interested in continuing with the group, the next thing can just serve as an "and the adventures continue" implied epilogue, and the game still feels complete.

I don't like players just bringing their own character sheet to the table. Someone who brings a disruptive character can ruin a session without me getting much useful information out of it, other than that I don't want to play with that person. And if it ruins the experience for the other players, I'm often out the opportunity to game with those people, through neither of our faults. I've experimented with both asking players to submit their characters in advance or making them choose between a collection of premade characters. The former is a good check for whether people will put in a basic amount of effort and follow instructions, but it can dissuade people who are just looking to dip their toes into playing for the first time. The latter can turn off players who are into crunchy games and are excited about character building. As a result, I'll usually choose the approach based on what non-5e system I'm currently most excited about running. Do I want to get together a group for a rules-light game? Premade characters it is. Looking to run some PF2e? Please submit your character sheet in advance. Some locations also do more drop-in based games, in which case it's premades all day.

As I'm running the game, I'm observing the players. There's a simple vibe check, obviously. Do I like playing with this person? But I'm also looking at how they play. What are they here for, what's exciting them? Are they struggling with finding optimal turns in combat, or do they like mastering a system? Are they curious about the world, or do they glaze over when the spotlight isn't on them? Do they light up in dialogue scenes? Do they want to try crazy things outside of their on-sheet abilities? Remember, later, I'm going to try to persuade this person to try to play a game they've never played before. I need to know what specifically is going to excite them.

I have (always with permission) recorded sessions before to go over in making these choices, but honestly even just a few small reminder notes will help me unravel things later. If a session goes well, I'll ask at the end for people to give me their contact information if they'd be interested in playing again. Non-committal, at their comfort, and it doesn't single out people that I don't want to play with. I can always just not call them. Usually I find I'm interested in playing again with a little more than half of the players I meet this way. In my experience, it's fairly rare for a player to say they're not interested in playing again, TTRPGs rule and there's a DM shortage.

What I usually do is keep running these until I have enough people in mind to run something else, even if it isn't the system I'm most excited about. Probably it would be better to spend more time in this starter phase building up more connections, but after running like 4-5 5e adventures, I'm usually more than ready to run anything else, and if I have to shelve my Lancer ideas because I've mostly found crunch-averse players, I'm usually fine with that.

So, next comes the invites. Now, most players I meet this way will eventually be open to playing most games, but listen: you can put people well out of their comfort zone for their third TTRPG, but you gotta be real careful with their second. Most of the time, the game I'm inviting people to will be their first real exposure to a non-5e TTRPG. If they don't like it, they will run back to the safety of 5e and you will never get them out of it again. So I am very careful in picking the right system for the players I am inviting.

Whatever the new system I want to run is, I will set up a pilot session for it. I am very clear to players that I will teach them the system at the session, they do not need to know it in advance. Eventually, when I have a reliable group of TTRPG people to play with, I'll expect them to be able to pick up systems without a ton of help, but for players that are only used to the complexity of 5e, the idea of learning a new system is daunting. I rehearse the teaching of the game session. It's the only thing for TTRPGs I ever rehearse, but I want to know down pat how I'm going to quickly teach a new system and make it feel approachable and non-threatening. I'm also very clear that this will be a single session, with the possibility of turning into a campaign if we like it. All of this is structured to feel very safe. No initial learning required, no long term commitment, with a GM you already know you like.

But even as safe as that is, you still have to pitch the system. Why should the player be excited about playing this new game? Don't go all TTRPG nerd on them and explain all the details of the system, or use a bunch of jargon. Give them one or two things to be excited about with short, detailed anecdotes to back them up.

"We're going to be playing Blades in the Dark. It's a game where you play a gang of criminals in a haunted, steampunk dystopia. Every session you'll do heists, but instead of meticulously planning them, you start right in the action, and when you need to have planned for something, you can do a flashback scene to explain your preparation. One group I ran this for got busted by guards during an early heist, but used a flashback to create a scene where they had gotten a buddy of theirs a job as one of the guards, and he helped them out of the situation. And for some reason they fell in love with this bumbling goof I improvised to be the buddy, and then on a bunch of future jobs they kept using flashbacks to get him jobs wherever they were robbing. So this one idiot was just a de-facto crew member who worked a dozen different inside jobs despite being about as sharp as an eraser. And eventually they fucked up and got him killed, but they brought him back as a ghost, because you can do that in Blades in the Dark."

I find using a specific example of play really helps get peoples' imaginations going, which is what is going to help them say yes. And that example is tailored to what I know that player vibes with, what it is I think that makes them a good fit for this game.

The last detail about the invites is that I'm telling them, not asking them. It is not, "Hey, are you interested in playing this new game?" It's "I'm going to be running this new game. If you're interested in playing, please let me know what times work for you." If you're asking, you're going to get some "well but can it be 5e?" If you're telling, then they can choose to learn a new game in order to keep playing TTRPGs with a GM they know they like, or they can choose not to play at all.

Once you get enough yesses for a game, you run it, and then from there you're on your own. I think those are basically just friends you have at that point, and I'm not gonna tell you how to have friends.

Hopefully at least one person finds all that useful!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI “art” and uncanniness

TOMORROW (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on TOMORROW (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.

I am, on balance, opposed to AI art, but there are some important caveats to that position. For starters, I think it's unequivocally wrong – as a matter of law – to say that scraping works and training a model with them infringes copyright. This isn't a moral position (I'll get to that in a second), but rather a technical one.

Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it's technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn't exist, then you should support scraping at scale:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And unless you think that Facebook should be allowed to use the law to block projects like Ad Observer, which gathers samples of paid political disinformation, then you should support scraping at scale, even when the site being scraped objects (at least sometimes):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

After making transient copies of lots of works, the next step in AI training is to subject them to mathematical analysis. Again, this isn't a copyright violation.

Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-christie-alzheimers-research

Programmatic analysis of scraped online speech is also critical to the burgeoning formal analyses of the language spoken by minorities, producing a vibrant account of the rigorous grammar of dialects that have long been dismissed as "slang":

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373950278_Lexicogrammatical_Analysis_on_African-American_Vernacular_English_Spoken_by_African-Amecian_You-Tubers

Since 1988, UCL Survey of English Language has maintained its "International Corpus of English," and scholars have plumbed its depth to draw important conclusions about the wide variety of Englishes spoken around the world, especially in postcolonial English-speaking countries:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice.htm

The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech/

Are models infringing? Well, they certainly can be. In some cases, it's clear that models "memorized" some of the data in their training set, making the fair use, transient copy into an infringing, permanent one. That's generally considered to be the result of a programming error, and it could certainly be prevented (say, by comparing the model to the training data and removing any memorizations that appear).

Not every seeming act of memorization is a memorization, though. While specific models vary widely, the amount of data from each training item retained by the model is very small. For example, Midjourney retains about one byte of information from each image in its training data. If we're talking about a typical low-resolution web image of say, 300kb, that would be one three-hundred-thousandth (0.0000033%) of the original image.

Typically in copyright discussions, when one work contains 0.0000033% of another work, we don't even raise the question of fair use. Rather, we dismiss the use as de minimis (short for de minimis non curat lex or "The law does not concern itself with trifles"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis

Busting someone who takes 0.0000033% of your work for copyright infringement is like swearing out a trespassing complaint against someone because the edge of their shoe touched one blade of grass on your lawn.

But some works or elements of work appear many times online. For example, the Getty Images watermark appears on millions of similar images of people standing on red carpets and runways, so a model that takes even in infinitesimal sample of each one of those works might still end up being able to produce a whole, recognizable Getty Images watermark.

The same is true for wire-service articles or other widely syndicated texts: there might be dozens or even hundreds of copies of these works in training data, resulting in the memorization of long passages from them.

This might be infringing (we're getting into some gnarly, unprecedented territory here), but again, even if it is, it wouldn't be a big hardship for model makers to post-process their models by comparing them to the training set, deleting any inadvertent memorizations. Even if the resulting model had zero memorizations, this would do nothing to alleviate the (legitimate) concerns of creative workers about the creation and use of these models.

So here's the first nuance in the AI art debate: as a technical matter, training a model isn't a copyright infringement. Creative workers who hope that they can use copyright law to prevent AI from changing the creative labor market are likely to be very disappointed in court:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-ai-meta-1235669403/

But copyright law isn't a fixed, eternal entity. We write new copyright laws all the time. If current copyright law doesn't prevent the creation of models, what about a future copyright law?

Well, sure, that's a possibility. The first thing to consider is the possible collateral damage of such a law. The legal space for scraping enables a wide range of scholarly, archival, organizational and critical purposes. We'd have to be very careful not to inadvertently ban, say, the scraping of a politician's campaign website, lest we enable liars to run for office and renege on their promises, while they insist that they never made those promises in the first place. We wouldn't want to abolish search engines, or stop creators from scraping their own work off sites that are going away or changing their terms of service.

Now, onto quantitative analysis: counting words and measuring pixels are not activities that you should need permission to perform, with or without a computer, even if the person whose words or pixels you're counting doesn't want you to. You should be able to look as hard as you want at the pixels in Kate Middleton's family photos, or track the rise and fall of the Oxford comma, and you shouldn't need anyone's permission to do so.

Finally, there's publishing the model. There are plenty of published mathematical analyses of large corpuses that are useful and unobjectionable. I love me a good Google n-gram:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fantods%2C+heebie-jeebies&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

And large language models fill all kinds of important niches, like the Human Rights Data Analysis Group's LLM-based work helping the Innocence Project New Orleans' extract data from wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

So that's nuance number two: if we decide to make a new copyright law, we'll need to be very sure that we don't accidentally crush these beneficial activities that don't undermine artistic labor markets.

This brings me to the most important point: passing a new copyright law that requires permission to train an AI won't help creative workers get paid or protect our jobs.

Getty Images pays photographers the least it can get away with. Publishers contracts have transformed by inches into miles-long, ghastly rights grabs that take everything from writers, but still shifts legal risks onto them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

Publishers like the New York Times bitterly oppose their writers' unions:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting

These large corporations already control the copyrights to gigantic amounts of training data, and they have means, motive and opportunity to license these works for training a model in order to pay us less, and they are engaged in this activity right now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html

Big games studios are already acting as though there was a copyright in training data, and requiring their voice actors to begin every recording session with words to the effect of, "I hereby grant permission to train an AI with my voice" and if you don't like it, you can hit the bricks:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

If you're a creative worker hoping to pay your bills, it doesn't matter whether your wages are eroded by a model produced without paying your employer for the right to do so, or whether your employer got to double dip by selling your work to an AI company to train a model, and then used that model to fire you or erode your wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Individual creative workers rarely have any bargaining leverage over the corporations that license our copyrights. That's why copyright's 40-year expansion (in duration, scope, statutory damages) has resulted in larger, more profitable entertainment companies, and lower payments – in real terms and as a share of the income generated by their work – for creative workers.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, giving creative workers more rights to bargain with against giant corporations that control access to our audiences is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch money – it's just a roundabout way of transferring that money to the bullies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

There's an historical precedent for this struggle – the fight over music sampling. 40 years ago, it wasn't clear whether sampling required a copyright license, and early hip-hop artists took samples without permission, the way a horn player might drop a couple bars of a well-known song into a solo.

Many artists were rightfully furious over this. The "heritage acts" (the music industry's euphemism for "Black people") who were most sampled had been given very bad deals and had seen very little of the fortunes generated by their creative labor. Many of them were desperately poor, despite having made millions for their labels. When other musicians started making money off that work, they got mad.

In the decades that followed, the system for sampling changed, partly through court cases and partly through the commercial terms set by the Big Three labels: Sony, Warner and Universal, who control 70% of all music recordings. Today, you generally can't sample without signing up to one of the Big Three (they are reluctant to deal with indies), and that means taking their standard deal, which is very bad, and also signs away your right to control your samples.

So a musician who wants to sample has to sign the bad terms offered by a Big Three label, and then hand $500 out of their advance to one of those Big Three labels for the sample license. That $500 typically doesn't go to another artist – it goes to the label, who share it around their executives and investors. This is a system that makes every artist poorer.

But it gets worse. Putting a price on samples changes the kind of music that can be economically viable. If you wanted to clear all the samples on an album like Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back," or the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique," you'd have to sell every CD for $150, just to break even:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Sampling licenses don't just make every artist financially worse off, they also prevent the creation of music of the sort that millions of people enjoy. But it gets even worse. Some older, sample-heavy music can't be cleared. Most of De La Soul's catalog wasn't available for 15 years, and even though some of their seminal music came back in March 2022, the band's frontman Trugoy the Dove didn't live to see it – he died in February 2022:

https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/de-la-soul-trugoy-the-dove-dead-at-54.html

This is the third nuance: even if we can craft a model-banning copyright system that doesn't catch a lot of dolphins in its tuna net, it could still make artists poorer off.

Back when sampling started, it wasn't clear whether it would ever be considered artistically important. Early sampling was crude and experimental. Musicians who trained for years to master an instrument were dismissive of the idea that clicking a mouse was "making music." Today, most of us don't question the idea that sampling can produce meaningful art – even musicians who believe in licensing samples.

Having lived through that era, I'm prepared to believe that maybe I'll look back on AI "art" and say, "damn, I can't believe I never thought that could be real art."

But I wouldn't give odds on it.

I don't like AI art. I find it anodyne, boring. As Henry Farrell writes, it's uncanny, and not in a good way:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

Farrell likens the work produced by AIs to the movement of a Ouija board's planchette, something that "seems to have a life of its own, even though its motion is a collective side-effect of the motions of the people whose fingers lightly rest on top of it." This is "spooky-action-at-a-close-up," transforming "collective inputs … into apparently quite specific outputs that are not the intended creation of any conscious mind."

Look, art is irrational in the sense that it speaks to us at some non-rational, or sub-rational level. Caring about the tribulations of imaginary people or being fascinated by pictures of things that don't exist (or that aren't even recognizable) doesn't make any sense. There's a way in which all art is like an optical illusion for our cognition, an imaginary thing that captures us the way a real thing might.

But art is amazing. Making art and experiencing art makes us feel big, numinous, irreducible emotions. Making art keeps me sane. Experiencing art is a precondition for all the joy in my life. Having spent most of my life as a working artist, I've come to the conclusion that the reason for this is that art transmits an approximation of some big, numinous irreducible emotion from an artist's mind to our own. That's it: that's why art is amazing.

AI doesn't have a mind. It doesn't have an intention. The aesthetic choices made by AI aren't choices, they're averages. As Farrell writes, "LLM art sometimes seems to communicate a message, as art does, but it is unclear where that message comes from, or what it means. If it has any meaning at all, it is a meaning that does not stem from organizing intention" (emphasis mine).

Farrell cites Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which defines "weird" in easy to understand terms ("that which does not belong") but really grapples with "eerie."

For Fisher, eeriness is "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI art produces the seeming of intention without intending anything. It appears to be an agent, but it has no agency. It's eerie.

Fisher talks about capitalism as eerie. Capital is "conjured out of nothing" but "exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity." The "invisible hand" shapes our lives more than any person. The invisible hand is fucking eerie. Capitalism is a system in which insubstantial non-things – corporations – appear to act with intention, often at odds with the intentions of the human beings carrying out those actions.

So will AI art ever be art? I don't know. There's a long tradition of using random or irrational or impersonal inputs as the starting point for human acts of artistic creativity. Think of divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

Or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies:

http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

I love making my little collages for this blog, though I wouldn't call them important art. Nevertheless, piecing together bits of other peoples' work can make fantastic, important work of historical note:

https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/famous-anti-fascist-art/heartfield-posters-aiz

Even though painstakingly cutting out tiny elements from others' images can be a meditative and educational experience, I don't think that using tiny scissors or the lasso tool is what defines the "art" in collage. If you can automate some of this process, it could still be art.

Here's what I do know. Creating an individual bargainable copyright over training will not improve the material conditions of artists' lives – all it will do is change the relative shares of the value we create, shifting some of that value from tech companies that hate us and want us to starve to entertainment companies that hate us and want us to starve.

As an artist, I'm foursquare against anything that stands in the way of making art. As an artistic worker, I'm entirely committed to things that help workers get a fair share of the money their work creates, feed their families and pay their rent.

I think today's AI art is bad, and I think tomorrow's AI art will probably be bad, but even if you disagree (with either proposition), I hope you'll agree that we should be focused on making sure art is legal to make and that artists get paid for it.

Just because copyright won't fix the creative labor market, it doesn't follow that nothing will. If we're worried about labor issues, we can look to labor law to improve our conditions. That's what the Hollywood writers did, in their groundbreaking 2023 strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Now, the writers had an advantage: they are able to engage in "sectoral bargaining," where a union bargains with all the major employers at once. That's illegal in nearly every other kind of labor market. But if we're willing to entertain the possibility of getting a new copyright law passed (that won't make artists better off), why not the possibility of passing a new labor law (that will)? Sure, our bosses won't lobby alongside of us for more labor protection, the way they would for more copyright (think for a moment about what that says about who benefits from copyright versus labor law expansion).

But all workers benefit from expanded labor protection. Rather than going to Congress alongside our bosses from the studios and labels and publishers to demand more copyright, we could go to Congress alongside every kind of worker, from fast-food cashiers to publishing assistants to truck drivers to demand the right to sectoral bargaining. That's a hell of a coalition.

And if we do want to tinker with copyright to change the way training works, let's look at collective licensing, which can't be bargained away, rather than individual rights that can be confiscated at the entrance to our publisher, label or studio's offices. These collective licenses have been a huge success in protecting creative workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/

Then there's copyright's wildest wild card: The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that works made by AIs aren't eligible for copyright, which is the exclusive purview of works of human authorship. This has been affirmed by courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Neither AI companies nor entertainment companies will pay creative workers if they don't have to. But for any company contemplating selling an AI-generated work, the fact that it is born in the public domain presents a substantial hurdle, because anyone else is free to take that work and sell it or give it away.

Whether or not AI "art" will ever be good art isn't what our bosses are thinking about when they pay for AI licenses: rather, they are calculating that they have so much market power that they can sell whatever slop the AI makes, and pay less for the AI license than they would make for a human artist's work. As is the case in every industry, AI can't do an artist's job, but an AI salesman can convince an artist's boss to fire the creative worker and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

They don't care if it's slop – they just care about their bottom line. A studio executive who cancels a widely anticipated film prior to its release to get a tax-credit isn't thinking about artistic integrity. They care about one thing: money. The fact that AI works can be freely copied, sold or given away may not mean much to a creative worker who actually makes their own art, but I assure you, it's the only thing that matters to our bosses.

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/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

[rachandroll]

There won't be another Aeor now, because Aeor was a very specific kind of tragedy, wherein the gods prioritized their own survival over the survival of huge swathes of mortals. They had choice after choice after choice where they could have diverted to a more merciful path. Even in the very last moments, they could have just destroyed the Factorum Malleus and spared the rest of the city, and found another way to deal with the knowledge that had been disseminated. But they chose their own immediate security over the lives of every regular person in Aeor, every refugee and civilian and child. The Primes may love mortals, may work to protect them, but when it comes down to it, they will choose themselves (and their Betrayer kin!) every time. It is love with a very big caveat.

Two thirds of the world's population died in the Calamity because the Betrayers were initially banished, not destroyed. The gods say they cannot let any of the Betrayers die because they might need them if a bigger threat arises, but what good does that potential possible protection do Exandria if their warring wipes the world out now? Why should anyone, god or mortal, expect that the Betrayers would help fend off such a threat anyway, when they very clearly want the Primes and all mortals dead? There was so much emphasis in Downfall on how, despite it all, the Primes and Betrayers are family and the Primes cannot let that go. It's hard to take Ayden at face value when he says that they need the Betrayers, in the light of that. SILAHA says "That's all our problem. It's all about ourselves. At least I have the, well, confidence to actually accept it." And that's the truth of their motivation that their actions indicate in Downfall.

The Arch Heart and the Matron explicitly told the Hells that the world was on the cusp of another Calamity. Except for those two, when confronted with the possibility of Predathos, the gods wanted to chose, once again, to sacrifice the lives of countless mortals in order to protect themselves. The Divine Gate is meant to stop another Calamity, but now we know that they are willing to tear it down to save themselves. So Calamity is the threat that hangs over the world much more immediately than potential cosmic horrors.

I don't think anyone is out here saying that this plan with the gods becoming mortal means that there will never be any danger to Exandria again. There ARE terrible threats that exist, like the Chained Oblivion and there are almost certainly more that exist out is the cosmos that are currently unknown. Predathos might eat those or it might not, we don't actually know. There absolutely will be more evil mortals, just as there will be mortal heroes to stop them, as they always have. This is not the creation of utopia. It's the aversion of another apocalypse.

But something that struck me, at least, about Aeor, something that I think often get lost underneath all the other debate, under the focus on hubris, is the stark fact that mortal understanding grew to the point where they could create a weapon that could kill a god. That's incredible. If the gods saw mortal understanding reach so far and instead of saying "you are children and cannot comprehend and so we will strike your knowledge from the world because it is too dangerous for you," said "you are our children and you are growing up, perhaps we should help you understand" what might mortal innovation have accomplished? What solutions would mortal creativity come up with that might have surprised their creators? If the gods chose to treat mortal attempts to understand with encouragement instead of condescension, what might the Cassida Previns of the world built?

You say that level of power has to exist to fight off the next eldritch horror that arrives. Why does that power have to be concentrated in a small handful of gods above any sort of accountability? Why can't it be power distributed amongst a larger number of mortals, defending themselves? Why can't it be mortals, no longer children to be shielded but instead come into their ascendancy to fully inherit the world and its responsibilities? Why can't mortals be equal to the gods, not in the sense sought by those power-hungry mages, but as a collective, with the gods reborn among them and treating them, as it were, as adults, who might come to understand?

In the final narration for Downfall, Brennan says:

"In short, brief life can even the infinite change, realize, recognize, commit to something new, singular. To move forward on the paths of destiny and fate, changed."

And I think this choice being given to the gods to become mortal again, beyond just giving them the ability to survive at the cost of their power, is also offering them the chance to learn and grow the way mortals do again. Being mortal in their quest to destroy Aeor, ending even as it did in something horrific, did actually change them enough that they created the Divine Gate. That was a sacrifice and it was better than what was before it. But it was not enough and now that the flaws in that approach have become clear, it's time to look for another path. Mortality offers that. And I think seeing how mortality could change them further will be a hell of a story, and I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, I don't particularly think this is going to convince you or anything, you seem pretty mad, but it's fun to talk about this stuff, and you gave me an excuse, so thanks.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Hey, I don't think anyone has asked you about Jane <3 Equius and I'm going crazy I want to know why (with sincere curiosity and thanks for answering in advance)

The primary reason is because 3/4 of the Alpha kids are introduced with "by the way, here's the dead troll you're supposed to date." Roxy goes on about how much she fucking LOVES wizards, and she writes a fanfic where she describes an evil arrogant despotic slytherin harry potter as incredibly hot, and she has a crush on an eccentric hipster prince... (and on Eridan's side, he's tried getting in red with a bubbly pink girl and a cat-themed rogue, and roxy is a bubbly pink cat-themed rogue...)

Jake is introduced with a small digression where he yammers about all the "cerulean babes" he's obsessed with, and in specific, neytiri from avatar, wishing he could've been the one to "overcome his paralysis on an alien adventure planet to become her boyfriend". Basically, he wishes he'd been in tavros's place while vriska was crushing on him. He's also immediately attracted to aranea, a dead ringer for vriska. vriska also pursued red with john and tavros, the former of which shares a lot of genetic similarities with jake, the latter of which is also a page and also shares a lot of personality similarities, and she also has a thing for nic cage, whose rugged adventury-ness (but also cringeness) echoes jake

jane is thus introduced with a wall of "cobalt beefcakes," with ron swanson being her ideal man. she's also constantly described as a "tightass" by her friends, correcting their grammar and being initially reluctant to swear, and catches a lot of 100%'s, not just from hal. equius's primary flushcrush was aradia, who was also a maid, and whom equius's attraction - as he describes - was primarily based on the fact that she was so dignified, if only she wasn't of such low caste - !

We also see with tiaratop!jane that at her worst, she's incredibly dominant and controlling, treating jake as an object and breeding stud. equius is a massive sub and he would be so down bad for this. she's technically the condy's heiress, so of incredibly high status; shes dignified in ways reminiscent of aradia; and to top it all off, she's domineering and bossy and has a part of her that wants a partner that can shut up and look pretty and do whatever she says.

this is all said with the MAJOR CAVEAT that none of these romances work without all the characters experiencing some pretty major character development - eridan as we last saw him is too volatile and dangerous for roxy, vriska as we last saw her is the same way, and i'm pretty sure jane would be fairly :/ about an equius as we last saw him. but an eridan who has his shit together and is actively crusading for the powers of good while still being an evil harry potter wizard would sweep roxy right off her feet; a vriska who's come to realize she doesn't need to be so switched on and dangerous all the time would get along well with jake, since her specific brand of "yeah 8itch let's go adventuring" meshes well with his; equius who's not a weird casteist anymore and has some prudence about his fetishes would basically be jane's ideal ron swanson? gruff, masculine, a cobalt beefcake, not really wanting to engage with everyone's dumb horseplay, except that he'd do anything jane tells him to do and she's into that tbh

like unfortunatelyyyyy i think they'd work well together & i think aradia would be so damn relieved about it

[natopi]

WELLCOME!!

Hello, my name is Nato! Here is my OC character sheet.

I may call them "he" or "she" due to a translation error, but their gender does not exist so call them They/Them or whatever you want.

If you paint them I will be happy to fly and you can paint them anytime＾＾

And a minor caveat⚠️

・I use a translator except when speaking Japanese, so please don't be harsh on me if I make mistakes in my English.

・I'm not a fan of political content.

・Basically I don't accept your OC art requests, but if I am in the mood I may be able to paint something small.

・Please do not abbreviate the words you speak as much as possible, as it could drive my translator crazy!

・My designs, regardless of my OC, are subject to frequent change. So please don't worry if there are differences from the character sheet and draw the figure you like.

・My jsab au exists and I plan to draw a comic one day, but I'm only thinking about the beginning of the story, so the OC or character settings could change frequently to fit the story.

[writing-for-life]

How Do Writers Get Compensated by Streamers?

(And Libraries, but That’s an Afterthought)

Across several platforms, I see a lot of discussions about whether it is ethical to stream shows by problematic creators because it might give them direct revenue.

I think some of this is down to the fact that many people don’t know how remuneration of writers by streaming services works. It’s not a “they get paid per view”-thing. Or even a, “If I stream this, the writer will definitely get more money”-thing. (All of this obviously excludes other considerations, like giving people exposure/promotion etc).

The moment a show hits the screen, credited writers have basically already been paid. Whether you watch or not makes no material difference to that fact whatsoever—with one caveat:

For the big streamers, this usually only applies to the first 90 days. Because this is the time period that’s covered by what’s called the initial compensation period (for really small streamers, that period is usually a year).

After this, you enter the stage of residuals and exhibition years. So for every year the show stays on a streaming platform, credited writers will receive residuals. These usually drop year after year (so the longer your show airs, the fewer residuals you will get in terms of percentage).

What Does This Mean?

Watching a big budget show within the first 90 days doesn’t make a difference to a credited writer’s bank balance (I’ll get to the exception in a sec). Watching thereafter is also not tied to a “payment per view”, but simply to a formula per year the show gets streamed. You can find this more neatly explained on the WGA website:

Streamers usually also don’t take a show/old episodes off their platform after 90 days or a year just because viewer numbers naturally fall with time (it’s usually a pre-negotiated license period of 3+years), although that sometimes happens (if you have a look through Amazon’s and Netflix’s catalogue, you’ll find lots of older shows on there that probably hardly anyone watches).

So whether people stream or not usually matters most when it comes to renewals and cancellations, because that’s where a streamer makes or loses money (production costs vs overall new subscriptions etc).

For a show that’s finishing or already cancelled, the implications are far less material. And the first 90 days do not matter at all in this context (they only matter for a renewal, but in terms of residuals, they’re basically out of the equation).

This obviously doesn’t mean that a boycott can’t be a consideration for many other reasons. But if it is financial compensation via residuals that’s the main ick, it really doesn’t matter as much as people think.

This isn’t to tell people to do one thing over the other, but I see so much misinformation about the basic nuts and bolts of this on a daily basis that I think it’s maybe worth looking into it a bit more closely for many people.

What About Libraries?

As a little addendum (because that’s also something people frequently misunderstand): Not every country has a PLR scheme that remunerates writers for library loans. And the ones that do have a cap. So if you are worried about giving a writer royalties if you borrow their books from a library, first have a look if your country actually has a PLR scheme, and how it operates (you can do this here). As examples:

The UK has a PLR scheme, so secondhand is generally preferable over libraries because authors get royalties up to a cap (which, generally speaking, is a good thing, but it’s obviously worth considering if the author is a vile human being). It also needs to be said though that they, or their estate, need to be a resident or have a principal home in the EEA to qualify, but that just as an aside.

The US don’t have a PLR scheme, so the author gets diddly squat per loan.

Again, there are other, legitimate considerations as to why secondhand is preferable over borrowing (or vice versa), but if we are talking about royalties, that’s how it works…

[transmutationisms]

do you feel like SSRIs are mostly pseudoscience? I'm not sure if I should be open to trying them or avoid them at all costs since I'm not sure if they even work or if they will mess me up permanently

a preliminary note that i don't find the category 'pseudoscience' to be useful & would classify SSRI research more as 'methodologically shoddy science' or 'ideologically slanted' or 'part of a centuries-long effort on the part of psychiatrists to secure themselves professional prestige by claiming neurobiological etiologies where none are shown to exist' &c &c. imo the notion of 'pseudoscience' is itself pretty positivistic, ahistorical, and ideologically noxious (particularly apparent in any analysis of epistemological imperialism).

that aside: you raise two major issues with SSRIs, namely whether they work and whether they will cause you harm.

efficacy of SSRIs is contested. a 2010 meta-analysis found that in patients with mild or moderate depressive symptoms, the efficacy of SSRIs "may be minimal or nonexistent", whilst "for patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial". a 2008 meta-analysis found a similar distinction between mildly vs severely depressed patients, but noted that even in the latter population, drug–placebo differences were "relatively small" and argued that the differences between drug and placebo in severely depressed patients "seems to result from a poorer response to placebo amongst more depressed patients" rather than from a greater efficacy of SSRIs. a 2012 meta-analysis found some SSRIs consistently effective over placebo treatments, but several authors disclosed major relationships with pharmaceutical companies. a 2017 meta-analysis concluded that "SSRIs might have statistically significant effects on depressive symptoms, but all trials were at high risk of bias and the clinical significance seems questionable" (emphasis added) and that "potential small beneficial effects seem to be outweighed by harmful effects".

when evaluating any of this evidence, it is crucial to keep in mind that studies on antidepressant trials are selectively published—that is, they are less likely to be published if they show negative results!

A total of 37 studies viewed by the FDA as having positive results were published; 1 study viewed as positive was not published. Studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with 3 exceptions, either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies). According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive.

meta-analyses are not immune to this issue, either. in addition to the problem that a meta-analysis of a bunch of bad studies cannot magically 'cancel out' the effects of poor study design, the authors of meta-analyses can and do also have financial interests and ties to pharmaceutical companies, and this affects their results just as it does the results of the studies they are studying. according to a 2016 analysis of antidepressant meta-analyses,

Fifty-four meta-analyses (29%) had authors who were employees of the assessed drug manufacturer, and 147 (79%) had some industry link (sponsorship or authors who were industry employees and/or had conflicts of interest). Only 58 meta-analyses (31%) had negative statements in the concluding statement of the abstract. Meta-analyses including an author who were employees of the manufacturer of the assessed drug were 22-fold less likely to have negative statements about the drug than other meta-analyses [1/54 (2%) vs. 57/131 (44%); P < 0.001]. [...] There is a massive production of meta-analyses of antidepressants for depression authored by or linked to the industry, and they almost never report any caveats about antidepressants in their abstracts. Our findings add a note of caution for meta-analyses with ties to the manufacturers of the assessed products.

so, do SSRIs work? they are certainly psychoactive substances, which is to say, they do something. whether that something reduces depressive symptoms is simply not known at this point, though it is always worth keeping in mind that the 'chemical imbalance' narrative of SSRIs (the idea that they work by 'curing' a 'serotonin deficiency' in the brain) has always been a profitable myth. look, any medical treatment throughout history has been vouched for by SOME patients who report that it helped them—no matter how wacky it sounds or how little evidence there was to support it. this can be for a lot of reasons: placebo effect, the remedy accidentally treating a different problem than it was intended for, the symptoms coincidentally resolving on their own. sometimes the human body is just weird and unpredictable. sometimes remedies work. i'm sorry i can't give you a more definitive answer about whether SSRIs would help you.

as to potential risks: these are significant. SSRIs can precipitate suicidal ideation, a risk that has been consistently downplayed by pharmaceutical companies and studies. SSRIs are also known to contribute to sexual dysfunction and dissatisfaction, again a risk that is minimised and downplayed in much of the literature and in physician communication with patients. further (known) side effects range through emotional blunting, glaucoma, QT interval prolongation, abnormal bleeding & interaction with anti-coagulents, platelet dysfunction, decreases in bone mineral density leading to increased risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis, jaw clenching / TMJ pain, risk of serotonin syndrome when used in conjunction with other serotonergic substances, dizziness, insomnia, headaches, the list goes on.

i don't mean to sound alarmist; all drugs have side effects, some of the ones above occur rarely, and you may very well decide the risk is acceptable to you to take on. i would, though, always encourage you to do thorough research into potential side effects before starting any drug, including an SSRI. more on SSRI side effects in david healy's books 'pharmageddon', 'let them eat prozac', 'the antidepressant era', and 'the creation of psychopharmacology'; 'pillaged' by ronald w maris; and 'the myth of the chemical cure' by joanna moncrieff.

in addition to the above, SSRIs are known to come with a risk of 'discontinuation syndrome'—that is, chemical withdrawal when stopping the drug. this, too, is often downplayed by physicians; many still deny that it can even happen. some patients don't experience it at all, though i can tell you purely anecdotally that SSRI withdrawal was so miserable for me i simply gave up on quitting for over a year, despite the fact that at that point i was already thoroughly experienced with chemical withdrawals from other, 'harder' drugs. again, i am not telling you not to go on SSRIs if you decide these risks are worth it to you! i simply think this is a decision that should always be made with full knowledge (indeed, this is a core, though routinely violated, principle of medical 'informed consent').

ultimately this is not a decision anyone should make for you; it's your body and mind that are at stake here. as always i think that anyone considering any kind of medical treatment should have full knowledge about it and should be making all decisions freely and autonomously. i am genuinely not pushing any agenda 'for' or 'against' SSRIs, only against prescription of them that is done carelessly, coercively, or without fully informing patients of what risks they're taking on and what benefits they can hope to see.

[toy-powerhouse]

The (not so) Thinly Veiled Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigotry in the TMNT Fandom (ft. mrabubu and bowandbrush)

The TMNT fandom has an anti-LGBTQ+ problem. But it's kind of subtle, so it may be hard for most to identify it. Sadly, and disturbingly, no community is safe from these forms of discrimination and fandoms are no exception to the rule. And, currently as an increasing number of nations are becoming more socially conservative, the rights and even existence of LGBTQ+ people are in peril. That said, the TMNT fandom has been around for several decades and with it comes the burden of years’ worth of bigotry. Of course, this won't be a comprehensive record of all anti-LGBTQ+ controversies found in the TMNT fandom. Instead, this will highlight a few subsets or types of anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes in the fandom specifically on Tumblr. A few rather popular fan artists on Tumblr uphold these attitudes both from a more secular and a religious perspective. These fan creators are so popular with their works being shared by other TMNT fans and casual TMNT enjoyers alike that their wide reach and appeal make it all the more prescient to call attention to their somewhat low-key bigotry. In other words, these fan artists with such abrasive and discriminatory views don't deserve having the large platform that they do to further spread vitriol against LGBTQ+ people, especially with how the TMNT fandom and franchise has become more inclusive and accepting of marginalized peoples over the years. Note: please read the alt text on each image.

Exhibit #1: Mrabubu, the Secular LGBTQ+ Bigot

Tumblr user mrabubu (aka Kishi) is a fan artist with mass appeal who's most known for her AU where (adult) Leo from Rise of the TMNT is in a relationship with a woman, and their love story is one of tragedy, joy, and out of character melodrama. Which is all well and good at first glance. Leo doesn't have a canonical sexual/romantic orientation and people can pair him off however they like. No one interpretation of the character's orientation is correct, and no one should be harassed over their interpretation of the character's orientation.

However, it's Kishi's needlessly incessant insistence that she doesn't headcanon Leo as gay or imagine him as being attracted to men that really should be raising more eyebrows at this point. While it's not right to accuse Kishi of being homophobic for not shipping Leo and Usagi or not interpreting Leo as gay, it's Kishi's persistent, and even aggressive protestations of not being homophobic that draw attention to that alleged homophobia. It's a real "you doth protest too much" sort of situation with Kishi having gone on longwinded rants about not portraying Leo as gay or interested in men at all. The following is just a small portion of Kishi's near constant complaining about queer headcanons and representation in the TMNT fandom.

In addition to that, Kishi only seems to discuss LGBTQ+ anything only within the context of this obnoxious shipping discourse. Meaning that virtually all of Kishi's posts about queerness are extremely negative and combative in tone. Kishi's adversarial attitude towards LGBTQ+ representation within the TMNT fandom is continued in two noteworthy situations.

Mrabubu Case 1

In mid-2024, one innocuous comment made on Kishi's work (Y/N:❌️ Usagi:✅️) sent Kishi on a warpath against Leosagi and the "Leo's gay" headcanon. A warpath that led her to another user, taringill (aka Vika), whose homophobic tendencies are much more overt and explicitly malicious. Somewhat paradoxically, Vika seems, at first glance, to be more accepting of queer headcanons than Kishi. However, the caveat is that she overwhelmingly favors mlw/hetero ships, shows very little interest in wlw ships, and virtually no interest in mlm. It turns out that, much like Kishi, she's willing to headcanon characters as bisexual, pansexual, aromantic, asexual, and so on, but only if they're mlw partnered or single. Thus, Vika is not beating the homophobic negotiations anytime soon, especially in light of reasons that will be discussed soon.

Vika asserts that the RotTMNT fandom is plagued like a disease by fans who headcanon Leo and other characters as being gay or lesbian and seems genuinely both confused and enraged that some people in the fandom don't prioritize mlw/hetero ships. Most of Vika's, subsequently Kishi's, ire stems from this YouTube video, "what made rise gay? | analyzing rise of the tmnt's queer coding" by heybuwan. The video just notes the queer subtext within the series and interprets the work through a queer theory lens while noting aspects that are queer affirming (i.e., Hypno-Potamus and Warren Stone as a canonical couple) and considers how such representation has limits as a children's program in a very much still anti-LGBTQ world. It's a nice video essay. Although, as a certified RotTMNT critic, I think the video hypes up the series too much, especially towards the end, but it's still a well-made video that’s worth a watch.

Nevertheless, Vika rants and raves about how (pro-)LGBTQ+ RotTMNT fans voicing their interpretations of the series being queer coded are somehow imposing that reading onto other fans and are erroneously asserting that their headcanon is canon. Vika's uncharitable and incorrect understanding of the video essay takes a turn for the worse when she repeatedly refers to these fans as being "crazy." She calls the video "schizophrenic nonsense" and claims that these fans are peddling "hallucinations and fantasies" for a "stupid agenda." With the long history of queerness and queer people being pathologized, notably homosexuality having been considered a mental illness within modern medicine in the not-so distant past, it's unsettling to see Vika perpetuate this idea that same-gender attracted people are clinically insane. All in all, Vika was so triggered by the video essay that she went on a petulant homophobic tirade using ableist language to discredit and shame fans for exploring queer coding in the series.

Vika Anti-LGBTQ+ Rant: Part 1 on July 8, 2024 (Warning: ableism and homophobia)

Vika Anti-LGBTQ+ Rant: Part 2 on July 8, 2024

But what does all this have to do with Kishi? Well, Kishi seems to agree, or at least doesn't express any opposing views to these extremely bigoted tirades. Vika tags Kishi multiple times in these rants and claims that she had discussed the matter privately with Kishi, which seems to be corroborated by Kishi's comments to Vika on Kishi's initial post about the one Leosagi favorable comment that seemed to kickstart Kishi's own anti-LGBTQ+ downward spiral.

The following is an approximate English translation of Kishi and Vika's exchange via Replies on the post seen above:

Kishi: sorry, I wanted to add a little at least in the comments, because I kind of understand what video you're talking about, and honestly, for me it's one of the most vivid proofs of how crazy some people are, because from the phrase when the author moved on to the section with Leo "And now let's talk about everything that… Is connected with Leo", I, honestly, was a little shocked at the start. And from the fact that, supposedly, people deny that Leo is gay and is proof of the opposite, I'm just, well, speechless.

There are actually a lot of thoughts, you can't really describe them in the comments, for the most part I expressed them in posts as softly as I could. I hope that people will start to understand something.

Vika: Yeah, I watched the video and… I didn't get it! I really thought Leo was gay because of his popularity and the fans forcing this headcanon. But at the same time, I never gave up on my headcanon. When I saw Ron's post… Oh, how good it is. It's actually great that the creators decided not to give an exact answer for free creativity, but… For some reason, the fans got it wrong

Yes, you're right… I really felt more comfortable in the fandom after such posts, support from other fans. Despite the fact that foreign fandoms are sick with such things, even American fans understand that something crazy is happening in their fandom, which is very pleasant for me personally

Oh, I noticed that you subscribed to me, nice :3 Kiss you on the forehead💋❤️

Kishi: and most of the "evidence" there is frankly far-fetched. Well, like about glam rock, like, Leo loves it, so he's gay. But the author has once again proven that he doesn't understand a damn thing about what he's talking about, because the genre itself is not about gayness at all, but rather about outrageousness, and debauchery and vulgarity in extreme cases. The guy has once again proven that people just want to see something that isn't there.

I like your thoughts xD

Vika: Thank you, colleague! And I thank you :)

Yes, yes, yes, I remember. Why Leo's behavior can't be perceived as his uniqueness, although it is. There is no hint of any orientation in his behavior. And if a person reasons in the style of "you like something wrong, strange, then you are gay." The tolerasts themselves think in stereotypes. If you are into glam, then you are gay, because they wear makeup. Curtain. The person has shit in his head.

Mrabubu Case 2

In 2024, there was a TMNT OC x Canon competition that Kishi and a few other popular RotTMNT fan artists were finalists in. One of these competitors received a hateful and homophobic message from an anonymous person on behalf of Kishi's OC, Ana.

Once this hate message was brought to her attention, Kishi addressed it on her blog in the most tepid way possible.

She doesn't admonish her fans specifically for slinging homophobic slurs at her competitors. After going on numerous rants about how she's totally not homophobic, she can barely string together a paragraph to discourage her fans from being homophobic. It's almost as if Kishi's much more concerned with and passionate about denying accusations of homophobia than she is about decrying homophobia. Kishi's homophobic pattern of behavior, coupled with her avoidance in calling out homophobia directly, has allowed homophobic attitudes to flourish and fester in her community of fans.

Kishi's bias against expressions of queerness in the TMNT fandom actually has been a bit of an open secret since late 2024, with a few fans having already raised the alarm. So, kudos to them!

Overall, Kishi just seems like a person whose homophobia and transphobia stems in part from how she doesn't find queerness to be appealing to her personally. Gay Leo is sexually/romantically incompatible with her self-insert cishet woman Ana, so she's very vocally against that headcanon. Trans man Leo isn't appealing to her either, and she doesn't want to understand that identity so she's very vocally against that headcanon. Kishi seems scandalized by and dismissive towards LGBTQ+ headcanons for not just Leo but most likely all fictional characters she engages with.

Bonus Content! Kishi continuing to whine about LGBTQ+ RotTMNT headcanons and bemoaning the potential for queer representation in the series on Reddit.

Now, let's move on to the next subset of anti-LGBTQ+ TMNT fans: the religious fans.

Exhibit #2: Bowandbrush, the Religious LGBTQ+ Bigot

Bowandbrush (aka Lexie) is a self-proclaimed "Jesus Freak" Christian who coincidentally is on friendly terms with Kishi making for an expanded universe of LGBTQ+ bigots because birds of a feather flock together. Much like, Kishi, Lexie also enjoys complaining about the popularity of Leosagi.

Anyway, there's much less to say about Lexie as Lexie's Likes (and her Reblogs), which are currently public at the time of my posting this, speak for themselves:

This is a pretty open and shut case. Lexie is just your run-of-the-mill bigoted conservative Christian who thinks being LGBTQ+ is sinful according to religious dogma that supposedly denounces queerness. However, this religious dogma has been contested and debunked over the years. Regardless, there are LGBTQ+ affirming religions and strains of Christianity and it should go without saying that any belief system that condemns marginalized peoples for simply being who they are is a deeply flawed belief system.

After having fallen down this rabbit hole of somewhat hidden bigotry within the TMNT fandom, I'm left feeling less safe in my place within it. Very naively, I had taken for granted the growth of the fandom into a more inclusive space in recent years and almost forgot that there are fans who are by no means truly friendly or accepting of LGBTQ+ people.

Recently I shared with a fellow fan my idea for an AU and this interaction went fairly well. That was up until I mentioned that there would be wlw and mlm pairings featured in the story at which point the fan wanted to break off communication with me citing how there are things they're not comfortable sharing or talking about, especially involving their real life. There is a chance (plausible deniability and all) that this fan may have cut contact with me for other reasons not related to LGBTQ+ bigotry. However, considering the context, I have my doubts. This fan often shies away from LGBTQ+ anything on their blog, has never posted anything pro-LGBTQ+, and seems to be a homophobic Christian fundamentalist if their Like history is anything to go by. It made me think about how there are people in the TMNT community, many in fact, who hide their bigotry for fear of being made to face the consequences for their discriminatory attitudes that oppress marginalized people.

These bigots in the fandom often don't voice their support of LGBTQ+ people and their rights. They avoid mentioning anything about LGBTQ+ representation or when they do, it's almost always for the purpose of conveying a negative sentiment (i.e., repeatedly voicing their distaste for popular LGBTQ+ headcanons or wlw/mlm ships). They cultivate fan spaces that are LGBTQ+ neutral at best or LGBTQ+ negative at worst, where LGBTQ+ people and their representation is begrudgingly tolerated or outright squashed. And, in this day and age where enthusiastic and unequivocal LGBTQ+ support is necessary and crucial to many, this neutrality or negativity is inexcusable.

These barely concealed bigots like Kishi/mrabubu and Lexie/bowandbrush do not deserve the space that they take up in the TMNT fandom. So, it'd be best to just block/ban/ignore/deplatform/exclude them and move on to greener pastures, especially in these very trying, unsafe times for LGBTQ+ people.

Well, enough negativity. Let's end this on a positive note!

To everyone else who isn't a bigot like Kishi and Lexie, please connect with and support LGBTQ+ TMNT fans. There are so many LGBTQ+ people in the TMNT fandom, and they and their works should be cherished and celebrated, especially over bigots like Kishi and Lexie. LGBTQ+ fans, let's make some noise and please stay safe out there. Cis straight fans, please raise awareness and support us.

[stormblessed95]

Hello,

I hope you have recovered fully or are recovering well.

I only wanted to say this because I am an over thinker and someone needs to tell me to shut up. I don't have any Jikook fans in real life so these are the places I vent.

I think I am either the majority or.the minority depending on which space we are in that thinks and feels that Jikook are distant and have been for a while. I don't think like only because of the car scene. Even when they are taking photos, they aren't doing it like they used to do before. Before if one of them was taking a photo of the two, generally they would be attached at the hips and in each other's face. I didnt notice them doing that in the first two episodes but I also just saw a small clip from Sapporo and they are also taking a pic but they are but distant from each other. I know it might be some miniscule to you but these are few of the instances where I felt that their relationship was beyond friendship.

I know I am over thinking it but I don't know, I don't feel as good about it I suppose. What happened to the Jikook that would literally smooshed their faces together for a photo? What happened to Jikook that were always seen hanging out prior to the hiatus. I heard about them hanging out all the time.

Yes they were busy and I get that. Jimin specially seems to have been super duper busy but he seems to have built a deeper relationship with the Hyung like but kep.a distance from the Maknae line so I am a bit confused I suppose. Out of all the BTS members, I always assumed Jikook were it and nothing would come in between so I am surprised to see work coming in between them?

I still feel like shiiitttt lol but I had to start work today anyway. Thanks for checking in though 💜

Listen, I'm not here to tell you what to think or tell you what your opinion should be. Think whatever you want. I'm sorry to say, but I'm not ever going to be the one to talk you into shipping Jikook. You think they aren't together, that's totally good by me! I hope you still love and support them as BTS, and I hope you have a wonderful day and enjoy any part of the fandom you continue to participate in, including mine if you stick around anyway on my blog.

I'm just here to present facts and let you draw your own conclusions based off that. And sometimes share my opinions about them, but only with the caveat that no one steals MY opinion and must create their own 😉

So for the facts, babygirl (I use as a gender neutral terms), for as many selcas as Jikook took like this:

They took JUST as many like this, which are (edging into opinion territory just a bit here) just the same as the glimpses we've gotten of selcas taken from AYS

Close together for the selfie, but not smushed as close as they could possibly get without just going ahead and crawling inside each other. Just a normal cutesy photo

More facts! As for hanging out prior to the hiatus (where I guess now it's assumed they never saw each other not even once, which is opinion and assumption, not fact), I have a post already done about all the times Jikook were spotted hanging out outside of work (because BTS time is work).

Hint: it's less often than you think

Double hint: they were still glued at the hip, we just know they were because they say and act like they were, not because we got to see or hear about it

Triple hint: it's probably exactly the same now except we know that currently, at this moment, they choose to continue to be glued at the hip for the next 18 months at minimum

I have other posts about their dates too, but this is the one that covers the topic I mentioned above best I think

Work came between them? Is that what they said or is that what you took their words to mean based on your biases and previous assumptions?

Anywho! Thanks again for checking in on me love.

Just a bit of unsolicited advice that you are free to disregard. I think whatever you decide about how you feel about Jikook, you should consider taking an emotional step back from them, just a smidge. Nothing that is only supposed to bring you joy, BTS or any other hobby, should get you feeling so far in your head feeling so conflicted. Good luck, sending you purple hearts! 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

[velvetvexations]

I feel like people who “society accepts when women wear pants” forget

1. Basically immediately forgetting that there are still pretty prominent cultures were this is not true. Not even just like in the “Middle East” or “Third World”(fuck I hate those terms), like I mean in the states, did you guys know that the Mormon church only recently let women start wearing pants on their mission? Though they tend not to like when you bring up religious communities, because those are exceptions, for some reason. And then get upset with you when you bring up other examples such as countries and cultures that have laws/rules against it or other such stuff.

2. Forget that there was created an entire new gender category of pants called “women’s pants”, “women” can’t just wear pants, they have to wear “women’s pants”. I assure you when that little girl is shopping in the men’s section, they aren’t praising her, they’re giving her some of the filthiest looks that she’s seen. Like just back in the 2016 election people were mocking Hillary Clinton(damn her soul) for her dressing to masculinity. Sure most people averagely walking down the street won’t be able to tell the difference, but acting like there’s still isn’t barriers for women wearing “masculine” clothing is kind of insane to me, because it’s much more than just pants. And what might be acceptable for one person in one situation might not be for another, this planet is very big with lots of different people.

3. What is culturally acceptable for men and women to wear, is not consistent worldwide. There were/are cultures where dresses and skirts were men dressing in these things are completely socially acceptable, even encourage. And the opposite is true there is one culture that I’m thinking about where very short shorts were worn by women to do their jobs on the fields. I feel like so many of these people come at it with such an American point of view, for a lack of a better word. Also, all of this is time depend, this shit changes constantly. I beg of these people to go research fashion history.

4. That was something people fought for, within my parents lifetime. I’m 18, My parents aren’t that fucking old. And people are still very much actively fighting for the right for everybody to wear skirts(as they should be to). The fight for clothes to have no gender will continue on forever, until we somehow get the schemers of boxing certain things into certain gender categories ends. That’s the true fight, dismantling the idea that clothes have gender and that one gender should wear one type of specific clothing.

5. This rhetoric often leads to a denial of crucial aspects of Butchphobia.

And the thing is people turn this into a competition, some how. It doesn’t matter how much women get punished for wearing pants. The fact that anyone is getting punished for the clothes that they are wearing is a problem, and this definitely applies to men in skirts.

Also a small addition to the women’s pants thing Something being society accepted, even one that is conditional, such as women wear pants. Might not be true interpersonally or in certain organizations. Again to use the example it’s only relatively recently that Mormon women on missions were allowed to wear pants, even though out of the temple and when the women are not on mission they are allowed as long as they are not “revealing”, which is also a major caveat to women wearing pants. See a big reason on why women bring pants was not society accepted is not only because they were a man’s “thing”, but also because it was revealing for women just to have legs. To be able to see the individual pant legs was considered revealing. Maybe a better statement that one could say is “in most places within the western world many people find it more socially acceptable for women to wear women’s pants, then for a man to wear a skirt or a dress, in this case* because of the fact we are still fighting for the right of anybody wear anything, the concession by the patriarchy has not been made yet for men to wear dresses or skirts, we must continue to fight not only for this concession, but until patriarchy is dismantled. Performing performing masculinity is conditionally accepted if only if that woman is not seen as enough threat to the patriarchy, this is mostly because of the work done by feminist, there are many situations and places for this is not conditionally, accepted, and both are equally punished or is punished the other is not fully.” These people also don’t like nuance so, mmmmmm

It truly doesn't take much to simply think before they say these things. They really have no sense of other people's perspectives.

[contententhusiast]

okay but has anyone else thought about what it must have been like to manifest a signet that is basically a death warrant except for one small caveat and then how do you explain and prove that to the people in charge who literally would not hesitate to kill you in an instant if your story does not check out? Because I can't stop thinking about how scared Dain prob was when he started manifesting

[starcrossed-sky]

Hey Twitter(/Reddit) alternative seekers

Okay, fandom. Everyone's all worked all the time about this or that new alternative to Twitter and how it's either awesome or it sucks. I'm here to tell you about an OLD alternative: Plurk.

(Note that this was originally formatted for Twitter so forgive the jank thread paragraphing)

Disclaimer: This information is specifically aimed at people who use Twitter for fandom purposes; it is not intended to cover the exhaustive list of things that people use Twitter for (professional networking, art/photography promotion world news, etc). It's friend-centric rather than follow-centric, at least as the existing site culture goes.

So what is Plurk? It's a threaded microblogging platform dating back to 2008 that has only ever seen extremely niche use in English-language use. (Its primary userbase is Chinese-speaking.) It has a purely chronological timeline and a lot of privacy features that you haven't seen since the LJ era (assuming you're old enough to remember that).

Plurk functions through an exclusively-chronological timeline on your homepage (desktop) or in the app. Algorithmically sourced content? We ain't got it! (There is a different page for viewing top content but you have to go there specifically.) Instead, your timeline shows your own content and the content of other plurkers you friend or follow, and the occasional ad (MUCH more occasional than Twitter).

Each top-level plurk can be replied to, and this creates a chain of replies that can be used for conversation. Unlike Twitter and Reddit, replies don't form branching threads; each plurk is only one stream of conversation. Plurks with unread replies will be lit up as unread; however, they can be "muted" to stop them from giving you notifications.

(Two small caveats: You cannot mute your own plurks, and there is actually a cap of around 200 muted plurks. Mutes will fall off from the oldest, so you'll sometimes see an ancient plurk pop back up on your timeline if someone comes back to it. You can just mute it again.)

Your plurk timeline has a global privacy control. If your timeline is set to private, only people you have friended can see what you say on there. If your timeline is public, then anyone who comes to you page can see what you've posted, AND logged-in users can share your post on their own timeline with the "replurk" function (works just like a normal retweet), as well as reply to it.

There is also an "anonymous" option, which anonymizes you and also the names of everyone who replies (it randomly generates names like "lemon354" and "libra262" for repliers to differentiate them). Anonymous plurks will stay within your timeline if your plurk is set to private, but can be replurked if it's public.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE, because individual plurks can also be given specific privacy levels: -> Friends only (if your timeline is public but you don't want this one getting around) -> Private to "cliques," which are Twitter circles but you can have more than one -> Individual users (including those not on your friends list - this is plurk's equivalent of DMs)

Your own plurk homepage is also insanely customizable, if you want to break out the CSS or even just have a custom background. You can also alter your display name (though the character cap is VERY short), and your display name color, as well as the standard avatar change. Usernames cannot be changed as a free user, but can be changed by paid users (more on paid options in a second).

Plurk also has its own image hosting, and a pastebin-alike plaintext called Plurk Paste that has no character limit. (The character limit for top-level plurks is longer than Twitter's.)

It also has CUSTOM EMOTES in addition to its (somewhat wild) default selection. They're similar to Discord's customs, except that you can use GIFs from the get go; what's restricted is the number of slots you have as a free user. (And size is capped at 48x48 px.)

Plurk has ads, but they're mostly unobtrusive (and can be clocked entirely with ad blockers, but I didn't say that). Plurk keeps the lights on through a subscription model called Plurk Coin, which is very cheap (under $2.50 USD/month) and can be gifted to other users. Coin gives you a number of benefits including the "Except" privacy option, more username colors, response editing, and a bunch more custom emote slots.

Concerned about harassment? Plurk has one of the most robust blocking systems in social media that I've ever seen. You block someone, and they can't see you (even by going to your profile) and you can't see them. That's it, done. Full no-contact.

NSFW/18+ content is allowed. There's a specific flag for it when you first post a plurk. Plurk does expect you to use that tag when appropriate, but is otherwise very forgiving of NSFW content, at least in my experience. (Again, though, English plurk is a very small community ATM).

The thing to remember about Plurk is that it is very much a remnant of an older internet, from the days before algorithms. Like Tumblr, it's a social media where you won't see anything if you don't reach out to follow and friend people. It predates "going viral" as a goal of internet usage. The goal is to talk to people.

As an aside: Since I originally wrote this up, I've seen rumors about Japanese fanartists moving to plurk and even seen one or two mentions of it in the wild on my Twitter timeline as people talk about following those artists. Fantastic! If that's you, then I hope you find this slightly more in-depth guide to features helpful.

If this sounds up your alley, I've made a public plurk specifically for Twitter refugees to come meet people and get more information on how plurk works! You can find it here.

Twitter version: [link]

Please replurk to spread this information about!

EDIT Sept 7 2024: You can mute your own plurks now, whoo!

[would-this-pokemon-be-a-friend]

The Top Pets of 2023!

Hey everybody! I hope you’re all doing well, and I thank you for bearing with me with the last few weeks of hiatus. We may be a little over a week into 2024, but let’s take a step back and celebrate the top ten pet contenders of the year according to score!

Well, okay, top ten is a little bit of a stretch. As it turns out, there’s quite a few ties in the top ten scores, and we’re covering them all. This is gonna be a BIG post, so let’s get right into it!

TENTH PLACE

Our tenth place slot is shared by not one but four pokémon! In no particular order:

One of only two Mythical pokémon in our top ten(ish), Mesprit is a pokémon that comes with some caveats due to their lowercase-“l” legendary status. But hey, numbers are numbers!

Next up is another psychic-type, fan-favorite natu! Look at them! They’re looking at you!

Living, breathing keyring coming right up! If you’re adopting a klefki, you’re gonna want quite the supply of keys to keep em happy, but that’s nothing to a dedicated pet owner!

Finally, we’ve got eevee! Reliable, adorable, harmless, cuddly: eevees have it all. Be careful though, this species is one of the easiest pokémon to evolve by accident!

NINTH PLACE

We have two pokémon tied for ninth place! First,

Hey, it’s a recent one! Delibirds are great pet candidates! They’re known not just for looking a bit like a certain holiday icon, but for being exceptionally generous!

Another small Mythical pokémon, another A-tank pet with some pretty big caveats. The chances of any of us even running into Celebi are pretty low. But, if you happened to meet them, I’m sure they’d be delighted to be your houseguest… for a time, anyways. “Pet”? Ehhh…

EIGHTH PLACE

In eighth place, we’ve got a four-way tie again!

First up: silcoon! Uh… Well, silcoons get a “A?” Score for a reason. This pokémon would be the definition of a pet that doesn’t do much. But hey, that’s what some people might want!

I was very excited about this score. C’mon, it’s abra! These little teleporters are adorable! And very sleepy! So far, eighth place seems to be the “doesn’t do much” category…

Except for ditto! What can’t dittos do? Well, they can’t do much to harm anyone, but we can transform into any person, pokémon, or object they want! Dittos are great! You can’t go wrong with a ditto! Look how cute we are! Adopt a ditto today!

Wooloo! Eighth place ends with another normal-type pokémon, and another one that I personally was excited to see score so high. Wooloos might have my very favorite cry out of all thousand-or-so pokémon discovered thus far!

SEVENTH PLACE

Just two pokémon this time around…

What do you know, a “just-a-cat” pokémon made it into the top ten! Listen, as a real-world cat owner, I’m very biased towards any pokémon that resembles mine in either looks or behavior. Skitties are a great pet option. If I had one, I would name them Skittles.

Wow, it’s been a long while since we covered fidoughs, and yet they’ve held strong in the rankings all this time! Special shoutout to my sister, who requested this pokémon!

SIXTH PLACE

There are three pokémon tied for sixth place, so let’s keep it moving!

Speaking of pokémon we covered a long time ago, it’s squirtle! The only starter pokémon in the 2023 top ten, squirtles would make great pets for anyone who likes to play in the water and/or doesn’t mind getting splashed with water every once in a while. I also hear that they look pretty rad in sunglasses…

Spiky baby! Spiky baby! Spiky baby! (Enough said, honestly.)

Would you look at that, it’s a “just-a-bird” contender! Do you like birds? Do you want a pet bird? Do you want a really smart pet bird? Then a chatot may be just right for you!

FIFTH PLACE

Just one pokémon holds the fifth place crown this year and… hold on…aw man…

It’s…uh… it’s another cocoon pokémon. Don’t get me wrong, I think pokémon like metapod and silcoon are charming in their own ways, but I recognize that they’re not the most exciting species to end up in the top ten-ish of the year. To the metapod lovers: congratulations! To the metapod haters: sorry?

FOURTH PLACE

Almost there! The fourth place slot is taken up by a single pokémon as well:

Cherrims are the one and only plant-like pokémon in the 2023 top ten! If you’re looking for a sweet-smelling, low-maintenance pet, them cherrims might be just right for you!

THIRD PLACE

Third place is the last category with multiple pokémon! We’re almost there!

Look at that little celery bowl-cut! Ralts are a great option for pet owners looking to adopt a psychic or fairy-type pokémon! They may be in tune with your emotions, but be warned: your mood will affect a ralts’. Don’t look to a ralts for a emotional support pet!

Wow, psychic-type really seems to be holding strong in the 2023 top ten-ish! So long as you don’t have an aversion to a lot of noise, a chimecho would make a great pet!

SECOND PLACE

In second place, we have another pokémon that we covered pretty recently: alcremie! I personally would still hesitate a little bit, just because I don’t have a great grasp of how a pet made out of a substance that’s at the very least similar to whipped cream, which is so easily dissolved by just water. But hey, alcremies are great! Very few alcremies are the exact same with so many possible variations of appearance, which is an added bonus.

FIRST PLACE

Without further ado, the best pokémon pet candidate of 2023 is…

Chansey! This one caught me by surprise, especially given how large they are! Who’d have thought that a three-and-a-half foot creature would get the highest score? It really all comes down to their friendly disposition and healing abilities. This is a pokémon that isn’t only receptive to living alongside humans, they actively enjoy caring for humans and other pokémon! That being said, they’re surely not common pets: this is a remarkably illusive pokémon that is rarely caught by trainers, so adopting one might not be as easy as popping over to the shelter. Thankfully, they can be found in many regions of the world.

So there you have it, the top ten twenty-one pet candidates of 2023! I’ve said it again and again, but thank you so much for following along with this silly blog! I’m hoping that the blog continues to grow and be enjoyed in the coming year. How far will we get in the pokédex? Who knows! Who can even say how many new species will be discovered this year? We’ll have to just wait and see.

[vickyvicarious]

Good observation that Dracula's great grimness at informing Jonathan that they must part soon changing to his usual smoothness when Jonathan refuses to return to his room as dictated. Or gives Dracula the pleasure to go "before we part and before you become one of us let's play one more time, lets see you walk back into my arms from danger once more, for good this time". Maybe he even expected this small rebellion from Jonathan, knowing him. Especially after he dared scale his walls. It's more satisfying to "earn" Jonathan's submission. An unbreakable will bending to his is sweeter.

I think Dracula absolutely loves Jonathan's stubbornness... but only with the caveat that he is in control of the situation and can prey upon it. This response is extremely belated, but I kind of like answering it now because I think Dracula's treatment of Renfield so far, as opposed to Jonathan, is so revealing. He's ignoring Renfield completely. He has no interest in him at all. Because Renfield wants to be with Dracula. And Dracula doesn't care to spend his time with people who want to be around him; he's only interested in forcing his company upon those who don't want it. It's a huge part of the fun for him.

If someone like... Seward, for example, had been sent to Castle Dracula, he wouldn't have lasted anywhere near as long. Because I think he would be too enticed/interested in the vampires, and thus he'd bore Dracula a lot faster by being too willing or even eager to play along. Then again, someone who refused to play along at all would get boring very quickly too - if they don't submit and play his game he'll force them into submission with violence and that'll be the end of it. Jonathan managed to thread the needle perfectly with playing along on the surface while still constantly trying to resist behind the scenes. It was interesting and fun, a challenge that never made Dracula feel truly threatened. (Of course, he didn't realize the full extent of Jonathan's resistance/that he did have cause to be threatened...)

And he loved it! He was having so much fun! He got to genuinely enjoy Jonathan's company, but also enjoy how little Jonathan enjoyed his company and how he couldn't do anything about that. He got to keep pushing and pushing and pushing him and watch Jonathan almost break again and again but still just keep bending. To tempt him into disobeying and then punish him for it. To force him to rely on Dracula himself for protection and thus stick even closer the more endangered he gets. He gets to work for it, while at the same time never actually facing real risk other than losing his new toy (and Jonathan always settled down in the end, always let the game continue). ...And then he had to call it quits, because he had a schedule to keep. Yeah, I think he was genuinely kind of upset about that. And so when he got the idea for the wolves, he cheered way up again.

Because Dracula was able to offer Jonathan exactly what he claimed he wanted, but in such a way that they both knew he would never accept it. Instead, he forced Jonathan into a situation where he was forced to "choose" Dracula instead, one last time and more definitively than ever before. It was the perfect way to end their time together. Well, except one final victory - 'rewarding' Jonathan's choice by honoring it with one last night together, with delaying no longer and finally drinking from him.

Contrast all of that to Dracula's complete disinterest in Renfield, despite his avowed goal of conquering England and spreading vampirism here. You'd think a servant who willingly came to him would be helpful for that. But no, because Renfield came to him truly willingly, wanted to enter freely and of his own accord.

Dracula likes the kind of person who enters freely and of their own accord... because they're alone in the wilderness with wolves at their back. He likes those who stay because doing otherwise would be their certain death. He likes those who don't want this (who struggle and struggle, who have an unbreakable will) and yet are forced by him into accepting anyway.

An unbreakable will who bends at his command - that's how Dracula saw Jonathan, and he loved him for it. Right up until the point he decided he was finished, and acted to break him once and for all anyway.

[dailyjameshunt]

To mark New Year's Day, here is a link to a strange little doco about James, from 2001. It features Niki, Murray Walker, Taormina Rieck, Bubbles Horsley, Lord Hesketh, Chris Jones, and Helen Dyson, so people who were genuinely close to James.

I watched it and made notes in real time, so I'd kind of committed to this post (and spent a fair bit of time on it) before I got to the segment where they show CCTV footage of James throwing hot coffee on a doorman in Doncaster and being arrested. They interviewed the doorman who was balanced and non-sensationalist, but tbh I don't love including the footage of the incident in a documentary about a man who isn't here to defend himself (although interviewing the doorman seems like good practice to me, victim first).

There is a lot of footage of Ronnie Peterson's crash and an interview with James about his experience of it, which wouldn't fly today.

It also leans heavily on the Hunt-as-a-brilliant-asshole-playboy narrative which is contradicted by everyone (except Murray) in the content of their interviews. There's no mention of his success and gifts as a commentator, nor of his activism. If you want to read some details of James Hunt as a more fully rounded person than his reductive and insulting "playboy" image, Cazzy has a brilliant post here which sums it up really well and I also recommend this one.

Aside: @cazzyf1 is the gold standard for classic F1 posts and especially for research.

Anyway, with those caveats, here are some highlights and my thoughts!

His teenage girlfriend, Taormina Rieck, seems absolutely beautiful and lovely

James around 11 minutes in giggling about Hesketh hiring him when no one else would, and playing hard to get. My heart.

There is a truly ludicrous song about Hesketh Racing with original 1970s footage partway through. It is so cringe I almost had to stop watching.

Frankenstein-esque footage of Hesketh bringing James to life. Wtf.

Murray gets to say a few nasty things about his old pal. My favourite is around 13.50 when he repeats a string of insults to add new ones each time. Oh, Murray.

Niki's eyes and smile talking about James around 23:33 - beyond adorable

James's overtake on Niki for the lead of the British Grand Prix in 76 is around 26:10 and it is GORGEOUS

There's a lovely moment where James's friend Chris Jones says that no one could blame Niki for bailing out in Fuji, directly followed by footage of one of Niki's team putting a very gentle arm around him as he walks away from the car (from about 28:15)

Niki's sweet little James smile makes a reappearance around 31:55. I melted. "I preferred to lose it to James."

From 33:00 onwards, lots on Ronnie Peterson's death. From 34:28 onwards is James's own account of it. I've never much liked that interview - I don't think a driver who had pulled his friend from a flaming car would be subjected to that today. There is also a LOT of crash footage so take care of yourselves if viewing.

This segment also includes Patrese and Murray Walker on James's treatment of Patrese after Ronnie's accident.

Murray concedes that James had an especially sensitive nature so was more affected by Ronnie's death and the general dangers of F1 than others.

Lots of discussion of James's depression from around 38 minutes in.

40:47 an actual photo of James's Light Green cock (trust me it's SFW)

41:30-ish, Niki recounts the famous lunch where James arrived with a puncture and couldn't pay for his lunch.

The doorman coffee incident is around 42:00-44:00

Thereafter there's a brief bit on Helen Dyson, who always seems lovely, and then it's mostly his death. Interestingly, he spent about four years at the end of his life with Helen Dyson, living pretty happily, being an involved dad, but that gets a disproportionately small share of the screentime. If I didn't know that, I'd assume they were just together a few months which isn't the case at all.

Niki's comments about James's death are at 47:20-47:40 - he calls James "a real friend" with obvious sincerity that's just heartbreaking, especially as Niki has said in later interviews (particularly his long interview with Graham Bensinger) that he doesn't consider himself to have friends.