#this is what happens when you only use photoshop for nearly a decade

[gruvu]

When you cannot join art fight this year because you’re working on your style and technique on a new art program and so far making even a sketch has taken hours of your life. Unable to actually do a full piece at this point because god is against you.

[milkplusvn]

Soundless FV: Rebuilding the Screens

Tip: You can get these same posts sent right to your e-mail by subscribing to the newsletter.

Today, I’ll show you the nitty-gritty of rebuilding the screens for the port!

What's in a Ren'Py project?

The code of Soundless is old. Very, very old. I have been working with Ren'Py for a decade now, ever since I was in middle school. I created Soundless’s Ren'Py project way back in 2016 according to some of the files. Maybe even before that—the oldest “last modified” date on an ancient type of Ren'Py file in the directory had 2016 as the year. That’s all I have to go off of, because moving data from PC to PC changed the creation date.

Before the new GUI template was launched with Ren'Py 7 in 2018, you were greeted with a selection of themes when you created a new project. They all had generally the same layout with tweaks to borders and elements like bars, such as a theme that looked digital and another theme that looked like it was drawn with marker. The ideal way to customize your screens back then, if you were an amateur, was to completely trash the whole default theme and create imagemaps.

For those unaware, an imagemap is a type of displayable that requires at least three different variations to work: the “ground state” version, the “idle state” version, and the “hover state” version. You would essentially create your entire screen in one image editor file, text and buttons and all, and save these different variations, then feed Ren'Py some numbers that corresponded to a bunch of rectangular spaces on the map. You would then tell Ren'Py that these rectangles are buttons/sliders from there.

That is how Soundless’s old menus were created. Just me, Photoshop 7 (yes, in 2016+), and painstakingly measured-out rectangle numbers.

This method is painful, even with Ren'Py’s built-in rectangle picker. But if I really wanted to, I could have just upscaled the old imagemaps and copied and pasted my code…except I did not want to do that.

I Needed To Change and Add Things Jesse

The old way just wasn’t viable anymore.

For one, Ren'Py’s modern screen code is just much less painful to use. You can add and manipulate elements on the fly if you just take the time to create and style various types of buttons and frames. It’s also much easier and faster to make any changes if your element isn’t hard-implemented into images. That screenshot up there doesn’t have a single bit of text that’s a part of a picture. Those are all typed out in the code file and rendered by the engine. This method allowed me to make tweaks to make the menus a little more player friendly, like making it very obvious that page 2 of the options screen is selected through better colors.

Another issue is the fact that I don’t have the .PSDs for the original imagemaps anymore! I have no idea where they went. And even if I did find them, I use the latest edition of Photoshop, so I’m not sure what would happen to the text’s appearance. I needed to add things like the accessibility options screen, and without those .PSDs there was no hope of doing it the old way.

There were, of course, slight downsides to this. I had to recreate the background images (mostly because of the missing .PSD issue), and they didn’t look quite the same because new Photoshop versions means a different way of processing the effects I once used. Since I also committed to reducing images as buttons as much as possible, the main menu buttons are slightly different as well.

A Special Mention Goes to the Save Menu

Like I said, the code for the original Soundless is really old and sad. The method used to make the save slot screenshots appear elsewhere on hover was long deprecated. I had to figure out a new way to do it all by myself, and it took me almost an hour, but I managed. I actually had the correct solution at one point, but because of what I can only assume was something being slightly off, it didn’t work at first…I nearly tore my hair out LOL. I’ll put up the solution I came up with on my personal blog (link) at a later time so that everyone can use it for themselves if you’d like to also have the save screenshot appear elsewhere on hover.

Though, to be fair to myself, if you gave this problem to the me of 5 years ago, they’d just go “I can’t do that, are you crazy?” and walk away.

That concludes this issue. Next issue, I’ll be talking about the new way Ren'Py parses the NVL text in Soundless, the differences from the old way, and how I got it to look (almost) just how it did before.

[callboxkat]

Just Your Average Ghost Hunt

Author’s note: I felt like writing a one-shot today, taking a break from my longer WIPs, and here’s the result! I hope you all enjoy.

Summary: Virgil has a YouTube channel where he talks about cryptids and conspiracy theories. Tonight, he sets out with his friend Roman on a ghost hunt. 

Warnings: ghosts, talk of death and murder, some crude humor, fear, Remus

Word Count: 1818

Writing Masterpost!

...

“You remembered the camera, right?”

“Wha—of course I remembered the camera! Come on, give me a little credit.”

“And it’s charged?”

Roman pouted at him, slinging his bag over his shoulder.

Virgil smirked, hopping out of the car. “Just checking.”

“It’s your camera, isn’t charging it your job?”

“Knowing you, you’d happily run down the battery before we even got here, with all those selfies you take.”

“That’s what my phone’s for,” Roman claimed, jutting out his chin. He slung the camera strap around his neck, double checking that it was secure.

“Oh, I see.”

“We’re not going to get in trouble for coming here, are we?” Roman asked, following after his friend and staring up the road.

“What, are you scared, Princey?”

“No, I just—”

“Because if you’re scared,” Virgil sighed dramatically, “we can go, I guess, but you have to be the one to tell Logan we still haven’t gotten his proof of ghosts. It’s your fault if he thinks we just couldn’t find it.”

Roman huffed. “What is it with you and proving to him that ghosts are real, anyway, Winnie the Boo? Isn’t talking about cryptids and conspiracies more your usual gig?”

Virgil raised an eyebrow. “Is that really the best nickname you can come up with? Wow, you really must be scared.”

“What, we’re on a ghost hunt, aren’t we? And don’t avoid the question!”

Virgil rolled his eyes, closing the car door. He took out a flashlight and switched it on, casting their surroundings in high relief. “I wasn’t, calm down. I just want to see the look on the dude’s face when we show him actual video of a ghost.”

The pair’s boots crunched on gravel, twigs, and assorted debris as they began the trek up the long-disused road towards their destination. “So,” Roman asked as they clambered over a fallen tree, “what are you going to do if we can’t find one?”

“I have Photoshop.”

“Well—then why are we even out here? Just photoshop yourself up a ghost and be done with it, Wail-E!”

“That nickname was even worse. And besides—” Virgil hopped down, reaching up to help Roman, whose jacket had gotten caught on a snapped branch— “this is way more fun.”

“Speak for yourself,” Roman grumbled, inspecting his coat for damage.

“Come on, it’s not that far now.” Virgil started forward, flashlight held high. Roman scrambled after, not about to be left behind.

“I don’t like this.” Roman peered around at the surrounding trees, whose shapes and shadows seemed to warp as they passed, reaching towards the pair like spindly arms ready to drag them into the dark.

“I didn’t ask you to come. I’ve done plenty of these without you.”

“You’ve done plenty of these with Janus,” Roman corrected. “In our friends’ houses. Not in the middle of nowhere.”

“I wasn’t going to put this off just because he’s got a stomach bug. It’s supposed to rain all next week.”

Roman swallowed. “And I wasn’t about to let you come to some old abandoned house alone.”

Virgil turned, putting a hand on his chest and grinning. “My hero. Now turn on the camera, I see the house up there.”

Roman squinted, and saw that, in fact, he could make out the shape of some kind of structure ahead. It looked like it was practically part of the forest now, trees grown around it and nearly obscuring the shape in the darkness.

“Welcome to Virgil and Roman’s final moments,” Roman said, turning on the camera slung around his neck, “documented for all those who want to see us torn apart by crazy woods people, or bears, or wolves, or, possibly, ghosts.”

“Very funny,” Virgil said.

“Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” Roman said. “I don’t know, set the scene.”

“Kind of hard to do that when you keep talking, isn’t it?”

Roman stuck his tongue out.

Virgil turned to face the camera. “My name is Virgil, and the lug behind the camera is my friend Roman. Tonight, we’ve got a treat. We’re visiting an abandoned house, deep in the woods.”

Roman silently shook his head, amused at the exaggeration. The nearest major road was only a ten minute walk away.

“Legend says it’s been abandoned since the 50’s—”

“Is Wikipedia where you heard this “legend”?”

“Shut up, Princey. And no, it’s not, actually. Will you let me continue?”

Roman held up his free hand in surrender.

“Legend says it’s been abandoned since the 50’s, but no one had been able to stay in the house for more than a few months at a time even before that. Apparently, there was a murder here decades earlier, and the ghost of that person has haunted the place ever since.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Roman and I are here to get the first solid proof of this ghost, and share its existence with all of you.”

“I’m sure YouTube will love it.”

“I am so glad I can edit out all your dumb comments.”

“You know you love them, Count Woe-laf.”

“You’re going to make me wish I’d waited to come with J, I just know it. Just make sure you’re holding the camera steady.”

Roman smiled innocently, then turned the camera up to focus on the house.

“We’ve just arrived,” Virgil said, “And are about to head inside. Wish us luck.”

“Virge, you know this isn’t live, right?”

“Yes, Roman, I know that,” Virgil said. “Let me put in a little flair, okay?”

“I must be rubbing off on you.”

Virgil ignored this comment and approached the house, peering around the crumbling façade of the dilapidated structure. “It looks like the front door is padlocked, but this window is broken. We can put one of our jackets on the sill and climb in.”

“Wait—whose jacket, Virge?” Roman stepped back, clutching his own protectively.

“Oh, relax,” he said, rolling his eyes as he shrugged off his own jacket.. “Some of us thought better than to bring our favorite jacket on a ghost hunt.”

“If that roof collapses on us, I don’t want cheap plastic all that’s protecting me.”

“I’m pretty sure a jacket won’t save you if the roof collapses; but go off, I guess.”

“Thank you; I will.”

Virgil laid his jacket over the window sill and hopped inside. Roman climbed in after him, turning on his own smaller flashlight and looking around warily.

Dust motes hung in the air, which smelled of mildew. A few pieces of furniture remained in the house, each covered in a sheet that might have once been white. The space had not been spared from the elements. Weeds even grew between some of the rotting floor boards.

“I know this is where I’d want to live, if I were a ghost,” Roman commented dryly, eyeing a grimy puddle that had collected in a fold of one of the sheets.

“Ghosts are tied to places where they died, or to objects that were important to them. Or their body. Odds are, this ghost has no choice but to live here.”

Roman sighed. “Okay, anyway. How are we proving there’s a ghost here?”

Virgil slung off his backpack and pulled out a wooden board. “We’ll start with this. It’s a Ouija board.”

“A Ouija board?”

“Yeah. It channels spiritual energy and lets them talk to us.”

“I know what a Ouija board is,” Roman sighed. “I was just… I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you brought one.”

Virgil sat down on the floor, beginning to set up the board. “Set up the tripod, so it can see both of us and the board. You sit across from me.”

Roman did as Virgil asked, then sat across from him. Each perched his fingertips atop the small, triangular piece of wood with a hole in it, which Virgil said was called a planchette. They slowly brought the planchette around in a circle, with Virgil narrating what they were doing and why, probably for the less supernatural-versed Youtube fans. Then Virgil said some mumbo-jumbo words about positive energy and communication, whatever; and then they finally they got to the questions.

“Is there a spirit with us in this house?”

There was a long pause, long enough that Roman started to think that maybe Logan had the right idea, before the planchette slid over to Yes.

That was you, wasn’t it, Virgil?

Virgil was trying to hide a grin. “How many spirits are here with us?”

1.

“What’s your name?”

The planchette slid over to B.

“Brandon? Bethany? Bella? Benjamin?”

U.

“…Buford? Bucky?”

T.

Virgil frowned. “Butler?”

T.

Roman bit his lip to keep from laughing.

S.

“Roman, stop messing with the planchette,” Virgil snapped.

Roman made an indignant noise. “I didn’t!”

“Spirit, I apologize for my friend. What is your name?”

B-U-T-T-H-O-L-E.

“Maybe it doesn’t want to tell us,” Roman said, shrugging and trying not to laugh.

Virgil was starting to look exasperated.

“Maybe it’s a kid. How old are you?” he asked.

6.

“You’re six years old?” Virgil’s mouth opened. “That’s so y…”

The planchette moved again, interrupting him.

9.

“69,” Virgil repeated. “Okay, maybe not a kid.” He glanced at Roman, looking suspicious, as if wondering whether he’d changed the results again. Roman pouted at him in response.

“How did you die?”

“Wow, that’s pretty personal, isn’t it?” Roman asked. “Ask it how it’s doing, at least.”

Virgil sighed. “They don’t usually stick around for long, Roman.” Then seemingly deciding to humor him, he asked, “Spirit, how are you?”

Yes.

“Well, that’s… an answer,” Roman said. Maybe the Ouija board was broken or something.

“How did you die?” Virgil asked, repeating his earlier question.

The planchette hovered for a few seconds.

K-N-I-V-E-S.

Roman swallowed.

“Oh.” Virgil shifted. “What year did that happen?”

4-2-0.

“Roman, seriously, stop.”

“I swear, it’s not me.”

“Fine, then let’s try again. What year did you die?”

D-E-A-D.

“Yes, you died,” Virgil said. “Do you remember what year that happened?”

Y-O-U A-R-E D-E-A-D.

Roman’s eyes widened. Virgil wouldn’t have done that, would he? “Um, Virge? I think maybe we should leave.”

“Are… are you a good spirit?” Virgil asked, his voice uncertain.

No.

The lights above flared into life, far, far too bright, like small suns. They shouldn’t have worked, even if they were still connected to power, or had the bulbs replaced in the past decade. Wind rushed through the room from an invisible source, the temperature dropping.

POP!

The light above them burst, sending sparks falling around them. The rest of the lights followed in rapid succession. The tripod fell over as if pushed, crashing to the ground between the pair and sending up a cloud of dust.

Roman and Virgil screamed, scrambling for the exit, pushing each other through the window, back into the woods. They raced back towards the car, both the camera and Virgil’s jacket forgotten.

Hysterical, cackling laughter followed them through the trees.

[purplesurveys]

816

Gonna do a before and after of one of the first surveys I took when I was FOURTEEN. Fucking wild that I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade. Kinda my way of celebrating the fact that I’ve just been reunited with my old blog, which Tumblr has apparently changed the URL of. Baffled by the move but still stoked, and @a-zebra-is-a-striped-horse​ is absolutely the coolest person for being able to find it haha. Let’s gooooo 1. Are you registered to vote? No. I still have 3 years to go. < That’s so precious. I’ve been a voter for four years now. I registered the second I turned 18 and I remember being very excited to make it to the presidential elections because only a handful of people from my high school batch were 18 by the time of the elections. 2. When days go by, do you cross them off on the calendar? Only when I’m counting down for something. < This still sounds like something I would do, but I don’t really get to anymore because I have digital calendars on my phone and laptop now. 3. Are you currently counting down to something? If so, what? Summer vacation! 4 days left! < Again, so cute. There’s no countdown that exists because I honestly don’t know when it will be okay enough to go out like normal again, but I am waiting for Covid to go away or at least for a vaccine to be available.

No #4? 5. Ever got injured at work? What happened? Nope. < I sprained my ankle at one of the parking lots in school, while walking to my car. Worst thing was it happened in front of an ongoing rally, and I heard their chants slightly falter when they saw me fall. I tried to play it cool, but my foot clearly felt fucked and someone had to hold my arm as I hopped to my car.

6. What color is your roof? Brown. < Stop pretending like you have a roof, Robyn. The house has always had a rooftop.

7. Do you use MySpace or Facebook more? Neither. < I was still far too young when MySpace peaked so I never did get to participate in its glory days. I definitely use Facebook a lot more, then and now. 8. Last time you sharpened a pencil? When I took a diagnostic test last Monday. < Sometime in 2019 when I was still heavily into coloring and I bought several coloring books and a pack of coloring pencils. I loved coloring and wish I kept it up, but it was just a bit of a hassle for me to sharpen every ten minutes or so. 9. List all the people in your phone under T: Zero, zilch, nada. No phone. < A high school batchmade named Dani, a college colleague named Kate, and a couple of aunts and uncles whose contacts start with Tito and Tita.  10. How old were you when you got into text messaging? I once had a super obsessive text problem when I was 11, I think? < That would be the first time I got hooked with texting, but I got my first phone when I was 7 and was already texting by then. Mostly my parents and grandpa, but still. 11. Do you pay rent to your parents? No. < No. They’ve already told me they won’t pressure me to do so either, but out of gratefulness for taking care of me for 20+ years I have absolutely no problems covering some of the bills when the time comes. 12. What do you think of Obama’s new healthcare bill? I don’t know a lot about it. < Honestly, still same. That’s another country’s politics altogether and we have enough issues in our own nation as it is. I do pay attention to US issues that are more universal like LGBT issues, police brutality against black people, Trump as a person...but not the more in-depth ones like healthcare or student debt. 13. How many icons are on your desktop? 34. < Exactly half of that. 14. Do you spit or swallow? Get outta here!!! < Still can’t relate. 15. Ever wrote something on a bathroom wall? Nope. < Eugh no, public bathrooms are so nasty. I don’t usually touch anything in them other than the faucet. I’ve written on other things though, like the desks in school. 16. What’s your definition of a slut? Uh. < Someone who often has casual sex with a lot of people, is how I understand it. 17. If you use the word “slut”, do you apply it to men who do the same thing as what you listed above? Nah. < I don’t really use the word. 18. Do you dye eggs for Easter? I did once, in a children’s party. < Yeah, just that one time at my second cousins’ place when they were in the mood to paint on eggs and invited me and my siblings. 19. What did you do on the first day of spring? Never experienced spring. < We don’t have spring. 23. Are you currently crushing on anyone? No. < Yes. 24. What color hair did the last person you kissed have? NKSB. < LOOOOOOOOOL I spent like two minutes puzzling over this like who tf is NKSB??? Eventually realized this just meant ‘Never Kissed Since Birth’ oh my god 14 year old Robyn you were SO uncool. Anyway, her hair is black. 25. Do you stand up to say the pledge in school? We don’t have a school pledge, but we do recite our country’s pledge and yes, we stand up every time we say it. < Not anymore in university. Everyone just kinda does their own thing in college and we’re never gathered as one student body for anything, except for graduation. 26. Do you like your eye color? God no. It’s so boring. < I mean yeah it is a bit boring, but we kinda have no choice. Unless you go to West Asia which is nearing Europe as it is, nearly all Asians have brown eyes and black hair. 27. What brand of orange juice did you last drink? Zesto. < That’s the only brand of orange juice I’m okay with drinking, even eight years later. 28. Pens or pencils? Pens. < Still feel the same. 29. Last skirt you wore and why? My school skirt, because I have to go to school. < Omfg again, this is so precious. The last one I wore was my denim skirt, but it’s also been a while since I wore that because one of its buttons has since popped out and I never got around to having it fixed, leaving me with no skirts. 30. Last time you wore heels, what kind were they? A prom I went to. I actually have no idea what kind of heels they are so I’m just gonna say old-women heels. < They were stilettos, you dumbass. I also wore a pair of stilettos the last time I wore heels. They’re my favorite kind, so. 31. Shoes you wear the most? My Keds. < My pair of Onitsuka Tiger sneakers. . 32. Favorite quote at the moment? “YOU DUMB BITCH! I’M NOT HOLDING A MICROPHONE! ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?” - CM Punk < Holy crap, I do not remember this quote at all and had to look it up on YouTube and – no regrets. Watching it made so many memories come rushing back lmao that clip is hilarious; Punk is the greatest. Right now I don’t really have a favorite quote. 33. What was the last magazine article you read about? I forgot. < It’s from the website version of the magazine, but the last article I read covered a viral Facebook post wherein someone had photoshopped the faces of The Big Bang Theory boys onto the traditional graduation photos of my university out of boredom. Article is here for anyone who wants to see how well the pictures turned out lol. 34. What do you think about communism? I don’t know enough about it. < I completely support the progressive youth orgs, especially the ones in my university, that are aligned with communist, socialist, and Marxist ideals. They speak the truth more than any other orgs, so I don’t shy away from defending them or promoting their ideals, especially on social media, even if it puts me in danger. 35. Are you planning on going to college? If so, which one? Of course. I want to study in Ateneo. < CAN WE CANCEL 14 YEAR OLD ROBYN?????? What a disappointment omg. You were always meant to be in UP, you weirdo. 22 year old me takes that appalling statement back lol I can’t even begin to imagine spending my college years in Ateneo. 36. What’s your favorite flower? Ugh I hate flowers. < Peonies and roses. 37. What’s the nearest beach? I think it’s like…600 km away + a 2 hour boat ride. < No it is not. There’s a beach I come back to in Nasugbu and that’s only 100 km away. 38. Ever been to Florida? Nope. < Still nope. 39. How old is your brother’s best friend? He’s probably 9 as my brother’s 9. < I don’t know if he has one and I don’t really care anymore. 40. What type of car did you ride in last? A Kia van. < Sksksksks this was referring to the school bus I used to ride omg :( I was last in our Vitara, when I had to go to the hospital to get some tests done back when I still had a pesky fever. 42. Are you excited for summer 2013? Fuck yeah. < I honestly don’t remember how it ultimately went, but apparently I was excited for it so that answers the question. 43. What class were your parents (ex. class of ‘75)? They’re the same age so batch ‘89. < There we go. 44. Are you in debt right now? For what? No. < Kinda-ish? I promised my sister I’d pay her for helping me out with iMovie (I wanted to make Gab a video for her birthday, but had never done it before), but I haven’t had the chance to do it since I only have big bills at the moment. She’s asking for ₱200 but I only have ₱1000s in my wallet, so I can’t pay her for now. 45. If you’re old enough, do you have a credit card? If you’re not old enough, do you want one when you’re older? I definitely want one. < Yep, still want one. Though I’ll need a crash course on how to use it because my parents never really taught me how cards work. 46. What color is your phone? No phone. < Apple calls it space gray but it’s really just black. 47. Have you ever had someone read a text message they weren’t supposed to see? Yes. < Yes. That person was me, and I accidentally read a text from my dad meant for only my mom when I was 5 because I had stubborn fingers that would click on anything. 48. What’s the minimum age you think someone should have a cell phone at? 10. < Holy cow, that’s a nope for me. I’d say 12 or 13. 49. Would you ever work night crew? Sure. < Yes. I’ve seen my girlfriend’s mom do it and honestly I find it pretty badass, especially because while everyone is stuck in traffic trying to get to work by 9 AM, she’s cruising down the highway on the opposite lane with no problem, to be home by 9 hahaha. 50. How old is the last person you texted? 41. < 22.

[fromthedust]

Teresa Crowder - Reliquary: Human Heart/Apocalyptic Heartbeat - acrylic, cloth, paper, metal on canvas - 48" x 36" - Today we find ourselves in the middle of a climate disaster largely of our own making. But there are answers and there are solutions. And we can find them in the fossils and bones of the past and by listening carefully to the truths of our ancestors. As artists, it is our job to foster the change we seek to inspire through our work and to illuminate the moments of awe that drive us into our studios in the first place.

Marcee Musgrove - Red Sky at Night, Fracking - 12"x 12" acrylic on canvas - Hydraulic Fracturing is a violation of the stability of our lands and the delicate balance of the tectonic plates that provide the structure for human existence. The aggressive nature of Hydraulic Fracturing is personally a big conscious concern.  With current technologies, we have many ways of "searching" for treasure that are less violent to our beloved planet. The treasure under our soil is vast and important, it is something we can work with and is not to be wantonly taken for the profit of a few. Water and air pollution are the biggest risks to human health from hydraulic fracturing.

Dedra Morris - The Futile Attempts to Manufacture a Grave New World - wood, polymer clay, ceramic, found objects - 12" x 12" - Thinking about global warming and humankind's toxic imprint on the planet can be overwhelming. Despite all of the environmental changes that need to be made, the planet still has to support nearly 8 billion people. Earth does not need our species, but our species is completely dependent on Earth for survival. Earth will survive the human race, the question is: will the human race survive?

Susan Lightcap - Winter Mother - mixed media - My work reflects my interest in the divine feminine. I find beauty in cast offs, the bits of paper, metal, wood, textiles, and other materials that reveal everyday life: what people use and throw away. Incorporating  found materials and objects, the pieces demonstrate a reiteration of consumption and waste that have contributed significantly to global warming in the last several decades. My work honors the path, chosen or inadvertent, that we travel, noting events and circumstances that mark the way, bringing a sense of order and comfort to stand against the chaos of the outer world.

Elyse Defoor - Chaos, a self portrait - photographic print - 36"x 29" - Chaos began as a piece created in response to witnessing the misery and destruction after Katrina. It is alarming to think of what has occurred during the past fifteen years since Katrina— the increased number and intensity of storms, uncontrolled wildfires, the destruction of plant and animal life, above and below the ocean— the effects of global warming has brought chaos to our civilization. I pulled it from storage, tore off all the additional layers that hid its core and focused on mark-making as my response to global warming. We cannot stand idly by. The future may not be completely in our hands, but to do nothing to help safeguard our planet and bring about change, is a true crime.

Paula Eubanks - Plum Rocker - digitally manipulated photograph printed on rag paper - 26" x 19" - When you live on the coast it is impossible not to notice sea level rise. I’ve watched these islands for well over half a century now and recently I read about sea level rise and climate change. The literature has changed a lot, from “this is what’s happening” to “this is how we can deal with it.” I blend images of historic architecture with images of water, beaches, clouds and sky using Photoshop. These surreal images are both frightening and serene out of respect for our beautiful Earth or Mama Gaia, as I prefer to call her.

Melinda Crider - Mother Earth - multi- fired terra cotta with underglazes, metal and plastic - 15" x 9" x 8" - Mother Earth is my expression of my outrage concerning Global Warming and what is happening to our planet Earth.  She is wearing her crown with plastic flags and the facial features represent her sadness for man’s destruction and the melting ice caps.

Callahan McDonough - Women Hold up The Sky - 36" x 46" - Arches paper, mixed media   I am the Woman who holds up the sky The rainbow runs through my eyes. The sun makes a path to my womb. My thoughts are in the shape of clouds.                                                ~ Ute Indian

Maureen Burns-Bowie - Indra’s Net: Each Jewel of Life Reflects Every Other Jewel - porcelain, glaze, handmade Kozo paper, gold leaf - 24” x 12” x 7” - Our lack of balance in the world is the result of losing touch with nature and our own core, forgetting our one-ness with other human beings and the world around us. Re-connecting with nature, spirit and humanity – developing a sense of unity with all life, is the only solution to looming climate devastation. Desecration of the environment is forgetting that any crime against nature is a crime against ourselves.

Molly Cusick - What Glacier? - photograph on metal - 16' x 20' - This past summer I hiked through Glacier National Park in hopes of catching a glimpse of the disappearing glaciers before they were completely gone.  When I saw a picture from the 1930s of the glacier I visited in July and what it currently looks like, I was shocked.  Massive walls of ice are replaced with a small pond and some barely covered ground.   Humanity has a responsibility to make widespread changes or this planet will soon be uninhabitable for most life forms.

One Earth / One Chance

for more images: http://www.wcaga.org/page/global-warming

[foreverfallen]

MUNDAY.

GENERAL

Name: Megan Birthday: September 20th Sexual Orientation: ??? Dad’s Name: Mark  School Status: Working on getting my Master’s

YES/NO

Drink?: Yes, on occasion Smoke?: No Eat cake?: Yes Believe in True Love?: Sure? Why not? I don’t know if everyone has it, but for some people, I think they can find their loves.  Afraid of the dark?: I kinda like the dark. Not the pitch blackness of nothingness, mind you, but just... the dark? Yeah.  Cat person: Definitely much more than a dog person; cats are great. 

FAVORITES

Shampoo: I don’t know if I have a fave; what I use came from the salon and it works and that’s all that matters hah.  Disney song: Oh probably... Be Prepared from The Lion King. I love that song so much!  Actress: I have ones I like and enjoy, but I don’t know if I have any particular faves in that regard. Person: Probably my mom. I love her to pieces.  Type of Weather: Fall and Winter. I love the dark and rainy days, the cloudy overcast skies, the windy breezes--I hate spring and summer with a passion, all the bugs and the hot sunny days... ugh.  Color: Black, green, silver, those sorts of colors.  90s Sitcom: I don’t know... Too many to choose from. 

QUESTIONS

What is your special talent/skill as a roleplayer? I like to think it’s my writing itself. I mean, I don’t format anything fancy, and my photoshop skills are just... what they are, but at least as far as Lucifer here is concerned, it’s a character and muse I’ve been with for so long, I understand so well-- they’re almost a literal part of me, and I’ve been writing in one way or another all my life, so... I don’t know. I just like to think that/tell myself that, for a confidence boost :)  

What is your favorite type of roleplay genre, and why? Anyone who writes with me will know I’m easily a magnet for angst, for hurt/comfort, for anything where I will torture this muse of mine. I feel doing so only makes us understand them that much more, and hurting them here makes me love them in my heart all the more. (I know, I’m weird. I show my love for Luci here by torturing him in writing, yes.) It’s very hard for me to maintain something purely fluffy, without any hints of trauma or angst... 

Why did you pick your muse? Um... you should have asked me that nearly a decade ago when I did? hah. I don’t actually remember why I first decided to write Lucifer, to be honest, but it was when he was first coming to SPN--seasons 4 (talked about) and 5 (actually there). Then he sort of dimmed down a little, and while he was still there, I didn’t roleplay him as actively for a lot of years in between. Seeing him again on the show, I guess, is what brought him roaring back to life, which led me back to finding my old blogs and rereading so many headcanons and being all “MY PRECIOUS!” about this muse. Needless to say, he’s my own creation pretty much, with just inspiration in a lot of cases taken from SPN by now.  

If you could write any other muse - but know you don’t have the muse for him/her - who would it be? Are we talking the same fandom or are we talking just in general? Just in general, I’d love to try my hand at some of the Dominion characters; rewatching the show has reawakened my love for it again (it doesn’t help that the dash does that too), and as far as the same fandom goes... Probably would be the likes of Dean. I never could get his voice down right.  

What is one thing you think you need to work on for a partner? I don’t know... Um... Probably reply speed in some cases? I mean, a lot of my partners are very understanding but I still feel bad making them wait. Especially when one or two threads may take focus and priority and then I’m like “I’m working back and forth on these and I’ve had these other replies/asks for months” and I feel bad... 

What would be your warning label to other roleplayers? Will probably give you feelings through the torture of muses. 

What is your favorite episode/scene of your muse? Season 5 in general, but damn, the scene in the hotel in the episode, “Hammer of the Gods” with Gabriel? The amount of times I watched that-- Kills me every time to this day. Oh, and probably second place would be conversing with Michael in “Swan Song” as I wish we’d gotten more of Michael & Lucifer... 

What crack!ships do you have for your muse? I don’t think I have any? I mean, when I happen to ship with this character, I ship with him; it’s not crack at all ;) 

What is your senpai blog for someone who plays the same muse as you? I tend not to follow a lot of other Lucifer blogs. Mainly because I’m intimidated, first off, and secondly, they’re all so awesome in their own way, and I have a hard time not judging myself against others, and then depression and anxiety kick in and... yeah. Mind’s a vicious place. 

tagged by: @fracturedsword tagging: @ anyone who wants to

[just-breathe-fight-cf]

FIVE FEET APART

Rachael Lippincott with Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis

Copyright 2018 / Simon & Schuster BFYR

Summary: Seventeen-year-olds Stella and Will, both suffering from cystic fibrosis, realize the only way to stay alive is to stay apart, but their love for each other is slowly pushing the boundaries of physical and emotional safety.

For Alyson

--R. L.

We dedicate this book, and the movie, to all the patients, families, medical staff, and loved ones who bravely fight the battle against cystic fibrosis every day. We hope the story of Stella and Will helps to bring awareness to this disease and, one day, a cure.

--M. D. and T. I.

________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER 1 - STELLA

     I trace the outline of my sister’s drawing, lungs molded from a sea of flowers. Petals burst out from every edge of the twin ovals in soft pinks, deep whites, even heather blues, but somehow each one has a uniqueness, a vibrancy that feels like it’ll bloom forever. Some of the flowers haven’t blossomed yet, and I can feel the promise of life just waiting to unfold from the tiny buds under the weight of my finger. Those are my favorites.

I wonder, all too often, what it would be like to have lungs this healthy. This alive. I take a deep breath, feeling the air fight its way in and out of my body.

Slipping off the last petal of the last flower, my hand sinks, fingers dragging through the background of stars, each pinpoint of light that Abby drew a separate attempt to capture infinity. I clear my throat, pulling my hand away, and lean over to grab a picture of us from off my bed. Identical smiles peek out from underneath thick wool scarves, the holiday lights at the park down the street twinkling above our heads just like the stars in her drawing.

There was something magical about it. The soft glow of the lampposts in the park, the white snow clinging to the branches of the trees, the quiet stillness of it all. We nearly froze our butts off for that picture last year, but it was our tradition. Me and Abby, braving the cold to go see the holiday lights together.

This photo always makes me remember that feeling. The feeling of going on an adventure with my sister, just the two of, us, the world expanding like an open book.

I take a thumbtack and hang the picture next to the drawing before sitting down on my bed and grabbing my pocket notebook and pencil off my bedside table. My eyes travel down the long to-do list I made for myself this morning, starting with “#1: Plan to-do list,” which I’ve already put a satisfying line through, and going all the way down to “#22: Contemplate the afterlife.”

Number 22 was probably just a little ambitious for a Friday afternoon, but at least for now I can cross off number 17, “Decorate walls.” I look around the formerly stark room I’ve spent the better part of the morning making my own, once again, the wall now filled with the artwork Abby’s given me through the years, bits of color and life jumping out from clinical white walls, each once a product of a different trip to the hospital.

Me with an IV drip in my arm, the bag bursting with butterflies of different shapes and colors and sizes. Me wearing a nose cannula, the cable twisting to form an infinity sign. Me with my nebulizer, the vapor pouring out of it forming a cloudy halo. Then there’s the most delicate one, a faded tornado of stars that she drew my very first time here.

It’s not as polished as her later stuff, but somehow that make me like it more.

And right underneath all that vibrancy is…my pile of medical equipment, sitting right next to a hideous green faux-leather hospital chair that comes standard for every room here at Saint Grace’s. I eye the empty IV pole warily, knowing my first of many rounds of antibiotics over the next month is exactly and hour and nine minutes away. Lucky me.

“Here it is!” a voice calls from just outside my room. I look up as the door slowly creaks open and two familiar faces appear in the small crack of the doorway. Camila and Mya have visited me here a million times in the past decade, and they still can’t get from the lobby to my room without asking every person in the building for directions.

“Wrong room,” I say, grinning as a look of pure relief washes over them.

Mya laughs, pushing the door open the rest of the way. “It honestly could’ve been. This place is still a freaking maze.”

“Are you guys excited?” I say, hopping up to give them both hugs.

Camila pulls away to look at me, pouting, her dark-brown hair practically drooping along with her. “Second trip in a row without you.”

It’s true. This isn’t the first time my cystic fibrosis has taken me out of the running for some class trip or sunny vacation or school event. About 70 percent of the time, things are pretty normal for me. I go to school, I hang out with Camila and Mya, I work on my app. I just do it all with low-functioning lungs. But for the remaining 30 percent of my time, CF controls my life. Meaning when I need to return to the hospital for a tune-up, I miss out on things like a class trip to the art museum or now our senior trip to Cabo.

This particular tune-up just happens to be centered around the fact that I need to be pumped with antibiotics to finally get rid of a sore throat and a fever that won’t go away.

That, and my lung function is tanking.

Mya plunks down on my bed, sighing dramatically as she lies back. “It’s only two weeks. Are you sure you can’t come? It’s our senior trip, Stella!”

“I’m sure,” I say firmly, and they know I mean it. We’ve been friends since middle school, and they know by now that when it comes to plans, my CF gets the final say.

It’s not like I don’t want to go. It’s just, quite literally, a matter of life or death. I can’t go off to Cabo, or anywhere for that matter, and risk not coming back. I can’t do that to my parents. Not now.

“You were the head of the planning committee this year, though! Can’t you get them to move your treatments? We don’t want you to be stuck here,” Camila says, gesturing to the hospital room I so carefully decorated.

I shake my head. “We still have spring break together! And I haven’t missed a spring break ‘Besties Weekend’ since eighth grade, when I got that cold!” I say, smiling hopefully and looking back and forth between Camila and Mya. Neither of them returns my smile, though, and both opt to continue looking like I killed their family pets.

I notice they’re both holding the bags of bathing suits I told them to bring, so I grab Camila’s out of her hand in a desperate attempt to change the subject. “Ooh, suit options! We have to pick out the best ones!” Since I’m not going to be basking in the warm Cabo sun in a bathing suit of my choice, I figure I can at least live a little vicariously through my friends by picking out theirs with them.

This perks them both up. We eagerly dump their bags out on my bed, creating a mishmash of florals and polka dots and fluorescents.

I scan Camila’s pile of bathing suits, grabbing a red one that falls somewhere between a bikini bottom and a single piece of thread, which I know without a doubt is a hand-me-down from her older sister, Megan.

I toss it to her. “This one. It’s very you.”

Her eyes widen, and she holds it up to her waist, fixing her wire-frame glasses in surprise. “I mean, the tan lines would be pretty great--“

“Camila,” I say, grabbing a white-and-blue-striped bikini that I can tell will fit her like a glove. “I’m kidding. This one’s perfect.”

She looks relieved, grabbing the bikini from me. I turn my attention to Mya’s pile, but she’s busy texting away from the green hospital chair in the corner, a big smile plastered on her face.

I dig out a one-piece that she’s had since swim class in sixth grade, holding it up to her with a smirk. “How’s this, Mya?”

“Love it! Looks great!” she says, typing furiously.

Camila snorts, putting her suits back in the bag and giving me a sly smile. “Mason and Brooke called it quits,” she says in explanation.

“Oh my god. They did not!” I say. This is news. Amazing news.

Well, not for Brooke. But Mya has been crushing on Mason since Mrs. Wilson’s English class sophomore year, so this trip is her chance to finally make a move.

It bums me out I won’t be there to help her make a killer ten-step “Whirlwind Cabo Romance with Mason” plan.

Mya puts her phone away and shrugs casually, standing and pretending to look at some of the artwork on the walls. “No big deal. We’re going to meet him and Taylor at the airport tomorrow morning.”

I give her a look and she breaks out into a huge smile. “Okay, it’s a little bit of a big deal!”

We all squeal with excitement, and I hold up an adorable polka-dot one-piece that is super vintage, and right up her alley. She nods, grabbing it and holding it up to her body. “I was totally hoping you’d pick this one.”

I look over to see Camila glancing at her watch nervously, which is no surprise. She’s a champion procrastinator and probably hasn’t packed a single thing for Cabo yet.

Besides the bikini, of course.

She sees me notice her checking her watch and grins sheepishly. “I still need to buy a beach towel for tomorrow.”

Classic Camila.

I stand up, my heart sinking in my chest at the thought of them leaving, but I don’t want to hold them up. “You guys have to get going, then! Your plane is at, like, the ass crack of dawn tomorrow.”

Mya looks around the room sadly while Camila twists her bag of suits dejectedly around her hand. The two of them are making this even harder that I thought it would be. I swallow the guilt and annoyance that come bubbling up. It’s not like they’re the ones missing their senior trip to Cabo. At least they’ll be together.

I give them both big smiles, practically pulling them to the door with me. My cheeks hurt from all this fake positivity, but I don’t want to ruin it for them.

“We’ll send you a bunch of pictures, okay?” Camila says, giving me a hug.

“You’d better! Photoshop me into a few,” I say to Mya, who is a wizard at Adobe. “You won’t even know I wasn’t there!”

They linger in the doorway, and I give them an exaggerated eye roll, playfully shoving them out into the hallway. “Get outta here. Go have a great trip.”

“Love you, Stella!” they call as they walk down the hallway. I watch them go, waving until Mya’s bouncing curls are completely out of sight, suddenly wanting nothing more than to be walking out with them, off to pack instead of unpack.

My smile fades as I close the door and see the old family pictures pinned carefully to the back of my door.

It was taken a few summers ago on the front porch of our house during a Fourth of July barbecue. Me, Abby, Mom, and Dad, goofy smiles on all our faces as the camera captures the moment. I feel a swell of homesickness as I hear the sound of the worn, rickety wood of that front step, creaking underneath us as we laugh and get close for the picture. I miss that feeling. All of us together, happy and healthy. For the most part.

This isn’t helping. Singing, I pull myself away, looking over at the medicine cart.

In all honesty, I like it here. It’s been my home away from home since I was six, so I usually don’t mind coming. I get my treatments, I take my medicine, I drink my body weight in milk shakes, I get to see Barb and Julie, I leave until my next flare-up. Simple as that. But this time I feel anxious, restless even. Because instead of just wanting to get healthy, I need to get healthy. For my parent’s sake.

Because they’ve gone and messed up everything by getting divorced. And after losing each other, they won’t be able to handle losing me, too. I know it.

If I can get better, maybe…

One step at a time. I head over to the wall oxygen, double-checking the flowmeter is set properly, and listen for the steady hiss of the oxygen coming out of it before I pull the tube around my ears and slide the prongs of the cannula into my nose. Sighing, I sink down onto the familiarly uncomfortable hospital mattress, and take a deep breath.

I reach for my pocket notebook to read the next thing on my to-do list and keep myself preoccupied-- “#18: Record a video.”

I grab my pencil and bite it thoughtfully as I stare at the words I wrote earlier. Oddly enough, contemplating the afterlife seems easier right now.

But the list is the list, so, exhaling, I reach over to my bedside table to get my laptop, sitting cross-legged on the new floral comforter I picked out yesterday at Target while Camila and Mya were buying clothes for Cabo. I didn’t even need the comforter, but they were so enthusiastic in helping my pick something out for my trip to the hospital, I felt bad not getting it. At least it sort of matches my walls now, bright and vibrant and colorful.

I drum my fingers anxiously on the keyboard, and squint at my reflection in the screen while my computer starts up. I frown at the mess of long brown hair and try to smooth it down, running my fingers through it over and over. Frustrated, I pull my hair tie off my wrist and resort to a messy bun in an attempt to look halfway decent for this video. I grab my copy of Java Coding for Android Phones off my bedside table and put my laptop on top of it, so I don’t show some serious under chin, and can have a shot that’s remotely flattering.

Logging on to my YouTube Live account, I adjust the webcam, making sure you can see Abby’s lung drawing directly behind me.

It’s the perfect backdrop.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, hearing the familiar wheeze of my lungs trying desperately to fill with air through the sea of mucus. Exhaling slowly, I slap a big Hallmark-greeting-card smile on my face before opening my eyes and pressing the enter key to go live.

“Hey guys. Is everyone having a good Black Friday? I waited for snow that never came!”

I glance into the corner of my screen as I turn the camera toward the hospital window, the sky a cloudy gray, the trees on the other side of the glass completely barren. I smile as my livestream count goes steadily past 1K, a fraction of the 23,940 YouTube subscribers who tune in to see how my battle with cystic fibrosis is going.

“So, I could be getting ready to go on a plane to Cabo for my school’s senior trip, but instead I’ll be spending this holiday at my home away from home, thanks to a mild sore throat.”

Plus, a raging fever. I think back to when I got my temperature taken on intake this morning, the flashing numbers on the thermometer blaring out a strong 102. I don’t want to mention it in the video, though, because my parents will definitely be watching this later.

As far as they know, I just have a nagging cold.

“Who needs two whole weeks of sunshine and blue skies and beaches when you can have a month of luxury right in your own backyard?”

I rattle off the amenities, counting them on my fingers. “Let’s see. I’ve got a full-time concierge, unlimited chocolate pudding, and laundry services. Oh, and Barb talked Dr. Hamid into letting me keep all my meds and treatments in my room this time! Check it out!”

I turn the webcam to the pile of medical equipment and then to the medicine cart next to me, which I’ve already perfectly organized into alphabetical and chronological order by the scheduled dosage time I plugged into the app I made. It’s finally ready for a test run!

That was number 14 on today’s to-do list, and I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.

My computer dings as comments begin rolling in. I see one mentioning Barb’s name with some heart emoji’s. She’s a crowd favorite just as much as she’s my favorite. Ever since I first came to the hospital more than ten years ago, she’s been the respiratory therapist here, slipping candy to me and the other CFers, like my partner in crime Poe. She holds our hand through even the most bone-crushing grips of pain like it’s nothing.

I’ve been making YouTube videos for about half that time to raise awareness about cystic fibrosis. Through the years more people that I could have ever imagined began following my surgeries and my treatments and my visits to Saint Grace’s, sticking with me through my awkward braces phase and everything.

“My lung function is down to thirty-five percent,” I say as I turn the camera back to me. “Dr. Hamid says I’m steadily climbing to the top of the transplant list now, so I’ll be here for a month, taking antibiotics, sticking to my regimen…” My eyes travel to the drawing behind me, the healthy lungs looming over my head, just out of reach.

I shake my head and smile, leaning over to grab a bottle from the medicine cart. “That means taking my medications on time, wearing my AffloVest to break up that mucus, and” -- I hold up the bottle -- “a whole lot of this liquid nutrition through my G-tube every night. If any ladies out there are wishing they could eat five thousand calories a day and still have a Cabo-ready beach body, I’m up for a trade.”

My computer dings away, messages pouring in one after another. Reading a few, I let the positivity push away all the negativity I felt going into this.

Hang in there, Stella! We love you.

Marry me!

“New lungs can come in at any moment, so I’ve got to be ready!” I say the words like I believe them wholeheartedly. Though after all these years I’ve learned to not get my hopes up too much.

DING! Another message.

I’ve got CF and you remind me to always stay positive. XOXO.

My heart warms, and I have a final big smile for the camera, for that person fighting the same fight that I am. This time it’s genuine. “All right, guys, thanks for watching! Gotta double-check my afternoon and evening meds now. You know how anal I am. I hope everyone has a great week. Bye!”

I end the live video and exhale slowly, closing the browser to see the smiling, winter-formal-ready faces on my desktop background. Me, Camila, and Mya, arm in arm, all in the same deep-red lipstick we’d picked out together at Sephora. Camila had wanted a bright pink, but Mya had convinced us that red was the color we NEEDED in our life. I’m still not convinced that was true.

Lying back, I pick up the worn panda resting on my pillows and wrap my arms tightly around him. Patches, my sister, Abby, named him. And what a fitting name that became. The years of coming in and out of the hospital with me have certainly taken their toll on him. Multicolored patches are sewn over spots where he ripped open, his stuffing pouring out when I squeezed too hard during the most painful of my treatments.

There’s a knock on my door, and it flies open not even a second later as Barb busts in holding an armful of pudding cups for me to make my medication with. “I’m back! Delivery!”

When it comes to Barb, not much has changed in the past six months, or the past ten years for that matter; she’s still the best. The same short, curly hair. The same colorful scrubs. The same smile that lights up the entire room.

But then an extremely pregnant Julie trails behind her, carrying an IV drip.

Now that’s a big change from six months ago.

I swallow my surprise and grin at Barb as she places the pudding at the edge of my bed for me to sort onto my medicine cart, then pulls out a list to double-check that the cart has everything I need on it.

“What would I do without you?” I ask.

She winks. “You’d die.”

Julie hangs the IV bag of antibiotics next to me, her belly brushing up against my arm. Why didn’t she tell me she’s pregnant? I go rigid, smiling thinly, as I eye her baby bump and try to subtly move away from it. “A lot’s changed in the past six months!”

She rubs her belly, blue eyes shining brightly as she gives me a big smile. “You want to feel her kick?”

“No,” I say, a little too quickly. I feel bad when she looks slightly taken aback at my bluntness, her blonde eyebrows arching up in surprise. But I don’t want any of my bad juju near that perfect, healthy baby.

Luckily, her eyes travel to my desktop background. “Are those your winter formal pics? I saw a bunch on Insta!” she says, excited. “How was it?”

“Super fun!” I say with a ton of enthusiasm as the awkwardness melts away. I open a folder on my desktop filled with pictures. “Crushed it on the dance floor for a solid three songs. Got to ride in a limo. The food didn’t suck. Plus, I made it to ten thirty before I got tired, which was way better than expected! Who needs a curfew when your body does it for you, right?”

I show her and Barb some pictures we all took at Mya’s house before the dance while she hooks me up to the IV drip and tests my blood pressure and O2 reading. I remember I used to be afraid of needles, but with every blood draw and IV drip, that fear slowly drifted away. Now I don’t even flinch. It makes me feel strong every time I get poked or prodded. Like I can overcome anything.

“All righty,” Barb says when they get all my vitals and finish oohing and aahing over my sparkly, silver A-line gown and my white rose corsage. Camila, Mya, and I decided to swap corsages when we went stag to the formal. I didn’t want to take a date, not that anybody asked me anyway. It was super possible that I would need to bail the day of, or wouldn’t feel well halfway through the dance, which wouldn’t have been fair to whomever I could’ve gone with. The two of them didn’t want me to feel left out, so instead of getting dates of their own, they decided we’d all go together. Because of the Mason developments, though, that doesn’t seem super likely for prom.

Barb nods to the filled medicine cart, resting a hand on her hip. “I’ll still monitor you, but you’re pretty much good to go.” She holds up a pill bottle. “Remember, you have to take this one with food,” she says, putting it carefully back and holding up another one. “And make sure you don’t--“

“I got it Barb,” I say. She’s just being her usual motherly self, but she holds up her hands in surrender. Deep down she knows that I’ll be absolutely fine.

I wave good-bye as they both head towards the door, using the remote next to my bed to sit it up a little more.

“By the way,” Barb says slowly as Julie ducks out of the room. Her eyes narrow at me and she gives me a gentle warning look. “I want you to finish your IV drip first, but Poe’s just checking in to room 310.”

“What? Really?” I say, my eyes widening as I move to launch myself out of bed to find him. I can’t believe he didn’t tell me he’d be here!

Barb steps forward, grabbing my shoulders and pushing me gently back down onto the bed before I can fully stand. “What part of ‘I want you to finish your IV drip first’ did you not get?”

I smile sheepishly at her, but how could she blame me? Poe was the first friend I made when I came to the hospital. He’s the only one who really gets it. We’ve fought CF together for a freaking decade. We’ll, together from a safe distance, anyway.

We can’t get too close to each other. For cystic fibrosis patients, cross-infection from certain bacteria strains is a huge risk. One touch between two CFers can literally kill both of them.

Her serious frown gives way to a gentle smile. “Settle in. Relax. Take a chill pill.” She eyes the medicine cart, jokingly. “Not literally.”

I nod, a real laugh spilling out, as a fresh wave of relief fills me at the news of Poe being here too.

“I’ll stop by later to help you with your AffloVest,” Barb says over her shoulder as she leaves. Grabbing my phone, I settle for a quick text message instead of a mad dash down the hall to room 310.

You’re here? Me too. Tune-up.

Not even a second goes by and my screen lights up with his replay: Bronchitis. Just happened. I’ll live. Come by and wave at me later. Gonna crash now.

I lean back on the bed, exhaling long and slow.

Truth is, I’m nervous about this visit.

My lung function fell to 35 percent so quickly: And now, even more than the fever and the sore throat, being here in the hospital for the next month doing treatment after treatment to stem the tide while my friends are far away is freaking me out. A lot. Thirty-five percent is a number that keeps my mom up at night. She doesn’t say it, but her computer does. Search after search about lung transplants and lung-function percentages, new combinations and phrasing but always the same idea. How to get more time. It makes me more afraid than I’ve even been before. But not for me. When you have CF, you sort of get used to the idea of dying young. No, I’m terrified for my parents. And what will become of them if the worst does happen, now that they don’t have each other.

But with Poe here, someone who understands, I can get through it. Once I’m actually allowed to see him.

 The rest of the afternoon goes by slowly.

I work on my app, double-checking that I worked out the programming error that kept coming up when I tried to run it on my phone. I put some Fucidin on the sore skin around my G-tube in an attempt to make it less fire-engine red and more of a summer-sunset pink. I check and double-check my “At Bedtime” pile of bottles and pills. I reply to my parents’ every-hour-on-the-hour texts. I gaze out the window as the afternoon fades and see a couple about my age, laughing and kissing as they walk into the hospital. It’s not every day you see a happy couple coming into a hospital. Watching them holding hands and exchanging longing glances, I wonder what it would be like to have somebody look at me like that. People are always looking at my cannula, my scars, my G-tube, not at me.

It doesn’t make guys want to line up by my locker.

I “dated” Tyler Paul my freshman year of high school, but that lasted all of a month, until I came down with an infection and needed to go to the hospital for a few weeks. Even just a few days in, his texts started to get further and further apart, and I decided to break up with him. Besides, it was nothing like that couple out in the courtyard. Tyler’s palms were sweaty when we held hands, and he wore so much Axe body spray, I would go into coughing fits every time we hugged.

This thought process is not exactly a helpful distraction, so I even give number 22, “Contemplate the afterlife,” on my to-do list a try, and read some of Life, Death, and Immortality: The Journey of the Soul.

But pretty soon, I opt to just lie on my bed, looking up at the ceiling and listening to the wheezing sound of my breathing. I can hear the air struggling to get past the mucus that takes up space in my lungs. Rolling over, I crack open a vial of Flovent to give my lungs a helping hand. I pour the liquid into a nebulizer by my bed, the small machine humming to life as vapors pour from the mouthpiece.

I sit, staring at the drawing of the lungs while I breathe in and out.

And in and out.

And in and…out.

I hope when my parents come to visit over the next few days, my breathing is a little less labored. I told them both that the other one was taking me to the hospital this morning, but I actually just took an Uber here from the corner a street over from my mom’s new place. I don’t want either of them to have to face seeing me here again, at least until I’m looking better.

My mom was already giving me troubled looks when I needed to put my portable oxygen on just to pack.

There’s a knock on my door, and I look over from the wall I’m staring at, hoping it’s Poe stopping by to wave at me. I pull the mouthpiece off as Barb pops her head in. She drops a surgical face mask and latex gloves onto a table next to my door.

“New one upstairs. Meet me in fifteen?”

My heart leaps.

I nod, and she gives me a big smile before ducking out of the room. I grab the mouthpiece and take one more quick hit of the Flovent, letting the vapor fill my lungs the best I can before I’m up and moving. Shutting the nebulizer off, I pick up my portable oxygen concentrator from where it’s been charging next to my bed, press the circular button in the center to turn it on, and pull the strap over my shoulder. After I put the cannula in, I head over to the door, pulling on the blue latex gloves and wrapping the strings of the face mask around my ears.

Sliding into my Converse, I push my door open then squeeze out into the whitewashed corridor, deciding to go the long way so I can walk past Poe’s room.

I pass the nurses’ station in the center of the floor, waving hello to a young nurse’s assistance named Sarah, who is smiling over the top of the new, sleek metal cubicle.

They replaced that before my last visit six months ago. It’s the same height, but it used to be made of this worn wood that had probably been around since the hospital was founded sixty-some years ago. I remember when I was small enough to sneak past to whatever room Poe was in, my head still a good few inches from clearing the desk.

Now it comes up to my elbow.

Heading down the hallway, I grin as I see a small Colombian flag taped on the outside of a half-open door, an overturned skateboard keeping it propped slightly open.

I peer inside to see Poe fast asleep on his bed, curled into a surprisingly tiny ball underneath his plaid comforter, a suave Gordon Ramsay poster, positioned directly over his bed, keeping watch over him.

I draw a heart on the dry-erase board he’s stuck to the outside of his door to let him know I’ve been there, before moving off down the hallway toward the wooden double doors that will take me to the main part of the hospital, up and elevator, down C Wing, across the bridge into Building 2, and straight to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

One of the perks of coming here or more than a decade is that I know the hospital just as well as I knew the house I grew up in. every winding corridor, or hidden staircase, or secret shortcut, exploring over and over again.

But before I can open the double doors, a room door swings open next to me, and I turn my head in surprise to see the profile of a tall, thin boy I’ve never seen before. He’s standing in the doorway of room 315, holding a sketchbook in one hand and a charcoal pencil in the other, a white hospital bracelet like mine wrapped around his wrist.

I stop dead.

His tousled, dark-chocolate-brown hair is perfectly unruly, like he just popped out of a Teen Vogue and landed smack in the middle of Saint Grace’s Hospital. His eyes are a deep blue, the corners crinkling as he talks.

But it’s his smile that catches my eye more than anything else. It’s lopsided, and charming, and it has a magnetic warmth to it.

He’s so cute, my lung function feels like it dropped another 10 percent.

It’s a good thing this mask is covering half my face, because I did not plan for cute guys on my floor this hospital stay.

“I’ve clocked their schedules,” he says as he puts the pencil casually behind his ear. I shift slightly to the left and see that he’s grinning at the couple I saw coming into the hospital earlier. “So, unless you plant your ass on the call button, no one’s going to bother you for at least an hour. And don’t forget. I gotta sleep in that bed, dude.”

“Way ahead of you.” I watch as the girl unzips the duffel bag she’s holding to show him blankets.

Wait. What?

Cute guy whistles. “Look at that. A regular Girl Scout.”

“We’re no animals, man,” her boyfriend say to him, giving him a big, dude-to-dude smile.

Oh my god. Gross. He’s letting his friends do it in his room, like it’s a motel.

I grimace and resume walking down the hallway to the exit doors, putting as much space as possible between me and whatever scheme is going on in there.

So much for cute.

[love-me-a-lotta-whump]

Chains + Daddy Issues (1/1)

Synopsis: Mac is captured and tortured. Jack goes full protective dad mode to get to his kid.

Under the cut!

Mac woke up to the disgusting smell of horse urine and charcoal. Everything seemed to be covered in a charcoal dust. The whole room was black. The floors, walls, ceiling, chains Mac was restrained with, the- wait, chains? Why was Mac restrained? He pulled on them, finally orienting himself. He’d been chained with his arms reaching up towards the ceiling, barely keeping his toes touching the dirty concrete floor. And that’s another thing. He’s got nearly nothing on. Only some sweatpants. No shirt, no shoes, no socks.

“Who are you?” A strong Ukrainian accent was heard. Mac could locate the sound to be straight in front of him in the darkness. It wasn’t until the man walked out towards him that he could see his face. His head barely made it to Mac’s chest, he was so short. His hair was so dark, it looked like someone photoshopped a black blob on top of his head.

“What happened?” Mac struggled in his restraints ignoring his captor’s question.

“Fine, don’t tell me. Why are you here, eh? You tell me why you’re here?”

“My head… It-it hurts. Jack?” Mac tilted his head, making it throb as he squeezed his eyes shut against his newfound nausea.

“I took your communication piece out. Your friend can’t hear you.”

:::::

They all heard it. The crunching crack of a comm under a boot. Jack stood from his chair in the van. “Mac! That’s it, I’m getting him out,” He burst out of the back doors of the van, running down the street towards the building Mac had previously gone into. He kicked the back door down, rushing into the room with his gun drawn.

“Dammit!”

Riley flinched at Jack’s frustrated outcry. “He’s not there? What’s happening, Jack?”

“He’s gone.” Crashes could be heard through the comms, making Riley assume he was kicking things around. “Mac’s gone.”

“Go back to the van and we’ll take a look at the drone footage and see what we can find.” Matty came through the comms.

:::::

“Tell me why you are here!” The man gave another swing of the bat to Mac’s stomach, making the agent cry out.

“I’m a photographer. I-I’m here to take photos,” Mac swallowed, hoping the man would believe him.

“Then why were you here talking to my men?”

“I-I was just asking for directions.”

“That’s not what they told me. You really shouldn’t be lying to me, right now!” The man took another swing at Mac, hitting his ribs with a loud cracking sound. He cried out, squeezing his eyes shut as he hyperventilated.

“P-please j-j-agh-just let me go,” A tear fell down Mac’s face. The pain was becoming too much to bear.

“When my men brought you to me, I could not believe it. I know who you are. I know who your father is.”

“That makes one of us.” Mac’s comment made the man’s head tilt. “I haven’t seen him in over a decade.”

“Well, say my experience with him hasn’t been so positive, either. I was going to let you go, but if I cannot make your father pay for what he has done to me, I will make you pay for him, no?” The man saw a small irregularity in Mac’s bruise on his ribs. “You do not have many days left. I have made mistake.”

“What?” Mac’s eyes widened.

::::::

“I’m going back out there. I have to find him,” Jack started to leave the War Room but Matty called out, making the older agent pause.

“I know how you feel but you’re not going to be able to help him if you don’t even know where he is.”

“No, you don’t know how I feel. That’s my kid out there! And I’ll have Riley call me and tell me where he is once she figures it out with her little computer thingy, but I gotta get out there and try t’ find him!” Jack slammed the door behind him, not hearing Matty when she called out to him from behind. Riley and Bozer stepped out from the hallway they were walking through when they came face-to-face with Jack. He didn’t stop walking, but the two understood and proceeded to follow him.

“Yo, man. We think we found where Mac is.” Bozer looked over to Riley who gave him a death stare. “Riley. She did it.”

“Get in the car,” Jack was on a warpath that wouldn’t be stopped.

:::::

Jack must have been driving at least 80 on a 55. Bozer kept a tight grip on literally anything he could get his hands on while Riley ignored the situation, typing away on her computer, trying to get an exact location on their man.

“I’m sorry, Jack. All I’ve got is a two block radius. I can’t get it any closer than that,” Riley typed faster, groaning at how frustratingly slow her computer seemed to be going in comparison to her mind and her desire to find her friend.

“Well just type faster,” Jack pushed even harder on the gas pedal.

“Just drive slower!” Bozer moved his kung-fu-death-grip from the seat he sat on to the ones in front. The fabric groaned in complaint at the pressure. “You almost hit that-ah!”

“Okay, I’ve got it down to a block!” Riley repeatedly clenched her fists, trying to get her hands to stop cramping. “There’s two buildings he could be in.”

“We’ll check every building in the whole damn world if we have to to find Mac,” Jack pressed even harder on the gas pedal, making Bozer squeal.

::::::

“That is starting to look pretty bad,” The man took another swing of the bat at Mac’s thigh. “It sound like I’m about to break femur.”

“Please, he doesn’t… he doesn’t even care about me. He abandoned me, why would he care what you do to me, now?”

“You do not know much about your father,” Another swing produced a loud, spine-chilling noise. Mac screamed at the immense pain ravaging his leg. The tears freely fell. “There goes the femur.” The agent huffed against the pain, doing absolutely nothing to alleviate it. The man started to lower him to the ground. When his leg started to bend, he screamed, hoping somebody… anybody would hear him.

“Please.” The tears fell faster down Mac’s cheeks. He pressed his palms flush against the dark floor, doing everything he could to keep himself from falling onto it. His arms crumpled under the weight, sending him to fall on his shoulder, lightly hitting his head on the concrete, rolling over onto his back. He wanted so badly to grab his thigh, to make the pain go away but he couldn’t.

“I will let you rest little bit. I am still not done.”

“Please, just let me go,” Mac started to crawl away before his chains held him back. He weakly fought the restraint making his wrists bleed. The blood flowed in small rivulets down his forearms.

“We have gone over this. My answer is no,” The man walked towards the door, reaching up to open it.

::::::

“This is the right building. I can feel it,” Jack trained his gun on the door. He brought his leg up, kicking it in while sending the Ukrainian man falling backwards, tripping over Mac’s broken femur. He screamed, taking in deep breaths against the pain. The man stood, his own gun drawn, facing Jack. “Put it down, Oryza!”

“Your man. I am not done with him.” The man pointed his gun at Mac. “But I guess we do not always get what we want, no?” He stepped towards the young agent.

“No. I guess we don’t.” Jack took the shot. Oryza collapsed, blood pouring from the hole in his chest. Jack ran up to Mac’s side, kneeling down beside him. “Mac? I’m here, buddy.”

“Jack.” His voice was breathy and full of relief. Jack’s smile was cut off by the sight of the blond’s eyes rolling into the back of his head.

“No no no no no no no, Mac. Mac?! Come on, kid!” Jack took grip of his kid’s shoulders, shaking them, hoping to wake him.

::::::

Mac awoke to the feeling of Jack pulling on his good leg, massaging his muscles and listening to his typical twangy country music.

“Hey, bud. Just makin’ sure your muscles are fine. Y’know how they can get stiff.” Jack laughed. “Doctors said you’ll be fine. You just need time.”

“Great. All I need is time.” Mac’s voice was hoarse from the intubation but he slowly felt it getting better.

“It’s not your first rodeo, kid. You know the drill,” Jack sat down in the chair next to the bed, laughing at how Mac rolled his eyes. “I’m glad we got you back, bud.”

“Yeah, he was going insane,” Bozer added when he walked into the room.

“How fast?” Mac’s head rolled to the side to look at his teammate and best friend.

“80 in a 55. Not only that, but 80 in a 30. Twists and turns and everything,” Riley entered the room right after.

“Jack,” Mac turned back to the older agent.

“There’s nothing you can say, Mac. I had to get to my kid.”

“Fair enough.” Riley laughed. Everyone was just happy the whole ordeal was over and that Mac was back with everyone and would have his time to heal. They all would.

[antoine-roquentin]

As long as South Korea existed, its politics had a division of the right-wing and the left-wing. By the early 2000s, however, the right-wing in South Korea seemed like old news, in a literal sense. Much of its subscribers were old people whose memories of the Korean War, communist terror and desperate hunger dominated their political decisions. As they did not grow up with democracy, they worshiped South Korea’s military dictators—foremost of whom was Park Chung-hee, who ruled for nearly two decades from the 1960s to 70s—as they would a king. In this sense, they could not possibly called “conservatives,” since the term, in its strictest interpretation, presumes a liberal democratic system. “Fascists” would be the more apt description. Korea’s right-wing was contemptuous of democracy, and favored dictatorship. They favored jailing “communists,” a catch-all stand-in term for any political dissident. 

But in the 21st century, the right-wing seemed like an old news. Twenty years after the peaceful democratization of 1987, it seemed that liberal democracy was the settled practice in Korea. Although the right-wing still wielded considerable force, they were aging and would fade away—or so Korea’s liberals thought. The liberals were riding high from the two consecutive terms of liberal presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, from 1997 to 2007. Of course, conservatism would continue to exist, but it would exist in a form that is more common in the advanced democracies: along the lines of the philosophical difference in terms of the proper role of the government, arguing over the proper size of the government, the appropriate level of taxation, regulation of corporations and redistributive policies, and so on. Even when the conservative Lee Myung-bak won the presidency in 2007, the liberals’ expectations for democratic governance continued.

It’s fair to say that Korea’s liberals were totally unprepared for what awaited them.

One cannot understand today’s Korea without understanding the internet. Until the 21st century, Korea was a middling, anonymous country. When placed among the numerous names of the world’s countries, Korea was a blank: not rich enough to command attention, not poor enough to arouse sympathy. Even the most seminal event in modern Korean history—the Korean War—is considered the “forgotten war.” Internet is what propelled Korea into the forefront of the world in the 21st century. Having seen the potential of high-speed internet earlier than just about any other world leader, Kim Dae-jung embarked on a massive project to equip the whole Korea with fiber optic cables during his term. This is perhaps the most underrated achievement of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. The result is the Korea of today: world leader in smartphone technology, cities constructed as a technological marvel, a major generator of the popular culture optimized for the digital age. So it shouldn’t be surprising the new breed of Korea’s young right-wing rose through the internet. What was surprising was just how retro these young right-wingers were.

The “new right wing” traces its origin to the website called DC Inside. Established in 1999, it was originally a message board to discuss the latest trend in digital cameras. (The site’s name means “digital camera inside.” It had a now-forgotten sister site called “Notebook Inside” that discussed laptops.) Soon, however, DC Inside organically grew into something else entirely. Reflecting its origin as a digital camera site, DC Inside had numerous “Galleries”—a themed message board in which people gathered to talk and, more frequently, engage in the earliest form of internet message board flamewar seen by the humankind. Particularly insane were the DC Baseball Gallery and the DC Comedy Gallery, where gladiatorial fights opened nightly to attract the amused onlookers.

The influence of DC Inside on Korea’s internet scene in the early part of the 2000s cannot possibly be overstated. DC Inside was the birthplace of every internet trend and meme. From the fires of the vulgar keyboard wars, a comedic gem would emerge. Such gem of a meme would spread into other major Korean websites, and eventually made their ways to newspapers and television. You might recognize this type of site—it’s Reddit, with Galleries being Subreddits. Reddit was once described as the “dark, unruly id of the internet,” but DC Inside was the OG of that description, as DC Inside is at least six years older than Reddit. (Note: Remember how I keep saying Korean politics is a five-year preview of US politics? Keep this in mind.)

DC Inside always was a cesspool, but even there, some truly deranged minds distinguished themselves with their over-the-top cessiness. Many of them gravitated toward DC Inside’s Comedy Gallery, then in 2010, separated themselves into their own message board site. There, they collected the most fucked up jokes, photoshopped images and gifs, and voted to choose the “best” material of the day. Thus, the site was known as the “Depository of the Daily Bests,” or Ilgan Best Jeojangso [일간베스트 저장소]. Over time, this site came to be known as the acronym of the first syllable of the first two words: Il-be.

For Korea’s young right wing, Ilbe was the demented internet version of the Viennese salon. At the first encounter, Ilbe would appear to be little more than a collection of destructive attitudes. The core of such destructive attitudes was self-loathing, in which Ilbe users wallowed and reveled. In their own telling, Ilbe users were aware of their own ugliness—the awareness which gave them a position of moral superiority in a twisted way, because everyone else who didn’t own up to his ugliness was a hypocrite. With this distorted moral license, Ilbe users engaged in a constant, nihilistic quest to create the most offensive contents possible, which in their minds would expose the hypocrisy of the rest of the Korean society. Violent misogyny, homophobia and racism were Ilbe’s mainstays. 

It was only a short time before Ilbe as a whole began taking on a discernible political stance as they sketched out their identity based on self-loathing nihilism. After all, all politics is identity politics. As they hunted for the sacred cows of Korean politics, they latched onto the most sacred one: Korea’s democracy. For the nihilistic youth who wanted to destroy the legacy of their father’s generation, there was no better target. Rejection of democracy was perhaps Ilbe’s only clearly stated political goal: the “downvote” button on Ilbe’s site was called “democratize.” This made Ilbe’s politics take on a curiously retro character—curious because while Ilbe’s political gaze looked backwards to pre-democracy Korea, it did not look at the same direction as Korea’s older right wings. The hero of Korea’s older right wing was Park Chung-hee, the authoritarian who (in their minds) defended South Korea from the communists in North Korea and delivered the country from desperate poverty. But the hero of Ilbe was Chun Doo-hwan, the authoritarian who succeeded Park Chung-hee—because Chun is most prominently remembered as the one who massacred hundreds of democratization activists in Gwangju in 1980. For Ilbe users, the ability to kill the liberals was more important than the authoritarian economic development.

Recall that Korea is the world’s first wired society. Korea had cyberbullying and doxxing before the rest of the world even knew what cyberbullying and doxxing were. Korea had the world’s largest social network service long before Facebook entered Mark Zuckerberg’s imagination. So it shouldn’t surprise you that Korea had the world’s first alt-right, long before there was such a word “alt-right,” because it is impossible to conceive of alt-right without the internet. Ilbe users were the world’s first alt-right, in that it foretold central characteristics of all the alt-right movements that would come. To put it diplomatically, they were disaffected young men who, disillusioned by the establishment politics, sought refuge in the idealized version of the past. To put it more straightforwardly, they were fuckheads who indulged in their worst tendencies online, to create a type of politics that is little more than a tool for nihilistically causing pain.

And boy, did Ilbe cause pain. In the decade of conservative rule began in 2007, Ilbe gained enough strength to be one of Korea’s largest websites by 2012. Ilbe became a social phenomenon, the fountainhead of noxious ideas from which Korea’s conservative politicians gathered their talking points and spread their own. When the Sewol ferry sank in 2014 and created the greatest political crisis that Park Geun-hye faced (at least until the Choi Soon-sil scandal broke,) Ilbe took the forefront of the unbelievable task of making the parents who lost their children in the sunken ship as greedy money grabbers. In the most disgusting political theater I have ever seen in my lifetime, hundreds of Ilbe members gathered at the City Hall Square, where the parents of the Sewol ferry children were engaged in a hunger strike, to start a “gluttony strike”: eating fried chicken and pizza to taunt the parents who had been starving for days. Ilbe’s negative influence peaked toward the end of 2014, when an Ilbe user bombed—bombed!—a leftist Korean American speaker, injuring three members of the audience.

Ilbe put Korea’s liberals completely at a loss. Never in their wildest imagination could they conceive that Korea’s youths would so actively reject democracy itself. Liberals—what else?—wrote a number of books and articles, trying to process what is happening. Some blamed themselves: Park Ga-bun, in his book “Ilbe’s Ideology” [일베의 사상], claimed Ilbe’s hostility to democracy resulted from the failed promises of democratization and the civic movements. Others tried to re-affirm their liberal values, such as freedom of speech. Law professors like Park Kyung-shin of Korea University and Hong Sung-soo of Sookmyung University offered pieties about how even Ilbe members had the right for free speech.

As it turns out, Korea’s liberals were even less prepared for Ilbe than they thought they were, because they simply lacked the imagination to fathom the lengths that Korea’s right-wing would go to destroy them.

Park Geun-hye administration was a lame duck almost from the beginning. Just days before the 2012 presidential election, an agent for the National Intelligence Service—South Korea’s spy agency—was discovered in a small room in Seoul, adding internet comments that criticized liberal politicians. It was big news that came too late in the election cycle; eight days later, Park Geun-hye squeaked past Moon Jae-in to become the sixth president of the Republic of Korea in the democratic era. The Park administration spent its first year fending off charges of a rigged election. After a year of investigation, the facts revealed by the end of 2013 was enough to shock the conscience. Since 2009, in the middle of the Lee Myung-bak presidency, the NIS ran a “Psychological Warfare” division whose sole task was to attack South Korean liberals. The 70 or so agents in the Psychological Warfare division were professional internet trolls. They wrote posts on major websites, and upvoted or downvoted posts. They spammed comments until every major news story comment board was filled with their comments. They fired out more than 1.2 million fake tweets. All of these were about Korean politics, praising conservatives and attacking liberals. All of these were in foul, vulgar language—the screen name for one of the NIS agents, for example, was “Decapitate Lefties” [좌익효수]. 

Four years later the Park Geun-hye administration fell, through an utterly irrational scandal involving a shaman’s daughter. The incoming Moon Jae-in administration re-opened the NIS investigation—whose findings are so staggering that it defied belief. 

The government actively created contents to damage the liberals. The NIS consulted psychologists to create the most damaging and humiliating photoshopped images of liberal politicians and activists. The most prominent example was the photoshopped mixture of Roh Moo-hyun’s funerary photo with a koala, designed to derisively undermine the last president’s dignity without quite stepping over the line. The Blue House also fed narratives: when the parents of the children who died in the Sewol ferry began their hunger strike, the internal Blue House memo said “take out Moon Jae-in, claim he is assisting suicide, politics of death.” 

Other damage to liberals was more direct. The Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations blacklisted liberal-leaning celebrities, making sure they could not appear on television. The NIS even had a timetable; an internal memo titled “Expanding the expulsion of left-leaning talents from MBC,” several celebrities such as outspoken rock stars like Yun Do-hyeon and Shin Hae-chul were specifically named, with the date on which they were to be taken off the air. The government also threatened advertisers, making sure that these celebrities could not appear on their commercials. The NIS also directed a GamerGate-style attacks against liberal celebrities, using its troll army to spread false rumors about drug use. 

The government also created Korea’s right-wing media. Not assisted, not subsidized, created it out of thin air. In 2009, the Lee Myung-bak administration tapped Byeon Hee-jae, a pathetic gadfly whose only claim to fame until that point was being called “a gadfly no one ever heard of” by a prominent liberal commentator, to start an online publication called Media Watch. The NIS under the Lee administration paid the seed money for Byeon to start his website. Then the Lee administration pressured corporations to buy advertisements on Byeon’s site, and also ordered government workers to sign up for Media Watch’s paid subscription. Park Geun-hye administration, for its part, pressured Naver—Korea’s analogue of Google—to bury the bad news stories from search results.

The conservative government also subsidized right-wing civic groups, using them as extra-governmental political weapons. Lee and Park administrations paid veterans groups, who in turn paid to carry in busloads of old people from the countryside to stage massive political demonstrations in Seoul. (These included the “counter protestors” to the Candlelight Protests that brought down the Park Geun-hye administration.) Again, the government simply told these civic groups what to do. Following the government’s direction, these civic groups petitioned to keep out former president Kim Dae-jung from the National Cemetery upon his death, and engaged in a letter-writing campaign to Norway to somehow cancel Kim Dae-jung’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Taken together, it was not simply that the conservative government added some trolling firepower Korea’s right wing with fake comments and tweets. Rather, the conservative government was the entire game. The conservative government created political storylines, fed them to the right-wing media that the government itself created, used the right-wing civic groups to repeat them—until they became the mainstream opinion. The dissident voices were harassed, defamed, fired, and silenced, through pressures applied to media and search engine sites.

From start to finish, the conservative government managed the entire process that created a political narrative. And the biggest beneficiary, of course, was Ilbe, Korea’s most heavily trafficked right-wing website. Ilbe was the testing tube that the NIS used to see what humiliating meme would work the best to attack the liberals. Ilbe was the never-ending wellspring of right-wing troll army, who swarmed the left-leaning celebrities the NIS directed them to attack. Ilbe was where right-wing storylines were amplified, giving clicks to right-wing media and serving as a meeting ground for right-wing groups. For all of its vile, outrageous actions, Ilbe was shielded from consequences—the Park Geun-hye administration gave the Ilbe bomber a suspended sentence while deporting the Korean American speaker.

A gardener does not bear a fruit; the tree does. But the manner in which the gardener fertilizes the grounds, prunes the branches and pollinates flowers, determines the type and quality of the fruit that the tree bears. Even without the conservative government, Korea may have developed an alt right; but the type and quality of that alt right would have been different. Without the efforts by the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations to nurture it with money, and mainstreamize its voices, Korea's alt-right certainly would have been smaller, its vileness less pronounced and more firmly rejected by the rest of the Korean society. It was the conservative administrations that raised Ilbe, to harvest the most toxic fruit. Korea’s alt-right, the first alt-right of the world, was a government start-up.

the author claims Reddit as the best American parallel to Ilbe, but 4chan would probably be a better one. 

incidentally, the founder of Encyclopedia Dramatica, girlvinyl, worked at a high level position in the National Nuclear Security Administration at the time she founded the site. part of her job was to work with counterintel agents. 

[tobns]

SNOWED IN: A (Tragic) Christmas Story — part two.

In Which Jennifer Proves to Everyone That She Really Has Gone Off the Deep End This Time

Josh Hutcherson has perhaps risen past every imaginable evil on the top of my hit list within nine hours flat, solely for doing the one damn thing I’d hoped he hadn’t done – jinxing us.

Jackie, Jack and I all wound up sharing a room – the original setup was for Alexander and I to share one of the guest rooms, but the second that was announced, Jackie grabbed my wrist and told Jen, “Over my fucking bloody corpse” – which I wasn’t too enthused about, seeing as how I didn’t really want to third wheel any more than necessary. Fortunately, Jackie is an even better best friend than she is a girlfriend and banished Jack to the sleeping bag, her and I sharing the full-size bed. If Jack had a problem with it, he didn’t voice it. Truth be told, I think he was so mentally exhausted from his journey through the supposed underworld that Jackie could have given him a blanket and pointed to the closet and he wouldn’t have complained any.

I’d been rudely awakened somewhere around eight, mostly to the sound of Jackie tripping over Jack as she stumbled to look out the window. Apparently, she wasn’t playing around when it came to buying our plane tickets out of here – she was hellbent on getting out of Colorado before the sun set, even if it meant she flew the plane herself. I’m not sure why she’s got her foot on the gas pedal with this one; if anyone would have gone behind our backs and orchestrated the Hunger Games cast reunion of the decade, I would have pegged it to be Jackie. I just don’t think she appreciates being lied to, and she doesn’t want to have Alexander’s blood on her hands when Dayo goes in for the kill and she gets her fair share of swipes in.

No need to set an alarm clock when with Jackie, she makes a good enough one all on her own.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!”

“Can you fucking keep it down?!” Jack had moaned. “I’m trying to dream about sleeping on a mattress and not this godawful carpet.”

The sound of curtains violently moving around filled the room, along with Jackie’s mumbling to herself under her breath about how she was going to strangle Josh once she saw him at breakfast.

“Where’s the fire?” I’d mumbled, still half asleep as I sat up. Even through bleary eyes, I could see Jackie standing in the glow of the window, everything white around her and a halo of strawberry blonde hair.

She’d simply turned around, frown settled on her face and the creases on her forehead deep. “Oh, there’s no fire,” was her mocking reply. “There’s too much snow on the ground for that to ever fucking happen here!”

Breakfast was an interesting affair; Josh was waltzing around the table giving everyone pancakes the sizes of our heads while we all glared at him. I think he begged Jen to give him that job for two reasons: number one, so he wouldn’t have to worry about any of us poisoning him (accidentally or purposeful), and number two, so he was always just far enough out of reach that he didn’t wind up with a butter knife in his side.

“Eleven inches of snow,” Dayo had mumbled into his glass of milk to no one in particular. “That’s just enough snow to bury Josh in and no one will ever be able to recover the body.”

Jackie nearly spit her orange juice clear across the table at that one.

After breakfast, the unspoken consensus is that we are all going our separate ways in this gigantic house to do our own thing while we wait for the heavy and blowing snow to settle. Jen, however has other ideas.

“Whoa whoa whoa,” she says as soon as Leven and Willow start to get up. “Where are you guys going?”

“Back to bed,” Willow replies.

Leven juts her thumb out in Willow’s direction. “What she said.”

Jen looks appalled at this revelation. “No, I’ve got stuff for us to do!” she exclaims, sliding her chair back. “Go nowhere.” With that, she darts back off into the kitchen.

Jackie leans over in my direction. “What are the chances that I can go outside and not die of hypothermia or frostbite?”

“Very slim,” I inform her.

“Might be worth it.”

Jen returns almost as quickly as she vanished, and perhaps it’s because I’m still exhausted (Jackie is still a kicker when she sleeps) but I’m having trouble discerning what it is that Jen has gone to do. That is, until I realize she is now wearing a shirt that has my face on it.

I don’t even want to know how much it cost her to get it made, but Jen has made herself a giant sweatshirt with the giant cast picture we all took for Vanity Fair back in Concord. Willow wasn’t present for that shoot and Liam was, but since Liam is not here but Willow is, Jen has taken the creative liberty to photoshop Willow’s face over Liam’s body. As if the shirt couldn’t look any more ridiculous with that addition, Jen spins around to show off the back – in between the shoulder blades, exposed thanks to her sloppy bun and in giant, orange letters, reads, ‘DIRECTOR OF FUN.’ Out of the corner of my eye, Dayo’s hand twitches a little bit closer to his fork, presumably to gouge out his eyes.

“I’m almost scared to ask why you have that on and what ‘director of fun’ could possibly mean,” Jack starts warily.

“Then I’ll save you the trouble,” Jen finishes, a smile that no one who has only gotten a handful of hours of sleep should be able to don reappearing on her face. “Since we’re stuck inside until later tonight at least, and you guys are kinda right about us all having grown up and gone down our different paths, I figured we could do some fun stuff with each other today! We can rediscover our bond.” She flourishes her end statement with a set of jazz hands.

Everyone is deathly silent, until Amandla speaks up. “That is the most ridiculous, whitest shit I have ever heard of.”

“Thank you,” Jen replies, and either she doesn’t see the insult in it or just elects to ignore it. “We haven’t hung out all together in ages, and I feel like we need to learn who we are now in order to be as close of friends, so bond we shall!” She then protrudes her cell phone out of the pocket of her pajama pants. “Now, I may or may not have stolen all of these things from the Camp Hi-Ho counselor training, but I think they’ll be just as fun.”

“Fun?” Dayo repeats. “You know what would be fun? Going back to bed. That heating blanket was everything.”

“That’s not on the checklist of fun,” Jen shoots down. Jack groans.

“There’s a checklist of fun too?”

“What do you take me for, Quaid, an unorganized moron?” I can see his answer perched on his lips even with Jackie sitting in between the both of us.

“Alright,” Jen continues, clapping her hands together after she shoves her phone back in her pocket. “I’m giving you losers an hour to take showers, brush your teeth – especially you, Hutcherson – and to pull yourselves together however you so need. I expect all of you sitting down in my basement by eleven to have fun.”

“The basement?” Alexander whispers as he leans in closer to me – he’d happily swiped the seat next to mine the very second I sat down, thinking he had beaten Jackie out. He had been a little deflated ever since Jackie swept me away to room with her. “Is she planning to off us one by one where they can’t hear our screams?”

“If we disobey, yes,” I mutter back, never taking my eyes off of our self-proclaimed director of fun.

When none of us begin to move from the table, Jen starts clapping wildly. “Come on people, let’s look alive!” she yells. We startle forward, grumbling our way out of our seats and leaving everything for Josh to clean – again, to keep himself out of the line of fire from everyone else for jinxing us.

“I’m pretty sure Jen was a drill sergeant in a past life,” Amandla muses when I find myself standing next to her as we wait for Jack to shimmy on up the stairs.

“Maybe that’s what she’s been doing in her free time,” I say, shrugging.

“Jen a drill sergeant, you an athlete,” she points out. Our eyes meet, and I can see the glimmer in them as she looks up at me with a cheeky little smirk on her face.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised by that too,” I warn. She quickly lifts one of her hands in mock arrest, the other settling on the banister as we start upstairs.

“All I’m saying is that I was the one who saved Alexander from going to prison when he tried to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after you fell off that platform.”

My eyes widen into a glare right about the time Alexander’s head pops in between us. “What’s this about me going to prison?” he asks.

Amandla simply reaches forward and pats him on the shoulder. “Nothing you need to worry about, bucko.”

Jackie exiles Jack from the bedroom after he offers to shower with her and save water – I want to crawl under the covers and die when he makes that suggestion, their coupledom can be a little disturbing to think about – leaving the two of us to get changed and pull ourselves together in peace. She asks that I braid her hair after we change out of our pajamas, perched on the edge of the bed while I sit on my knees, weaving strands of her hair together as delicately as I can.

“This is gonna be a fuckshow, I’m sure,” I say, and Jackie snorts.

“Ya think? Twenty bucks says Dayo tries to kill Alexander, Alexander hits on you, Jack manages to break a limb, Leven breaks a nail, Amandla escapes through the fucking air ducts, and Saturn falls out of orbit.” She then makes a circular gesturing motion. “All before lunch.” I simply hum my agreement, and Jackie continues talking.

“Speaking of Alexander, what the hell were you two talking about on the plane last night?” she asks. “I swear, you two liked to have never shut up.” It’s a very good thing we aren’t in front of a mirror and Jackie has no choice but to look straight ahead, because I can feel the heat beginning to rise into my cheeks.

Jackie and Jack had been diagonal to Alexander and I on the plane, Jackie’s need for the window seat overruling the need to monitor Alexander and I. “Hands to yourself,” she’d warned him before ushering on in, and he’d simply rolled his eyes.

“She’s not changed any,” he told me as we walked into our little row of seats, waiting for me to slide past him into the window seat – he’d been happy to offer it to me.

My reply was every bit explanation as it was remark. “It’s Jackie.”

Despite having a decently-sized arm rest in between our seats, Alexander had offered to share his USC blanket with me as an alternative to using the shitty one provided by the airline, as well as his earphones and jumbo bag of Sour Patch Kids. I think most of it was simply an excuse to talk to me, which ultimately worked in the long run.

Somewhere over Illinois and around the fifth Black Keys song that had come on shuffle thus far, Alexander had glanced over at me, smirk riddling his face. “You still only eat the red ones?” he’d observed, head tilting in the direction of the half-empty bag of Sour Patch kids.

I’d nodded. “The others still taste like medicine.”

“The green ones do not taste like medicine,” he countered, and I’d rolled my eyes.

“They’re lime flavored, which is a sin within itself.”

A quiet laugh had fallen past his lips as he looked right at me. “You haven’t changed any, either.”

“Oh, god, I don’t know about that,” I’d mumbled. “I mean, I can now drive a car, buy cigarettes, get tattoos, and buy lottery tickets – I’m a breath away from legally ordering shots at a bar. I’d say a lot has changed since our Hunger Games days.”

“Okay, well if you look at it like that, then yeah.” Alexander ran a hand over the top of his head, smoothing down his hair. “I’m just referring to…well, you, I guess. Your personality. You’re exactly how I remember you, maybe a just little bit feistier.”

“Coming from the grown man who has no qualms about exposing his bare ass for all of Instagram to see.”

“You saw that?” he asked, a slight guffaw slipping out. I merely shot him a look.

“How does one not see that?”

Underneath the blanket, his arm reached over the arm rest and he nudged my arm with his elbow. “Hey, you can’t say too much – there’s no way I’m ever gonna unsee that Joshua Tree picture you posted a little while ago.” My cheeks immediately started to burn; that picture had only come about from a dare courtesy of Madeline, and hadn’t bothered me any when she posted it. There was no shame or embarrassment to be had, up until then at least. All it seemed to do was amuse him. “Yep, still modest – I’m telling you Iz, you haven’t changed a bit.”

The conversation rolled on through how school had gone for each of us (we had fallen out of contact by the time I made it to my senior year) to recent projects, past what family vacation we’d last been on and crushing right through the political climate of America before touching on our individual meanings of life based on what the last few years had brought our way. Eventually, we just decided to be courteous to the majority of the cabin around us and shut up, the both of us pulling books out of our carry-ons and diving in. Part of me felt compelled to take a picture of it, since I knew Jackie couldn’t see it and she wouldn’t believe me when I told her Alexander was reading a book not entirely composed of giant words or pictures of naked girls. It had been nice just coexisting next to him for a little bit, the version of him that felt a little more subdued than the one I’d known back when I was fourteen. For god’s sake, the man wore reading glasses now. It was enough to make me overlook the revolving door of shitty girlfriends he had for just a little while and appreciate the human being next to me, skipping over all of the country songs because he knew how much I loathed them.

“Oh, nothing really,” I reply to Jackie quietly, voice a little squeaky.

She scoffs. “Yeah, I’ll bet it was.”

I finish off the braid, moving the hair tie up my wrist and tying it off. Patting her shoulders to signal I’m done, I fall back on my ankles. “Listen, I could have grilled you about your sex life now that Jack has finally fucking left us alone, but I didn’t, so count your blessings and hold your tongue.”

The whole way downstairs, Jackie drills holes into the back of my head for that comment.

Everyone save for Jack and Willow is already downstairs in the basement, which has been renovated to be a giant recreation room. Jen’s pushed the pool table against the back wall, the TV above it reflecting her Spotify account as she plays the aptly titled ‘Fun-ger Games’ playlist (it’s currently playing Sister Sledge’s We Are Family). A bunch of beanbag chairs, random storage chests, and stray couch cushions have been lined up against the long wall, where everyone else is sitting, looking less than pleased. Jackie and I exchange glances, both of which have a unanimous mood: death is nigh.

“Fuhrman, Emerson!” Jen chirps, meeting us at the doorway. “What, no Jack?”

“Why would Jack be with us?” Jackie replies, to which Jen’s face falls.

“You’re hilarious, Mrs. Quaid,” she teases, and Jackie’s eyes darken. “Go sit down, we’ll start in a minute.”

As we saunter past Jen, Jackie sidles up to me. “Don’t you dare tell him this, but Jack was right yesterday,” she hisses through my hair and into my ear. “That airport was the gate to hell, hell being this.” All I can do is nod in agreement.

She and I sit down on one of the trunks next to Dayo, who is watching the weather like it will suddenly reflect the very thing he wants to see – melted snow and free roadways. Jackie leans over my lap to try and get a look at what he’s scrolling through. “You looking at the website for a funeral home?” she asks, their eyes meeting knowingly after she flickers her gaze in Alexander’s direction.

Dayo scowls. “Nope, that was last night’s light reading.”

Her lips curl up in a thin smile. “How I’ve missed my kindred mind.”

Jack and Willow finally come traipsing down, Jack wearing the exact same outfit he was wearing last night on the plane. “Okie doke,” Jen announces, producing a little bucket out of nowhere. “Before we get started, fork over any and all cellular devices.”

“Have you lost your mind, woman?” Jack asks as she juts the bucket out in his direction first. She simply blinks, unfazed. The two of them engage in a little stare off, to which Jack finally caves in on. Her face brightens.

“Hand ‘em over, rest of you.”

Each of us puts our phone into the bucket begrudgingly, giving Jen a look as she makes her way down the line. After she’s collected the last phone, she pulls her own out of her pocket and sets it on top – at least she’s committing to it as well, I guess – before walking across the room. I hadn’t noticed the gigantic fucking safe sitting on top of the counter until she stops in front of it, putting the bucket inside and slamming the door shut.

Jackie leans a little closer to me as she whispers, “She really wants to incite the real-life Hunger Games, Iz, Jen has gone full-blown kamikaze.”

“Well, let’s get this show on the road, shall we?” Jen proclaims, turning away from the safe and back towards us.

“I’d like to get on the road to the airport,” Dayo mutters under his breath. Jen hears this, shooting him a glare in response.

“Anyways,” she draws out, cutting her eyes away from him. “Like I said, I swiped most of this from Camp Hi-Ho, but I think it’ll work just as well! Normally, we’d start off by introducing ourselves and sharing one fun fact with each other, but I think that’s a little bit uncalled for in this situation. I think we’ll just jump straight into the human knot.”

“The human what now?” Leven repeats.

Jen gestures for all of us to stand up, arranging us in a circle. I’m standing shoulder to shoulder with Amandla and Alexander, who all but shoves Jackie out of his way so he could stand beside me, Amandla and I exchanging pained glances and murder flickering in Jackie’s eyes. “Alright, so everyone has to grab hands with someone that isn’t standing next to you,” Jen explains. To make an example, she reaches across the way and grabs my left hand with her right, and Jack’s left hand with her left hand. “Commence the tangling.”

With my free hand, I grab onto Leven’s, while everyone else around us reaches over and tries to grab hands with the minimal amount of grumbling. At least the objective here is to tangle together, because that is exactly what happens. I think Alexander purposefully grabs onto one of Jackie’s hands, which, to her displeasure, only has the realization until after there’s a mass of arms above their intertwined hands.

“Now what?” Amandla asks after we’re all closer than we ever thought we’d be in 2017.

“Now we untangle ourselves before twenty minutes goes by,” Jen replies. “And you can’t let go of anyone’s hands, or we have to start over. All the way over.”

Already I see this not going well.

Instead of untangling ourselves any, I think we only make things that much more complicated. Jackie and Josh take the leads in dictating where each of us ought to go, and how we ought to move, which meets varied reception from all of us. Some of their ideas work, and others absolutely do not. Whatsoever.

“Isabelle is going to have to get out from between Jackie and Alexander somehow, they need to be beside one another.”

“That might not be a good idea, I value my life a little more than that.”

Josh looks across the circle at me. “Izzy, how good are your limbo skills?”

My eyes narrow. “Um, not very.”

“Y’know, it’s a very good thing we didn’t do this where some of you weren’t allowed to talk.”

“You want us to complete this before we ring in the New Year, right?”

“Okay, on what fucking solar system do you expect me to be able to dive between the tiny gap that yours and Dayo’s arms create?” Jack asks Josh after he makes the suggestion, his eyes narrowing.

“Well, we gotta get you through here somehow, dude.”

“We can just not and say we did, thank you very much.”

“Guys, time is running out!” Jen warns.

Willow rolls her eyes. “Jen, you’re deluded to think we can do this in under two hours, much less twenty minutes.”

“I believe in you guys,” she argues. Dayo snorts.

“Well that is some misplaced faith, sister.”

We don’t beat the twenty minutes, of course, but Jen insists we keep on going until we figure it out. After an extra twenty minutes of the human knot comes the hypothetical plane crash, where we have to work together to think of what twelve items within Jen’s basement we’d find most useful in the case we were all stranded on a desert island. After that comes the game of three truths and a lie, which is about as disastrous as one could expect – we spend a solid ten minutes debating on whether or not Alexander accidentally told two lies instead of just the one, and I lose my appetite upon learning much more about the sex lives of my former costars than I would ever care to know. Jen finally lets us break for lunch after that, which is subpar due to the fact that she wasn’t anticipating a blizzard to trap us here and prevent Dominos from delivering. The only bright spot is the Christmas cookies that are low in number and in high demand. I come close to breaking one of Jack’s fingers trying to get the last one.

As Josh goes around and collects our trash, Jen starts up with yet another prelude to what I can only imagine is an equally as horrific as the others we’ve been subjected to.

“Okay, I think the next thing on my list was the blindfolded maze—”

Alexander raises his hand. “Uh yeah, I can tell you right now that blindfolding me and sending me on a journey of disorient ain’t gonna end well, can we push that one back?”

“Or just not do it at all?” Jackie adds hopefully.

Jen’s face draws up into full-blown resting bitch mode. “We’re doing it, Emerson. But,” she concedes, her shoulders slouching. “I guess we could do something a little less action-y.”

“That would be splendid,” Dayo remarks.  

“Can we do nap time?” Josh asks, lifting his hand in question. “Because I think we’d all be in agreement that naptime is the perfect bonding experience – we’re all in one another’s presence while we sleep relatively peacefully.”

“Naps are for chumps.”

“Says the girl who fell asleep standing against a tree.”

Jen rolls her eyes, taking a sip from her water bottle. “Okay, so this next bit is called the purposeful mingle.”

The guys all groan at that. “Purposeful mingle?” Alexander whines.

“I already know all of you, why do I need to mingle and more importantly, why does it have to be purposeful? There’s nothing purposeful about mingling!” Dayo insists. “The two contradict one another entirely!”

Out from her back pocket – I’m really going to have to ask Jen where on earth she bought these sweatpants, because these pockets have to be bottomless pits – Jen withdraws two Camp Hi-Ho bandanas and holds them out. “I can always blindfold you,” she offers. Dayo shuts his mouth very quickly, and Jen smiles.

“Purposeful mingling,” she says. “Blaine told me he had to do this once at a leadership development thingy and that it was utter bullshit, but I figured out a way that we can make it fun.”

Under his breath, Jack mutters, “Heroin would be more fun.”

“I may or may not have stolen part of this from One Tree Hill, but basically I’m gonna pair all of you losers up with someone that you don’t see all the time—" Jen shoots a pointed look at Jackie and Jack, to which they both react with a frown “—and you’re gonna mingle. Purposefully. Anywhere in the house. Just talk about stuff, bond and shit! The person who I think has the most purposeful mingling is gonna win something spectacular,” she promises.

“And how are you gonna determine who mingles the most…purposefully?” Willow asks.

“Like I’m gonna tell you – you morons cheat the system enough as it is. I gotta keep some cards up my sleeve.” She begins to look around our little circle, cogs whirring as she tries to decide who to pair up. I can already kiss any hopes of being with Jackie a fond farewell.

“Okay,” she says slowly, lifting her pointer finger. “Dayo and Jack. Amandla and Josh. Willow and Jackie. Isabelle and Alexander.” Jackie begins to mutter something rather colorful under her breath. Alexander’s already got his eyes locked on me, a hopeful smile on his face when he catches my glance. “And then me and Levvy.”

“You said we can go anywhere in the house?” Josh repeats for clarification.

“Yes,” Jen replies, and then she backtracks a little. “Well, anywhere within reason.” Her eyes then drift over towards Alexander. “I don’t need to see the future youth of America in the contraception stage when I come to gather you all for the regroup.”

From beside me, Jackie’s face is fifty shades of murder as she gleefully assists Jen in shooting Alexander a warning glare. He merely rolls his eyes.

“For fuck’s sake, you people act like I don’t know how to keep it in my pants.”

“You don’t,” Amandla replies, masking it in a cough.

Jen claps her hands, breaking up the conversation. “Alright people, get to mingling. Purposefully! But not too purposefully, Isabelle-and-Alexander-in-particular!”

As I stand up, tugging down the hem of my shirt, I tell Jackie, “You know, maybe the whole hypothermia and frostbite situation won’t be that bad.”

She simply lifts both of her eyebrows, as if to say, ‘I told you.’

Alexander is quick to meet me halfway, rubbing at his chin sheepishly. “They’re insane,” he mutters quietly, what I suppose is his apology on the rest of our nutcase friends’ behalves.

“You’re just now figuring that out?”

His hands burrow down into the pockets of his jeans as he glances around the room, watching as everyone else scatters and Jen and Leven set up camp in the corner of the room. “Where do you wanna go to do this thing?” he asks me.

“I might have an idea or two.”

                                                              ...

“Okay, I don’t know anything about women’s fashion, but this cannot be Jen’s.”

“I don’t even think that could be her mother’s.”

Alexander looks down at the sweater he’s held up to his chest, another laugh falling from his lips. “I wonder if they’d notice if it went missing – this would win me every ugly sweater contest there ever was.”

“You mean ugly Christmas sweater?” I try to correct, my hands fiddling with the rogue lid of a shoebox.

“No, Isabelle, I mean ugly sweater. All of them. This is their king.” Alexander returns it back to the rack in the same place we pulled it from before sitting down cross legged in front of me. “What made you think of coming in here again?”

I shrug. “Tell me, if you were a rabid, anti-Alexbelle Jackie looking to keep an eye on the two of us, where’s the last place you’re gonna think to look?” He concedes, tilting his head towards me. “I dunno, I figured we’d get a little privacy in the master closet, no successful spying attempts occurring for the first few minutes anyways.”

To that, Alexander rolls his eyes. “I’m sure Amandla and Josh have already made it their personal mission to sniff us out.”

“Them or Dayo one.”

A shadow falls over Alexander’s face, and I instantly want to withdraw that statement. It’s so easy to forget that Dayo is a raw nerve for Alexander and vice versa – it’s incredibly easy seeing as how I don’t know the full story behind that. “Why do you think they’re so hung up on the thought of us being together?” I try to reroute the conversation, my voice a little higher than usual.

“They probably bought into that huge fucking fanfiction craze back in the day. Surely you remember that.” His voice is a little lighter, which I’m taking as a good sign.

“How can I forget? I’m the one who sent you links to them half the time,” I tease, cracking a half-smile.

“Will literally followed them for years,” he continues. “I caught her reading one when we went out to lunch one day.”

“Will and Mandla might as well have championed that craze,” I muse. “I still remember the texts I got from them when that Castro posted that stupid list.”

“You know I’m sorry about that, right?” Alexander says softly, and once again, I have singlehandedly managed to derail the conversation to a place I really wasn’t expecting to go to.

I wave my hand around in dismissal. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, of course. It’s water under the bridge, Zander. That happened so long ago…”

“I know, but it doesn’t change the fact that that was super shitty of them and it changed things between us. They knew what they signed up for when Nic got involved with me, the whole fan thing – I told them that they had a thing for the two of us together and it never meant anything other than them just being passionate about something fictional. Still pissed her off though.”

“That wasn’t why you two broke up though, right?” I ask nervously.

He shakes his head, scoffing lightly. “Nah. Nic was an iceberg. We might have had a tiny problem on the surface, but it extended miles beneath it.” His shoulders fall as he sighs. “The relocation Vikings wanted out of me wasn’t something she wanted to commit to, amongst other things.”

My eyebrows furrow together. “Other things?”

When Alexander’s eyes meet mine, I start to feel little punches right to my diaphragm. The vulnerability reflecting in them is the same as if he was standing here in front of me naked – not the kind in which he frequents, but the kind where he’s entirely exposed. No little schticks to hide behind. “Life, I guess,” he admits. “Being the dudebro douchebag can’t last forever, y’know? I burned out with that act faster than I got started with it, it just…wasn’t really me. And that was what she wanted, the parties, the sex, the alcohol, all of that. But I wanted to mature up. Get serious with work, do something that gave me the leeway to get married and have kids.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear my ears were deceiving me. I try not to let the shock color my face as I speak. “Is that still what you want?”

One of his hands drags down his jaw, and his eyes cast back down at the carpet. “Yeah, ‘course it is. I’m ready for that.”

“But?”

“But,” he sighs. “I just don’t feel like I’m…I don’t know. I still don’t feel like I’m in the right place for it, even after ditching all the dead weight I possibly could. Everything I do just feels like one misstep after the other.”

“Hey, that’s not true,” I insist, reaching out and resting my hand on the top of his knee. “As far as I’m concerned, the only missteps you ever took were Liv it Up and Grownups 2.”

Blue eyes flit back up at me. “I was an idiot, huh?”

“Please, this might as well be the cohort of idiots,” I reassure him. “We’ve all done stupid stuff.”

“Gimme a break – you’re perfect, Belle.”

“And you’re full of shit.” One of my eyebrows raises as I grin. “Wanna hear a secret?”

“Isabelle Fuhrman has secrets?” Alexander asks incredulously, and I roll my eyes.

“I’m gonna retract the offer,” I warn.

He shakes his head, sliding a little closer to me. “No, tell me. I’m all ears.”

“Airplane,” I tell him bluntly. He stares at me puzzled.

“Airplane?” It doesn’t seem to click with him as he repeats it out loud, and I give him a pointed look. Even if he didn’t want to, he took away more from the dudebro douchebag act than I think he realizes, seeing as how he can’t take a damn hint or comprehend loaded statements. It takes a second for what I’m actually saying to arrive on his doorstep, and the look on his face when it comes to him is priceless. His face lights up, a shocked laugh echoing through the closet. “Isabelle Gretchen Fuhrman,” he gasps.

“It wasn’t like...the whole shebang,” I clarify. “Just almost.”

“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he says in the midst of what I hope is feigned shock. “Never in a million years would I have ever thought—”

“Yeah, well, welcome to the year 3000,” I tease.

Alexander wallows in his surprise for a minute, the two of us just breaking out into laughs about it once he regains control over his ability to emote beyond wide eyes and jaw dropped. Our bubble is popped right about the time someone starts knocking on the door. “Go away, Jackie!” I call out.

It’s Jen who yells from the other side of the door. “Are your clothes on?”  

“Oh my god,” I groan. “Yes.”

“She’s lying!” Alexander yells out, and I swiftly deliver a punch to his shoulder. “Jesus, you can still pack a punch.”

“Magic, I guess.”

Jen cracks open the door, sliding in a tiny little polaroid camera before shutting it back. “You guys are the last ones to get it – take a cute little picture of each other however you best see fit to commemorate, and for the love of god, if you do nudes—”

“—we are not—“

--definitely gonna do nudes—”

“—then please retrieve them and hide them where I will never be able to see them. Ever. Just bring it with you when you come downstairs, we’re meeting back up in ten.”

I scoot back on the carpet, grabbing the camera as I hear Jen’s footsteps recede away from the closet door. “Take a polaroid to commemorate our time in this stupid walk-in closet,” I repeat, turning the camera over a few times in my hands.

“Oh, I’ve already got a great idea for yours,” Alexander insists, hand expectant as he reaches out for the camera. “Gimme, Fuhrman.”

I sit with my hands in my lap as I wait for him to take the picture, and he very quickly shakes his head. “No, no, no. You aren’t getting off that easy.” He stands up, perusing through the aisles of clothes around us, and all I can do is watch him confusedly. “Was Jen’s grandma a flight attendant in a past life?” he asks, eyes sparkling as he glances back at me.

“Alexander,” I hiss, eyes growing wide as I realize where he’s taking this. “Stop it.”

“Put this on,” he finally says, holding out a navy blazer, pencil skirt and a pair of black heels.

“You’re fucking insane.”

“It’s adorable when you swear,” he comments. “And it’s not like anyone’s ever gonna see this aside from me anyways. I’ll just lie and tell Jen that we did the nudes.”

“Alexander!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Seriously though. No one’s gonna see this. I might put it in my wallet or some shit though, just to…y’know. Commemorate.”

“You’re ridiculous,” I grumble as I slip off my jeans and switch it out for the pencil skirt. The blazer covers up my white sweater alright, and the heels are two sizes too big – I feel exactly how I look, like a little girl playing dress up in someone’s closet. Alexander also finds me a tie from the men’s side of the closet, helping me tie it around my neck before backing up a little.

“Oh yeah, definitely the flight attendant aesthetic. This is so going in my wallet.”

I frown, flipping him off.

“C’mon, Belle, lighten up. Strike a stupid pose or some shit,” he persuades.

I figure I have nothing to lose – if anything, Alexander will forget where he even puts this picture. So I force an overly cheerful smile onto my face, giving a little two fingered salute as I pop my hip out. He laughs as he takes the picture. “Gorgeous,” he compliments playfully.

“If that ends up on Instagram, I will bury you,” I threaten as I kick off the heels.

I shimmy out of Jen’s mom’s clothes, who I hope will never notice that they’ve been disturbed, Alexander putting them back up on their hangers while we wait for the picture to develop. “You gonna get your payback on me?” he asks.

My lips purse together as I sift through a few potential ideas, most of which involve just that. “Mm, nah,” I finally settle. “I’ll think of how to do that later.”

“Oh god,” he mutters. “That might be even worse.”

“Okay, shut up and do as I tell you.”

I position Alexander where I want him and he does so without complaint – a much better model than I will ever be – and I raise the camera up to my face. “Gorgeous,” I mimic him, lowering my voice as I press down on the button. He breaks into laughter right as I do so, and I already know that that’s exactly how the picture will develop.

When we leave the closet and start to head back downstairs to the basement, the polaroid of Alexander is tucked safely into the back pocket of my jeans, far away from Jackie’s prying eyes. She swoops in right next to me when she spots me walking past the kitchen, which is apparently where she and Willow stayed the entire time. “How was it?” she whispers.

“It was fine.”

“Any attempt of penetration?”

My jaw drops a little, and I shove her. “Jacqueline!”

“What?!” she protests. “I had to ask!”

The vibe in the room seems to have shifted a little, some of the edge deriving mostly from hostility having dissipated. We all go back to sitting against the wall, Jen leaning up against the pool table and messing with the cue ball while she waits for us to get settled and shut up.

“Alright Jen, I purposefully mingled my ass off,” Dayo tells her. “How are you picking the winner?”

“See?” she muses to no one in particular. “You guys are so much more motivated when there’s a tangible incentive involved – I should have done this three team building exercises ago.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Jen pushes a piece of hair out of her face, peeling her body off of the edge of the pool table. “Okay, kiddos. I want to see how much purpose you actually mingled with. Everyone’s going to go around and tell one fun fact that they learned about their partner. Person with the most interesting, not-surface level fact gets a check for a thousand dollars.”

Jack begins to choke on the very air he’s breathing.

“A thousand dollars?! For a fun fact?”

Jen looks like the cat that ate the singing canary as she nods. “Yep. So you better make it good, motherfuckers.”

“Do I get a thousand dollars if I pretend to like this whole team building shit?” Dayo asks, Jen’s face quickly falling.

“No. I only bust the checkbook out for worthwhile bribes.” She then wildly gestures towards all of us. “Somebody go!”

The thousand dollars on the table most definitely changes the vibe in the room – this is the first time since we realized we had the curtain pulled over our eyes that we’re actually on board with this whole get-together. Everyone is so excited about this, in fact, that we all start talking over one another.

“Dayo got drunk at a Shades of Blue wrap party and sang Jenny from the Block in front of J-Lo!”

“Dude!”

“Jackie’s on a first name basis with the president of Germany!”

“Amandla babysat Blue Ivy!”

“Josh was still sitting on a phone book to reach the gas pedal his senior year of high school!”

“Isabelle almost joined the mile-high club!”

I’m so prepared to spring everyone with the little tidbit that Ludwig, Manwhore Extraordinaire actually wants to settle down in the next year or two and have kids and watch that thousand-dollar check come my way that I almost miss Alexander’s voice shouting out the fun fact about me. Almost.

It’s Jackie’s turn to choke on the very air she’s breathing, her head whipping in my direction so fucking fast that I don’t know how her neck breaks. I, however, beat her to the punch.

“Excuse me!?” I screech, the room going deathly silent. The gravity of what sort of mistake this has been hits both Alexander and Jen square in the face the minute my voice rings out in the quiet, Jen slowly backing up into the pool table and making her way underneath it so it serves as cover. No number of zeroes is going to deliver us from this level of hell.

“Belle—”

“Dude, too far.” Jack says quietly, shaking his head. “The sex life is always off limits.”

Jackie is nearly purple in the face as she spits out the words at Alexander like they’re knives. “With who, you?”

“Jackie, get a fucking grip, of course not,” I snap, only letting my eyes stray from her for a second before I round back on Alexander. “That was personal, Ludwig.”

“I know, I know,” he starts to backtrack. “I’m sorry, Belle, it just…slipped.”

Everything that happened in the closet between us is beginning to slide down a very slippery slope, becoming more and more lackluster by the second. Leave it to Ludwig to ruin it. Should have seen it coming, really. “Just slipped,” I repeat dully. “That’s wonderful. Really.”

“I’ll give you the thousand dollars, I swear—”

“I will set fire to your bank account, Jennifer, if you pay him.”

“I like you better anyways, Belly,” Jen rushes to confirm. I nod, pulling myself off of the ground and dusting off my hands. I start walking around the room, rummaging through random trunks and drawers along the wall lined with cabinets.

“What are you looking for?” Leven asks me. “Ludwig’s sanity is nowhere to be found, babe.”

“I can hear you!” Alexander snaps.

“A knife,” I reply. “I’m curious to see how well my skills have held up after all this time.”

And with that, team building activities for the rest of the day get postponed. Indefinitely.

[lexyeevee]

Correcting the record

Some people are saying some things again, and I don't really have a masterpost of why those things are off the mark, so here is one. I guess I'll update this if anything else spicy crosses my radar, for ease of linking.

(That doesn't mean to send me new things; I don't need to be kept constantly up to date on the latest hot takes from Breitbart Jr.)

I know this is long, which means most people won't bother to read it. But hey, that means it must be true, right? That's how it works for callouts, so surely it works the same way here.

Foreword

KiwiFarms is a forum that grew out of a wiki dedicated to the sustained stalking and harassment of an autistic trans woman. Their biggest subforum is called "lolcows", referring to the idea that certain people are valued only for the forum's ability to squeeze mockery out of them.

This is the source of much of the scandalous "truth" about glip and myself.

They don't lie, not exactly. Instead, they find a single tweet or sentence somewhere, then concoct a story that fills in the details. That way, they can present the original source as "proof". A casual reader will notice that the source matches their story, and take the story as true. The source doesn't prove the story, but that's a subtle distinction.

Sometimes they'll even claim that the source says something slightly different than it actually does, and still most people won't notice. Maybe the order of sentences gets reversed. Maybe "this will happen" is spun into "I want this to happen". Close enough.

Once they have one reason we're horrible, they can take for granted that we're horrible, which justifies interpreting the next snippet as proving that we're horrible. The more horrible we appear to be, the easier it is to justify digging ever deeper.

They collect mountains of these stories, which makes it very difficult to push back. No matter how many individual tales we respond to, there will always be more. It's actually a well-known poor debating tactic, but it works.

A huge post about how awful someone is looks like a documentary, even though it's carefully constructed to only "report" on things to make the subject look bad. Things we've disproven or apologized for years ago still show up in callouts. Just a few days ago, I saw someone link a post that didn't even exist any more; it had been replaced by an apology. Neither the person who linked it nor the person they linked it to seemed to notice this.

Juicy gossip spreads very quickly, both among people who love gossip and people who genuinely want to do the right thing. Retractions and corrections are boring; nobody spreads those. Besides, if you spread something awful about someone, and it turns out to be false, what does that say about you? Once you've spread gossip, if you want to save face, it's in your best interest to insist the gossip is true — whether it really is or not.

Other people are discouraged from pushing back on our behalf, since that risks attracting the same scrutiny. Besides, if you try to say someone isn't abusive, you may get called an abuse apologist. That makes no sense at all, but it doesn't matter.

And there's no downside to doing any of this. If something false spreads to thousands of people, who's accountable for it? Nobody. You can outright make things up about people and nothing bad will happen to you — but if it's just a misunderstanding, all the better.

Keep all that in mind as you read this.

glip did not refer to autistic people as emotionless robots

Let's start out with a particularly great example of callouts in action. The log screenshot used as "proof" that glip said this about autistic people actually proves it false, because the conversation was:

pk: know what also pk: the section on sociopaths was creepy pk: they’re like emotionless robots

glip/eevee didn't really self-diagnose as autistic

It's weird to be accused both of thinking we're autistic and of insulting autistic people.

But no, not really? We've both observed that lists of symptoms are conspicuously familiar. We don't make any effort to call ourselves autistic, we don't claim to know anything about autism, and our lives haven't changed as a result of this observation.

I don't really get why people care about self-diagnosis anyway. I "self-diagnosed" with ADD before going to a psych who then regular-diagnosed me with ADD and gave me magic brain pills for it.

eevee did not put glip's boobs online

Another good example, though I don't think this ever spread beyond the confines of the forum thread.

I have a public filedump, full of files. One file is called "bewbs.jpg", and unsurprisingly is a photo of some boobs. Someone assumed the photo was of glip's boobs, and so it became truth.

Surprise! It's not. I don't know who's in the photo. It's some image I found online, probably over a decade ago. I don't have the slightest idea why I uploaded it. You can even check out the metadata and see that it was saved from Photoshop 4, which I've never used. Also, Photoshop 5 came out in 1998, when glip was 8, so... prooobably not them.

our cats poop a lot i guess

No, seriously, I've heard this complaint. Our cats do poop a lot, but I'm not really sure what it's supposed to say about us, or what we're supposed to do about it. Corks?

glip is not abusive

The "abusive" label is usually ascribed to a massive callout post by PengoSolvent, but he never said that. He did say "potentially abusive", but left the conclusion up in the air. The difference seems significant.

Oh, and he later recanted, and he's now on good terms with glip. Turns out it was all a series of misunderstandings.

Also, I've been dating glip for nearly a decade now and I'm pretty happy with them, but for some reason, nobody seems to think that counts for anything.

fieldoftheother's level 100 post is bad

Previously.

glip is not trying to get kids to see their porn

I've seen a couple people cite this line from the Discord, claiming it means glip wants 13-year-olds to read forflor:

my legacy will be 13 year olds secretly reading forbiddenflora and realizing they're gay and/or trans

But this was said because people were talking about having themselves been young teenagers who secretly looked at porn and realized they were gay or trans. It was a tongue-in-cheek observation: teenagers will look at porn one way or another, and if they read forflor, its themes may very well jostle some realizations.

I've also been told that glip must want everyone who reads the main comic to also read the porn, because they put character development in the porn. But if that were the case, why would they have the sites separate in the first place? How would anyone even know there's porn, just from reading the main site? The only place that even comes close to linking is in a heavily-disclaimered blurb at the bottom of a few character profiles, on the volunteer-edited wiki, which neither of us even knew about until someone told me in response to this very post. This makes no sense as a master scheme.

The truth is much more mundane: glip feels attached to their characters and likes to make comics with character development.

It is true that glip doesn't care if teenagers seek out their porn. I don't care either? We're not your parents, and we have no way of stopping determined horny teens anyway. It's tagged and separated so people who don't want to see it don't have to, but if you're trying to seek out porn then that's your own business. Just, uh, please don't try to talk to us about it, that's super weird.

glip drew a porn comic with an underage character, but...

This is true. They later took the comic down, and they've since talked about how it was a way of wrangling with their own experiences with CSA.

glip is not transphobic

I think people say glip is transphobic because their comic has a girl with a dick who doesn't hate her dick?

Well, er, newsflash: not all trans girls hate their dicks? It seems like this complaint is implying glip should only depict stereotypical self-hating trans characters, and I don't really understand how that's any kind of improvement.

Ironically, I've seen this claimed multiple times by people who refer to glip with the wrong pronoun.

glip's irc does not prey on children

Someone we knew as spaggledagger claimed that people hit strongly on her on our IRC, despite knowing that she was only 13 and had never had any kind of sexual interaction. She also claimed to have gone to the police and asked them some details.

I've been over this before, but the short version is:

She never mentioned she was 13 until the day she left the IRC for good (because of alleged ageism on our part — she'd invited a friend and the two of them were being incredibly disruptive). On the contrary, she made frequent reference to drinking and having had sex, so by all accounts she presented herself as an adult.

The thing she says the police told her is technobabble. It makes no sense at all.

We cannot find any shred of evidence of the conversations she says she had. However, we did find one thing she claimed was said to her — it was in public, and wasn't directed at her at all.

She mentioned having lied to get an ex-boyfriend in trouble. We also got a message from the moderator of another small community who'd interacted with her before, warning us that she tried to get back at them for banning her by claiming elsewhere that she'd been abused.

She claimed to be paranoid because we mentioned living near her, but she told us where she lived, after someone else in the channel mentioned living in the same area. We've never lived anywhere near either of them.

So this was someone with (by her own admission!) a history of lying to screw over older people, who never told us her age, who supposedly got incomprehensible advice from police, and whose few concrete details were completely wrong.

This particular claim appears to be a total fabrication. To get back at us for not wanting her friend around, I guess?

eevee does not support legalizing child porn

I once read an article that argued for it, and I said "I'm not sure I disagree" — referring to the argument, which was that outlawing a photo of one particular kind of crime was inconsistent. I'm bothered by inconsistency, but obviously it wasn't right to just legalize child porn, therefore the argument must be wrong. So I thought about it out loud.

That's why I also asked someone why a photo of a particular type of crime should be illegal. It wasn't rhetorical; I genuinely wanted to know what the other person thought about the inconsistency.

I wasn't especially clear about this at the time, and it didn't occur to me that my lazy phrasing could be taken as active support for abolishing the law. It was also pretty insensitive to treat a serious topic like debate club — especially one that almost certainly had impacted some of my audience. I know I upset a couple people, and I'm sorry for that.

The tweets have since been dug up and transformed via a game of telephone to "supports legalizing child porn", "has talked extensively about legalizing child porn", and straight up "is a pedophile". Sorry, no. I just like nitpicking, and I made a very poor choice of thing to nitpick.

I've also tweeted about this before.

eevee is not trying to help kids to look at porn

In a FurAffinity journal from 2009, I played armchair lawyer over FA's handling of minors and their access to porn. FA had (and, I assume, still has?) a policy that if an admin finds out a user is underage, their account will be prevented from seeing porn — "agelocked" — until they turn 18. This was usually said to be for legal reasons. I was saying there weren't any legal reasons.

The claim is thus that I wanted teenagers to look at porn for some kind of nefarious reasons. I don't know what those reasons could be? I didn't even draw porn at the time, so it's not like I was trying to lure anybody in or whatever. My actual motives were much more mundane:

I like nitpicking. See above.

I'd seen a few cases where people had done some very invasive snooping to find someone's age. I thought that kind of near-stalking — especially targeted at someone already suspected to be underage — was pretty creepy, and I saw the policy as encouraging it.

glip had been drawing porn since they were 16, mostly in the form of commissions, and at one point had been agelocked. They were 19 when I made the post, so it was still relatively fresh in my mind, and I was annoyed that the policy had landed squarely on glip's main source of income.

(That said, FA is a rickety thing, and I don't think they'd ever tried to agelock a porn artist before. I believe the result was that glip could still post porn, but then not see their own work. I don't know if that was ever fixed.)

eevee did not let her cat die rather than give him medicine

I heard this one second-hand so I don't know exactly what's being said, but regardless I am fucking livid about it. It boils down to a sentence from my old tumblr:

given that atenolol’s most common side effect is lethargy and styx already spends most of his time asleep i don’t think i’m going to do this

My cat, Styx, started rapidly losing weight around the beginning of April. I spent the next month and several thousand dollars being shuttled between vets, trying to find a cause. At one point I was sent to a cardiologist, who — shockingly — diagnosed him with a heart condition.

He was prescribed atenolol, a beta blocker and the usual treatment for the heart condition. I was hesitant to give it to him, since also on the table was FIP — a disease with no cure and a life expectancy measured in days. Beta blockers can cause lethargy, Styx was already sleeping most of the time, and I didn't want to cost him his last few waking hours for no reason.

I decided to wait a few days for the vet's formal diagnosis. What I got was the post linked above, saying the most likely cause was FIP; the heart condition wasn't even on the list. So, yes, I decided against the vet's recommendation, and did not give him the medication for the condition he probably didn't have that wouldn't have affected him until years later anyway. There was never any indication that the atenolol would've helped his FIP in any way; I interpreted the vet's advice as being just in case he had the heart condition instead.

A week later, the vet finally started talking about looking into experimental treatments for FIP — a full ten days after the first mention of a disease that can kill cats in as much time.

Four days after that, we buried the cat I loved. He'd just been sitting in pools of his own diarrhea — the same thing that had ultimately led a vet to recommend we put down our elderly cat.

That month was by far the worst thing I've ever been through. I did everything I could think to do, burned through cash, spent every waking moment with him, and it wasn't enough. I still can't reread his eulogy; it's the only thing that makes me cry.

Extremely cool that some jerks who are desperate for a reason to hate me are now trying to use my dead cat against me.

eevee/glip are not... usually... mean online

It's not uncommon to see people calling us super mean based on a tweet thread that they've carefully cropped to remove the part where the other person was being an asshole. Maybe check for that first.

We get enough assholery that we have fairly low bars for who qualifies as an asshole, too, so there might be false positives. If that's you, ah, sorry. We try our best!

But also, it's common for someone to be a dick while feigning politeness, and we tend to have little patience for that, whereas other people have seemingly infinite patience for it. If you see us snapping for seemingly no reason, we probably got a very different read off of someone.

Final thoughts

I'm sure there's more, but hopefully this is enough that you're starting to suspect a pattern. Most of what we're called out for is wildly misinterpreted or misreported just enough to be damning.

These are people who misgender us and use glip's old name, then call us transphobic in the same breath. They follow our every public move with bated breath, while being largely anonymous or sockpuppets themselves. They show up as one of the top referrers every time I publish a game on itch. They've dug up a comment I made on a friend's LiveJournal from 2004 and implied nefarious explanations. They archived the entire "styx" tag on my old Tumblr, meaning they read everything I went through and their only takeaway was some new "dirt". They've taken the worst things that have ever happened to both glip and I, and used them as blunt weapons to say we're awful. They put this crap in the Tumblr floraverse tag, inflicting it on people who just want to share fanart. They hide in our IRC and our Discord, waiting for new logs they can post and reinterpret. Only completely locked-down spaces are safe from their obsessive eyes, and they openly speculate about what happens behind closed doors as well.

Does this sound like a reasonable way to behave? If a single person acted this way towards someone else, anyone would be rightly horrified — this is straight up stalking. But people reblog their callouts and never question their tactics. I guess stalking is okay if we "deserve" it, and we deserve it because we're awful, and you know we're awful thanks to the stalking.

Here's my question: if they know all their existing stuff is true, why do they keep looking? Ostensibly they believe that we're both proven to be complete monsters, so what else are they hoping to find? Do you think I accidentally tweeted a confession to a murder? Does my old MySpace contain the plans for an orbital superlaser?

Or look at it this way: who have we hurt in the however many years this has been going on? Where are all the actual victims of our cruelty? Who has been protected by this muckraking, and from what?

They have no interest in what's true, only in what's titillating. It's right there in the name of the forum: "lolcows", not "investigative journalism".

And, hey. If you want to hate us for actual reasons, please go ahead. I'm thoughtless and insensitive at times, and I'm bad at maintaining friendships. glip is short with anyone who appears to be acting in bad faith. We both fuck up sometimes. If any of that has put you off, fine. If you think we're insufficiently horrified by the idea of a 17-year-old somewhere sneakily looking at a drawing of a boob, sure, hate us for that too.

But don't make stuff up to fulfill your power fantasy of defending the world from a cartoon villain. Yeah, you — I'm sure a bunch of Kiwi folks are eating up every word of this post simply because I've written it. Hot tip: the first thing to enter your brain is not automatically the truth. How cruel are you being if you're wrong?

[knclarin-blog]

no. 18 magnum opus [final]

The Asian Beauty Standard: Is White Right? 

By Kristine Clarin 

Umbrellas, sunscreen and shadows--these were some of the ways I was taught to keep my skin white and bright. Growing up in the Philippines, my grandmothers and aunts urged me to wear a hat and slather my body with SPF 55+ because as soon as I stepped out into the sun, the only potential threat was not the risk of a sunburn, but the mere idea of getting a few shades tanner. A subject that is often overlooked in mainstream culture is the problem that within the East Asian community, the idea of white skin and Westernized features are glorified while tan skin and Asian features are frowned upon.

For decades Westernized beauty standards have circulated within this community, and unfortunately, darker skinned Asians such as Filipinos, Malaysians, Vietnamese people and so on, are shamed for failing to strive or maintain white skin. My aunts would give compliments when my skin was lighter than usual but would scold me when I was a tad bit darker, describing me as “dirty”. Being surrounded by this mentality, I genuinely believed that white skin was the only skin that fit under the definition of beauty. Sadly, this childhood is not only exclusive to myself but to most, if not all East Asian girls. In history, skin colour determined social status. The lower class would generally be working tirelessly under the sun while people of higher stature avoided the rays by staying in the shade. While this mindset doesn’t apply to modern day as much, many people still see dark skin as something negative and undesirable. Fortunately in North American society, we are taught to love our features which increases self confidence. However, this isn’t the case in other parts of the world and skin colour is not the only issue.

In Asia, the use of whitening products and undergoing cosmetic surgeries to look “Westernized” are as popular as ever. Statistics show that there has been a 20% increase in cosmetic surgeries between 2011-2012 and the numbers continue to rise rapidly. A 12 year-old girl named Lee Min Kyoung in Korea lacked confidence growing up. Her mother’s solution to her daughter’s shyness? Plastic surgery. Min Kyoung did not ask for the procedure but her mother insisted because “this is a society where you have to be pretty to get ahead” implying that she did not think her daughter’s looks were adequate. After the surgery, she became confident in her appearance because of her new eye shape. Lee Min Kyoung, like many adolescents, are still learning to accept themselves and being constantly pressured to “look a little less Asian and look more American” restricts them from doing so. This way of thinking is just not acceptable. Western features became a “need” rather than a “want” as this glorification continues to spread through the constant advertising of skin whitening products, celebrity endorsements, white washing, as well as the mentality of older generations.

Growing up in a Filipino household, I’ve gotten used to the sound of my grandmother’s daily dose of teleseryes or “soap operas” echoing from our living room. It wasn’t long until I started to indulge in these addicting television series and soon became obsessed with the main leads. Afterwards, my addiction went further as I branched off to watching Filipino variety and talk shows. Looking back at that phase, I realized that most, if not all of the celebrities were advocates for skin whitening products. From creams, to soaps to pills, they’ve vouched for them all. There’s even a brand called “SkinWhite” selling a range of products dedicated to achieving a fair complexion. Being a darker skinned girl, it was very hard for me to resist the temptations of wanting to be as “beautiful” and “perfect” as my soap opera idols and I did everything I possibly could to keep myself from tanning. Staying indoors, using bottles upon bottles of sunscreen and using every kind of chemical there is to achieve “perfection” while my family encouraged and even participated.  It is extremely saddening to know for a fact that others felt the same way I did and went to even greater lengths. Many people in the East Asian community have gone to the extremes to get the perfect pale complexion, even if it meant putting their lives at risk. An outbreak in Hong Kong occurred when certain whitening creams contained between 9,000 and 65,000 times more than the recommended dose of mercury, hospitalizing several women. However, women are not the only ones that feel the societal pressures of Eurocentric beauty because men feel the same way.

We often focus on how women see themselves and forget that the Asian beauty standard is a broad spectrum that shelters men as well. Many of my Asian-male friends are also surrounded by the idea that Western beauty is ideal. GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) is one of the most well known men’s magazines and released its first issue in 1957. Fast forward to present day, GQ has over 600,000 monthly subscribers with more than half of the demographic to be men. In its 60 years of publication, GQ has only featured one Asian male on the cover which was back in 1996 and that was Jackie Chan. Almost all of the men on the covers were white, but doesn’t reflect the audience that the magazine reaches. It is without a doubt that many East Asians boys and men read their monthly issues and it is discouraging to see that what society constantly idolizes are people that look nothing like them. Asian-men become alienated and it’s implied that they are not attractive the way they are. By the looks of it, they are not worthy of being on the cover of magazines, but the same white males are offered several features in their careers not only on the US issues but in Asian ones as well.

Many people have labelled Asians to be those nerds that don’t know how to have a good time and all of them happen to be Chinese. Asian girls are submissive and cute, while Asian men are weak, short and have small--- nevermind. Society has painted this picture for the whole world to look at East Asians as nothing more than their stereotypes, that they’re not complex human beings like everyone else and we can give credit to the lack of representation in Hollywood. Recently there has been a rise in the remakes of movies and shows originating from East Asia, some of them I personally loved watching growing up. I was absolutely livid to discover that Scarlett Johansson would be the leading actress for the movie Ghost in the Shell which was once a Japanese animated film and that the show Death Note based in Japan would have a Netflix remake with no Asians in the cast whatsoever. The thought of Hollywood taking shows and movies from East Asia but have the audacity not to cast a single Asian, aggravates me. There is a plethora of roles to be filled by white actors and actresses while Asians aren’t even able to play characters that represent or supposed to represent their ethnic backgrounds. How are aspiring actors and actresses of Asian descent supposed to work for their dreams when they aren’t even given the chance to? Many people let go of their aspirations because it seems nearly impossible to be casted, no matter how hard they work. The roles that are available for them are the stereotypical nerds and immigrants with Chinese accents, not allowing these young actors and actresses to experiment and grow as artists. I grew up with very few role models in Hollywood because I had no one like myself with the same background and upbringing to take inspiration from. I looked up to actresses like Anne Hathaway, and Meryl Streep, not that I’m saying they are not talented, but I believed that I had to look like them in order to achieve anything in life. Although there have been steps taken to diversify Hollywood and the media, I still believe that even now, the mentality is “white is right”. Besides American culture, whitewashing is also a huge problem within East Asia itself.

In the past couple years, I found myself delving into the world of South Korean pop music. At first, I was in it for the head-bopping tunes, but then I slowly got deeper and deeper into the fandoms as well as the basic structure of the music industry in that country. I discovered that my beloved k-pop idols are constantly under the pressure of having porcelain skin. Fans take pictures of the stars and photoshop them so that their skin is whiter, smooth, clear and completely free from imperfections. The celebrities too, become ashamed of their skin and pile on products to remove the dark pigments because they feel as if the fans will not support them if they looked a certain way. Fans bash on their idol’s natural complexion because they think that it’s ugly and dirty. At one meet and greet of a group called Winner, a fan came up to a member named Mino, begging and pleading him to use whitening creams because he was dark. In a once and a lifetime event, the fan chose to criticize their idol, rather than expressing their gratitude for their music. How crazy is that? Another idol, Hyorin from the girl group Sistar has noticeably tanner skin and the public is blind to her talent and beauty because her “scandalous” complexion is what makes it on the headlines. I am in a constant state of confusion when it comes to this issue because not only are the celebrities already being targeted in the public eye, but picking on their slightly tanned skin makes them even more vulnerable. Skin colour has no correlation to one’s talent and ability to entertain, so what’s the big problem? It all stems from the idea that white skin is the right skin and that Western and European features are desirable.

Women and men of Asian descent as a result, detest their appearance and strive to Westernize because of the lack representation, the glorification of white skin and the constant shaming of those with darker complexions. Being a South East Asian girl, it took time and an accepting environment to realize that the Asian beauty standard is indeed a serious problem. I would look at myself in the mirror and wonder why I tanned so easily and why my eyes were so small. It’s sad to know that I was not alone in those insecurities. Why is light skin, a taller nose and bigger eyes deemed to be exclusively beautiful in the East Asian community? Shouldn’t we embrace our differences and accept that being unique is not a bad thing? My hope is that Asians and even non-Asians will learn to accept, admire and appreciate their features while educating others on inclusivity and self love. In the past, it was definitely not easy but now, I see beauty in myself and in others. Tan skin and all.

[biofunmy]

Internet Companies Prepare to Fight the ‘Deepfake’ Future

SAN FRANCISCO — Several months ago, Google hired dozens of actors to sit at a table, stand in a hallway and walk down a street while talking into a video camera.

Then the company’s researchers, using a new kind of artificial intelligence software, swapped the faces of the actors. People who had been walking were suddenly at a table. The actors who had been in a hallway looked like they were on a street. Men’s faces were put on women’s bodies. Women’s faces were put on men’s bodies. In time, the researchers had created hundreds of so-called deepfake videos.

By creating these digitally manipulated videos, Google’s scientists believe they are learning how to spot deepfakes, which researchers and lawmakers worry could become a new, insidious method for spreading disinformation in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

For internet companies like Google, finding the tools to spot deepfakes has gained urgency. If someone wants to spread a fake video far and wide, Google’s YouTube or Facebook’s social media platforms would be great places to do it.

Imagine a fake Senator Elizabeth Warren, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, getting into a fistfight in a doctored video. Or a fake President Trump doing the same. The technology capable of that trickery is edging closer to reality.

“Even with current technology, it hard for some people to tell what is real and what is not,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor of computer science at Arizona State University who is among the academics partnering with Facebook on its deepfake research.

On ‘The Weekly,’ A.I. Engineers Create a Deepfake Video

Deepfakes — a term that generally describes videos doctored with cutting-edge artificial intelligence — have already challenged our assumptions about what is real and what is not.

In recent months, video evidence was at the center of prominent incidents in Brazil, Gabon in Central Africa and China. Each was colored by the same question: Is the video real? The Gabonese president, for example, was out of the country for medical care and his government released a so-called proof-of-life video. Opponents claimed it had been faked. Experts call that confusion “the liar’s dividend.”

“You can already see a material effect that deepfakes have had,” said Nick Dufour, one of the Google engineers overseeing the company’s deepfake research. “They have allowed people to claim that video evidence that would otherwise be very convincing is a fake.”

For decades, computer software has allowed people to manipulate photos and videos or create fake images from scratch. But it has been a slow, painstaking process usually reserved for experts trained in the vagaries of software like Adobe Photoshop or After Effects.

Now, artificial intelligence technologies are streamlining the process, reducing the cost, time and skill needed to doctor digital images. These A.I. systems learn on their own how to build fake images by analyzing thousands of real images. That means they can handle a portion of the workload that once fell to trained technicians. And that means people can create far more fake stuff than they used to.

The technologies used to create deepfakes is still fairly new and the results are often easy to notice. But the technology is evolving. While the tools used to detect these bogus videos are also evolving, some researchers worry that they won’t be able to keep pace.

Google recently said that any academic or corporate researcher could download its collection of synthetic videos and use them to build tools for identifying deepfakes. The video collection is essentially a syllabus of digital trickery for computers. By analyzing all of those images, A.I. systems learn how to watch for fakes. Facebook recently did something similar, using actors to build fake videos and then releasing them to outside researchers.

Engineers at a Canadian company called Dessa, which specializes in artificial intelligence, recently tested a deepfake detector that was built using Google’s synthetic videos. It could identify the Google videos with almost perfect accuracy. But when they tested their detector on deepfake videos plucked from across the internet, it failed more than 40 percent of the time.

They eventually fixed the problem, but only after rebuilding their detector with help from videos found “in the wild,” not created with paid actors — proving that a detector is only as good as the data used to train it.

Their tests showed that the fight against deepfakes and other forms of online disinformation will require nearly constant reinvention. Several hundred synthetic videos are not enough to solve the problem, because they don’t necessarily share the characteristics of fake videos being distributed today, much less in the years to come.

“Unlike other problems, this one is constantly changing,” said Ragavan Thurairatnam, Dessa’s founder and head of machine learning.

In December 2017, someone calling themselves “deepfakes” started using A.I. technologies to graft the heads of celebrities onto nude bodies in pornographic videos. As the practice spread across services like Twitter, Reddit and PornHub, the term deepfake entered the popular lexicon. Soon, it was synonymous with any fake video posted to the internet.

The technology has improved at a rate that surprises A.I. experts, and there is little reason to believe it will slow. Deepfakes should benefit from one of the few tech industry axioms that have held up over the years: Computers always get more powerful and there is always more data. That makes the so-called machine-learning software that helps create deepfakes more effective.

“It is getting easier, and it will continue to get easier. There is no doubt about it,” said Matthias Niessner, a professor of computer science at the Technical University of Munich who is working with Google on its deepfake research. “That trend will continue for years.”

The question is: Which side will improve more quickly?

Researchers like Dr. Niessner are working to build systems that can automatically identify and remove deepfakes. This is the other side of the same coin. Like deepfake creators, deepfake detectors learn their skills by analyzing images.

Detectors can also improve by leaps and bounds. But that requires a constant stream of new data representing the latest deepfake techniques used around the internet, Dr. Niessner and other researchers said. Collecting and sharing the right data can be difficult. Relevant examples are scarce, and for privacy and copyright reasons, companies cannot always share data with outside researchers.

Though activists and artists occasionally release deepfakes as a way of showing how these videos could shift the political discourse online, these techniques are not widely used to spread disinformation. They are mostly used to spread humor or fake pornography, according to Facebook, Google and others who track the progress of deepfakes.

Right now, deepfake videos have subtle imperfections that can be readily detected by automated systems, if not by the naked eye. But some researchers argue that the improved technology will be powerful enough to create fake images without these tiny defects. Companies like Google and Facebook hope they will have reliable detectors in place before that happens.

“In the short term, detection will be reasonably effective,” said Mr. Kambhampati, the Arizona State professor. “In the longer term, I think it will be impossible to distinguish between the real pictures and the fake pictures.”

Sahred From Source link Business

from WordPress http://bit.ly/37vlf4V via IFTTT

[purplesurveys]

476

If someone's laughing, do you instantly think they're laughing at you? Egh no, not really. I’ve had people laugh at me but I do know about it; I’ve never felt paranoid like this. What is the strangest thing you've been asked? My mom’s masseuse asked me if I was pregnant after taking a good look at me and deciding I looked familiar. It felt weird and eerie until I told my parents about it the next day and they said “Oh yeah, she’s the one with the third eye.” Didn’t feel as strange after that, but at the time when she looked me dead in the eye and asked me that question it was definitely so weird lmao. What’s the weirdest thing about life that people just accept as normal? Sometimes I wonder how people from the far past got to decide how certain animals were safe to eat even though they a) clearly scream danger, b) have such a complex way of being consumed (like crabs), or c) ARE STRAIGHT UP POISONOUS (like the pufferfish in Japan). But hey, we’re all eating them right now.

What was your favorite game as a child? I liked local games. We had langit-lupa (heaven and earth), piko (hopscotch), ice-ice water (freeze tag), Chinese garter, 10-20, and patintero. What’s the stupidest thing you've ever heard? Anything that comes out of conservative Catholics’ mouths.

What's the most random thing you've done out of boredom? It would have to be that time that I got really depressed last December and I spent all my Christmas savings meant for friends and family on a bunch of coloring books and my own set of coloring pencils. All for myself. It’s a little morbid, but whaever.  What show did your parents not let you watch as a kid? My parents were pretty liberal and weren’t too strict about shows. My mom absolutely hated Mr. Bean though because she was convinced he was the reason my brother didn’t start talking until he was like 6. She would change the channel if it was on, but she didn’t outright ban us or anything. What is your personal catchphrase? I don’t have one. What is the most pleasurable feeling that doesn't involve anything sexual? Biting into your favorite food after a whole day of not eating. What was your 'Oops, wrong person' moment? I don’t think I have one. I’d die of embarrassment. What do you find attractive that isn't considered 'normal' attraction? I really can’t bring myself to be into the muscular/buff look and don’t mind if someone is on the bigger side, is skinny, or is generelly not a gym person. What’s the dumbest thing you’ve done drunk? Fell asleep in the pool. What's your proudest moment in the bathroom? ?????? What’s something you own that gets you lots of compliments? Technically not mine, but Gabie would lend me a windbreaker-type of jacket that was very colorful. It was green, yellow, pink, basically a very bright and gay jacket. I got complimented on it EVERY SINGLE TIME I wore it by nearly every single person who passed by me in school – and I wish I was kidding lmao. She got it in Baguio for 50 pesos ($1), it’s insane. I think it was lost by another person she lent it to. A damn shame. If money was no object, where would you want to live? Canada. Who is your favourite mythological character? In the brief moment I was into mythology, I really liked the way Rick Riordan wrote Apollo to be in his Percy Jackson series. Big ol’goofball. What's something that's happened which couldn't happen at a worse time? [continued from this afternoon] > Had the sign for my gas start blinking while I was stuck in standstill traffic > Get into a car accident while finally making a turn to the gas station > Get pulled over by an officer for changing a lane and nearly hitting a car, because unbeknownst to me, the accident had closed my right side mirror, making me not see my entire right side and I almost hit the car to my right All happened within ten minutes. I was a freshman in high school and couldn’t be more terrified. Police let me go when I started having a panic attack. What is the best pickup line you've ever heard? I don’t like pickup lines. What did aging ruin for you? Dreams. What is the most hilarious thing you’ve ever heard? Idk, I’ve found a lot of things hilarious. What is the darkest thing you have seen on the internet? It would be either Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared or Too Many Cooks. What's something you really enjoy, but can't have? A regularly luxurious life. What Wikipedia article have you recently read? OMG hahaha so there were times in internship where nothing was tasked to me FOR HOURS and I would get super bored. Then I remember hearing from somewhere that Wikipedia has a whole article that’s just a list of unusual deaths that’s happened from modern history until the present, and I gobbled that shit up until I was given a responsibility. I found out more listicles they apparently had – list of last words, list of people who disappeared mysteriously, etc; read all of those too. What's a book you were made to read in school that you really liked? My #1 would have to be Without Seeing the Dawn by Steven Javellana. It’s the most honest narration of the Philippines’ Japanese occupation I’ve ever read. It’s painful to read, but it’s the beauty of it. What objective did you fail to complete this week? I told myself I was gonna start externals work for my org, but I’ve just been so burned out in the last month that I haven’t gotten around to starting yet. I definitely have to this week, though so it’s not like I’ll completely fail it. What could have gotten worse for you but it didn't? Tbh the desire to end my life? I threw in the towel by the time I was 12, but I’m still here so I guess life is doing something right.

What subject should be taught at schools, but isn't? Adulting. Like being taught about taxes, social security, insurance, documents they ask when you apply for a job, etc. I’m 21 and I know nothing about these. I didn’t even know what insurance meant until I was 20. What is the best thing about having a Significant Other? The idea of having a go-to person for everything is very comforting for me. What makes you unusually uncomfortable? Distorted sound effects. It’s probably not unusual though. What is an upcoming purchase you're excited about? It’s no longer future tense because I was finally able to find Pop-Tarts at the nearby mall! I couldn’t find it ANYWHERE in the last couple of years and I’ve been craving it for the same period of time. Then Gab convinced me to try the supermarket at the mall we went to today and we found a box of Chocolate Fudge gloriously sitting on one of the shelves. It was way more expensive than I remember it being, but I waited for so long that I just grabbed it and didn’t care about my budget anymore. What is the worst game you've ever played? The Hannah Montana game for the Wii that I had was so bad it was good. What’s the oddest thing you like to do? I don’t think I have particularly odd habits. What's the funniest news story you've seen in the past few weeks? There’s a satirical article I came across a week ago that was about how dinosaurs got extinct because they ate pineapples on pizza. It was made even more hilarious by the fact that it included a graphic of dinosaurs and there were slices of pizza with pineapples on them photoshopped into the graphic. Definitely pissed off a number of pineapple enthusiasts that day lmaaaaao. What do you really really want right now? I’m so excited to eat my Pop-Tarts but I think I should save them for tomorrow. What do you hide from people? Suicidal thoughts, because I never wanna bother anyone. What was the first sign you knew you had a crush on someone? When I actively avoided her because it hurt to see her. HAHAHAH yuck drama What's the best lemonade you've made from the lemons life gave you? Lasting long enough to create a family in the form of my orgmates. Who was your cartoon crush while growing up? Sam from Totally Spies. What's the best way to deal with religious door knockers? We don’t have that culture here but I most likely would just never open the door. What’s the most hypocritical thing you’ve ever seen or heard? A large chunk of Catholics. Who’s the most interesting person you’ve ever met? When I was still interning at my PR firm, I shadowed my supervisor in an interview that one of our clients had for that day. Our client’s representative is the biggest badass I’ve met. He’s from South Africa and was born and raised at a time when apartheid was still around. He’s white, so he was brainwashed in school to think that they were superior and for a time, he really thought his race was. Then he got to work under Nelson Mandela’s party when he was much older and that was the only time he realized how backwards that mindset was. Anyway he had Mandela’s spies stalk his ass every single day because of his background and he ultimately got shot twice. There’s loads more stories to tell but I don’t want to give him away. 

When I was watching him get interviewed he proved to have a lot of knowledge on history and current events too so that’s another plus. He was just super cool and it was a breath of fresh air to talk to a foreigner that was more aware of social situations than the average Filipino. What just doesn't impress you? Carly Rae Jepsen. What’s the worst possible way to introduce yourself? There’s no worst way; just don’t try too hard because the bullshit can be detected so easily. What makes you wish that you were born in the past or the future? How easy it was to make a living and score a job decades ago. What tragic event was coincidentally beneficial to you? My breakup. What's something people are proud of, but it doesn't impress you? ‘Miracles.’ What's the worst possible moment to go and play on a bouncy castle? Doing it with a bunch of sweaty, rowdy kids. Who is the greatest ever comedian? Not really into comedians so my recommendations might suck for some. What’s your irrational fear? Commercials at night. What's your oldest memory? Playing in a Winnie the Pooh tent when I was 3. What can you not wake up without? Checking the time. What did you think was cool when you were younger that you now think isn’t? Wristbands. What are your favourite or most memorable lines from any movie/show? “How do you like them apples?” from Good Will Hunting. What's something people love to hate? The Kardashians. What’s something that is underrated but extremely useful? Being polite.

[bigyack-com]

Internet Companies Prepare to Fight the ‘Deepfake’ Future

SAN FRANCISCO — Several months ago, Google hired dozens of actors to sit at a table, stand in a hallway and walk down a street while talking into a video camera.Then the company’s researchers, using a new kind of artificial intelligence software, swapped the faces of the actors. People who had been walking were suddenly at a table. The actors who had been in a hallway looked like they were on a street. Men’s faces were put on women’s bodies. Women’s faces were put on men’s bodies. In time, the researchers had created hundreds of so-called deepfake videos.By creating these digitally manipulated videos, Google’s scientists believe they are learning how to spot deepfakes, which researchers and lawmakers worry could become a new, insidious method for spreading disinformation in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. For internet companies like Google, finding the tools to spot deepfakes has gained urgency. If someone wants to spread a fake video far and wide, Google’s YouTube or Facebook’s social media platforms would be great places to do it.Imagine a fake Senator Elizabeth Warren, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, getting into a fistfight in a doctored video. Or a fake President Trump doing the same. The technology capable of that trickery is edging closer to reality.“Even with current technology, it hard for some people to tell what is real and what is not,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor of computer science at Arizona State University who is among the academics partnering with Facebook on its deepfake research.On ‘The Weekly,’ A.I. Engineers Create a Deepfake VideoDeepfakes — a term that generally describes videos doctored with cutting-edge artificial intelligence — have already challenged our assumptions about what is real and what is not. In recent months, video evidence was at the center of prominent incidents in Brazil, Gabon in Central Africa and China. Each was colored by the same question: Is the video real? The Gabonese president, for example, was out of the country for medical care and his government released a so-called proof-of-life video. Opponents claimed it had been faked. Experts call that confusion “the liar’s dividend.”“You can already see a material effect that deepfakes have had,” said Nick Dufour, one of the Google engineers overseeing the company’s deepfake research. “They have allowed people to claim that video evidence that would otherwise be very convincing is a fake.”For decades, computer software has allowed people to manipulate photos and videos or create fake images from scratch. But it has been a slow, painstaking process usually reserved for experts trained in the vagaries of software like Adobe Photoshop or After Effects.Now, artificial intelligence technologies are streamlining the process, reducing the cost, time and skill needed to doctor digital images. These A.I. systems learn on their own how to build fake images by analyzing thousands of real images. That means they can handle a portion of the workload that once fell to trained technicians. And that means people can create far more fake stuff than they used to.The technologies used to create deepfakes is still fairly new and the results are often easy to notice. But the technology is evolving. While the tools used to detect these bogus videos are also evolving, some researchers worry that they won’t be able to keep pace.Google recently said that any academic or corporate researcher could download its collection of synthetic videos and use them to build tools for identifying deepfakes. The video collection is essentially a syllabus of digital trickery for computers. By analyzing all of those images, A.I. systems learn how to watch for fakes. Facebook recently did something similar, using actors to build fake videos and then releasing them to outside researchers. Engineers at a Canadian company called Dessa, which specializes in artificial intelligence, recently tested a deepfake detector that was built using Google’s synthetic videos. It could identify the Google videos with almost perfect accuracy. But when they tested their detector on deepfake videos plucked from across the internet, it failed more than 40 percent of the time.They eventually fixed the problem, but only after rebuilding their detector with help from videos found “in the wild,” not created with paid actors — proving that a detector is only as good as the data used to train it. Their tests showed that the fight against deepfakes and other forms of online disinformation will require nearly constant reinvention. Several hundred synthetic videos are not enough to solve the problem, because they don’t necessarily share the characteristics of fake videos being distributed today, much less in the years to come.“Unlike other problems, this one is constantly changing,” said Ragavan Thurairatnam, Dessa’s founder and head of machine learning.In December 2017, someone calling themselves “deepfakes” started using A.I. technologies to graft the heads of celebrities onto nude bodies in pornographic videos. As the practice spread across services like Twitter, Reddit and PornHub, the term deepfake entered the popular lexicon. Soon, it was synonymous with any fake video posted to the internet.The technology has improved at a rate that surprises A.I. experts, and there is little reason to believe it will slow. Deepfakes should benefit from one of the few tech industry axioms that have held up over the years: Computers always get more powerful and there is always more data. That makes the so-called machine-learning software that helps create deepfakes more effective.“It is getting easier, and it will continue to get easier. There is no doubt about it,” said Matthias Niessner, a professor of computer science at the Technical University of Munich who is working with Google on its deepfake research. “That trend will continue for years.” The question is: Which side will improve more quickly? Researchers like Dr. Niessner are working to build systems that can automatically identify and remove deepfakes. This is the other side of the same coin. Like deepfake creators, deepfake detectors learn their skills by analyzing images.Detectors can also improve by leaps and bounds. But that requires a constant stream of new data representing the latest deepfake techniques used around the internet, Dr. Niessner and other researchers said. Collecting and sharing the right data can be difficult. Relevant examples are scarce, and for privacy and copyright reasons, companies cannot always share data with outside researchers. Though activists and artists occasionally release deepfakes as a way of showing how these videos could shift the political discourse online, these techniques are not widely used to spread disinformation. They are mostly used to spread humor or fake pornography, according to Facebook, Google and others who track the progress of deepfakes.Right now, deepfake videos have subtle imperfections that can be readily detected by automated systems, if not by the naked eye. But some researchers argue that the improved technology will be powerful enough to create fake images without these tiny defects. Companies like Google and Facebook hope they will have reliable detectors in place before that happens.“In the short term, detection will be reasonably effective,” said Mr. Kambhampati, the Arizona State professor. “In the longer term, I think it will be impossible to distinguish between the real pictures and the fake pictures.” Source link Read the full article

[pauldeckerus]

Guest Blog: Educator & Photoshop Magician Bret Malley

LIFE IS A COMPOSITE

Hello everyone! For this guest blog post (thank you Scott and Brad for the wonderful invite to contribute!), folks are probably hoping to eek out some super slick tips and tricks about compositing, both for shooting and editing alike (and I’ll definitely deliver on those—I promise!).

But I also wanted to get a bit more philosophical about the nature of compositing and its greater possibilities and implications in my own life’s grand composite—and perhaps yours as well.

For those that could care less about the musings and meandering background of a super Photoshop wizard/nerd and just want the goods, feel free to jump down to the header “Five Tips for Shooting and Editing Composite Images” (you’re welcome :-)!

For everyone else feeling either a bit more curious, pensive, or similarly introspective, please read on!

Put Daddy Down, Please

Like creating any new image, I like to start at the beginning with sketches of the process and figure out some kind of endgame. So here we go with a medley of biography, discovery, and realization—but first, an overview!

Filtering and searching way way back, some of my earliest memories are of making art with computers—and after teaching Photoshop for over a decade at the university and college level (yes, big time-leap there!), and writing two books on compositing in Photoshop, I realize the lens through which I perceive the world and life in general has been forever altered. It’s helped me shape my own creative direction. As my (nearly) six year old son now describes his dreams to me in terms of Photoshop tools and features (and accurately I might add!), I see that my focus has even spilled (just a bit) onto my family as well (sorry, family!).

I also realize that I’ve always been a compositor in life—or at least a collector, editor, and creator in some form for nearly my entire 33 years of being. I also believe that we all are compositors to some extent, whether or not we realize it; after all, life is essentially one mega composite we piece together one experience, moment, scar, and laugh at a time… I know, deeeep, right?

But seriously, there is a lot to be said about having a creative career concept, a goal, and using the pieces you have at hand (some garbage and some pure gold)—and seeking out or creating the ones for the concept we’re after. Yes, this is one big “compositing is a box-of-chocolates” life metaphor/story (please excuse the metaphor merge here). So for those interested in going a bit deeper into these layers, here’s a bit of my own composited story… And no, it does not start with a floating feather picked up by Tom Hanks—but that was a pretty damn good composited intro for its time!

A Little Personal History Panel Scrolling way back again into my own childhood, I was doomed to be an artist from the onset. Starting with lining beans up into a perfectly (obsessively) straight line on some craft paper, my mother had me pegged at only a year or so of age. I believe her gardening journal for that day read something prophetic such as, “he’s definitely doomed to be an artist.” Okay, she probably did not use the word “doomed” but the realization was definitely meta tagged in there.

And while my mom was hobbit level earthy, my dad was equally Tron level nerdy as he ran his own “cutting-edge” computer business in the 80s. Dual custody between the two was like going back and forth from PC to Mac every week—blast you Ctrl vs Cmd!

However, when living with my dad on his week with me, I had access to gadgets such as those early scanners (the kind you had to hand roll over your images with) and the very first digital art applications. I discovered that when bored enough, there was definitely quite a bit you could do with nothing more than a pencil tool and paint bucket.

I was constantly inspired with the fantasy garden dreamland of my mom’s place and was jacked into the Grid at my dad’s. This all happened with a backdrop of living near Yosemite as my non-virtual backyard. This combination made for some interesting early digital art to say the least! Hidden metaphor tip in this—pick out an interesting background if you can.

Fantasy Landscape featuring some good old archived Yosemite imagery. Mac OS is not the only one that gets inspiration from this place!

Learn From Failure And Success Unfortunately though, my first memory of inspirational and creative failure hit deep (definitely a destructive edit). Apparently the local county fair art competition judges did not understand digital art of any kind (there was definitely no category for it in the early 90s). I suppose I can dismiss my “honorable mention” non-award award, in that I was perhaps a bit too ahead of my time as the crayon drawn house with a crappy looking rainbow took first place that year. Solid play on that kid’s part though—and it’s a good thing I’m still not bitter about it… because that would be one strange snapshot of childhood to travel around with waiting to use as a background to motivation.

Speaking of which, these are all literal (mental) pictures in my life I that have inserted into a number of life compositions and choices. Some imagery we just have with us, and it shapes what we can do with it, who we are, and where we’re going with the pieces. My mental archive to this day is my most cherished inspirational material. Sometimes for texture, narrative, concept, or adding some atmosphere—or revenge! Check out my composite from ten or so years ago (notice the house with a rainbow? Take that, first place-winner kid from childhood!).

Rainbow’s End, a fantasy composite of over 200 layers created from my own photography archive back in 2008.

Each Composite Has Its Strengths, Difficulties and Elements of Contrast Scroll down/forward a bit to an awesome artsy Waldorf school education and my dad tragically passing away when I was nine years old (yeah, that one sucked). Regardless of what the life experience is, both joy and drama can definitely add dimension to the composite—and this too had a hand in heavily shaping the direction of my ongoing layering and the direction I have since taken the composition.

From then on, it was entirely up to my mom to see my interests in digital arts continued and supported—and for that she essentially made sure we had a computer loaded with art programs (thank you, mom!) including an early version of Adobe Photoshop (version 2), and the rest was up to me.

An interesting counterpoint complication to this form of creativity was the influences of my school. A large part of the Waldorf School philosophy was/is to heavily discourage computer and screen-time use for children (even back then) of any kind, so I was always a bit of a closeted digital art nerd.

This snapshot of minor intrigue and juxtaposition came in handy though, at least creatively—I was a well supported digital rebel. And contrast is always a nice touch for just about any final image. So is community and family support for that matter.

To Create Is To Play By the time I was released into the public high school along with my friends, we all had computers (finally!), and we were soon killing each other on networked computer games of extreme violence and gore. But even then, I was somehow the ultimate class creative nerd, even in gaming—and would use my super art/design magic to create beautifully elaborate and intricate game levels to then brutally trap and murder my friends within (what are besties for after all?).

This was another technical direction to the development of my creativity—and my friends definitely paid the price with their avatar lives. I learned that like legos, building your vision is incredibly fun and rewarding. Imagination could be made tangible—and even playable. This is how I think of digital creative tools to this day. Only with less gore.

Experiment And Push Your Creativity To The Edge Throughout high school though, I never took an actual art class until darkroom photography (which blew my mind and forever changed my life—more on this soon) my final term of senior year. Even without any traditional art classes for four years of high school, I was misguidedly voted on by my peers as “Most Artistic” student of our class (which I bet confused the hell out of those art teachers I never met).

However, it was the photography class that truly had the most impact as I found a catalyst for my creative medium. Even back then, I began compositing, Jerry Uelsmann style, in the darkroom, combining everything I shot.

At 18 years old I took a trip to Europe with some close friends, and started scanning and compositing the resulting images in Photoshop before I really knew what compositing was. Experimenting a bit and pushing yourself creatively is an important goal for any big project.

As mentioned, taking that photography course opened my eyes to the pure magic of a new kind of image creation. It also most definitely made me wonder why I took band as an elective for all those years instead of photography (what was I thinking?!)… But then again I may never have met my wife as she was first chair clarinetist, so there is that.

In any case, I went on to UC Santa Cruz for a degree in Film and Digital Media, then immediately on to graduate school at Syracuse University for an MFA degree in Computer Art. This is where I took my self-taught Photoshop skills to another level and started winning awards and various features—and my first master class tutorial in Advanced Photoshop magazine.

That, unfortunately, gave me the first inkling that I could indeed write a book on the subject. This was also a great lesson that just because you could do something, does not mean you should—but that’s another story entirely! (Sorry for writing the book, family! And the second one too).

Advanced Photoshop Magazine Master Class tutorial on Fantasy Landscapes.

Refine Your Concept/Goals and Find Your Drive During graduate school I also directed and edited an award winning feature length documentary on Greenwashing (Greenwashers 2011). Oh, and I also used my minor in electronic music to co-score the feature film as well. For some reason this still gets screened internationally at various festivals and educational institutions (as the concept is still fairly relevant across the world).

This epic filmmaking experience is where the concept of compositing comes back into more relevance. Each of these mediums (for myself at least) are nearly indistinguishable from a creative standpoint. For documentary filmmaking, it is about collecting, gathering, imagining, pre-visualizing, then shaping, arranging, layering, building, and whittling to the core of the concept and balance of the story and composition. It’s a different dimension of the same processes as compositing in Photoshop. Same with music composition as well—you build, piece by piece, layer by layer, getting each element in the appropriate location, at the right level of intensity and emotion—everything needs to resonate and blend seamlessly, intentionally. In this layer of my life (well, more like a smart object, really), it awakened the realization of power behind the combination of intent and craft. Results were the results (obviously?).

Enjoy your Inspiration Moving to the Pacific NW, my wife and I soon had a son, Kellen (okay, my wife obviously did all of the real work on that part of creation some six years ago), and my world became both smaller and much much larger all at once. The only creative outlet and interest I really had was in raising my little super-dude, so this became a literal compositing theme in my Photoshop work.

We all use the tools and resources we have at hand, so I unabashedly drew my family into my creative obsessions. Out went any need for gaming, and in came a new level of digital play that was more addicting than any high score or Facebook like (though I have to say, those were nice as well). This realization paralleled my earlier theme of finding out that creating is play in itself as back when I created my own video game levels. Though in this creative play, the gore was definitely replaced with the stinky kind waiting to attack me hiding in some little guy’s diaper—and I definitely paid the price this time around.

Make The Plan, Pursue The Goal With most of my own imagery archived deep, ready to pull out when needed, the most recent elements I had to plan, pursue, and persistently capture at just the right angle, lighting, and timing. From national and international client work, teaching at universities and colleges full-time, in addition to teaching online with Craftsy, CreativeLive, and now with KelbyOne (yay!), these pieces don’t always just fall into place on their own, but take quite a bit of shooting and reshooting to get done right.

I wrote the first edition to Adobe Master Class; Advanced Compositing in Adobe Photoshop before I turned 30, then when that one sold out everywhere, I wrote the second edition (aka tortuous-rewrite/expansion) which just came out this last December. Super proud of this one, though I’m still not sure anything is worth that much slogging at three chapters a week (one new, two edits). Okay, done complaining about my feather.

Conclusion In general, and in case it was somehow missed, this entire story is a bit of a composite in itself, right? It more or less has just the pieces that I feel fit with the concept, creatively, professionally, and personally. Quite a lot has obviously been masked out in this story, but I think that’s the point of compositing in general. Concept to finish, usage of vignettes, paying attention to eye-flow, hierarchy, it all matters in how we move forward and finalize the idea behind it all. We all have choices as to what we bring to our subject and narrative—and how we can better blend the elements we’re perhaps stuck with and the ones we still need to go out and gather.

With proper planning, imagination, numerous fails, attempts and more attempts—and loads of creative drive and obsession, we all composite to some extent. Hopefully we like the results and have a load of fun along the way. For myself, I’m doing my best to think big and make the most of each element I have. My final concept? Have a magical adventure and make it a blast! Okay… that sounded a little bit like I want to take a trip to Disneyland, but I think (hope) you get the point.

And now, as promised, here are some actual relevant tips on shooting and compositing in Photoshop—enjoy!

Five Tips for Shooting and Editing Composite Images

For shooting in-frame composites (ones where all the material is in the same framing), lock down your camera and settings, and use either an intervalometer—or better yet, the wifi or bluetooth wireless tethering capabilities of your camera and phone/tablet app if it has it. Not only can you see and control the live image on your phone or tablet screen, but you can easily see exactly how to better position every single element and push your concept and pre-visualization to the next level.

Again, for in-frame compositing, select each piece you want to bring into the composite using the rectangular marquee tool (M) and give loads of room around each element you drag to select—then copy (Cmd+C/Ctrl+C) and use paste in place (Cmd+Shift+V/Ctrl+Shift+V) in your master composite file. This will paste the selected content exactly where it was copied from, leaving out the guesswork and the wasted time spent having to tediously move the element to properly match up with the background content. Mask as needed—you may not even need to use Select and Mask, and rather, just paint with a soft brush around the subject and edges of the copies (if there is nothing overlapping behind it).

Sometimes a single layer can be slightly too light, too dark, too warm, cool, etc. than the others (even those shot during the same shoot!)—use clipped adjustments when this happens. This tip is an obvious one for some, but if you are not yet using clipped adjustments, you are definitely missing out on the amazing potential to isolate adjustments from layer to layer without globally adjusting your composite from the top down. To clip an adjustment layer to affect a single layer, place the new adjustment (or any layer with an altered blending mode that you want to only affect the one below it) directly above the one you want to clip to; next, hold down Alt/Opt while you click directly between the two layers. Just before you click, you should see the mouse pointer change to a clipped icon indicating the hotspot for this killer feature. Adjustment layers also come pre-equipped with this capability in the form of a button at the bottom of the properties panel for the adjustment layer.

When shooting composites such as adding a subject to a completely different background (such as those shot in studio being transported to outside or a different location in general), don’t just match lighting direction and quality (this should be a given, hopefully ;-), but match both original background shot focal length (check the essential metadata in Bridge or Lightroom to see your settings) as well as frame position and distance of the subject to the camera. This will not only make your compositing SO much easier in post, but it will definitely make it look more believable as our eyes pick up on even small things that are off—even if we can’t exactly put our finger on it.

One trick I use to better color continuity in all composite scenarios is to desaturate all the various elements, then bring in your own color cast effects or filters—then increase the vibrance as a global adjustment (not saturation). For warmer tones, try something like a new solid fill layer that is a yellow-orange. Change its blending mode to Overlay and decrease the layer’s saturation to under 15%. This always adds some nice warmth to a composite without muddying the highlights like the Photo filter often does. Another thing to play around with is the Color Lookup adjustment layer as this adjustment has some quite interesting presets that you can toggle through much like phone photography app filters. You can always use the adjustment layer’s opacity slider to bring in however much you want or don’t want for the desired effect.

And with that, I will leave you all to ponder the meaning of your own composites, whether in the grand picture of life—or more literally within Photoshop. Either way, rock on!

You can see more of Bret’s work at BretMalley.com, check out his classes on KelbyOne, and keep up with him on Facebook and LinkedIn!

The post Guest Blog: Educator & Photoshop Magician Bret Malley appeared first on Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider.

from Photography News https://scottkelby.com/guest-blog-educator-photoshop-magician-bret-malley/