#uncharismatic facts

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

Today locusts are most commonly thought of as a biblical plague, but in fact swarms of them occur almost every year in Africa, North America, Asia, and Australia. The largest swarm ever recorded occurred in Kenya in 1954; it covered 200 sq km (77 sq mi), and the population was estimated about 10 billion individuals!

(Image: A desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) by Mourad Harzallah)

If you send me proof that you’ve made a donation to UNRWA or another fund benefiting Palestinians– including esim donations and verified gofundmes– I’ll make art of any animal of your choosing.

[1ore]

i feel like plant ecology is how they get you. when you become a plant person whats next. mycology? lichen? the world;s your oyster....

[sergeifyodorov]

i’m in desperate need for a scholar to undertake the jhughes thesis

Jack Hughes has all the arrogance of a true American superstar, but none of the vulnerability. Jack Hughes has all the grace of an undersized, injury-prone forward, but none of the caution. Jack Hughes has all of the social status of a chosen one, but none of the leadership.

jack hughes is a middle child and despite my own lack of siblings i can Definitely tell -- the vicious competitive drive that made him become that good. quinn takes his stick and pulls out jack's braces. as much as the endless hughes brothers fascination can totally grate and i Get That you HAVE to look at each of these three as once part of a unit (especially Luke because he was drafted after Jack, and to his team -- he will only ever be in Jack's shadow, unless one day one of them leaves).

the hugheses are not a huge family -- that is, not a family of very large people -- and they've made a name for themselves as smooth-skating, agile skill players in spite of that, or perhaps to make up for it. jack as a result is notably smaller than a lot of other players both on the devils and in the league and you can Just Tell he's insecure about it. the skill his hughesness afforded him has made him better than other players his age when they were All small and size was less of an issue. when he wasn't so much of a boy among men. it was for this reason he was picked first overall, you see. when he made the NHL he was suddenly confronted by a faster game, of players who could and did just knock him to his ass, and he was suddenly thrust into a world where he wasn't the biggest fish in the usntdp pond and it threw him.

you see, that's another thing. skill in hockey means social status. they like to tell you that it doesn't, but there's a reason that the captain's most likely to be one of the best players on the team, if not outright the best. and in the usntdp jack was The Best. so he was made captain. so his teammates flocked to him. so it was allowed to all go to his head, so caufield and zegras -- the cady and gretchen to his regina george, and i don't mean that in a fun way -- congregated to him.

and now on the devils he might be the star but he's not the captain and because hockey players are Supposed to love their teammates he loves nico but nico's bigger than him and nicer than him and can grow real body hair. and jack's the darling of every teenage-girl devils fan, a fact which i understand and have minimal opinion on but fifty-fifty he either soaks up attention from or resents, or possibly both.

so yeah he's a greasy insecure uncharismatic controlling arrogant frat boy, and because he has a cute perfect smile and scores PPG people love him, and because he is not the archetype of the ubermasculine hockey superstar he believes that he is barely clinging to this thread. and i love him too don't get that mixed up

[seat-safety-switch]

Recently, I was watching television when a formless ghoul appeared and told me that it was my fault for not owning a house. Despite the fact that I do own a house thanks to the unsolved death of my landlord and the subsequent squatters-rights law that allows me to keep adverse possession of the property unless I leave for over 24 hours at a time, something else about what she said stuck in my craw.

She explained that if I would just take $1500 a month out of my paycheque, and put it aside, and never touch it, I would have enough to make a down payment on a house. This made sense, but only that kind of sense which is made until you put down the bong and ask the other person at the party to repeat themselves very slowly while you pull out your Bowie knife and body-snatcher detector.

if you did indeed start saving $1500 a month in January 1st, 2018, you would indeed have $90,000 by January 1st, 2023. Probably a little more from interest, but not nearly as much as you would have had by repeatedly putting that money into literally any investment vehicle, such as a 1978 Plymouth Volare.

Now, here's where things get really crazy.

If you take that same $1500 a month and you start putting it in your bank account in the year 620, by January 1, 2023, you will be able to afford a $25 million house, all cash. Or the 20% downpayment on a $125 million house if you’re feeling like you can stretch it a little. And you also will have experienced the entire arc of the industrial revolution, which you will have been unable to enjoy while paying rent to more than two dozen landlords, even as the concept of serfdom collapses around you.

Here's where things get even crazier.

If you had $1500 American dollars per month in the year 620, you would actually be able to just buy the papacy and install yourself as Pope, replacing the uncharismatic Boniface V. In this case, you would be living rent free in the Vatican for over 1400 years, unable to be removed unless through direct sub-papal fiat, although still vulnerable to the radical side-effects of internecine warfare in Italy and especially the pressures of standing up to a politically strong emperor in a time when the Church’s absolute power over politics is beginning to wane. Then, you can spend that $1500 a month on whatever you like, instead of housing or food. I recommend a 1978 Plymouth Volare.

This is the real life hack, and it's shocking nobody talks about it.

Subscribe to my tiktok for more finance tips, and by “tiktok” I mean the sound that the broken camshaft on my 1978 Plymouth Volare is making. If you buy it, I swear it’s an easy fix.

[seasurfacefullofclouds1]

These mainstream music critics all sound so angry that someone dares to succeed despite their predictions, which have been decided and curated by the industry.

Pop music critics aren’t immune to the influence of money, and in fact are no longer independent of industry. Critics appease industry to gain access to the biggest pop stars, the ones who bring readership and ad revenue to prop up their dwindling livelihood.

There’s absolutely no need to punch down on a musician who has obviously been blacklisted by an entire industry so that an industry-anointed ex-bandmate could “shine,” as it were (through sex appeal if not actual talent).

And yet they don’t hesitate to spew angry and unkind words: the repeated reminders of Louis’ family tragedies, the reiteration of the same lines Savan Kotecha used years ago— not the best looking, not the most talented, not the best singer, etc.

Their actions bring to mind a Shakespearean line, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” 😌

If Louis Tomlinson is such a nobody, so uncharismatic, so common (the classism there!), such an undeserving, working class lout, it must drive the industry crazy that he’s still touring (and selling out) the same arenas that Harry Styles toured just last year?

He’s still able to get a #1 UK album? Still able to have thousands line the streets for him? Still have hundreds of fans wait for him outside his concert venues just to wave hello? Still able to bring strangers together to celebrate life and hope? Still able to sell £millions in merch? Still able to write and sing incredibly validating, life-affirming, emotionally honest, funny and witty songs, and stay humble and kind?

How fucking dare he.

How fucking dare his fans.

The critics tried so, so hard.

Louis is supposed to be crying into his pillow every night from his “lack of talent,” supposed to have disappeared into the ether, but instead he’s going on a real world tour? Visiting countries that never saw One Direction? With an incredibly close, joyous crew that has fun on the road, and openers who love him. Louis has the respect of technicians working on his tour because of his intelligence, patience, and ideas. He’s building a career from the ground up, with actual music. With no payola, no radio support, no critical acclaim.

No wonder they’re so angry.

[cemeterything]

i feel like i'd be unstoppable if i could just hold my own in verbal conversations but the fact is my concentration issues, hyperactive and intense personality and inability to emote appropriately or sincerely overshadow my strengths (friendly, kind, capable of picking up on and following things quickly, good listener, thoughtful and articulate) and make me an incredibly uncharismatic conversational partner 😔 i'm working on it but it's hard when for most of my life i've rarely gotten the chance to actually share anything more than a handful of words of small talk with another human being

[piosplayhouse]

Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games

(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)

(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)

Part I. The Backstory

My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.

However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.

The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.

(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)

Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.

However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.

(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)

This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.

(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)

¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.

Part II. The Game

The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.

To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.

Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)

What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.

You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))

Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:

(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)

I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.

In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.

(Image taken from an anonymous friend)

Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.

On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.

As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.

(My original post)³

What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.

² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.

³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.

Part III. The Ban, The Report

I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.

You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.

By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.

Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.

The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".

So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:

"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.

I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.

So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.

Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.

I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.

Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.

The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.

As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.

Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.

Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.

You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.

I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).

Part IV. The Backlash

I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!

After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.

However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).

I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).

I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.

Part V. Conclusions

I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.

However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.

Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.

Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.

It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.

[morrak]

Untitled Wednesday Library Series, Part 131

The year is 2000, and you’re either Dan Hipes, Dale R. Jackson, Katy NeSmith, David Printiss, or Karla Brandt. A book with your name on it, Field Guide to the Rare Animals of Florida, has just been accepted for publication thanks to a couple of Garys — Evink and Knight— in the state DoT and the Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI), respectively. Maybe you’re pretty excited. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re worried about the copyright situation, which won’t be resolved for another year. I don’t know, I’m not you.

The How

The year is 2023, and you’re either me or @krieper. You’re walking through a thrift shop and see this book, still in two layers of plastic wrap, sitting on a shelf next to a dubiously salable woodcarving. If you’re krieper, you recognize a couple of beasties on the cover. If you’re me, you recognize the title typeface as an Ed Benguiat joint. Either way, you think it looks pretty neat.

The Text

Well, it’s a state field guide. Corals, mussels, snails, crayfish and shrimp, mayflies, dragonflies, beetles, butterflies, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, all with info on IDing, similar species, habitat, range, and status. Each (sub)species represented was or is ‘rare’; most were or are under imminent threat of extinction. Data come mostly from FNAI records.

The Object

The real stars of the show are the (always doting and often even useful) photographs and drawings. These come from dozens of different people, but a shockingly large plurality are courtesy of one Barry Mansell. Barry, you’re my hero.

A little fragile, as evidenced by the slight cup ring sustained (somehow) through the wrapping at some point in the foregoing decades. Also very glossy. Sorry about that.

You have have noticed this is in a three-ring binder. When we picked it up, the block wasn’t even installed — we had to unwrap and click it in ourselves. Very satisfying. Very fun era-typical typesetting, too, though there are about two too many fonts going on. Readable if textbookish. Did you know ITC Korinna was used to subtitle Devo’s ‘Whip It’?

The Why, Though?

First, because it makes me happy to give something this pretty its due affection. More than two decades in just-off-the-presses condition is a new record for me; I hope other copies of this — there can’t have been many — got to better homes. It’s a great example of a well-funded, administratively supported side-product of slow, uncharismatic research, though nothing can save it from the fact that it’s also a production of the same systems that made it necessary (to the extent that it is so).

To that point, and second, because it’s several flavors of violent upset at once. ‘Only’ a few dozen species have been delisted from US rolls since this was printed, and a quick cross-check agains the ToC came up blank, but that’s not especially the point. The invert roster is underrepresented and shrinking fast; specialized local subspecies like this displays are faring badly, especially in the Keys. This feels like a yearbook from the 50s or a last-ditch scribble more than a field guide, really. Maybe that’s worth something.

[crevicedwelling]

Are there any Myriapods that're kind of halfway between a centipede and millipede? Not counting just the fact that a lot of flatback millis look a little like centis

no, not really. there are only four classes in the Myriapoda; the two nobody talks about are the Pauropoda and the Symphyla and imo they are both very much their own unique types of guy

[cloudabserk]

Hiiiii it’s nosy time for me so: 4, 7 and 9!!!!

!! hi nosy! :D

4. were the romantic undertones between sasuke and naruto accidental or on purpose

i don’t feel like i know enough about the writer to be able to say buuuut speculatively… it kinda seems like they’re written gay by someone who doesn’t know he can be gay. like the fact that they apparently do get married to women but then their marriages are sad and unfulfilling (so i’ve heard) … and even in the og story that every other important thing in their lives is second to each other… idk. i do think kishimoto at least knows their bond is not brotherly.

7. i’m not sure …. honestly i do rly like fics where naruto decides not to pursue the role for his own sake. but for the purposes of story/canon? i think he has to be hokage. i think that’s kind of what the story is. he can’t be strong enough to save the world unless he can save sasuke and vice versa: that’s what his journey is during shippuden. convincing people over and over of the purity and power of his love for sasuke.

obviously the political system in naruto is crazy fucked, but that aside, i think the plot is about proving his idealism is realistic and his promises aren’t false: his love can save sasuke and so his love can change the world.

9. naruto fandom words ur allergic to

hmmm i don’t really get into discourse that much and i’ve only been in the fandom for like a month so idk. but i hate when people are like “why was X behaving illogically” when it’s pretty clear their reasons are just grief and mental illness (see: almost every uchiha)

in fanfics i hate when they drastically change naruto or sasuke for no reason especially if it’s to make them “seem” more like a top or bottom. i also hate when one of them is given buckets of pity and sadness and the other ones trauma is totally ignored. or when one of them is made way more crazy and the other is normal. obviously details have to change for aus but i like when it’s balanced and both characters have a reasonable amount of angst and quirkiness

i hate when people think sasuke is into murder. he very openly does not like it and goes out of his way to help others. or when people say he doesn’t feel empathy/care about anything. it’s canon that he feels more intensely than most people and that’s why he’s the way he is. and i hate when people make naruto uncharismatic or overly dumb. he’s oblivious and a little annoying but his people skills are his best superpower.

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

A worm that can jump? It's more likely than you think! Asian jumping worms will thrash wildly when threatened, and have been known to leap nearly 30 cm (11 in) into the air! If that doesn't deter predators, they may also drop their tails just like a lizard.

(Image: An Asian jumping worm (Amynthas agrestis) by Tom Potterfield)

If you send me proof that you’ve made a donation to UNRWA or another fund benefiting Palestinians– including esim donations and verified gofundmes– I’ll make art of any animal of your choosing.

[bog-goblin]

Being a biologist that works with "uncharismatic" species can be really upsetting at times. We as biologists do our best to find the most beautiful examples of our species, but convincing people who are stuck in their way of disliking something is often very difficult. On the flip side, being surrounded by academics who simply gush over their animals, especially the more unappreciated species, is eye-opening.

I had a professor who specializes in biting flies, specifically those belonging to the family Tabanidae (more commonly known as deerflies and horseflies). He would light up whenever he talked about them, lamenting about their gorgeous diversity in colour and patterns. I see them quite differently now.

There is not a single animal that I dislike. In fact, it is extremely difficult for me to pick a favourite, given just how many there are! Please feel free to tag this post with your favourite critters, as I'd love to hear about them!

[sergeifyodorov]

god the hughes brother archetypes DO drive me crazy and the thing about quinn is that yes he's Eldest Daughter Syndrome but specifically in in the "is no one else going to deal with that? fine, then I'll do it" way. Canucks need a captain "okay then i'll do it" teammates need a friendly face and english help "guess i'm doing that" teammates need a million assists on the ice "okay fine i'll do it" petey's sports car can't do the snow "fine i'll pick you up." what a storyline. you're presented with a problem and you just go "yeah okay fine I can fix it" and then you do because that's always just been the expectation.

exactlyyyyy he's altruistic in a really annoying way because like. he has been expected to be so his entire life and obviously understands that it is not only helpful but also unlikely to be done by anyone else. but also he finds it so ugggghhhhhhh like he's gonna help you because you need help. but he hates it.

quinn number 1 trait -> going to help u even if he doesn't want to. not because he neeeeds you to like him because frankly he doesn't really care if most people like him or not. like it's cool if you do like him but it's not on his list of priorities (no matter how much the little tkachuk in his ear whispers that it Should Be). he's going to help you because it's his duty. because it needs to be done.

quinn number 2 trait -> loyalty. too loyal in fact. loyal to vancouver even when it would serve him not to be. loyal to his brothers, even when it would serve others better for him not to be. loyal to his teammates because obviously.

ultimate underlying motivation -> practicality. duty. hard realism. realism to the point of minimal progress -- loyalty to the old way, too -- but realism nonetheless. another life is possible but changing this one is easier.

these two traits do make him a good captain. i suspect as he gets older they'll make him a great captain. i suspect no other canuck will ever wear 43 again, so make sure and watch him for the next fifteen years ! he'd be more likely to stay a canuck forever than to ever join his brothers on the opposite coast, especially now that the C is on his chest and the sense of duty has stuck him in vancouver like a sewing pin on a paper map. he's petty and an enabler in the way that these things make you and horrifyingly uncharismatically awkward. and quorgeous (quinn gorgeous!)

[necronatural]

The absolute hostility of the website that going "its extremely fucking funny to say 'I'm NOT ignoring racism, in fact i have a Homestuck Racism Workshop'" immediately veers into this bizzare vitriolic bile.

It really does feel like a stupid little slapfight suddenly gains stakes when people found out those on the other side are trans women [therefore their statements should be taken with more suspicion and ill intent]. Like its all haha until the trans-misogynistic logic pit of "wait...I like this person less for mysterious reasons...I feel like maybe they being smugly unfair and judgemental and not acknowledging they're unlikeable for very valid reasons [I don't know those reasons but they're valid]" manifests

like trans women can't do something wrong, because people need Evidence of their general feeling of dislike, and thus everything they do is "Possible Evidence Of Why They Deserve My Discomfort With Them"

& like it happens to more than just trans women. the fucking insane lindsay ellis reaction was this too, that a lot of people just didn't like her and found her uncharismatic and felt self-conscious that other people did not seem to have this reaction to her, so there was motivation to tear her down and relief when they found something. This is the entire premise of why KiwiFarms feel so self-righteous for their e-stalking too. its just insane with trans women because regardless of their charisma they STILL can't do right no matter what.

always watch out for this circular logic. scary stuff

[nonbinarygamzee]

i think it is very interesting how people pick and choose which characters to sympathize with on the basis of being reduced to plot devices or being in general captives to their narratives. and obviously you dont have to like or give a shit about every character to exist especially not in a work so simultaniously dense and flat as homestuck, but i have both an intense interest in sociology and too much experience with how this fandom treats people for liking the "wrong" fictional children not to be eternally preoccupied with what makes these distinctions. when the character is liked, they are allowed the grace of being kind of poorly written; its the fault of the author, or theres some significant nudging about of their story beats to recontextualize them into something more nuanced and whole. by contrast, if the character is generally agreed upon to be uncharismatic, their personality flaws are inflated and the flatness of their writing is either erased in preference of integrating those authorial decisions into the characters personality (regardless of how glaringly contradictory) or more concerningly becomes a means of shutting down criticism on the basis nobody should care about the unserious/unwritten ones anyways.

interestingly, with gamzee in particular, ive found that people tend to do one or the other moreso than both; dont get me wrong, theres still a plethora of moralizing over peoples sympathy for This particular fictional child going on, obviously, thats basically the reason i am trapped here. but because gamzee is accepted as not a character but a plot device or an obstacle, a lot of people arent invested enough in her potential personhood to insist that the (antithetical) ways that she behaves are proof of her being "iredeemable". but they still have a negative emotional response to people having investment in her character. it isnt relevant whether or not shes a bad person, or whether she is being puppeteered, because her functionality in the world she exists in is to propagate the story and stand in opposition to its protagonists.

however as interesting as i think that is and for all i do think it says about an individual persons approach to homestucks presentation, i also cant ignore that that dichotomy only really started to Exist once it became less in vogue to harrass people for their character allegiences. in the same way, it seems like we as a fandom cannot escape the trap of being really, really weird about tavros every couple of years. skirting around some of the more blatantly ridiculous stuff because i do actually value my sanity a little bit, he is definitely one of the characters i first noticed people using critique as a pretense for passing judgement on people who liked or cared about him. again basically coinciding wiyh when it stopped being generally socially acceptable to just openly laugh about what a pathetic loser the disabled kid being humorously abused onscreen was. when ableism started to become a topic people cared about and disabled people and fans who related to tavros began to provide more in depth critique of the writing choices, and of fans, namely fans who made very light of his disability or who had a general refusal to talk about vriska's(and others but you know why its about her here) ableism, there was a massive uptick in people feeling the need to talk unprompted about how boring and shitty tavros is, questioning how anybody could like him when hes so badly written, etc. all in ways that did not try very hard to hide the fact that the concern about character writing was disingenuous and only really served the purpose of shutting down critiques of ableism in the fandom and comic. obviously this all seems to stem from investment in canonicity but i do notice it informs even the choices of people who approach their engagement in a "my city now" type of way. because the presentation of these characters impacts the wider perception, which impacts the ways people will deconstruct them. and this is why the idea that "homestuck doesnt have a canon" is a lie being sold to you for the sake of shutting down investigations od authorial motivation. was not intended to be epilogue snark but thatd as good a way to end this nonsense as anything else.

[souryogurt64]

aw man why was the arctic monkeys concert…like that?

the main thing was that i literally just thought it sounded really bad, both the band and the venues sound. i felt like the vocals were really bad and i couldnt hear the bass at all which was compounded by the fact i felt like the guitar work wasnt very good. there was a lot of feedback at one point during the show (i think multiple tbh) which i feel vindicated that i wasnt crazy. idk how but i somehow felt like i couldnt hear anything (never felt like that at a concert before) and like it was hurting my ears.

this is not really about the show itself but the lineup procedure was very bad, drawn out and disorganized and there was a lot of cutting for something that took 2 hours and a ton of screaming to do “fairly”. i also felt like the people there were kind of awful, usually theres like a sense of at least fake camraderie when youre in line for hours but there was none of that, plus i was next to this group of girls who were shit talking their friend who had headphones in and couldnt hear them.

also it was the most invasive and over the top bag policy ive ever experienced. venue was also fugly and was also not in an awesome location in terms of transportation, what was around, and safety. there also wasnt enough staff around at all given what they were asking of us

ive also never considered myself to be sensitive to flashing before but the strobing during the show hurt. there was also basically no set design, props, or confetti/inflatables, creative lighting, fog, water, anything. most big rock acts ive seen (weezer, mcr, green day, fob, panic, etc) have used almost all of them plus pyro/fireworks/other sfx so i was pretty surprised. i wasnt super close to the stage but i feel like i wouldve noticed if they had. they also abruptly cut the walkout music mid-song after only about 90 seconds or so and turned the lights up to full blast (ow) which was also really jarring and then they turned the music back on after maybe 20 seconds which i felt (like the mic feedback) vindicated that i wasnt crazy and whoever running sound was kind of clueless

opener also wasnt good. there was only one opener which i was glad for given how bad it was but i felt like the wait times between sets were a bit much— i feel like other big rock shows ive seen have managed to do a lot more in the same or not much more time, like somehow squeezed in 3-5 bands. the opener was also a pretty small band, which was fine but all in all it felt like kind of ripoff given how much it cost-- the most important thing is how the headlining band sounds but that was. also real bad.

finally alex also seemed like a very uncharismatic and uncomfortable performer to a degree that was offputting, he also didnt look so hot in general -- not like attractiveness, i mean as slang for sickly haha.

i dont want to be a hater but no one goes into a rock concert of one of their all-time top streamed artists they paid hundreds and *wants* to feel like they need to cover their ears during the show lol.

i know i was pitching a fit about the fob wrigley show but it wasnt actually bad, i was just mad i couldnt hear the bass at all during headfirst slide, they played 3 covers and i didnt like my 8ball song . otherwise it was fine. but this was like legit for real unpleasant. ive gone to over like 60 concerts including seeing the arctic monkeys a really long time ago so i feel like i have a good metric for what concerts are like normally haha