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gemkun · 1 month

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@hindblight ↬ continuation.

⸻ the crepitating fire — a beacon , against the backdrop of ebony , past windowpanes — recalls system hours ago , whereupon he’d been recruited amidst his exclusive lessons. gratitude , should have been his reaction , but instead he’d consigned himself under the scrutiny of his students. how they clamoured , prattling away as if to shirk his teachings for this precise moment , adorned by a visitation ( or rather a phenomenon ). only to the trained eye , would one detect the scheme employed by the tempered scholar , and to the mundanite’s chagrin , it is a successful one.

leading to where they were now — secluded and without a soul to intervene. the treacherous conditions of this planet , prompts him to consider the calculations implemented by her deliberate hand. though , the absence of a signal , enabling him to communicate across the cosmos , was not a hindrance.

not when the studies being performed were utterly engrossing. devouring only to the intellectual mind , where hunger festered in light of new discoveries.

a feat he had witnessed , not mere moments ago , when the dead was blessed with the elixir of life once more. the ethics , however , unsettles his mind as he observes. for subjecting flora to unconventional methods , was no pressing matter , but ruan mei was not one to be content with a small victory.

hers was an immense and ravenous hunger that needed to be quenched.

but veritas was just as insatiable.

attention curves , steering to beverages and desserts alike , arranged neatly in perfect circularity. with cakes at its focus. how geometrically pleasing. fending off his wish to respire , he acts accordingly , as a gentleman should when a lady beseeches him to participate in harmless trials. though , as cup is lifted to grace his lips and subsequently assuage taste buds , a pleasant sensation fills him so. mimicking the purification of his sanctum.

content , he hums. before placing ornate china against lacquered wood , with no clink resounding upon its return. a temporary diversion — both are privy to this fact — but it is a necessity , for the purpose of establishing amiability.

❝ miss ruan mei — ❞ splinters their silence. disrupting the session of profound observation , and perhaps , she’d known too , but this sole realisation does not dissuade the researcher. ❝ — your unconventional methods have led you to yet another astounding achievement. ❞ he opens , utilising a factual statement , having witnessed the reanimation of the departed. ❝ however , i'm no fool. i am well aware you intend on applying this to more than just flowers. ❞ his gaze lingers , enthralled in the vision of flames and how they dance.

where a single spark could set ablaze their current dwelling. how poetic , indeed.

❝ i have pledged to assist you in ascertaining the effects against our agreed upon subject — your garden. once you widen your sample size , i will rescind my position. ❞

the pop of firewood sears his tongue , cutting off the remaining stance he upholds. though , a genius can surely understand his bearing.

❝ that being said , i would either reduce the time of exposure to prevent overgrowth and the susceptibility to rot , or i would taper the concentration by diluting it with the water we filtered earlier. the residual pollution will not tamper with your blooms , now that we have purified it. ❞

still , he watches , in mesmerisation at the kaleidoscope of oranges and reds. whilst , truth beknown , his sights rest on the woman beside him , with his attuned senses , where even his peripheral gaze does not require the flit of pupils.

#* ✦ 𝐕𝐈. ❮ muses ❯ ⸻ ❝ 「 veritas ratio 」#* ✦ 𝐕𝐈𝐈. ❮ threads ❯ ⸻ ❝#* ✦ hindblight #* ✦ hindblight | ruan mei #i was like i'll write a bit and then it became this behemoth #i didn't want to get too specific into the measurements cause like its all variable #but if veritas is like add 77.4mL later down the line don't be surprised #hes still so sus of her for good reason #i also think he's the type to realise if his drink has been tampered with so he'd know if there's a drug or something unlike normal people #wow he should be a poison taster okay but that's for another au #kinda also took insp cause like with sunday and aven he just looks away but in reality he's watching closely

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headspace-hotel · 6 months

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I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

#agriculture #it's so messed up #plants #livestock

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ohnoitstbskyen · 6 months

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re: Somerton

Not for nothing, but I think we should remember that James Somerton's fans and subscribers are normal people, just like you. They are people who received his output in good faith, and extended to him a normal amount of grace and benefit of the doubt, which he took advantage of.

I don't think it's helpful to respond to the exposé on Somerton with sentiments along the lines of "wow, how could anyone ever think THIS GUY'S videos were any good, ha ha ha, how did he ever get subscribers?" because 1) you have the substantial benefit of hindsight and a disengaged outsider perspective, and 2) it's a rhetoric that creates a divide between you (refined, savvy, smart, sophisticated) and Somerton's audience (gullible, unrefined, easily taken advantage of, terrible taste), which is a false divide, with a false sense of security.

Somerton's success happened because he stole good writing. He found interesting, insightful, in-depth work done by other people, applied the one skill he actually has which is marketing, and re-packaged it as his own. He targeted a market which is starving for the exact kind of writing he was stealing, and pushed his audience to disengage from sources that conflicted with him.

Hbomberguy makes this point in his exposé video: good queer writing is hard to find and incredibly easy to lose. The writers Somerton stole from were often poor or precarious, writing freelance work for small circles under shitty conditions, without the means or the reach or the privileges necessary to find bigger markets. And, as Hbomb demonstrated, when people did discover Somerton's plagiarism, he used his substantial audience to hound them away and dissuade anyone else from trying to hold him accountable.

He stole queer writing by marginalized people, about experiences and perspectives that people are desperate to hear more about, and even if his delivery and aesthetics were naff, his words resonated with people because the original writers who actually wrote them poured their goddamn hearts and souls into it.

Somerton also maintained a consistent narrative of persecution and marginalization about himself. He took the plain truth, which is that queer people and perspectives are discriminated against, and worked that into a story about himself as a lone, brave truth-teller, daring to voice an authentic queer perspective, constantly beset by bigots and adversaries who sought to tear him down. As @aranock, who works with some of the people he targeted, writes in this post, Somerton weaponized whatever casual bias and bigotry he could find in his audience to reinforce his me vs them narrative (usually misogyny and various forms of transphobia), which is what grifters do. They find a vulnerable thread in a community and pull on it. And while you may not have the particular vulnerability that he exploited, you do have vulnerabilities, and they can be exploited too.

People felt compelled to support him, even if his work was sometimes shoddy, because he presented himself as a vulnerable, marginalized person in need of help, he pulled on that vulnerable thread.

Again, he has a degree in marketing, and just like propaganda, nobody is immune to marketing.

YouTube as a system is set up to push for more, constantly more. More content, more videos, more output, more more more more, and part of Somerton and Illuminaughty's success was their ability to push out large amounts of content to the hungry algorithm, even if it was of inferior quality. The algorithm rewarded their volume of output with more eyeballs and attention, and therefore more opportunities to find people who were vulnerable to their grift.

It is a system which quite literally rewards the exact kind of plagiarism that they do, because watch-time and engagement are easily measurable metrics for a corporation, and academic rigor is not. There is pressure to deliver, and a lot of rewards to gain from cutting corners to do it.

Somerton and Illuminaughty and Internet Historian are extreme and very obvious cases, so blatant that you can make a four hour video essay exposing what they've done, but the vast majority of this kind of plagiarism isn't going to be obvious - sometimes it might not even be obvious to the people who are doing it. Casual plagiarism is endemic to the modern internet, and most people don't get educated on what the exact boundaries are between proper sourcing and quoting vs plagiarizing. We had an entire course module at my university aimed at teaching students the exact differences and definitions, and people still made good faith mistakes in their essays and papers that they had to learn to correct during their education.

All of this to say: it is extremely easy in hindsight to call Somerton's work shitty and shoddy, his aesthetics flat and uninspired, and to imagine that as a sophisticated person with good taste and critical faculties, you would never be taken in by this kind of grifter. It is extremely easy to distance yourself from the people he preyed on, and imagine that you will never have to worry about your fave doing your dirty like that.

But part of the point of Hbomberguy's video is that plagiarism is extremely easy to get away with, and often difficult for the average person to spot and call out, and with the rise of AI tools blurring the lines even further, it is not going to get any easier.

So I think we should resist the temptation to think of Somerton's audience as people with bad taste and poor faculties. We should resist the temptation to distance ourselves from the perfectly normal people he preyed on. Many times in your life, a modestly clever man with a marketing degree has fooled you too.

On a personal note, by the same token, I am resisting the temptation to assume that I am too good to be vulnerable to the systemic pressures that produced Somerton and Illuminaughty. No, I've never made a video by word-for-word reciting someone else's work, but I know for a fact that I could do a better job of double-checking my work and citing my sources. I feel the exact same pressure to get a video out as fast as possible, I have the exact same rewards dangled in front of me by YouTube as a platform, and I can't pretend it doesn't affect my work. To me, Hbomb's video felt like a wake-up call to do better.

#tb blog #james somerton #hbomberguy #todd in the shadows #plagiarism #youtube

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fixomnia-scribble · 1 year

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Scientists are very serious.

This is a post about science. And soup.

Dr. Elinne Becket, a microbiologist from Cal State University, is in the middle of one of those Fridge Experiments that happens to us all - except in this case, she is uniquely placed to unravel the science down to the microbial level.

While cleaning out her fridge, Dr. Becket found that a tub of family-recipe beef vegetable soup had turned bright blue. “Ok I'm outing myself here,” she tweeted, “but there was forgotten beef soup in our fridge we just cleaned it out and it was BLUE?!?!? Wtf contam would make it blue??? Like BRIGHT blue!! Even w/ all my years in micro I'm not handling this well.“

Read on for a breathless and ongoing saga of Soup and Science, and the wonderful international community that is Academic Twitter.

Academic Twitter quickly reminded her of her Responsibilities to Scientific Inquiry. (Cue the chanting from around the world of “CLONE THE SOUP! CLONE THE SOUP!”)

“I can’t believe y’all talked me into going back into the trash.” she tweeted in response, over a photo of a puddle of beautiful Mediterranean-sea blue soup in the trash bin, with bits of veg and noodles arising from the depths.

Scientists being scientists, Dr. Becket agreed to take a sample and send it to colleagues for cloning and microbial analysis.This involved getting arms-deep into the trash bin of Old Soup. “I’m never forviging @ATinyGreenCell (genomic biologist Sebastian Cocioba) for this.” Dr. Becket tweeted, with a photo of a properly dipped and snipped and VERY blue q-tip in a small clear plastic tub.

Diving into decomposing soup was not the only hazard. She writes: “My mom (who made the soup for my birthday) came across this thread and now 1) I have to answer for letting her soup spoil and 2) she's worried @ATinyGreenCell will figure out her secret recipe.“

Dr. Becket and Sebastian were able to culture the Blue Goo!

Becket posted a photo of three petri plates of streaked beef bouillon agar at 72 hours incubation, at 37C, room temp and 4C. She writes: “Left the plates where they were for another 2 days, except the 37°C one was brought to RT, which then grew white stuff over the yellow stuff and stinks to high heaven. RT looked the same. 4°C had impressive growth. Restreaked them all onto TECH agar, awaiting results!”

Sebastian, from his lab, tweeted a photo of three more covered petri dishes, with early results: “Great progress on isolating the glowy microbe from our #BlueSoup! It's so fluorescent the streak is GREEN. Still needs another restreak as it seems there is a straggler but should clear up in the next plate. Exciting!”

Then yesterday, Sebastian tweeted out an updated photo of his plates under daylight and blacklight. “Whatever grew on the #BlueSoup colony plates overnight glows under UV, but only on King's Agar B! That particular media is used to tease out fluorescein expression in pseudomonads. What are the chances that the same cell line expresses fluorescent AND blue pigments?“

“Looking closer, there definitely is a handful of different microbes showing distinct phenotypes. Could be that the blue producer and the fluorescent microbes are totally different microbes!”

At which point, Professor Cynthia Whitchurch of Norwich, England, responded: “Consistent with P. fluorescens being at least part of the #BlueSoup community. The fluorescence is due to production of the siderophore pyoverdine which is up-regulated when iron availability is limited. P. aeruginosa produced this too but my guess is you have blue Pf.”

And Australian agricultural researcher @WAJWebster helpfully tweeted a petri dish of ALL KINDS of colourful bacterial colonies from white to yellow to orange to stark black, with a cheerful: “You need bact-o--colours? I got you, fam.”

The best part is that as of today, March 9, 2023, THE BLUE SOUP MYSTERY CONTINUES. WE ARE WATCHING SCIENCE HAPPENING!

A paper is being written. And Dr. Becket’s mum is getting an author credit as the proprietary owner of the #BlueSoup recipe.

Dr. Becket’s Twitter is here: https://twitter.com/bielleogy

Sebastian Cocioba’s Twitter is here: https://twitter.com/ATinyGreenCell

Fun IFLS story is here: https://www.iflscience.com/microbiologist-investigates-after-her-beef-soup-turned-blue-in-the-freezer-67894?fbclid=IwAR0H27KqVZhzzrosnjzzKkxuKASZ-0L0Lt6hGwCRDJK8xvFbbSlyS4JvwlM

#soup #science #science twitter #academic twitter #fridge experiments #bluesoup

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literalgrill · 5 months

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Do NOT Support Hard Drive On Patreon

You might see friends today suggesting you support Hard Drive on Patreon today. You know, the funny video games version of The Onion? As a journalist, I will firmly tell you DO NOT GIVE THEM A DIME.

The CEO has pushed out all former staff that have built the site up to its current greatness and has been pushing the use of AI. The staff begged to have a Patreon before basically all being pushed out, but the idea was refused until now, when it will only line the pockets of a single person instead of hard working writers.

I know they might have provided laughs before, but Hard Drive is a shell of what it was once. Let it die and support the people who actually made those moments of joy possible. Don't believe me? Check out what former employees are saying below:

Kevin Podas: Okay you know what, I would feel bad saying nothing about this, so here goes:🚨SAVE YOUR MONEY🚨

We passionately advocated for a Patreon at Hard Drive & were aggressively shot down. The talent & people who built the site were pushed out. To see this now is beyond upsetting. For the past few years or so I put a lot of myself into this website. I pitched a ton of jokes, got over 120 articles published, & met a lot of great people. I'm sure if you've been following me for some time you could easily see this.

However, there is a lot of misinformation. I was eventually promoted to Managing Editor of the site & was ecstatic. Grateful for the opportunity. Felt like all of my hard work in the comedy mines was finally paying off. But things took a turn for the worst, & each day there were new surprises that affected our livelihoods. These were all very avoidable surprises, mind you.

A patreon was going to be our hail mary, but alas, for some reason, the power that be did not want it. Causing us to leave a dream job behind. "At least we did all we could," we consoled ourselves afterwards. I put a lot of myself into this project. I pitched all sorts of ideas that could have helped-- we all did. Merch collaborations, Patreon-integrated YouTube content, so much more. And most of them were shot down out of sheer stubbornness and nothing more. To see lie after lie spread, and multiple big publications and YouTubers that I am a fan of promote this Patreon under these pretenses is incredibly upsetting. There are so many receipts.

Please share this and consider pulling out if you've already put money into this. On Hard Drive using AI, also from Kevin Podas: I can't personally confirm that part aside from some of the recent header images for articles on both Hard Drive and Hard Times are being made with AI. As far as writing, it's been mentioned in the past, but I personally do not know. Maybe others do, maybe not. MORE From Kevin Podas suggesting the owner denying a Patreon being set up earlier cost an artist a job that was replaced by AI: We had a social media person who was awesome! He made the images until this AI implementation. He had to leave because ad revenue was low and a Patreon was aggressively refused.

Luca Fisher: at the risk of burning some bridges, i have to back up kevin here. i've only been part-time, in-and-out of hard drive since i got in last year, but i can corroborate that management doubled and tripled down about not hosting a patreon/crowdfunding and that many other suggestions and ideas, including mine (and ones much smarter than mine!), were shot down in really long, apocalyptic threads of everyone left on deck desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the lights on. managerially it has been messy and sad

i've written for multiple publications that have long since died, ones that were in the process of dying, and ones that, in this case, are soon to be put in the ground. it is sad and sucks every time. i don't know what could have been done differently, but i do know that a lot of great writers and content creators were left shorthanded and unhappy by the way things have gone. and it is sort of puzzling to see the sudden championing of patreon after we were all told plenty of times that it couldn't work and we should move on also, just to add my own personal two cents here, i was really disappointed by the shuttering of many different article sections on the site over the past 6-8 months. i understand cutting corners in a deficit, and i know it had to be done. that said…

all in all, i'm really sad to see this all happen. i don't fault anyone, if only because i don't really know enough about how this all can happen to make sense of it. games journalism is in a sad, sorry state, and will likely no longer be a thing in the next decade

VideoSealMan: I'm gonna say this because I think I deserve to. For months, MONTHS on end I was bugging Hard Drive management about a Patreon. Often I got ignored for a week+, but when I actually got a response I was encouraged to - of all things, write up a Google Doc pitching the concept I did it regardless. I wasn't the only one trying to sway management on a Patreon, but so fiercely was I fighting for it that last night, I was accused of making this comment directly by the CEO! With no evidence whatsoever! After I'd been gone for over a month.

I vouched so hard for Patreon because I wanted all the writers and creatives working with Hard Drive including myself to get paid better. When I actually got a response, the idea was often shut down. Eventually due to the state of my company, my pay was cut for a second time I confronted management alongside a couple other important figureheads at the org and told them that if we couldn't do a Patreon - I could no longer financially justify staying there. The answer was still no, so I left. Baffled at the decision, but whatever.

It is unendingly frustrating to know that myself and many other people who put their soul into Hard Drive LEFT because of management's absolute refusal to compromise on a Patreon, to then see them launch one anyway a month later and get over 1000 people pledging money. I'm seeing a lot of things float around about greed and people being fired. No one was fired. Everyone who left, left because they were sick of management's decision-making. And honestly, management is a lot of things but I would not call them greedy. (From my experience.) They did genuinely make an effort to pay people as much as possible. I found the pay very fair for a while. I am not disputing that I was paid what I was owed - yet management frequently feels the need to remind critics of that. Lmao, yes. I was paid what I was owed. No one is disputing payment. You did the bare minimum a business owner should do and paid everyone their due, very well done. I make no allegations of greed, cheating or foul play. I make allegations of poor management and incompetence that has fucked over other people.

Basically the only people left at Hard Drive have been there for about 2 months. They will reap the rewards of this successful Patreon I and so many others passionately fought for for so long. We will not see a dime.

I do not know the new people at Hard Drive, But I feel bad for them. They were haphazardly thrust into Hard Drive's workplace with little to no explanation on how anything works, or given any context on the state of the place. Even now managements feeds them half-truths and misinformation about other people's grievances. I am broke and have been for a while. I had to move out of my flat in Reading and back with my family because of how little money I was making. This has basically doomed my flatmate to moving back in with abusive parents, which is something I feel guilty about every day. If we had gone with the Patreon I worked myself hoarse over back then, this could have been avoided. Some of my other good pals could also not have been fucked over.

It was a bad judgment call, but it's not a crime. It's just management getting it wrong.

So should you give to the Hard Drive Patreon? I don't know! I don't think any of the new people working there to patch up the holes left by the recent mass exodus have any bad intentions. Maybe they deserve it! But it is not the same site you knew a year ago, or even a month ago. Myself and many people who were there far longer than me and did far more for it than I did are all gone now because we could not deal with management's terrible decision-making and dogass communication any longer. That's what you should know, imo

I had an agreement in place with management that I would receive the next 8 months of revenue from the Hard Drive YT channel from my leaving in November. This was a deal I appreciated, and thought was very fair on management's behalf. So far, the deal has been honoured for 2 months. However as of last night I was removed from the Hard Drive Slack without warning, and as an editor for the YouTube channel. This means I no longer have any way of verifying how much I am owed, I just have to take their word for it. I'm sure management will make their own statements full of half-truths and weird language on the many cases being brought against them - I'd take everything they say with a pinch of salt if some of the screenshots I've seen of them talking about me are any indication lol

To management; I do not want to talk to you. I want you to DM me a screenshot of how much I'm owed every month and then send me the money per our agreement until June, then we can go our separate ways. Do that and admit to your mistakes, and maybe you can recover your reputation! That's it from me, lol. If they pull out of the deal and fuck me over I'll have more to say, but most of what I know is other people's stories of incompetence and poor decision-making, lol. I genuinely get no pleasure out of doing this; I do not think management is evil - I just think they're really bad at what they do and it's cost other, more talented people, lol. You should believe the writers imo

One last thing I wanna say btw, management did often stress that no one should try to make Hard Drive a full time thing. They were transparent about that, and that is fair. I was working on it because at a few points, I was lead to believe we actually were doing a Patreon. Many other ppl have similar stories of being strung along by management changing their minds and stop-starting shit every 2 weeks. We all made the fatal mistake of overestimating our manager - who would tell you one thing one day and something totally opposite the next week lol

Hunter R. Thompson:

I'm not your dad, but speaking as a Hard Drive writer, I don't know that funding Hard Drive on Patreon is worth it

The driving talent on the back end—behind the kickass site I joined in 2019—have peaced out over the years as the site's been (in our view) increasingly mismanaged. Mismanagement like, not setting up crowdfunding before the ship sank and all its best crew failed; or publishing a screenshot of Andy Ngo pedojacketing a trans writer, complete with her deadname; or a disgruntled ex-writer getting falsely accused of shit-talk, by actual staff. I'm grateful for the writing I've gotten to produce for HD (and will forever be kicking myself for not writing even more, in the four years I've had to do it!! i'm a dumbass!!!) but it is very much no longer the site I signed up for.

I don't want to resign as a contributor altogether, because I'm open to the idea of the site recovering and bad practices being retired as finances level out-- it would just be dishonest for potential backers to not be Aware Of The Circumstances, I think.

Jeremy Kaplowitz: i truly don't want to start shit, but feel compelled to say: i want to see Hard Drive succeed w/o resorting to throwing former writers & editors, myself included, under the bus. surely there's a way to save the site without building it over the corpses of those who left. my $0.02 i don't blame anyone who wants to sign up for the HD patreon and i support the website, but that includes those who worked on it for years, have complaints, and don't deserve to be treated like bitter assholes like this kind of stuff is just objectively true, meanwhile there's these new writers who joined the site after i left (meaning, in the last ~3 months) claiming people are liars. decide for yourself if you care, but this is what happened! [Quotes this Tweet]

Seth Finkelstein: Writing for Hard Drive has been a privilege the past few years, and it makes me so angry to see people I looked up to get jerked around behind the scenes. The amount of grenades the editors jumped on our behalf is immense, and I don't think the way they're being treated is right.

Other Bits On AI: We do know for sure however that AI art has been used by the site. Its fucking owner confirms it here:https://twitter.com/MattSaincome/status/1743040541603123622. Seems the owner pushed AI written articles as well! TayFabe: My vaguetweet is making the rounds & these made me apoplectic. - owner regularly lobbied using ai. Once he tested it & said ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. - ai images were used on the site & socials w/o consulting the team or disclosing it publicly I found the ai bit relevant to include bc 1) it illuminates a stark change in HD's current direction & leadership, 2) ai images have previously been used on the site and (since deleted) ig posts, 3) ai content fucking sucks, and repeatedly pushing to use it is a telling quality The "handful of writers who chose to leave" includes 2 editors-in-chief (both cofounders who wrote a combined total of >1,000 articles & defined the voice of HD), & at least 3 other editors. These guys put in WORK since 2017, so cool to be corrected by ppl who joined in Nov 2023 [Link to mentioned vague tweet from post.] More from TayFabe: owner continuously lobbied for using ai in every possible way. No one else wanted to do it, but he kept on, saying ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. Also, ai images were used on the site & socials without public disclosure or consulting the team.

The owner has responded now multiple times in a private discord... Thank you for people sharing screenshots! First Screenshot:

Kevin's Response: He banned me from the server for speaking out, so no, I didn't see it. And he gave no indication of a timeline, it was just "we'll do one when *I* say so" and gave every inclination he was totally against it. It bred an environment that pushed our hands to have to leave. Screenshot Round Two:

Kevin's Response: "Starting one in 3 months" is an absolute lie. He denied it, I have screenshots and others who can confirm. No timeline was given. Just "this is what it is now" and like, I couldn't live off of that. I wanted to do more but he was allergic to good ideas from others around him.

Matt, owner of Hard Drive, responds publicly on Twitter.

Matt: Kevin, the patreon launch was delayed because I didn't think it would work. Everyone is happy that it did work. Everyone who left the site because we didn't have money to pay for creative content which didn't revenue is welcome to return home. But unclear why the hostility.

Hard Drive paid out literally every dollar it had, then a bunch more, to creative people who worked on the site. When we ran out of money, we couldn't pay anymore. We did our best.

Kevin: Right, and my point of this thread was that it was completely and totally avoidable. This is reasonable to be upset about. How could I have been any more clear?

Matt: If we knew with 100% certainly that the community would have supported us via patreon, we would have done that. We didn't know. We had tried 4 years ago and got no support. We were wrong this time. We did our best to figure it out. We paid all the money we could.

Kevin: So you knew with 100% certainty this time? Or you took a leap of faith?

Matt: It was a last gasp panic effort after ad rates got cut in half on january 1st due to seasonal spending changes. We didn't know it would work. We were embarrassed to ask for support. We wanted to figure it out.

Kevin: Every site has a Patreon. Every YouTuber, comedy group, etc. But you insisted that nobody cared about Hard Drive. Which is wildly untrue. I know you see that now, but again, I think you can see why I and many others are pretty upset. A last ditch panic effort was long overdue. A couple more things from Matt:

It was about the size of the hole we needed plugged budget wise, the time I had left of personal resources, and the past data I had about us trying a patreon (which turned out to be a bad indicator). I didn't think the Patreon would help us fast enough. I made a bad estimation

aka "if we make $1000 more dollars a month via patreon, which would be 10x what we got last time, we will not solve any of our problems. If instead we try to plow down path B, we might make it out in time." That was the thinking. I chose the wrong path, but didn't mean to Kevin also retweeted this comment from the user Matt was responding to: So you're saying that you're bad at running the business, didn't listen to any of your employees until after they were forced to leave their jobs, and now you're going to get more of the money from the Patreon that was their idea in the first place? Matt's Response: Respectfully, I made a mistake delaying the patreon decision. But keeping a comedy site alive for 9 years is not easy, there are lots of potential ideas, and think overall we've done a good and honorable job. Will leave this thread in peace now to allow people their space.

Sorry for linking to Elon's hellsite (derogatory), but sources need links so...

#video games #patreon #hard drive #ai critical

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kestalsblog · 4 months

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Basic Tips to Improve Your Writing

I used to read a lot of unprofessional writing online, and through that endeavor, I started mentally compiling different qualities that turned me off to people's work right away. I'm sharing some of my thoughts about ways to improve your writing so others don't click off your work right away!

-Change paragraphs when different characters are speaking.

-In that same thread, remember to make new paragraphs and not have one giant block of text. This isn't only discouraging for some readers, but actually physically impossible to read for those who are visually impaired.

-Learn grammar. Sorry, but there is no way around this one. For example, commas aren't just for aesthetic appeal or your personal choice, and it will turn some readers away if your writing is littered with grammatical errors. You can't break the rules for creative purposes if you don't even know them, and the difference is generally apparent.

-Remember the narration style you've chosen. For example, if you're writing in third person limited, you can't think outside the mind of your main character. Don't jump suddenly to the thoughts of other characters or an all-knowing, omniscient voice.

-Slow down. Each word matters, so try not to think of writing as "I must get from Point A to Point B," but "I must get from Point A to Point B beautifully."

-Avoid repeating the same word or phrase too much, especially within the same paragraph. There are exceptions in dialogue, of course. (It's sweet when writers acquire their own personalized phrasings that mark their voice, but I have turned away from works where the exact same line just kept coming up again and again).

-Don't forget about setting. You might be able to imagine where your characters are, but no one else can if you don't let them know.

-Use a consistent verb tense.

-Your characters are not you and generally shouldn't always be mouthpieces for you to share your own values and thoughts.

-Your characters should sound distinctly different from each other, including their talking styles.

-Don't bog the reader down with too much description, and make sure the description you do have is realistic. Think about it. In the morning, do you wake up, go to the mirror, and think to yourself, "I looked at my shaggy dark hair and emerald green eyes"? Nobody thinks that way about their own appearance, and it feels like a forced way to let the reader know what the main character looks like.

-There's no need to start tossing out every character trait if it's not relevant to the story.

-Last, show some passion and excitement for your own work. Make sure the language embodies that passion because if you don't even care about your writing, who will?

#writeblr #writing community #writing #writers on tumblr #for writers #writing advice #kestal #text post

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orchidbreezefc · 27 days

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ok. years have passed and we've had some distance, so i'm finally gonna take the leap of faith that tma fandom is finally ready to hear me on this. let's talk about tannins.

161 was the first tma episode i heard on early release, and i felt the bit where martin declines wine and cites tannins was pretty obvious in its implications. cool, got it, say no more.

imagine my surprise when i was one of maybe three people i saw read between the lines there, in a fandom famous for red stringing--a fandom that immediately caught the much less obvious thread of ignition sources in the same episode. i'll spell it out: alcohol is an issue for martin.

maybe it just felt obvious because addiction is a pet issue for me--as it is for jonny, who has said everything he writes is filtered through a lens of addiction. i don't know if that's due to his own experience or a loved one's, and i won't speculate; i also don't know if martin personally struggled with drinking or just avoids it for fear he would, but alcohol would fit what we know of his family. his dad walking out and his mum spiralling into bitter wallowing and verbal abuse? i'd bet one or both of them drank, yeah.

on a basic level martin tries to decline alcohol, and that alone should have raised eyebrows given what we know of martin and, again, a fandom that dissects everything. we already knew martin "K" blackwood lied about his personal life and his family in particular, especially pre-canon, which is when this flashback took place. i was shocked that everyone took his flimsy excuse at face value with no further questions.

and the excuse is flimsy. martin turns down wine by--nervously--exclaiming tannins are "a proven headache trigger!" which sounds like trivia from a magazine cover and not the words of someone who actually has headaches--and it hasn't come up before or since. jon, confused, points out that tea, a drink martin consumes to a degree that is memetic both in- and out-of-universe, also contains tannins, and martin squawks a panicked, "what?!"

if tannins are enough of a concern for martin that he knew they're in wine and so avoids it, why didn't he know they're in his drink of choice? why does he still drink tea at the time of canon, and why doesn't he struggle with constant headaches from consuming 'a proven headache trigger' day in and day out? why, indeed, would someone avoid wine and not tea?

when sasha insists martin drink he caves and agrees to 'just a drop'. i imagine him pouring it in a plant, which admittedly he could have done if tannins really were the issue. i will say that i, for one, would be less likely to falsely agree to something that makes me physically ill than to a private issue that i'd rather not be pressed on any further. this scene also establishes martin's birthday was an ice cream party instead of the more traditional visit to a pub.

also, this scene was in the first episode of the final season, as one of three flashbacks that could have been to any pre-canon event in the archives. prime narrative real estate. not really time one would waste on establishing the important character context that martin has... headaches. which never comes up before or after, even regarding the week he spent in spiral town. but you know what is pretty crucial character background...?

it felt like a no-brainer, and yet all i saw was h/c fluff about jon attending to martin's headaches. and i hate feeling bitter about disability representation. i want folks with chronic headaches to feel seen and have fluffy escapist fantasies. i don't want to be mad about people portraying a character with a disability. but, guys? you got the wrong disability. jonny sent a clear message, and it went over fandom's head.

#martin blackwood #tma #the magnus archives #tma meta #the magnus archives meta #tma 161 #mag161 #sage speaks #sage original post #meta #im sure others caught it that i didnt see but listen. i was DEEP in the fandom. people getting it made up maybe 1% of the response i saw #and i had people fighting me for saying it #alcohol cw #alcoholism cw #addiction cw #greatest hits #wonderful news: tma fandom WAS ready to hear me say this!

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mvybanks · 5 months

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the deal — the one where you almost break up

a/n: writing flangst just to feel something oh how i love being a woman😫 on a serious note, don’t kill me pls + this can be read as a stand-alone but it’s a post-series blurb from the deal !!! (i know this is longer than a blurb but we all know that i don’t care)

warnings: FLANGST!!!, rafe is mean, mentions of things that happened in the series, ward being a terrible parent, not proofread (will do it tomorrow🫡)

nav the deal masterlist

add yourself to my taglist <3

—

You and Rafe are in a fight.

Or at least what started out as just a fight.

It’s rare for either of you to be mad at the other, but he truly has crossed the line this time and you feel like your relationship is hanging by a thread now.

He had gone back home for a couple of days, that turned out to be a week, and although you didn’t know what was the reason, you didn’t think much of it, it was a habit of his and you believed that he only wished to see his sisters. However, when he came back, he wasn’t your Rafe. You couldn’t recognize the man that had walked inside your apartment and to be honest, you didn’t want to get to know him.

“Hey, baby!” You ran to him as he had opened the front door, for you had given him a key to your apartment.

If there’s one thing that he had always loved was being welcomed by your sweet embrace, engulfed by your comforting perfume and finally being able to relax against you. But that didn’t happen this time.

“Hey,” was all he said. No emotions behind it, no joy of seeing you again after an entire week, and that had already alarmed you. Hell, what had already made bells go off in your head had been the little to none contact when he was away.

You were only able to place your hands on his chest before he kept walking inside, ignoring you, while he reached the bathroom and left you at the entrance. Where was your boyfriend?

You went to lie on the couch and stayed there until he came back in the living room. You could tell something was wrong and you were unsure if you had done something to make him upset.

“How was your trip?” You only asked, not wanting to pry on his behavior immediately.

“I don’t feel like talking.” He coldly exclaimed, making your lips seal shut.

And so you remained in silence for what seemed an eternity. An uncomfortable silence; one that you had never experienced with Rafe and it was hurting not knowing what was going on.

Finally, you attempted at getting an answer, gently placing one hand on his shoulder as he sat next to you on the couch. “Baby, what’s wrong?” You inquired, worry laced in your voice.

“Nothing’s wrong. I told you I don’t feel like talking, Y/n, for fuck’s sake!” He groaned, shaking your hand off and breaking your heart in a million pieces as he did so. He got up from his seat, not even noticing the tears that were threatening to spill from your eyes.

“Just tell me if it’s something I did. This isn’t you.” You whispered, heartbroken.

This isn’t you.

The words kept echoing in his ears. The same ones he had pronounced. He let out a humorless laugh, “What, you think you know who I am, then? This is me! Make your fucking peace with it.”

You also left the couch, anger running through your veins as your eyes were focused on the stranger in front of you. “No, I won’t make my fucking peace with it, Rafe! You left for a week, you avoided me, then you come here, in my apartment, and keep ignoring me. I think I deserve an explanation!”

“You know what? Yes, I left for a week and I wanted to come back to my loving girlfriend. Is she here by the way? Because she sure as hell isn’t in front of me now.” He raised his voice once again, his tone accusatory.

Shaking your head, you matched his tone. “Don’t you dare turn this on me! Jesus, Rafe! You’re acting as if you hate me. We haven’t talked for a week and you’re still ignoring me. You’re here and you still feel distant.” Although it went unnoticed by him, a tear ran down your cheek as you pronounced the last words, and even that felt like a punch in the stomach because nothing that you’ve ever done has gone unnoticed by his always attentive gaze. Not a day has gone by where you weren’t his sun and every star in the universe, where you weren’t the reason why to everything, to all of his breaths. And yet, you felt like this has been the first day.

“I’m here, Y/n! I’m fucking here, aren’t I?! Stop lying and bullshitting me with this stuff. God, is this what you always do, you lie to everyone until you find someone better? Huh?! Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Your whole world stopped. You felt like the ground beneath you had fallen and had brought you with it. You were gasping for air and felt lightheaded all at once as everything in you ached. How could have he thrown that in your face? Your ears were ringing and your voice broke as you murmured, “Get out.”

The thing is that Rafe had regretted what he had said immediately. The hated filled words had spilled from his venom-tainted lips, but it hadn’t been your fault. Nothing was ever your fault, because you were his universe — you still are and have never stopped, because his whole life revolves around you and he wouldn’t want it any other way. So, he only let out a whispered “What?” as he felt a pang in his chest.

“Get out of my house.” You repeated looking at the ground before you raised your head to stare at him, “Get the fuck out of my house!” You yelled then, pointing towards the door.

He took a step closer to you, “Wait —“

But you were quicker, putting even more space between you, “If that’s what you think of me, why don’t you just break up with me? If that’s how you feel, why are you still with me?”

“Baby —“

“Shut up. Just — Shut up! Get out of my house, I don’t wanna see you.” You raised your voice once again as tears ran freely down your face.

“ I —“ He kept attempting to say anything, to make it right, but you interrupted him each time for the sound of his voice wasn’t a comforting melody anymore, but the reason of your pain.

“I don’t wanna see you again. I don’t wanna hear your voice. Get. Out!” And that’s when you began to physically push him away. He couldn’t stop you, nor did he want to upset you further, therefore he left.

However, he could hear you crying from outside, he listened as you sobbed against the door and punched it. He wished he was able to come back inside and take you in his arms, to console you, but he knew he wasn’t who you wanted in that moment, indeed he was the last person you desired.

But he stayed.

He stayed outside until he listened to the sound of your steps taking you far away from the door; until his back and his legs hurt and he had to sit down; until his heart screamed for you, loudly, bleeding for the tears that he had caused you; until now.

Softly knocking, “Can I come in?” He tries to choke out, the lump in his throat now impossible to swallow. Guilt. That’s what it is.

You’re sitting on your bed, the door of your room showing you the entrance, and you can hear the muffled words coming from the other side, but you won’t give in. You listen to him, pleading for you to let him in, because he wants — no, he needs to know that you’re okay, for he hasn’t heard from you for over three hours.

So, yes. You and Rafe are in a fight, but you’re not sure if this is the end of your relationship as well.

What you’re not aware of is that he has the key sitting in the pocket of his jeans, and although he’s dying to use it, he wishes for you to open the door, for you to tell him that you can find it in your heart to forgive him, to just hear him out; but he knows he doesn’t deserve it. As time passes and the lack of answer continues, his fear increases. Are you okay? That’s all he keeps thinking about. Therefore, he decides to open the door, slowly walking inside while looking for you.

You don’t even raise your head when he comes in, you don’t give him the satisfaction of your attention. Once he enters your room, tears streaming down his face, he reaches his hand to gently cup your cheek, “Baby,” he whispers. But you’re quicker, instinctively running away from his touch. The action breaks him completely.

He falls on his knees, sitting in front of you, as he shows his raised hands to you. “I’m sorry. Please, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it, sweetheart.” He says quietly for the uncomfortable sensation in his throat doesn’t allow him to speak at a normal volume. “I didn’t mean it, please.” Rafe repeats once again before a long string of hushed ‘i’m sorry’s leaves his lips. Finally, he lets his head fall on your closed knees and his fingers delicately grab your calves while the never ending apologies make him sound like a broken record.

You can’t help but cry with him, although your gaze is still on the wall beside you, and yet you can feel the pain written on his features.

“My father was there.” He mumbles against your clothed skin.

“What?” The word leaves your lips but you don’t even realize what you’ve asked until he continues.

“My father was home. He never is when I go back home, but he was there this time.”

You‘ve learned about Rafe’s relationship with his father; he’s told you a lot — actually, he’s told you everything about it, because he wanted you to know him, and you do. You know him better than anyone else in the world. “He was mad. Said that I’m ungrateful for never showing up when he’s there and that this isn’t me. He just— he kept yelling, saying that I’m a piece of shit who deserves nothing. I don’t deserve his kindness, I don’t deserve my sisters, I… I don’t deserve you.” He murmurs the last words, which finally makes you look down at him.

Your heart is in a thousands of pieces as you softly ask, “Me?”

Rafe stares up at you and bloodshot eyes bore into yours. “You. He never stopped saying that, until I believed him. I know you deserve better, I’ve always known that, but I guess hearing this from someone else, out loud, it made it real. So, I pushed you away and I’m sorry. I’m not finding an excuse, I swear, I only want you to know that it’s not your fault and that I take full responsibility.”

In a moment of weakness, you let your hand faintly touch his jaw and your thumb brush against his cheek, causing him to rest his head further in your palm.

“I’m sorry about your father, Rafe, I really am, but what you said hurt me, and I didn’t think it was possible for you to ever cause me so much pain.”

Twisting his neck, he kisses the palm of your hand and tightly shuts his eyes. “I know. I know and I’m sorry. I will regret this for the rest of my life, but I promise you with everything I have, with every single cell of my body, that I will never do that again. And I know how this sounds, but if you just give me one more chance, I will spend the rest of my life showing you how much I want to deserve you.” At last, he gets up and holds your face in his hands. “I love you so much, baby. So, so much.”

“The rest of your life, huh?” You playfully ask.

He lets out a wet chuckle. “The rest of my life, baby. You know I’m here for the long run.”

“You better act like it, then, Cameron.”

Rafe rests his forehead on yours, breathing you in and nodding his head at your words. “Can I kiss you?” He mumbles, his mouth almost touching yours.

“Please.”

Your lips connect to each other’s and it feels as if this is the first time you’ve been able to breathe in the past hours. He goes to sit next to you on the bed, never leaving your lips, before he grabs you and manhandles you until you’re sat on his lap. Rafe holds you impossibly close, scared that you’re going to leave as soon as he lets you go. However, unbeknownst to him, you could never leave him, not when he shows you how much he loves you over and over again, and especially not when you go to sleep in each other’s arms and the only thing that helps you sleep is the feeling of his skin and the sound of his voice, repeatedly whispering ‘i love you’s with his lips pressed against your head.

taglist:

@gemofthenight @vigilanteshitposting @m-indkiller r @buckysdogtags s @yoonabeo @iruzias @babypoguelife @poppet05 @earth2starkey @palmwinemami i @marzipaanz @softherveauxs @sweetestdesire @guililove e @colbysbrocks @magnificantmermaid d @chaostudee @rafesmoon @fangirl-madz @canarysposts @screan @fishingirl12 @darleneslane e @mattyskies @rafecluver @pedrosprincess @jjmaybankisbae @em-dee @rentaldarling @houseofperfecttaste @3in1shampooconditionerbodywash @michelle-26 @imawhoreforu @pankowperfection @buckyhad @kliness @sugarcoatedstarkey @starkeybae @lexi1sblog @starxsluv @wickedlovely121 @softlies @outerbankspov @littlefreaksatellite @aris-void @maybankslover @dogmomalsop @savage-aespa @emery-333 @camelliaflow3r @midnightsgetawaycar @thatsthewaythechrissycrumbles @wpdailyminimeta @cloismami i @madelynie @mskezza @chaeraq @kardamenaa @alexxavicry @strkeys @lovelornanonymity

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