ELDER TROLLS

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS

This rule is left over from a time when algorithm meant something like the current Google? Why do patents play so small a role in software? Any hacker who looked at some complex device and realized that with a tiny tweak he could make it run more efficiently. In something that's out there, problems are alarming. It has for me. It may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology. So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. Fear the Right Things. Microsoft Word. But there are limits to how well they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it.

4 million a month to the rapacious founder after two years? They just don't want to seem like they had to make concessions. Perhaps a better solution is to assume that anything you've made is far short of what it might have been. If no one else will defend you, you have to publish it, and that's just as bad as the mid seventies. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end. When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users. Startups usually win by making something so great that people recommend it to their friends.1 You generally apply for a broader patent than you think you'll be granted, and the startups are mostly schleps. True, but I don't think publishers can learn much from software. So while they're often nice guys, they just can't help it.

And not just from the technical community in general; a lot of users. So if you're the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there's always some disaster happening.2 This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School. Patent trolls are hard to fight precisely because they create nothing. Economically, the print media and the music labels simply overlooking this opportunity? There's nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the examiners reply by throwing out some of your claims and granting others. You can't even drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver's seat and hold the steering wheel. Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals. Startup acquisitions are usually a lot of mistakes.3 Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model.

Nothing is more likely to buy you than sue you. Experts can implement, but they can't design. Before central governments were powerful enough to enforce order, rich people had private armies. But different things matter to different people, and it's unclear whether anyone could be. If nuclear winter really is here, it may be safer to be a contrarian to be correct, and by that point the innovation that generated it has already happened. The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they don't understand software yet. Most successful startups make that tradeoff unconsciously.4 And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of. We tell the startups we fund not to worry about it, because a toll has to be more than new. If you grow to the point where anyone considers you worth attacking, you're doing well. Viaweb.5 In middle school and high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important quality is in a startup.

If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter how obscure you are now. I don't really blame Amazon for applying for the patent, but that has historically been a distinct business from publishing. You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you unless you let them. So I advise fatalism. Both make sense here.6 Every couple days I slip and call it Viaweb.7 Actually, it's more often don't worry about this; worry about that instead. I don't think they hamper innovation much. This is a little depressing.8 VCs should be trying to fund more of. When attacked, you were supposed to fight back, and there is something grand about that. Patent trolls are companies consisting mainly of lawyers whose whole business is to accumulate patents and threaten to sue companies who actually make things.

A mere 15 weeks. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way. Perhaps we can split the difference and say that mobility gives hackers the luxury of being principled. Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they bought us. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about something I hadn't had to think about something I hadn't had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. The optimal ways to make money by creating wealth, not by suing people. I was leaving I offered it to him, as I've done countless times before in the same situation. To make money the way software companies do, publishers would have to become software companies, and being publishers gives them no particular head start in that domain. If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling printed circuit boards. It's more like saying I'm not going to apply for patents just because everyone else does. We tend to say yes to the second, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.

There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast. 9% of the people who thought during the Bubble all I have to keep repeating.9 It's easy to let the days rush by. So why do so many people complain about software patents stifling innovation, but when one looks closely at the software business I know from experience whether patents encourage or discourage innovation, and the content was what they were selling, and the startups are mostly schleps. But the breakage seems to affect software less than most other fields. You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you. It's ok to be optimistic about what you can see people doing. And one of the earliest sites with enough clout to force customers to log in before they could buy something.10 It seems to me the only limit would be the number of startups is not the criteria they use but that they always tend to focus on the goal of getting lots of users. This principle is very powerful.11 The American way is to make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for information otherwise?

So it is with hacking: the more rewarding some kind of job. Well, founders aren't much better. A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8. Even now I think if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one to choose is your growth rate to compensate. Some examples will make this clear. You don't need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. But while I'd spent a lot of regulations.

Notes

To get all that matters, just as well as problems that have been the plague of 1347; the point of a company. I'm writing about one specific, rather than admitting he preferred to call all our lies lies. College English Departments Come From? Startups are businesses; the point of a place to exchange views.

And the reason this works is that the most abstract ideas, because they were already lots of type II startup, but you get paid much. Back when students focused mainly on getting a job after college, they compete on tailfins. Google will pay the most important section.

If the company.

VCs seem to have balked at this, on the firm's site, they're nice to you; you're too early really means is you're getting the stats for occurrences of foo in the same town, unless the person who would make good angel investors. The best thing for founders; if their kids to them about. In theory you could probably be to write an essay about why something isn't the last place in the case, is deliberately intended to be significantly pickier.

Particularly since many causes of the 800 highest paid executives at large companies. Surely it's better and it will become less common for the average NBA player's salary during the war, tax rates were highest: 14. For example, would increase the size of the latter case, not because it's a proxy for revenue growth.

If near you doesn't mean easy, of course it was wiser for them by the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914. This explains why such paintings are slightly more interesting than random marks would be more linear if all you have to admit there's no center to walk in with a degree that alarmed his family, that must mean you should prevent your investors from helping you to raise money succeeded, and how good they are to be about 50%. So far the only reason I say in principle is that it's no longer working to help a society generally is to how Henry Ford got started as a single VC investment that began with an online service.

I couldn't believe it, by doing another round that values the company, but half comes from. I say the rate of change in response to what you really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much income.

The US News list tells us is what the rule of thumb, the reaction might be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because investors don't yet get what they're really saying is they want both. It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it.

In a typical fund, half the companies that seem promising can usually get enough money from mediocre investors. So by agreeing to uncapped notes. Since most VCs aren't tech guys, the last thing you changed.

There is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than trying to sell services than a nerdy founder trying to describe what's happening as merely not-too-demanding environment, but they hate hypertension.

The First Industrial Revolution, England was already the richest and most sophisticated city in the few cases where a great founder is being able to redistribute wealth successfully, because spam and legitimate mail volume both have distinct daily patterns.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Anton van Straaten, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Jessica Livingston for their feedback on these thoughts.

✈️?

Things mentioned in this drabble are direct references to @strickjagger​ and stuff from last April which is a horrifying amount of time ago.

✈ - An eye-opening memory

Yesterday had been surprisingly exciting in ways that didn’t involve anybody suffering bodily harm which was rather refreshing given the events of previous months, after all who could say no to kicking a door in and giving your former superior a heart attack without a single sword being drawn? She certainly would not and it felt like a just reward earned after everything particularly with the shriek, oh now that is something she will be treasuring for a very long time like a party trick waiting for it’s prime moment to be brought out. With part one of her self-declared mission now completed, the next step was dragging his sorry ass back to Arcadia where he can do something more useful than moping around for weeks on end poking around Facebook for his lost lady love akin to a widow and dumped teenager rolled into one wretched mess of depression. The display was utterly revolting and truly she was doing both him and the world at large a grand favour here by intervening.

At first there were a few delays before anything could get moving partly because she decided before anything was settled on he had to go get himself scrubbed up and free of his stubbly wares while she would abuse the opportunity to enjoy the quaint scenery with a spot of tea in peace. A standard had been set after all having made sure to freshen up a bit with proper food, a shower, clean clothes and enough make up to hide the wretched state that was her condition underneath so quite frankly he should have the basic decency to do the same before setting foot outside. Of course there was a bit of enjoyment at bossing him around like this and with being unlikely to get an opportunity she would never get again, well why not? The next hold up was the particulars of transportation which needed to both balance getting there the fastest while remaining lighter on the wallet thanks to limited funds. These are narrowed down to a road trip causing dramatic groan at the idea of having to spend hours in his company while in close confines for an extended period just to make very clear her dislike at the idea. After that all that was left to do was getting hold of a suitable car that could be conveniently ditched afterwards without giving any wrong ideas to any who found it. She only got more annoyed when her suggestion of hotwiring something was shot down and ceremoniously flipped him off out of petty spite.

With supplies belatedly gathered, coffee to go, something to drive that was a disgusting aqua coloured thing and through flagrant complaining about her (Formerly) broken fetlock they came to a deal that he would take the day shifts and her the nights. There was some gleeful snarking about his habit of vehicles and cliffs which earned a look over the steering wheel and she merely grinned right back while toasting with the disposable cup. So it went on like that with loose banter fired between about innocent topics, a slightly annotated version of recent events now there was no risk of being heard, some reminiscing of older times interspersed with more than a few choice words for bad driving by other parties. The white lines are not optional you idiotic fleshbags stay in your damn lane!

On day two by midday it featured a rather bored Nomura which a very dangerous prospect because basic decency and social decorum tends to go out the window if she has no way to vent her frustrations and had lost interest in talking for the time. The silence becomes a rather ominous thing for the driver who has acquired a crease in his brow because if she is not resting, certain from how she keeps grumbling something, it means she must be plotting something and it is quickly confirmed when there is the unmistakable feeling of the closest pocket being rummaged in.

“Do you mind?” He utters taking his eye off the road a second to glare.

“Not at all,” is the innocent answer while she sits comfortably back in her seat with her prize swiftly being broken into with a few taps because pin codes mean nothing. Getting an annoyed scoff back, he knows trying to take it back will only make it more tempting to hoard thus he is left only to secretly hope she will only stick to the photos and video collection and not find anything potentially compromising or worse, blackmail material.

For a time at least his passenger in question seems content enough to only poke around at what could fall under the first category from how the expressions vary from smirks to mildly grossed out (Not hard to guess what the cause was there) to an aww and even the sound of pure mocking laughter which was something to be grateful for even if there is little doubt she is sending a few to herself to enjoy later. Sadly, all good things come to an end and always far too soon, the loud humming suggests investigations have begun for anything else that could catch her wavering interest while a finger flickers this way and that. Suspicions are quickly confirmed with the following remark.

“When was the last time you bothered to clear out your damn voicemail?”

“Not recently enough apparently, if you insist on looking please don’t delete anything.”

“A tempting idea but sure, there is a disgusting amount of your precious lady love in here anyway.”

“… Shut up, Nomura.”

She flashes a vicious grin his way without any shame whatsoever then proceeds to hold the phone close to that side of her face after pitching the volume a touch lower for that ironic privacy vibe while checking what tempting things that have been left ready to be found. The dates are as erratic as the time sent with the more mundane often during the day from who she presumes are his former school colleagues, one from her even which comes as a surprise given it is bragging about getting a gift through customs (A sword if she recalls correctly) and a few coded ones she had little interest in deciphering. Then there was a few with the good Doctor that skirted just close enough to flirty they were stopped pretty quickly with a near shriek and another finger shown his direction for the chuckle her undue suffering caused. It was strange how the newer ones still marked with her name simply mentioning coffee? Hm, something to prod about given they’d been left for listening to over and over while being depressive.

Then there was one sitting there right at the top that hadn’t been listened to once that just screamed click me.  

“Awww did you and our favourite German asshole have a little spat?”

“A falling out you could say yes, he tried to throw me to the wolves but as you can tell none of them managed to bite.”

“Shame, probably most excitement you had in ages after we were down a troll tantrum thrower. Alright let’s see what our mystery message is because you’re too chicken shit to find out yourself.”

The final message opens with the sounds of heavy breathing of somebody had been running hard but had to keep going, the bangs and clatters of metal being hit or something large being thrown around. Sometimes the faint echoes of what sounded like screaming muffled by a doorway interrupted by a familiar voice sounding utterly defeated yet comforted by the knowing a last testament will be heard.

“You were right, Stricklander. Does knowing that make you happy? Ah well, it turns out we were as disposable to him as we were to one another it seems no matter our plans or great feats we have overcome for a moment of glory none of it meant a thing in the end. Some of us tried to buy as much time as we could what little it was but I can’t say for sure how many managed to make it out… I won’t but I’ve chosen my grave and I think you’d like it-” There is a pause with the sound of movement, of someone yelling in their own tongue before being cut off mid-sentence by a Reaper carved of stone.

“You were truly one of the best of us, mein freund. If you never believed a single thing I’ve said in our long years together please accept that I… I don’t have very much time left. Ah listen to me of all changelings being sentimental on my very own deathbed! Alas I cannot quite pull the same tricks as you being her favourite while we were the abandoned children of the night. If we truly have souls may we meet in the next life and know you still owe me a good bottle of r----”

The message cuts out into static before petering out into nothingness. Silence overcomes the car.

According to a narrative that’s currently popular in the mainstream media and the more lowbrow end of academia, the recent surge in popularity of the American nationalist right was caused by the radicalization of nerds. Dweeby white manchildren, so the story goes, retreated into video games, the science fiction fandom, and anonymous online forums like 4chan, and formed misogynistic, resentment-fueled subcultures within them. These neckbearded neo-Nazis gradually coalesced into the ‘alt-right,’ an internet hate machine that contributed greatly to Toupee Hitler’s otherwise inexplicable rise.

There are many versions of this narrative. The common feature is the ascription of Trump’s electoral victory — and, in some cases, the surge in right-populism all across the Western world — to the vile machinations of movements of fascistic, internet-based nerds; but the details vary. One version, laid down in a popular Tumblr post (at the time of writing, it has over 22,000 notes), ascribes the rise of the alt-right to a successful campaign by Stormfront to turn 4chan Nazi. Another version blames it on Gamergate, allegedly a hate campaign born out of a misogynist’s attempt to “punish his ex-girlfriend” that served as a breeding ground for far-right extremism, and as the petri dish that they organized in before taking over America. The Z-list Youtube celebrity Zinnia Jones has described Gamergate as “one of the worst things ever to happen” because it “enabled Trump” — apparently, a piece of fandom drama ranks up there with the Spanish flu pandemic, the Mongol conquests, the Black Death, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the post-Columbian plagues that depopulated the Americas, and the unfortunate events of the 1940s.

Deployments of the narrative abound. A popular Medium “32-minute read” bears the headline, “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.” Politico insists that “the Trump campaign … paid rapt attention to meme culture from the start.” CNET helpfully explains that “what began as a backlash to a debate about how video games portray women led to an internet culture that ultimately helped sweep Donald Trump into office.” Chris Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, complains that “the overlap between Gamergate and Trump(ism) is astounding. GG was like the trial run for this whole mess.” The Independent, a British paper, speaks out against the “very geeky” Trump supporters of the alt-right, and claims that “The uncomfortable truth, that should worry anyone praying for a Trump defeat, is that the Alt-right following he has tapped into are more numerous and unpredictable than traditional political commentators understand.” And so on. And for every article that explicitly draws a connection between internet-based youth countercultures and Trump, there are a dozen more that simply make a point of mentioning them in the same breath, and let the reader work out the connection for himself. Trump… Gamergate… Trump… neckbeards… Trump… 4chan… Trump!

At this point, it’s worth taking a step back from the phenomenon of heavy internet users failing for the first time to line up in lockstep behind the Democrats, and looking at the bigger picture. Trump’s electoral success was not driven by the alt-right; it was driven by the usual factors. To make a long story short, Trump won because Clinton ran a bad campaign and took unpopular positions on the issues. Insofar as the election was unusual, it wasn’t because Trump posted a picture of a cartoon frog — Clinton made her own bids for pop-cultural relevance, as did her husband when he took out his saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s show in 1992 — but because Clinton, in violation of a long-standing norm, directly insulted large swathes of the voting population with her “basket of deplorables” line.

Trump’s success is also not unusual in a global context. In recent years, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz won a supermajority in Hungary and proceeded to rewrite the Hungarian constitution to declare Hungary a Christian nation and ensure the electoral dominance of Fidesz for the foreseeable future. Britain voted to leave the European Union, and politicians like Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Andrzej Duda became household names among the set that pays attention to international politics. Trump is not a uniquely American phenomenon; if anything, he’ll likely prove to be a more moderate parallel to the trends sweeping Europe, just as FDR paralleled the European extremists of the Depression years. Of course, these trends are not just sweeping Europe, as is proven by the victories in Asia of politicians like Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte.

This global trend simply could not have been caused by an obscure piece of American fandom drama. Gamergate and 4chan cannot have contributed to the rise of the right, because the rise of the right happened to approximately the same extent in countries outside the Anglosphere and outside the cultural reach of Anglosphere nerd culture. Even Vox, which once described Trump as “the first Republican nominee whose ethos owes more to 4chan and Gamergate than it does the Bible,” has found that “polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least.”

Nor could Trump’s rise to power have been substantially helped along by pictures of cartoon frogs. A full analysis of Trump’s victory is beyond the scope of this article, but it borders on delusion to believe that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were flipped by 4chan trolls, rather than by such ordinary factors as Trump’s more popular positions on the key issues of immigration and trade and Clinton’s failure to run a functional campaign.

The internet has, however, reshaped American politics; just not in the way pundits say it has. The main effects have been on the left, not the right.

The most obvious effect is that leftists, especially those in the fields that shape and promulgate leftist doctrine, spend a lot of time online. Journalists spend less time cultivating networks of sources and more time ‘building their brand’ and interacting with other journalists; academics network on Twitter; and so on. Connection matters more than ever, and the internet has weakened local scenes and replaced them with placeless ones. Indie game developers from all over the world, for example, can compete for the attention of the largely U.S.-coastal ‘mainstream’ games journalism industry, whose writers are of course all on the same mailing lists, not to mention following each other on Twitter. Journalists, academics, political advisors and the like disappear into their own world — a world where it’s acceptable to wage war on large parts of one’s own audience, or to lead a mainstream presidential candidate to insult a large part of the voting population. And the scenes that are best able to capture the attention of this world will gain power, influence, and the propagation of their norms.

One scene that has been markedly successful in capturing the attention of the journalistic world is the one that developed from the pay-to-post forum Something Awful. Originally a humor site, it became one of the most influential sites on the internet — you probably know that 4chan was created by a Something Awful regular, and that its initial userbase drew heavily from SA. Its influence on politics, however, extends far beyond 4chan. Buckle up, folks: you’re in for a long, confusing, and terrible ride.

In the essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Mark Fisher, who was roundly condemned for writing it and killed himself three years later, attacked not only the identitarianism that has metastasized in academia since the ’60s, an identitarianism in which “the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender,” but also the “paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an acrid, stifling fog” and the “kangaroo courts and character assassinations” that are, as anyone who has observed the state of the left today, overwhelmingly common. This guilt and suspicion, these kangaroo courts and character assassinations, need not have anything to do with politics; in one memorable instance, a once-popular Tumblr communist blogger with the sadly real URL of “fuckyeahmarxismleninism” was dogpiled and laughed into irrelevance for admitting to watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with his daughters. This was seen as a far worse faux pas than even his support of North Korea. I am, unfortunately, not making this up; I saw it all happen firsthand.

These aren’t the kangaroo courts of Stalin. What they are is the schoolyard courts of Helldump, a Something Awful subforum created for the strange purpose of being a schoolyard court. The Something Awful wiki speaks for itself here: “The official birth of Helldump 2000 spawned a new creative outlet for pedophiles, racists, bigots, Ron Paul supporters, gun zealots, defenders of anime and otherwise crap posters to be outed in a thorough, convincing manner by an astute civilian task force. Essentially, it checks and balances the stupidity that seeps its way into the forums as a whole, although (unfortunately) it does not function as a preventive treatment (shit posters still propagate at an alarming rate). Rather, the modus operandi of Helldump is to profile and insult the (assumed) poor goon for his questionable views, and in turn function as a virtual tourniquet in an attempt to stop the bleeding, as well as force said shit poster into online anonymity and/or reclusiveness.” In practice, most of what Helldump did was dogpile furries.

As a side note, internet lore has it that the population of Helldump regulars itself skewed furry. This is not terribly out of the norm for Something Awful, the admin of which employed Shmorky for ten years before firing him on the sensible grounds that he was “secretly into pedophilia incest diaper shitting roleplay” and allegedly “would get way too excited over [SA admin Lowtax’s kids] coming to the office.” (Shmorky has also been reported to at least have once been friends with Rebecca Sugar, the creator of the TV show Steven Universe, which has a remarkably Shmorky-like art style and has as its target demographic the same Tumblr crowd that Shmorky fell in with.)

Zoe Quinn herself was a SA member under the username Eris, and participated in at least one Helldump dogpile. It’s often believed that Gamergate began when her ex-boyfriend posted a ‘callout’ of her abusive behaviors, cheating, and so on — the “Zoe Post” — on 4chan, but he actually joined Something Awful to post it there first. He was quickly banned for it, and the ban message reads: “Thank you for joining the Something Awful Forums in order to post a giant loving psychopathic helldump about your ex-girlfriend in the forum about video games.” (The original phrasing was “giant fucking psychopathic helldump,” but SA has wordfilters.) The belief in a connection between Helldump and ‘callout culture’ is held by the SA moderators themselves.

Helldump was closed after two years, and many of its regulars migrated to a different subforum, Laissez’s Fair, “the original Dirtbag Left.” The SA wiki entry for LF helpfully explains that it was “opened up to put all the Ron Paul shit” and became a “refugee holding bay” for Helldump after the latter was closed. “Over time people started making effort posts about such things the nightmare that is our criminal justice system, social justice in general, as well as the ideas of Karl Marx. The lack of moderation was made up for by basically shouting people out of the forum who were stupid MRAs and concern trolls. Gradually the complexion of the forum shifted from liberal to socialist.” Eventually, LF was closed, because “LF posters went internet detective on mods and posted death threats,” including several to then-President Obama.

At least two regulars on Helldump and LF went on to get careers in journalism. Jeb Lund, who wrote a vague and rambling essay about his posting career for Gawker, went by “Boniface” and “Mobutu Sese Seko” on Something Awful. Under the former pseudonym, he threatened a Helldump victim: “how about you promise never to post here again on pain of being permabanned, otherwise there’s no reason for all the posters here with lexis-nexis to stop at just your email addresses and not go straight for driver’s license photos and info, tax records… the list goes on and on.” Sam Kriss was (or at least was widely believed to be) Dead Ken, as well as Red Ken, Dub Mapocho, Agenbite Inwit, Dead Skeng, and presumably other accounts. After LF was removed from SA, its regulars established and migrated to explicitly Communist forums offsite; he was a regular on one such forum, “tHE rHizzonE”, which was later given some sort of contest by the leftist magazine The Baffler, whose editor was “a fan” of said forum. (Sam Kriss has written for the Baffler.)

Many people from the more leftist parts of SA went on to become “Weird Twitter,” which was puffed by outlets like Buzzfeed. John Herrman and Katie Notopoulos, the authors of the linked piece, gravitated toward LF superstars on Twitter and tried to replicate their style. Some of them, such as Lund, Kriss, David Thorpe (who had a regular column on SA and is now a music journalist), Virgil Texas, Jon Hendren (who was, as docevil, once an admin of the “Fuck You And Die” (FYAD) subforum, but was shamed off the site after a bizarre incident involving a charity event featuring Smash Mouth and Guy Fieri), and Alex Nichols, parlayed those connections into posting careers.

Herrman also profiled a Weird Twitter poster, @CelestialBeard, whose claim to fame was tweeting a lot, and being followed by Herrman on Twitter. @CelestialBeard has since become a transgender brony.

From Weird Twitter, which attracted and assimilated people who weren’t active in SA’s leftist cliques (such as Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas, who just lurked), came Chapo Trap House, darling of every obscure Slate clone from Brooklyn to Queens. Chapo has featured several SA regulars, including Alex Nichols (@Lowenaffchen), who was active on LF as Golden Lion Tamarin (his Twitter username used to be @GLDNLNTMRN), and Dan O’Sullivan (@Bro_Pair), a now-banned former SA moderator whose username is now Fat Curtain Dweller. It’s interesting that a podcast heralded for ‘actually giving a shit’ comes from a subculture that began as pure trolling.

Providing a precise accounting of the impact of Something Awful on the Anglosphere left is difficult, as it would be with any subculture. The history is oral, largely lost, deliberately obfuscated, and shrouded in irony. It is likely that nothing will come of it, and that, in the end, it will be the farce mirroring the tragedy of neoconservatism: an insane political movement that developed out of a bizarre and insular clique in a world where having the right connections matters above all else, writing things that very few people care about but doing a great deal of damage along the way. It seems that the norms of Helldump have become callout culture, SA users’ trolling of the libertarians corralled in LF have become the dirtbag left, and some of those responsible have written for not only Gawker and Buzzfeed, but also The New York Times.

At the very least, the overlap in population is clear and suggestive. Someone can go from being repeatedly banned from a pay-to-post forum for something involving the word “nigger” to writing for the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New York Times, largely on the dubious strength of his Twitter account and forum fame. There are few lessons that can be drawn from this; the obvious one is that perhaps the media rewards expertise less than connectedness.

I’m told that this is what Gamergate was about. But there are many things I’ve been told Gamergate was about. The internet is something awful indeed. And it’s only going to get worse.

KEIYNAN LONSDALE? No, that’s actually HARRY JAMES POTTER from the GOLDEN TRIO ERA. You know, the child of LILY POTTER (NEE EVANS) and JAMES POTTER? Only 22 years old, this GRYFFINDOR alumni works as an AUROR (FOR NOW) and is sided with THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. HE identifies as CIS MALE and is a HALF BLOOD who is known to be MERCURIAL, BULLHEADED, and PRIVATE but also EMPATHETIC, BOLD, and SELFLESS. — &&. ( LIZ, GMT+2, SHE/HER, 22. )

pinterest.

Instead of writing the longest intro possible I’m just gonna ignore Harry’s background BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW IT ALREADY !!!!!!!!!! thx

depression tw, death tw, war tw, PTSD tw

AFTER HOGWARTS.

So, the war is over ( a war that Harry has grown up fighting, mind you, the boy hasn’t had time for much else, has he now ? ) and people look to a teenager to continue being what he has been for the last seventeen years ( but what they’ve also rejected, when it suits the current tide of war ). But Harry James Potter doesn’t care much for being a beacon of hope ( of clarity, of light ), anymore. He’s not their symbol ( but at the same time, he knows that he will always be just that ).

The aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts itself is a blur, for him. Tugged in every direction. Not so much a man, more of an object, something that his entire world feels entitled to. But he’s exhausted ( has he been able to breath properly for the last year, at all ? ). It’s too much for any seventeen year old, yet people expect him ( the boy who lived, never just Harry ), to carry it with gratitude, with a smile, with bravery. 

The days after the final battle, he feels very little, barely anything at all. All he really does is sleep.

The mark on his back is gone ( the one on his face isn’t ), but it doesn’t feel like it. Sure, he doesn’t have to fear for his life anymore, but the crowds are relentless. Suffocating him. He’s grieving, and all the masses ( the strangers, people who think that they know him because he’s famous ) want to do is hug him, shake his hand, clap him on the back. He tries to be understanding ( they’re grieving too, logically, he KNOWS that ). But by now, Harry is growing a little bit tired of being everyone’s emotional-support-boy-who-lived.

Anyways, a few weeks after the war ends, Harry falls off the map. Disappears from the grid. Could not be found, through any means. Some of his friends say that he rented a muggle car and drove through Europe. Others say that he just slept, refused to leave his house, so exhausted and depressed that he couldn’t be reached. Others are firm in their belief that he was busy hunting down the last of the Death Eaters. No one truly knows what Harry did, during those months. Only those closest to him have a vague idea.

He eventually returns, a little bit better. The weight on his shoulders lighter. Back to his former self ( though, he’s not quite sure who that was, this war has tried to consume him since boyhood ). His smile comes easier, it’s less weary. He has that Potter sparkle back in his gaze ( the one that makes his eyes look less like Lily’s, more likes James’, despite what the color might tell you ). He’s not at peace yet, but he will be ( his scar hasn’t hurt in months, that’s a start ).

Harry finds solace in his friends, that much has not changed. It was them he fought for, and it’s them that he continues to live for. The war never changed Harry’s capacity for love.

So, he’s back. People still look to him ( and they think that they know what he will do, ALWAYS always, always ). He can’t escape their eyes, their whispers, how they think that they know him. Most of the time, he hates it. But he’s also the type of guy to poke fun at it, doing his best to not take himself too seriously. Everything’s easier, that way.

Maybe he does it out of habit, or out of duty, but he does what he thinks will make the most people happy and joins the Aurors ( they had been nudging him in their direction ever since Voldemort fell, who wouldn’t want the famous Harry Potter in their ranks against the dark? ).

But Harry is just Harry, and Harry is so tired of being Harry Potter. For the first year after the war, the poor guy could barely go out for a drink without being mobbed, you know? The excitement eventually ebbed out ( thank god ) and became less exhausting, but it was still there, in smaller waves.

ANYWAYS ---- so he’s an auror. He doesn’t hate the work by any means, but he feels as though he has just gone from fighting one war, to fighting another. Which is really the last thing he needs right now? He still suffers from night terrors, about his friends dying, about Voldemort ( not so much Voldemort as other people remember him ----- in his dreams, Harry sees the Voldemort in limbo, at King’s Cross ). Eventually, those will go away too. Partly.

The Wizarding Wars have taken a lot of things away from Harry, and for that he is silently angry, a little bit, all the time. The war he fought may have ended —— but it’s still taking things from him. His agency, for one thing. Did he want to become an auror? Well, it would have been ONE possible path, but perhaps not the one he would have chosen first. Ever since the war, everyone just keep looking to him, to have him continue being the symbol of hope and greatness that he was during the last year of the war. But Harry is just Harry, you know?  Not much has changed since that evening when Hagrid came to get him, all those years ago. But people just assume to know what The Chosen One will do next, and Harry’s just sort of…. along for the ride, for the most part, when it comes to that and his public image. Right now, he is just doing what he thinks is right, for the greater good. He does what he thinks is expected of him, what he thinks will make the most people happy. He’s not thinking of himself, at least not yet. I don’t think Harry even realizes that he has grown resentful, a little bit bitter, angry. 

With that said, I really like the idea of post-war Harry as the biggest troll possible when it comes to the media. All those ridiculous rumors you read in the papers about The Boy Who Lived are often started by Harry himself !!!! It’s his way of gaining some of that agency back but also he just thinks it’s a fucking blast. 

Constant bad jokes about how 'he didn’t die for this’ and ‘did we really defeat Voldemort so that you could’.... are PRIME coping mechanisms too!!!! 

Never actually finished school but totally got away with it because he’s Harry Potter. Finally some perks, am I right.....

Overall, Harry IS concerned with being a good role model for the younger kiddos, but that year after the war? Harry was in a dark place, not fit for returning to school. Not fit for returning to anything, really.

Harry is a really good teacher and we ALL know this, so why isn’t this man teaching? It would be much better for his mental health too. Damn it.

With that said ----- I think this version of Harry will either continue down the auror route, eventually become head auror, but devote his life more to teaching the new aurors and reshape the auror department. BUT I have also always adored the idea of Harry returning to Hogwarts as a professor, taking up the position as the Defense against Dark Arts professor. We love full circles in this house !!!! I also think that would be really good for Harry, to be surrounded by kids ( who wouldn’t have really lived through the war, the boy who lived would just be a myth to them, it would be less dramatic, they’d soon forget that Harry has ever been anything other than their professor ).

Never really replaced Hedwig. These days, Harry uses various messenger birds and owls, mostly borrowing those of his friends. He did adopt a dog, though. 

I don’t think Harry will be fully at peace until more time has run its course. He has been through so much trauma, way more than any man ( much less a boy ) should ever have to experience. The scars may fade ( no, not THAT one ), but they will never quite heal, not for him. BUT he will be at peace, eventually.

TLDR: Harry is an auror, right now. He hasn’t washed off his past, but he has come to terms with it, in a way. 

PERSONALITY & OTHER FUN STUFF.

Harry Potter is compassionate, selfless, kind. Good at seeing the good. But also petty, impulsive, seething, moody. Bad at letting things go.

So incredibly brave, but shouldn’t have had to be? An eleven year old should not under any circumstances be led into the lion’s den and that’s that on that.

Has a hero complex, but it’s one that was forced upon him ( do not get me started on Albus Dumbledore, it will take up the rest of the intro ). Harry was LITERALLY just Harry, until suddenly, he wasn’t. 

The sheer dumb bitch energy of this man sometimes....... Thank god for Ron and Hermione is all I’m gonna say.......

Masks a lot of his trauma and pain with bad jokes, sarcasm and a seemingly carefree attitude. Tries his best to play down a lot of things ( his pain, his fame, his trauma, what he did during the war ). But he has a really serious streak too.

With that said, Harry does struggle with PTSD and survivor’s guilt. 

A total smart ass ( there’s no need to call me sir, professor? ). Harry has a sharp tongue aND is often much sassier than he should be, especially when challenged / when he sees something as unjust / when there’s someone that he just doesn’t like. But that sharpness can seep into his everyday life too.

Like I mentioned earlier, Harry is a total troll and will leak the most outrageous rumors that have 0% truth to them to the press. It’s all in good fun. Most of the time.

Honestly that thing Dan Radcliffe did when he wore the same shirt everyday for a month so that the pictures of him would all be un-usable is peak Harry behavior.

Harry would ultimately LIKE to forgive the remaining Death Eaters, the ones who has repented ( eg. The Malfoys ), but he is having a hard time with it. He is prone to spite and pettiness, and forgiveness ultimately doesn’t run easy in his veins. But the attempt IS there, and he doesn’t want to live with a sliver of bitterness in his heart, you feel?

The war hasn’t so much hardened him though, as it has softened him. Sure, it has made him weary, careful, closed off. But it has also made him kinder, more empathetic, more understanding, stronger in his sense of self.

Isn’t as rich as he used to be. Used a large chunk of his fortune after the war to help victims of the war to get back onto their feet. Anonymously of course. Harry has no desire to make headlines, ever again.

Refuses interviews. Most of the time. Only The Quibbler will get an ounce of truth out of Harry.

TIME CLASH.

Harry has always had a family ( a found family, his friends, family doesn’t end in blood ), but suddenly everything has been amplified, he has his parents back, his godfather, their friends. But they’re all his age, they don’t recognize him ( but he barely recognize them, either ---- if it hadn’t been for staring himself blind at their photographs, he wouldn’t know them ). It’s basically like The Erised Mirror Extreme Version, for Harry.

But there are also The Death Eaters ------- and the fear of having to go back, be the figurehead of yet another war that he has to sacrifice EVERYTHING for. Frankly, Harry has had quite enough. He doesn’t want to be their Atlas, anymore. But at the same time, his parents are back. And he doesn’t want to lose them again. AND he knows that they’d fight this war for him. Which makes him want to fight this war for them. Can you see where I’m going for this? It’s a really tumultuous time for Harry, he’s confused and just a little bit lost.

AND then there are the KIDS !!!!!! HIS KIDS !!!!!!!!! It’s a total mind fuck, Harry doesn’t feel ready to be a father, nor does he feel that the world is ready for him to have children. But his children are all grown up and from the future. He wants to protect their future, their peace. 

It’s a little bit selfish too. Harry wants that peace for himself. He wants all to be well, you know?

You Don’t Say

For me, one of the unforeseen benefits of Facebook and other social media is that it gives me a chance to do rough drafts of ideas, assembling my thoughts and getting feedback before committing to more permanent form.

And sometimes, like asteroids colliding in space, two separate ideas / posts slam into one another and either create something new and unexpected, or else shatter themselves and reveal interesting aspects of their nature heretofore hidden from view.

That happened recently with a pair of Facebook posts I made on Dennis Prager and Harlan Ellison.

Let’s get the turd out of our mouth first.

. . .

Dennis Prager is a purveyor of herpetology lubricants admired by many on the right-leaning-nazi side of the spectrum, primarily because he keeps his mouth closed when chewing.  Half of what he says is repackaged self-evident truths of the “Don’t eat the yellow snow” variety, a quarter is opinions that if not startling original are at least not genuinely harmful, and the remain quarter is egregious bullshit for which he deserves a public pants down spanking.

Hmm, what?  Oh, yes; purely metaphorically, of course.

I long since wrote off Prager as a. utterer of inanities, but recently his turdmongering was forced on my attention by someone who posted a link to Prager’s argument that the “left” (i.e., basically anybody who thinks Auschwitz was a Bad Idea) is inflicting harm on both the American body politic and the universe at large by denying people like Prager the right to drop the N-bomb whenever they feel like it.

As some of you no doubt already knew, Prager is a member of what polite bigots used to refer to as “those of the Hebrew persuasion”.

That a person from an ethnicity that historically suffered hatred so vicious and specifically targeted that a special word had to be created for it (“anti-Semitism” because the original word -- “Jew-hatred” -- was too damned ugly even for bigots to use) now has his knickers in a twist because he’s “not allowed” to use the only other word of equal or greater impact -- also coined specifically by oppressors for expressing unrestrained hate and contempt against those oppressed -- is so rich in irony that all I can do is swipe a phrase from Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station and say Dennis Prager has “all the self-awareness of a dog licking its own asshole in the middle of the street”.

First off, he’s lying: Neither the “left” nor American law prevents him from dropping the N-bomb whenever he feels like it and I invite him to go down to the intersection of Normandie and Florence in South Central and drop it at the top of his lungs for as long as he is able and please make sure to take plenty of video recorders along because I really wanna see what happens next.

Second, why the fuck would you want to say that? Seriously, other than in an evidentiary context (a cop giving testimony in court, a journalist reporting what some bigoted politician says, etc.), who today gains anything from repeating the word other than inflicting unjustified distress on people who have done nothing to deserve it?

(This is the point where a bunch of alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and say “but whatabout all the times when black people say it?” and to those trolls I’m gonna say STFU & STFD; if you can’t grasp the difference in context then you’re too damned stupid to be allowed out in public except at the end of a leash and with a ball gag in your mouth.)

It’s a word specifically created and designed to be used to brutally oppress people who did nothing to deserve that brutal oppression.  Why would anybody outside that group use it except to participate in that brutal oppression?

. . .

Least there sit any in the cheap seats who presume the above rant was targeted at Dennis Prager simply because he was Jewish, guess again, ya yutzes.

Few writers enjoyed as brilliant and as incendiary a career as Harlan Ellison, and I count myself privileged to have been one of his friends.

Ellison, as many of you know, also was Jewish, a damned tough little bastard, singled out for hatred and abuse as the only Jewish child in his backwater Ohio school, growing up with nerves & balls of chromium, a bona fide Army Ranger, and a writer so honest and fearless that when he wrote about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s he did so by infiltrating and joining a street gang to get first hand experience and insight on the kids who ran in that crowd (and as icing on the cake, James Caan played him in the TV version!).

Top that, Dennis.

Harlan’s electric eclectic career features many highpoints, but the one I want to focus on is his brief 4-year run as TV critic for the legendary Los Angeles Free Press (a.k.a. The Freep) from 1968 to 1972.  

What’s interesting is that Harlan did this while at the same time at the height of his demand as a TV writer.

You got any idea how hard it is to make a living while you’re gnawing on the hand that feeds you?

Harlan may have been crazy, but damn it, he was honest.

Back to the issue at hand.

Recently I’ve been re-reading his TV criticism columns, collected in two volumes, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat.

The depressing thing is that all the evil we see today was in place back in those days, and the same smug pious frauds and their dimbulb marks kept congratulating themselves how wonderful they were as things continued to spiral out of control.

Oh, we've had good moments when we made changes that improved the lot of people who'd previously been marginalized, but the core cancer is still there. Harlan was no cock-eyed sentimentalist -- he was often filled with anger and could vent it spectacularly at deserving targets -- but he did have hope that somehow we could keep nudging the ball further towards the goal lines.

The columns make fascinating reading; they are nowhere near as dated as one might suspect. Sometimes they offer diamond-like brilliant dissections of a particular instant in the cultural gestalt, other times they examine the unseen (well, to most audiences, that is) tides of Hollywood that shape our media, sometimes he turns his attention to bear on seemingly insignificant and forgotten local programming only to show with McLuhan-esque clarity how that tiny piece of seemingly insignificant fluff is symptomatic of a much wider, much vaster, and far more serious problem.

One entry caught my eye in particular, the March 7, 1969 column on a failed ABC pilot called Those Were The Days.

Harlan sat in the studio audience watching the taping of that pilot, and his column praised the courage and insight of producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, the brilliant performances of Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, and the raw honesty of the pilot’s sharp comedy and writing.

Those of you not in the cheap seats have already realized this was the second failed pilot for what would eventually become All In The Family over at CBS (there was an even earlier original pilot called Justice For All back when Archie and Edith’s last name was Justice, not Bunker.)

I remember the hoopla when All In The Family finally aired in January of 1971 as a mid-season replacement.

You might count Archie Bunker as the white Dolemite insofar as the comedy sprang from the shock of all the crude and vulgar things he said.

Lear and Yorkin were mocking that mindset, belittling bigotry, exposing the Babbittry of millions of “good” Americans who lacked either the self-awareness or the courage to take a long introspective look at themselves and realize how badly they were failing as citizens of this country.

Audiences weren’t supposed to like Archie Bunker.

And that’s where Lear and Yorkin made their fatal mistake.

No, audiences didn’t like Archie.

They loved him.

. . .

Asteroids collide, and sometimes they form new planets, and sometimes they shatter and expose what lies beneath.

Prager’s modern day Babbittry crashed into Harlan’s half-century old anti-Babbittry, and from the explosion a stark truth revealed itself.

It’s almost impossible to make an outlaw a villain in popular media.

No matter how many banks they rob, stages they hold up, sheriffs they shoot, the mere fact that somebody wrote a song / dime novel / movie about ‘em makes them into heroes.

Demi-gods.

People to be admired.

Emulated.

Professional wrestling knows this.

You can never be so big a heel that you won’t have a legion of followers.

And you can turn a heel into a baby face in the blink of an eye and none of the fans will remember the despicable acts the wrassler did just last week.

You put an Archie Bunker on TV, you do not get millions of people to recognize themselves in his hateful / hurtful behavior and change their ways.

Oh, hell no; you get millions of people to applaud him for saying and doing what they say and do in private.

And now that it’s all big and bold and brassy on TV, why it becomes even easier to say it in the privacy of your own home, then over the fence with the neighbors, then in the bar down the street, then on the street itself, and then against people who have done you no harm, who have committed no sin other than the heinous crime of not being exactly like you.

I remember watching and liking All In The Family when it first came on because I, like millions of other Americans, got the joke:  Archie was no hero.

But it wasn’t long before the voices cheering Archie began to drown out the voices laughing at him.

Lear and Yorkin tried undoing their damage with Maude and The Jeffersons and Good Times and other spinoff shows, but the bigot was out of the bottle.

Archie Bunker, even though written in a way to ridicule his use of bigotry and stereotypes, became a champion and defender of those who clung to said bigotry and stereotypes.

So tell me again why you want to drop that N-bomb, Dennis.

Explain to me -- even while you talk out of both sides of your mouth and claim even if everybody can use they word maybe they shouldn’t use the word -- how that does anything to help anybody…

…other than bigots and hate mongers.

Your argument is as circular as the thumb and forefinger gesture white supremacists use to signal one another, a gesture deliberately chosen because it lets them transgress openly by lying about the truth meaning of their gesture.

And Harlan, you were right about Those Were The Days as it began evolving into All In The Family.  Absolutely brilliant -- but absolutely deadly.

Not airing All In The Family wouldn’t have eliminated racial / ethnic / sexual prejudice in the United States…

…but it would have denied those ideas a voice.

The narcissist always proclaims, “I don’t care what they say about me so long as they spell my name right.”

Well, that’s what we got with Archie Bunker.

None of the bigots cared if we made fun of their ideas…

…just so long as they got their ideas out there.

Because ideas are made legitimate by their presence.

Now clearly, this is a bade that cuts both ways.

Ideas once unthinkable -- liberty and justice for all in the form of racial and gender equality, f’r instance -- need to be championed in public.

But we need to shout down and stamp out the bad ideas.

The United States took their foot off the neck of the defeated white racists after the end of the Civil War, and as a result jim crow came roaring back, and things did not change for millions of Americans for another entire century.

We allowed bigots and hate mongers and slavers to be whitewashed and glorified and forgiven for their crimes against humanity…

…and in the process we allowed them to continue victimizing African-Americans more and more.

Every song about the Ol’ South, every novel glorifying plantation life, every movie showing happy field hands, every statue commemorating murderous traitors as men of honor and principle, every single iteration of that idea made millions of people’s suffering not just possible but inevitable.

. . .

Now this is the point where the alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and ask “did you ever drop the N-word?”

Not in casual conversation, no.

I was born and raised in the South (Appalachia, mostly); my father’s side of the family were almost all Southerners.

Almost all.

My paternal grandmother was born and raised in New Jersey and met my grandfather when both served in the U.S. Army medical corps in WWI.  When my grandfather died in his 40s, my grandmother originally moved back to New Jersey, but her three children (dad and two aunts) felt heartbroken at having to leave their Southern cousins and friends behind so even though she carried no particular love for the South, my grandmother moved her family back and stayed there for the most of her life (she and one of my aunts moved out to California to be near us, but that’s another story for another post).

One thing my grandmother absolutely refused to tolerate was use of the N-bomb anywhere near her, especially under her roof or in the homes of her children.

This included both the -er and -ra variants, because Southern racists who didn’t want to appear as uncultured and as boorish and as bigoted as their backwoods cousins preferred the second pronunciation because they could claim they were actually speaking respectfully about “colored people”.

So I grew up in the rare white Southern home where the N-bomb merely wasn’t used, it was actually denounced as wrong.

Now, don’t go thinking my grandmother was some great paragon of virtue; she wasn’t (she was hell on wheels, in fact, but that’s another story for another post).

But she did recognize there was something wrong with the use of the N-bomb, and whether she demanded her children never use it in any form to keep them from appearing to be boorish, bigoted louts, or whether she just thought it was simple good manners of the golden rule variety not to use it, I dunno.

But I do know we never used it, and when my parents heard our neighbors or schoolmates use it, we were reminded in no uncertain terms that we were never to use it.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t used it.

A couple of decades ago I wrote a screenplay based on the life of Robert Smalls, in particular his incredible escape from Civil War Charleston by hijacking a Confederate gunboat and sailing it right past Ft. Sumter to join the Union fleet, bringing his wife and several other escaping African-Americans with him.

As a skilled harbor pilot, Smalls enjoyed certain privileges other enslaved African-Americans didn’t.

For example, he was allowed to go about the streets of Charleston unescorted…

…provided he wore a big diamond shaped brass tag around his neck.

Like a dog.

The tag indicated to slave catcher patrols that he was one of the “good” ones, that he could be trusted because he was helping his masters in their struggle against the Union by guiding blockade runners into the safety of Charleston harbor.

But knowing Southerners the way I do, and knowing the kind of low class good ol’ boy types they recruited for such jobs, I couldn’t imagine the slave catcher patrols being particularly courteous to him, even when they knew they had to let him pass because clearly he had the protection of some high positioned muckamuck.  

And I could easily imagine them flinging the N-bomb at him with great glee, taunting him, daring him to act “uppity” so they could beat the crap out of him and teach him some manners and remind him of his place.

So I used the word in their dialog in my script.

Would I use that word today?

Probably not.

It’s not that crucial to the story, and if the viewer doesn’t grasp the concept that these are bigoted bully scum from their actions and attitude, then I’ve failed my job as a writer.

Have I ever quoted people who dropped the N-bomb?

Yeah, I have, in the past.

I’ve quoted Richard Pryor and Blazing Saddles and Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

I would excuse it then as the aforementioned evidentiary context but ya know what?  I don’t quote those lines anymore.

I still think Pryor is hilarious and will recommend his routines to anyone I think might be interested, but he as a member of the African-American community at large (because like any other ethnic group, African-Americans have numerous sub-cultures and sub-communities among them), he could say things in a way neither I nor any other white person could say them.

(And, yeah, there’s a big debate going on to this very day among African-Americans about the appropriateness of that word and you know what?  Whatever decision African-Americans reach for themselves is their business and should not involve any input whatsoever from we white folk; we not only can’t use the word, we can’t even comment on how they choose to use it.  Period.  Full stop.)

Blazing Saddles when it came out used the N-bomb to be deliberately transgressive, to make a sympathetic point re how unfairly African-Americans were treated.

All well and good.

But nine years earlier there had been a movie called A Patch Of Blue and while it wasn’t a raucous comedy like Blazing Saddles it tried making a point about race relations in America and it was a really. Really good movie and it made some important points but today is virtually unwatchable not because of any flaws in it but because the times have changed.

Ditto Blazing Saddles.

We don’t need to approach the problem that way any more.

Quentin Tarantino?  I really like what he does as a director and a screenwriter but his use of the N-bomb to show us how transgressive his characters are is really shallow.  I have a strong feeling his movies are going to be considered embarrassingly passé’ in a generation or two, much the same way as benign-yet-stereotypical characters in 1940s movies render many of them passé’ today.  

Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction lose nothing by changing the N-word to something else.  

Maybe an argument could be made for its use in Django Unchained or The Hateful 8 but even there I think substituting another word wouldn’t significantly change the tenor or tone of either movie.

So I stop quoting those lines from Tarantino’s films, at least not fully.

I can admire his skill / talent / craft without signing off on his problematic elements.

Let me offer an analogy: If a creator can get the same dramatic effect by pretending to shoot somebody but not actually blasting them with a gun, then they can get the same dramatic effect by using something evocative of the N-bomb without actually dropping it.

(By the way, for those who may be curious, my mother was from Naples and a bona fide card carrying member of Mussolini’s Fascist Youth Brigade, but that’s another story for another post.)

. . .

We are plunging into a new cultural conflict -- and while I think there will be violence, I don’t see it being violence on the scale or level of political organization as the Civil War -- and we can only win by refusing to let the bigots and the hate mongers spew their bullshit in the marketplace of ideas.

There is no compromise with an oppressor.

Stand up to it every time you encounter it.

Make it unthinkable, never acceptable. 

  © Buzz Dixon

Proceeding logically, we now go to 71.

As I lay sleeping in the night, a thought occurred to me:    it seems much more likely that it will be our Calliope who reigns over the Candy timeline than Alt!Calliope.  This is primarily because of the fact that Alt!Calliope had their fingerprints all over the mainstream of Homestuck, but also because of they suggest that the only reason they interfere with the Meat timeline is because of Dirk’s tyranny.   If in fact the Candy timeline is, as a baseline, a Cherubic paradise, as was implied, then this would give Alt!Calliope no real specific reason to have inserted themselves into it in the first place (albeit the logic of that statement is a bit complicated and tenuous).   Furthermore, this becomes likelier because Dirk suggests Calliope was acting particularly grim because she knew that John Egbert would be sacrificing himself in the Meat timeline; thus, (given the reasonable suggestion that Calliope’s will for John to survive could potentially either be responsible for the split in the timelines or possibly for her theoretical control of one of them) and particularly considering both the necessity of the defeat of Lord English and the suggestion on Dirk’s part that the fandom would be debating the legitimacy of the Candy Timeline (whether it “counts” as living, or something like that), it makes some sense that the supposedly more “fan fiction-y” and sweet/saccharine timeline might be one which our Calliope is responsible for. If this is the case, erm... well, I may not be able to post everything that comes up in the future, there.  Given Roxy’s description of how Calliope freaked out and started drawing pictures, later on, well...  I am reminded of the stated nudity that is involved in some of said pictures, and obviously Tumblr will not allow for the posting of pornography; thus, I will either have to be using cropped images or merely (obliquely) describing what is happening on those panels, should that eventuality come to pass. On a different note:  Maybe Troll Obama Karkat will actually succeed in his election attempt, this time around! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This strongly (and most disturbingly) reminds me of the heavy “convincing” that Dirk performed as his second to last resort, when he wasn’t giving characters direct orders. I do very much hope that if this is indeed our Calliope’s work, they don’t subvert the free will of the inhabitants of her timeline very often.  I would be very, very disappointed in them.    >:

Well, well... this is certainly quite interesting. It could be either interpreted as him believing that his decision doesn’t matter, either way, or, given his contempt for the leaf and his toss of it away, his rejection of that sort of bounded, directional choice; thus his embrace of free will, despite the previously apparent pre-determined pathways Paradox Space would allow for in order to ensure the single direction it had in mind (away from the stem) was carried out.  A most interesting metaphor, indeed. As for the sky:   It is VERY interesting that John doesn’t react with disgust toward the sky, given his stated belief that it was over-saturated and painful in comparison to his former home’s own sky, when he returned with all of the Kids for their “first big meet-up,” from their perspective.    Perhaps it was only the jostling of his memories that actually seeing that Earth’s sky again allowed in the first place that made him feel, in retrospect, that the one in the world they created felt “wrong.” Or maybe “that blue” is meant to suggest the same reaction and a desire to embrace it, rather than reject it as the other version of him had. It’s a bit of a shame that it’s not elaborated upon. Oh, by the way, there were certain things that the Meat Timeline didn’t address which will indeed be very important for Paradox Space’s great progression, and which this timeline could fulfill, so I guess that that could further ensure that this timeline has an important reason/justification for being.   Chief among them is ensuring that the Calliope/Alt!Calliope split happens in the first place.   Given the fact that the Retconned Alpha Kids’ session could not have produced a new universe, let alone one with trolls and earth in it, so the previously speculated split in the world’s timelines as a result of the shenanigans John ensured could not actually work out.   Instead, it will have to be the Meat/Candy split that functions to ensure this split possibility (with Alt!Calliope actually coming from the Meat world, which will not have anyone to greet the Cherubs, but will still have the Meteor available to eventually have them start the Game, I think; whereas the Candy timeline will have normal Calliope’s emergence, and Gamzee). I actually thought about this in the 3 day period where I could not post because my account had been terminated by Tumblr, much to my chagrin, but... to even greater chagrin, I am reporting this to you now because I unfortunately saw a flash of “It’s time to release the bard from his prison,” or something like that, and now I have to admit it to you all because, despite the fact that it makes my actual development of the idea on my own more questionable and the revelation weaker in general,  I cannot help but be honest with you and leave judgment in the matter up to your judicious hands, rather than trying to bury the matter. Darn self-spoiling nonsense... .    >.<

Hmm. This is a very interesting moment. Particularly in light of the narrator’s way of describing things, including the surprise involved, here.   It’s got me quite questioning whether Calliope is actually in charge of the narration as of the current moment. The way that things are being worded at the moment sounds like the person involved doesn’t know about the gender concerns of Calliope or Roxy, as of now. Furthermore, their halting, uncertain way of narrating it very much reminds me of Dave.  I am in no way certain of this assessment, however, especially considering Dave has indeed been in contact with Roxy and Calliope and should have known about their identity concerns for some time.   Hmmm. It’s possible, of course, that they haven’t really reached that point in their personal development, but I would guess this isn’t the case.  The plot thickens.

I’m quite sure that this matter will be figured out momentarily. This may very well be the moment that actually starts the John/Roxy relationship in the first place: the moment of affection resulting from the fact that Roxy knew John was likely going to die on this mission could make her feel confident enough to suggest they enter into such a relationship, in fact.   Or it could just be one step among many. Guess there’s no point in speculation.

At least for a while, yes. Yes, it shall be awesome. As for that... John, did you really think of them as anything less than family to begin with?  I mean, you knew that they quite literally were, as far as the Kids are concerned, ever since you Ectobiologized them!   And the trolls have quite seriously been grafted into that family at that point, don’t you think? But regardless of these silly little revelations that a depressed person might legitimately suddenly have, even if he should already know these things...

That is an interesting thing to say, Calliope. Well, two interesting things.  The equivocation fading obviously refers to the fact that, for the most part, their depth of connection to the canon will be fading in the near future, despite the fact that the actions in this timeline will heavily influence and directly lead to certain necessary canonical outcomes (specifically, the rise of Caliborn, and through him, Lord English).   The other interesting matter is those plans. That Calliope has interesting plans which she wishes to impose upon John is most interesting, indeed, and makes a great bundle of question marks (uncertainty noodles, were they called?) pop up over my head.

My guess is that this will specifically be the version of Gamzee seen in Collide?   At the very least, that would make sense, given the way his fate was mysteriously glossed over in the flash.  Maybe he didn’t get sucked into the black hole as so many were speculating.

I fricking love the way this is describing her. So cute. <3

This is also incredibly cute, and I adore the contrast between Calliope’s enthusiasm and semi-innocence and John’s skepticism and disdain.  It makes for a very rich tapestry to devour.

Hah. Void is blocking his interpretation of Roxy’s thoughts, even now, I think.  I think that’s what this means, at least.  I am indeed quite curious about whether this impenetrability will persist in this timeline, generally, though.

Yes, levitas does generally make one feel more whimsical and act less grave.  I wonder if this suggests John is more in-touch with Breath, in this timeline.  (I wonder if his binding to the fate of Paradox Space [and perhaps his wonderful dice hammer in particular] was what made it impossible for him to flee out of Lord English’s mouth like the Breeze whistling through his teeth.  LE does have ridiculous super speed, but Davepeta was able to interject their claws to [partially] protect John in time, at least. Hmmmm.    ...  I wonder if we’ll be able to see Jasprosespritesprite in this timeline, some time. )

Do:   

What is Time in Homestuck? What is its function, its purpose, what are timelines, what defines the Alpha and doomed timelines. How do timeloops work?

Time in Homestuck takes from a couple of theories about the workings of Time and Parallel Timelines. So, Time itself doesn’t have any Function, much like in real life, instead, Space and Time are treated as the two main building frames of a physical reality, to the point where the Universe Frog requires a Space and Time players to actually even be possible to be created.

Going in detail though, according to Homestuck’s Interpretation, there’s an Alpha Timeline that marks a path that must be followed, but there are alternate realities, sometimes required by the demands of the Alpha Timeline itself, where divergent Choices and Actions from the various characters have led to a deviation from this path that needs to be followed. A Time Loop is nothing more than ensuring no Paradoxes are created while following this Alpha. For example, according to the Alpha Timeline, Lil Cal ends up in Jack Noir’s possession, and eventually is shot through a meteor portal into Alternia. This is a stipulation that must be followed, so in the Timeline where John dies because Terezi sent him to see Typheus early? We learn with John’s ghost, that Typheus didn’t actually just insta-murder him, he gave him a Choice, to Die for the benefit of the Timeline. The thing that doomed the Timeline wasn’t John dying- It was Dave prototyping Lil Cal. Davesprite needed to exist, because without Dave preventing Lil Cal from being prototyped, Lil Cal would become a sprite, and thus never get to Alternia. This is the kind of Paradoxes Stable Timeloops want to avoid, and the reason this Timeline leaves behind a Doomed Rose. We see in a couple of occasions, Daves dying when a Time Loop is broken- When Dave screws up Time-Travelling, he creates an offshot Dave that doesn’t become ‘future Dave’, instead it’s its own iteration of Dave unrelated to the Alpha Timeline, and as such, Doomed to die. Davesprite manages to become un-Doomed by Prototyping himself into Davesprite, and thus becoming an integral part of the Alpha Timeline, rather than a Doomed Version.

Of course this still leaves the question of what the Alpha Timeline itself is. After all, we see dead God Tier Trolls, implying that actually becoming god-like is somehow not Alpha, and thus rendering the explanation of the Alpha Timeline being the ‘best’ or ‘most beneficial’ path impossible. No, in fact, the entirety of the Alpha Timeline is filled with Death and Suffering and awful things and characters being erased off the story.

This is because the Alpha Timeline is, in reality, a Time Loop that favors the Lord of Time, Caliborn. All the Alpha Timeline does is ensure Lord English is created and does what he does in the story, after all, he IS the Lord of Time, and he Commands Time itself. Paradox Space bends to his will.

[S] MSPA Reader: Mental Breakdown is a quick example of one of the Alpha Timeline’s most important devices- Lil Cal. A Juju which contains the Essence of Lord English, and needs to follow an EXTREMELY specific path to reach where it needs to reach, dividing in two at one point to become an Entry in Caliborn’s Land, through which he spreads his influence, and in which he eventually becomes trapped, and an Exit in the Lil Cal Dave has, which eventually ends in Gamzee’s Possession, and is ultimately used to convert Jack Noir into a Proxy for Lord English.

Everything in Alpha Timeline is delicately crafted to eventually lead to Caliborn’s Rise. Lil Cal is not just the Entry and the Exit, the Vessel for His Soul, it’s also the only reason why Caliborn manages to achieve full, unconditional Immortality. When he reaches Yaldabaoth’s Boon, he uses the Juju Breaker Crowbar to obtain Inconditional Immortality. Crowbar which he’s had since before he actually met ‘Crowbar’ from the Felt. Crowbar which was gifted to him by Gamzee of all people, the Troll who raised Calliope and Caliborn. Gamzee needed to be there to raise the twins, and he offered the tool that would eventually grant him Immortality. And how did both Gamzee and the Crowbar get to Caliborn? Through the Black Hole created after killing the Jack Noir possessed by Lord English through Lil Cal. Black hole which ALSO absorbed a majority of LOTAK, including its core, where the Denizen Yaldabaoth himself was, making it seem like everything relevant to Caliborn’s Session arrived there in the first place only thanks to Lil Cal.

Similarly, even the God Damn Retcon favors Lord English, even though it seems like a Canon-Breaking tool, even though it seems like something meant to bypass the Alpha Timeline in the first place, it’s actually a necessary tool for Lord English’ creation- Without the Retcon Powers, John would’ve never reached Caliborn’s Masterpiece, becoming stuck in the House Juju with the other three Betas. He wouldn’t have led the Kids that would, in turn, defeat Caliborn and suck his Soul, ARquius’ Soul and half of Gamzee’s into Lil Cal to create the amalgam known as Lord English. And without the Beta Kids stuck in the House, it would’ve never been filled in, and thus become the double-edged sword that would eventually cast Lord English into the Breach.

But of course even the Retcon favors Lord English- After all, he kills the Author. Caliborn interacts with Hussie through the Command Prompt, and physically smacks the website around on several occasions, as well as glitches the cartridge containing the data to continue the story. Doc Scratch and Vriska seem to be the only other characters in the comic to even be aware of the existence of Hussie as the Narrator- With Scratch being part Lord English, and Vriska literally getting angry at Hussie for switching the narrative just as she was about to reveal the House Juju, and tearing it back from him to show everyone what was in the Juju Chest. A Villain that messes with the Narrative itself would definitely still benefit from a tool meant to break the narrative. And in the same way, when the Villain of the Story has control over not just Reality, but the direction of the Narrative, the only two that can oppose it are a Character who Knows they are in a Story and Wants to be the Protagonist, and a Protagonist who Can Alter the Narrative and just wants to be Happy.

As such, Homestuck takes the idea of ‘parallel timelines’, and throws us a scenario in which an evil entity has basically overwritten Free Will through imposing himself in a very specific path, so if I had to give a short answer to the question of what “Time” and “The Alpha Timeline” is? I’d have to answer, The Alpha Timeline is Homestuck in itself, both the story and the struggle of the characters as they navigate through it.

( From this point downwards, these are my THOUGHTS and opinions, and may not reflect what’s strictly Canon or what may happen in the future )

This ties in to my thoughts on why I think Act 7 is good, contrary to what many in the Fandom seem to believe. We’re shown Caliborn’s rise to immortality, the beginning of his journey towards becoming Lord English, and eventually becoming the big villain of the story, contrasted with Vriska inserting herself in the role of the Heroine, even though everything was already set in the story for this exact same culmination and all she did was take the spotlight by opening the Juju Chest, and the Release of the Kids from the Alpha Timeline to live in Earth-C, free of the influence of Lord English, of the grasp he’s had on their choices and their existence.

Already at the very beginning, John himself states it clearly. 

It is your thirteenth birthday, and as with all twelve preceding it, something feels missing from your life. The game presently eluding you is only the latest sleight of hand in the repertoire of an unseen riddler, one to engender a sense not of mirth, but of lack. His coarse schemes are those less of a prankster than a common pickpocket. His riddle is Absence itself. It is a mystery dispersing altogether, like the moon’s faint reflection, with even one pebble of inquiry dropped in its black well. It is the most diabolical riddle of all.

When the Kids cross the threshold of the Door to the new Universe, the story ends canonically, because they’ve escaped the Time Loop known as the Alpha Timeline, they’re beyond English’ Realm. They are no longer Stuck, and they’re free to make their choices without fearing the creation of an offshot Timeline or worrying about what may happen in the future.

It’s my belief that the fact we see Caliborn with the Ring of Life Calliope has, that two Nannasprites exist without one dying, and a few other details such as Caliborn stating seeing himself surprised at the Kids appearing to face him using John’s Retcon Powers, means that this is not following the Alpha Timeline at all by the ending. John’s ‘I’ll do it’ has sparked many theories about this being the conflict that sparks John to want to go back to fight Caliborn, but it has always seemed nonsensical to me. John is depressed, Terezi is looking for Vriska, but for most of the part, they’re happy. They’re content with having gone through the hardships of the Game, and now being able to just live their lives. I could maybe see John using a fight with Caliborn to mask his emotions, but I can’t see him convincing Rose, happily married to Kanaya, that they should go back to beat up the stupid asshole that keeps Trolling him through Snapchat, using his highly dangerous Retcon Powers.

To me, it always felt that this was the result of a Timeline we didn’t see, but may see in the Epilogue, and even though there are ways to make it work, it ties perfectly well to this theme of breaking out of the Alpha Timeline, that by the end of the comic, we wouldn’t even be following the Timeline that spawns Lord English, and rather, the one the John we’re following, seeing master these Retcon Powers, creates following Terezi’s Instructions.

Ironically enough, this Timeline ends as an empty victory for both John and Terezi. John, with his adventure over, and having never seen inclined to even think what he may want to do after it’s over, is now left alone with his thoughts, the trauma he’s went through, and missing his father, while Terezi, who in the Game Over Timeline thought all she needed to be happy was Vriska, realizes that even that is more of a patch for some deeper self-steem issues, and yet continues to try to chase after her around the crumbling Paradox Space for no avail for years.

It’s my belief, when the Epilogue comes out, that we will see a distinction between the Timeline in which John reaches Earth-C, and the one in which they all go to Caliborn’s Masterpiece, as well as have Terezi return to Earth, not with Vriska, but with Davepeta, Sollux and Aradia, who are still potentially alive and out there. But that’s mostly because I don’t think Vriska should survive the encounter with Lord English.

Vriska herself, in this case, climatically becomes what she’s always wanted to be, the protagonist, only by her desire to be as such. She treats the Game of SBURB like a Game, and similarly, she treats Homestuck like a Story, a Story in which she wants to be seen as the Heroine. Not for Noble or Heroic reasons, but merely for the hell of it. She becomes the perfect Counterpoint to Lord English- The man who set the Alpha Timeline, whose existence jeopardizes the entirety of Paradox Space, the unseen, mysterious hand behind every event. Lord English becomes the Villain of the story, and Vriska takes advantage of it. A story needs a Villain and a Protagonist, and with John more focused in his Friends than the Big Bad, she steals the role for herself, which would make seeing her never actually return, all the more fitting. Act 7 is the Finale. It’s the End of the Alpha Timeline, the End of the Story that is Homestuck. So of course, once the curtains are drawn, both Villain and Protagonist are out of the picture entirely.

Seeing Cas screw over the brothers over and over and over again in the episode and if the baby isnt controlling him (bobos comment maked it sound like its not control but idk) and Cas has /genuinely/ choosen Kelly/satans baby/"faith" over his family(sam and dean!!) im gonna pissed... if been a bitter!cas since s10 and the end left me feelibg the opposite. I mean i was fine since i thought Cas was controlled but apparently thats not clear soo ugh

When Castiel Winchester says he has faith, I get a deep sick feeling in my stomach that this is not my angel :P 

I was just thinking about the angel tablet, and how it ~controlled~ Cas but not strictly in a mindcontrol sense - it pushed all his angel buttons in that original programming that season 8 made a big deal out of. Cas had an overwhelming urge to protect the tablet - that it was the right thing, and his job to do. He was really acting perfectly “in character” if the character was as an angel and not Cas.

The nephilim has pushed every single one of Cas’s buttons in being lost and broken and wanting a purpose he can do and a win to bring home, and a god to believe in and everything he’s been feeling bad about - he lists his failures at like 3 different points in the episode, and there’s a strong emphasis on him being the Winchesters’ guardian angel, as he sees himself (and has done a long time, as he said in 6x20 about it, and I think is related to just as many bad decisions as that one since it was an emotional motivator there to keep them out of the big bad decisions and do this by himself - his motivation behind “I was there where were you” and turning away from Dean raking leaves is identical to Cas stealing the Colt, and he spells it out to Kelvin after he does it. 

Cas may be controlled in a sense but it’s pushing buttons in such a way it might hardly feel like control or be easy to treat like it, in the same way the Mark of Cain affected Dean’s “programming” and yet he was still somewhat Dean the entire time; Amara never creepily spoke through him and he was never controlled per say. The Mark fed his instincts and blood lust and rewarded him for killing and in this way twisted Dean extremely effectively, but on a scale where he was always Dean to at least sort of Dean and acting on basic emotional impulses that had identifiable origins within Dean, even if the version of Dean we grew to love would never actually act this way from a standing start.

But yeah. Kelly was paralled to Hael, wanting to take Cas over and become one with him, that they’d help each other by him taking her to the Grand Canyon and then she’d possess him. (whee what a great deal :P) - Kelly wanted to go to the sandbox instead, and she succeeded in getting Cas there and lo and behold the threat pays off and they become one - he’s sharing her baby’s power, and the same light is intermittently in both their eyes. He says he wishes he could HAVE her faith, and so she GIVES it to him, and at the end he says he HAS faith. 

And obviously it’s meant to be a bad thing - Cas can’t just HAVE faith like that. He’s a depressed messed up angel with no direction and who God rejected practically to his face (I mean, chinese whispers 3 people removed in God’s terms was pretty much to his face :P). Joshua wasn’t a symbol of Cas’s lack of faith for telling him that that then had to be obliterated and Cas magically has faith again, although you could draw a great false correlation graph between 5x16 and 12x19 and Cas’s faith. He was a reminder that Cas has no faith, because of what Joshua said that day. And Cas cold-shouldered God at the end of the universe. That’s Cas.

Whether it’s direct mind control or not, what Cas is going through is then a manipulation, a false dream and playing off his very loudly broadcast trauma and depression. It’s very clearly not good because Cas betrayed his family over it and seemed to choose Kelly over Sam and Dean, by leaving them there unconscious however gently he did it, it’s an act of aggression he wouldn’t commit against the people he literally was doing everything for to protect all episode until the nephilim got to him. Cas’s actions are not a sign of something good happening to him, and I was actually really disappointed just between Cas having the sweet moment where he was talking about who would be a good guardian for the nephilim and it sounded like a POSITIVE thing where he might do that, and the nephilim choosing Cas without giving him a choice in the matter, and influencing him to want to do it to the point of creepiness and choosing it over Sam and Dean.

Like, bottom line, this is not meant to be depicted as something good for Cas, and though I haven’t seen Bobo’s tweet, he’s presumably straight-faced trolling in the way writers can’t spoil stuff or tell you how to think about a story, so repeating what seems like the obvious surface line here, like, nah, Cas just found faith! lol! Of course he has, but the details of it went from hopeful to horrific in the flash of nephilim eyes on Kelly, and Cas’s instinct to protect and guard people and be the good angel he is, the one angel who ever seems to behave as angels should when it comes to protecting and caring and watching over people, sealed his fate that the nephilim felt Cas would selflessly protect it, and so he would have to selflessly protect it.

It’s tragic because it’s this close to something that could be positive to Cas, but this show of course never goes easy, and so of course it turns into something horrific where his agency has been compromised. It doesn’t have to be full control for his agency to be gone. He just never got a chance to choose to do this, even if his actions said “yes I will protect you”, within moments it had gone too far and crossed too many lines of who Cas is, what he really wants, and corrupts what, ironically, would have been the best thing for the nephilim if it HADN’T got grabby about wanting the best guardian angel in the universe, because Cas probably would have done the job for free >.>

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb5Qo4B6rbw/W0TnteE-7tI/AAAAAAAAj9s/zjOE2rjzke0MU0dV28vwYFLoL8P2jJJxACLcBGAs/s72-c/Socorro%2BUFO.png

     Recently, after the authors recent visit to Socorro, New Mexico, important new information has come to light that we wanted to share with the readers of www.TheUfoChronicles.Com

By Ben Moss and Tony Angiola The UFO Chronicles 7-10-18

First, we must put to rest the poorly researched idea that this event was a hoax. Our documentation will easily dismiss these rumors, but we felt compelled to take the hoax theory apart piece by piece, in order to finally move past the fiction to the truth. This will be discussed in the first part of this article. Second, having just returning from our second visit to Socorro, there are more details concerning this very important case, still listed as an "Unknown" by Project Blue Book, that need to be told. This will be discussed in the second part of this article. Tony Angiola and I, with the excellent assistance of Ray Stanford, the original NICAP investigator of the Socorro UFO incident, have been looking into and researching this case for the last 4 years. We have been able to gather new comprehensive data, as well as investigate what was already known about this famous April 24, 1964 incident in the desert town of Socorro New Mexico. Our extensive investigation, along with Ray Stanford’s excellent book "Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry", show that a very unusual event occurred in the early evening of April 1964. Everything we have found indicates that an ellipsoid shaped object landed displaying 4 struts, or landing gear. Two small bipedal figures were seen next to the object, before seemingly retreating back into the craft. The craft then took off, leaving important physical evidences behind. Suffice it to say that the details of this event can be found online, and do not need to be repeated here. Instead, our focus is on the newly gathered information, and a point by point refutation of online armchair speculation and conjecture, promoted by individuals who have never been to the site itself. Many factual errors of this case are still promoted by armchair bloggers, and the hoax story seems to be cobbled together using poor or non-existent research, and leaps of faith. Imagine, as a detective, trying to solve a murder, but saying that part of your investigation does not require you to visit the scene of the crime to get a ‘lay of the land’. You would not be a detective for long, and I doubt you would ever solve a case. The point we feel compelled to make, with regards to speculation that this event was a hoax, is that poor research, conjecture, and changing known facts to fit your own theory is what has hurt and continues to muddle Ufology’s most prominent cases. That has been true with regards to the Socorro Incident, one of the most evidential and important UFO landing cases ever to occur in the USA. We will set the record straight here now. Let’s examine the main claims that have been made by so called ‘researchers’, whose investigation consist of trolling through the Internet, making one or two phone calls, and then creating an imaginative yet laughable tale to fit their convoluted theories.

In 1968, a letter to Dr. Sterling Colgate, from Dr. Linus Pauling inquiring about the Socorro sighting, Colgate had replied with the simple scribble saying:

"I have a good indication of the student who engineered the hoax. Student has left. Cheers, Sterling."

This is almost the entire basis for the hoax theory. What follows from this ONE letter appears to be speculation, urban myth, and the musings of a scientist who simply believed that since no Aliens can get here from wherever, that 'It had to be a student hoax'. There is no proof, there is only rumor, hyperbole, and fabrication. Let’s go deeper...

As with most people who debunk the Socorro event, MOST HAVE NEVER EVER BEEN TO THE LANDING SITE IN SOCORRO. Let that sink in for a minute. Any researcher or investigator working on a case would certainly visit the site of the event, if only to get a feel for the topology, lines of sight, remoteness of the area, and to understand what is and what is not possible in said environment. As a UFO Investigator that (not physically visiting the location in question) is a huge red flag. How can you debate an event like this but not even know your way around ground zero? More on this point later. Imagine students pulling off a hoax that is heard around the world! It fools the Project Blue Book investigators (as well as the Air Force, FBI, and CIA) yet never brag about it, or tell several friends and family, even today when there would be no repercussions. Remember, this occurred within a month of final exams, in a remote area of the desert. There is ZERO evidence that students liked to play around in this location in the desert as has been stated. Of course, if any of these bloggers had been to the landing site, they would understand how ridiculous that sounds. One imagined reason for the hoax was because Lonnie 'hounded' tech students during that time. While in Socorro, we found no evidence of this. In fact, Lonnie "was usually very lenient and let students off with warnings “often. This shows you what anyone in Socorro knows to be true; Lonnie was a nice guy, fairly quiet, not a man to anger quickly. And this is an important point, as many hoax supporters’ reports about Lonnie are contrary to what each and every person who knew him stated. While in Socorro in April of 2018, we spoke with several people who were there in 1964, and who were close to the event and Lonnie Zamora, the police officer who witnessed this UFO landing. Not a single one of them believes the hoax tale. In fact, we were told by a town official who was there in 1964 that students rarely ventured into Socorro, and certainly did not wander around in the desert. As the locals reminded us, you have to watch out for Cactus, holes, rocks, snakes and various other dangerous things that inhabit the desert. This is not a place to 'play hide and seek' nor ‘hangout’ as quoted by armchair bloggers. Students from 1964 have come forward and said that their pranks were usually small local events on campus, and the worse that anyone would have done to Lonnie was flatten his tires. But because of Lonnie’s good nature, we cannot find reports of anything out of the ordinary directed at him or his tires. The enrollment at New Mexico Tech was small and a prank of this nature would have required planning, sophisticated equipment, and a lot time that your average student just did not have access to. Several pranks did occur on the campus, and the perpetrators were always known shortly after, as young students are usually too happy to tell their peers how 'they fooled the man'. To actually pull off something like what occurred at Socorro, is virtually still impossible today, unless your last name is Spielberg. This is a valid point, as debunkers have consistently changed their version of the hoax to accommodate how it was done, which of course, has never been completely explained. One of the most ignored points by hoax theorists is THAT NOBODY CAN SHOW OR SAY HOW THEY DID IT, NOR CAN ANY REPLICATE IT, USING 1964 OR CURRENT MATERIALS. Now let’s look at Colgate’s letter stating how it was done:

In the exact words of the university president himself, the craft itself consisted of:

"A candle in a balloon.” Not sophisticated."

This is where the hoax theory begins to crumble, and has been ignored by many. The object departed into a stiff 30-35MPH wind, which was constant even when we were there. We have the documented weather from this exact day and location. Also, imagine a candle in a balloon fooling anyone. First, where are the students when this balloon (which would have vanished in the opposite direction in a matter of seconds) was released? Again, this points to the fact that armchair debunkers have no idea of the site, its difficulty to reach, and the fact that there in nowhere to hide or run to without being seen especially where Lonnie stopped his car. You can only fully understand this by visiting the site yourself. When I had an email exchange with one of these debunkers fairly recently, he said that perhaps a balloon was towed on a wire by a car. Again, this tells you THAT HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT ITS LIKE ON SITE. You can barely get there in a modern car, much less a car from 1964. You CANNOT drive in that arroyo, there are bushes, cactus, depressions and rocks everywhere. There is NOWHERE TO HIDE. In several follow up post, one blogger keeps substituting different balloons in an attempt to match the description, yet Colgate said it 'was a candle in a balloon'. This small balloon was then 'maybe a Helium balloon’, which balloonist would say is wrong as they are launched in the early hours of the day when conditions are better, and certainly not at around 5:40 in the evening into a wind gusting up to 40MPH. The balloon was 'probably towed with a cable’. Huh? A cable attached to what, pulled by what? You begin to see that this tall tale is being changed to try and fit the research that shows all of these scenarios to be untenable. Other more glaring distortions of the known facts include:

"Footprints from teenagers" were found at the site by government investigators immediately after Zamora's encounter."

That statement is 100% false. Sargent Chavez was there in 2 minutes, and later White Sands up range commander Captain Holder also was on scene with several other people. The official report says that there were no footprints at all, only the 4 landing gear indentations, and a few circular depressions possibly made by a ladder that the beings came down and up from and to the craft. There we have a couple of marks that may have been left by the beings themselves, and Captain Holder included those in his drawing of the event.

About one day later, the locals found the site and that's when the footprints were laid down (all after the fact). Holder can be seen below with his description of his investigation:

"Burned brush that was seen at the site was caused by "pyrotechnic ignition" according to experts.”

This is another complete fabrication. Captain Holder said there was no indication of any combustibles, fireworks, nothing. This is all also in the official Blue Book files. A review of the Air Force Materials Laboratory Analysis of the soil samples gathered at the landing site concluded that 'there was no foreign residue. Analysis of the burned bush revealed no chemicals that could have been propellant residue, and there was no evidence of any pyrotechnics on site." They were the experts on the scene. No one can produce these 'phantom experts' mentioned in one post, because they do not exist. One must begin to wonder, with so many factual errors, if these debunkers are simply trying to put a square peg in a round hole, or if they are just inept researchers. Since most have not been on site, my hunch is both.

'The "whining frequencies" heard by Zamora may have come from novel, sound-producing pyrotechnics.'

Again, no proof at all of this, another fabrication.

"The landing impression were 'dug' by students."

Another fabrication. The estimated weight of the object able to penetrate the still moist soil and leave this quadrangle of 4 depressions was approx. 9 TONS. The soil was pushed in a direction that indicated it came in at an angle. Who would have thought of that detail? If it was a hoax. The depressions were made by a wedge shaped landing gear, and the thruster producing the blue orange exhaust (4 times longer than wide), that sliced a creosote bush in half with radiant heat, was in the exact center place in the quadrangle that it had to be for the struts to balance this object. This was noted by Dr. Hynek and Ray Stanford when they were measuring the distance between the impressions, and the distance that Lonnie was when closest to the vehicle (35 Feet), with his glasses still on.

“Students in lab coats were the 'beings seen”.

On one website of the loudest debunker, as of today 07-06-18, still shows a picture of students in lab coats with the caption "Early Photo of Physics Lab Techies.” That picture is NOT FROM NEW MEXICO, but from Caltech, and he knows this but is still insinuating it as from New Mexico Tech. Wow, can we find more fabrications? Why yes, we can...

"Lonnie had impaired vision and required corrective lenses, which he lost.”

Here he forgets to mention that Lonnie’s glasses fell off AFTER he had seen the craft from only 35 feet. Lonnie’s daughter told us they were not corrective lenses at all, but more like readers.

"LONNIE DRANK, AND STUDENTS PRANKED".

This I find is the most disturbing fabrication of all, and is indicative of the type of dubious lack of research that has occurred, which appears to consist of Google, and a phone call or 2. While in Socorro this April, we found that the bartender from the local pub, called The Capitol Bar, was still around, and in fact he had just retired as a professor from New Mexico Tech. He said that 'Lonnie was in the bar at least 4 times to break up fights, not to drink.' He was not known as a heavy drinker, and when being questioned after the event he stated that he had 'a few beers several months ago'. Locals we spoke with, who knew Lonnie well, said he was just the opposite, and expressed great anger that this is being promoted by remote ‘talking heads’. The flimsy evidence behind this ludicrous claim, is on a debunkers web site that post anonymous people’s comments as fact, and that reminds me the common practice of going on Yelp and posting great things about your own business using false names, to promote your company. Again, we have no first hand witness testimony, as we have gathered on site, to support these farcical claims. Paul Harden, President of the Socorro Historical Society and a staff member of the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in Socorro, whom I spoke with for 2 hours last month, mentioned that 'most people from 1962 are still here in Socorro.' We found that to be true as we had no trouble finding original witnesses, and no need to embellish this story as one would who has not visited the site and taken the time to talk to those who know this story best. I found Paul to be a very conversational and kind. He clearly knew Lonnie quite well, and was very familiar with almost all of the people associated with this event. He shared many details from 1964 that challenged our ability to write down all of the important points that he was covering. In fact, when discussing the integrity of Lonnie, it is important to quote the real 'experts' who were involved in this seminal case. Hector Quintanilla, the head of Project Blue Book in 1964, had this to say in the CIA publication "Studies in Intelligence" released in 1966:

The brief was called “Policeman’s Report.”

“There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora’s reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw, and frankly, so are we. “This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.” This is where the subject of a “named so called student hoaxers” came into the debunkers world, but not surprisingly, this pool of students vanished like a light rain on a hot summer day in the desert. In an email, one of the debunkers asked if I knew who the names of the students who were in on the hoax. I did not at the time, but he said, “does one of them have the initials JC?” Well, while in Socorro, I found out quite easily who JC was. Apparently, Sterling Colgate provided 2 names of the known hoaxers. This is counter to an email between a debunker and Colgate where Colgate stated that he ‘did not know the names of the students”. I will not divulge these names to protect them from further harassment, but we will be digging deeper on this. I did speak with a very good friend of one of the so called hoaxers, and he said that the former student was very upset with Colgate for naming him, and wondered what he did that made Colgate LIE about his involvement as a hoaxer and throw him under the bus. This is different from what debunkers have related on various websites, that this same person did not deny being a part of a hoax. In fact, he indicated that a debunker was trying to get him to say things to conform to what he (the debunker) believes. This is called leading the witness. Mmm, somebody has their story wrong, and I think I know who. We will find out very soon. The other student, who just retired, said he was not even in classes with the others, and he also denied being a part of the hoax. He was a Geologist. Both said that hoaxes are fun to do, but not in the week leading up to finals week. So, in summation, all of the so called hoaxers have both indicated that they had no part of a hoax. It appears that Colgate really liked the limelight, but got caught up in something that became bigger than his small circle of friends. Another point is that this letter surfaced AFTER Lonnie had passed away. Then it became more public AFTER Colgate passed away. Also, in our interviews with several former students and people that knew Colgate we find that Colgate had an affinity to party with students while enjoying libations besides alcohol. This memory kept coming up from several past students. I point this out for 2 reasons (and not to disparage Colgate), because debunkers imply that Lonnie was a drunk and thus his story cannot be trusted. Can not the same also be said of Colgate? Also, because someone is brilliant and has multiple degrees, that does not mean they do not have flaws and the capacity to promote false truths. If you started a rumor based on second or third hand testimony, and to save face wanted to defend that rumor, then you would have what is now seen as the ridiculous unsubstantiated claims by Colgate, and his true believers. So, the crux of this impossible to reproduce hoax theory is based on fabrication, speculation, and bad investigation. Lonnie Zamora, over the many years since 1964, never changed, nor embellished his story. There is another important point to make about Lonnie’s character. Our investigation shows how much he was liked by all of the people who spoke so well of him. In April of 1964, Lonnie’s patrol car was only one week old, and it was shared by another officer. In our first visit to the site in 2016, we drove a new rental car to the site, and beat it up pretty good, bottoming out on rocks every few feet. As a proud police officer, in a new car, the only reason that makes sense for Lonnie to drive into this difficult area was to see if there was someone in trouble, perhaps a crashed plane. That tells you the nature of Lonnie, that he would risk a brand new car driving into a difficult area, because he felt IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO DO IF SOMEONE WAS IN TROUBLE. Debunkers, on the other hand, have modified what Colgate originally said (a balloon with a candle) by trying to fit several different types of balloons into the picture, including a helium balloon, a weather balloon, and maybe a balloon towed by a rope. Yet, not one single person can provide any evidence of a hoax, nor how it was done. No one can answer the question of how Lonnie was lead to the site, if it was students, a quarter of a mile away, hoping to lure him to a SPECIFIC location. Lonnie heard a roar and spotted a glowing blue orange flame in the sky, which was descending BEFORE he crested the mesa and looked down into the arroyo. The landing site is several hundred feet from the road. That would have to be one magical balloon. Now that the reader can see how the idea of a hoax is untenable and virtually impossible using 1964 technology and materials, let’s get to the events themselves and try to determine the real story of this incredible event. In order to determine the facts of this event, the authors revisited Socorro for the second time in April of 2018 and dug even deeper into this fascinating mystery of a UFO landing in the New Mexico desert. Many people that have heard of this case are not aware of the fact that several egg-shaped craft were witnessed by civilian and military personnel in this general area and time frame. This is an important thread to follow and expands this case from the one event in Socorro to a plethora of similar incidents that support a mini flap of such craft, which appeared in and around several military installations that are located throughout this area. In fact, New Mexico, for many years, has been a military crossroads for the United States. As the Second World War began, the Albuquerque Army Air Field was training thousands of military personnel on the B-17 "Flying Fortress". The privately-owned Portair Field in Clovis became the Clovis Army Air Field and, just east of the White Sands Proving Grounds, the Alamogordo Army Air Base was established. As the war raged, the B-29 Superfortress became an integral part in the Pacific Theater. Alamogordo aircraft saw more action, as did planes from Albuquerque and Clovis. In July 1945, the world changed forever as we entered the nuclear age with the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at Trinity, located in the northern stretch of White Sands. In September of 1947, the United States Air Force was officially established. By then, Albuquerque's base was re-named Kirtland, Clovis became Cannon Air Force Base and Alamogordo became Holloman. Kirtland has stayed on the forefront of nuclear development for both war and peacetime applications, with many of the discoveries being tested south at White Sands Missile Range. But in 1964, with the Socorro UFO landing hitting the press in advance of the militaries ability to investigate it, we find that an extensive search of all of these bases yielded NO OBJECT that could account for the craft that Lonnie Zamora came upon while investigating what he thought may have been an explosion of the dynamite shack in the Socorro desert. This extensive and mostly secret investigation included Project Blue Book, the FBI, CIA and the Army, with inquires and interest from the White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff. The idea of a hoax was considered and dismissed after the facts came to light. Upon digging deeper into the Project Blue Book reports and local newspaper archives some interesting cases were discovered:

–In 1957

Two military police units patrolling the Trinity site at White Sands, independently of each other, reported seeing an egg-shaped object hover over the desert. The object reportedly landed, leaving ‘footprints’, and then departed at high speed.

–April 26th, 1964 Albuquerque, NM

George Mitropolis was driving north on US 85 when he spotted an object ahead of him, appearing to come above the crest of the mountains and then drop back behind. He stopped his car and saw a luminous object, like an ‘inverted bathtub’ thirty feet in length, with a glow radiating beneath it.

–April 27th, 1964 El Paso, Texas

Eight children and several adult witnesses viewed a hovering egg-shaped UFO over 6 feet in height above the Crosby School.

–April 28th, 1964, Near Socorro NM

Two egg shaped objects were seen by a truck driver and his wife around 5:30PM, moving as fast as a jet plane. That same day, in Hobbs NM, (Police report) a group of children and 2 adults witnessed the same event: a white round object that hovered over the city and then departed to the Northeast. Later the same day in Cheyanne, Wyoming, 3 women reported seeing an egg-shaped UFO with a trail streaking from it, followed by a second UFO.

–April 30th, 1964 Holloman AFB

Two military sources said there was an encounter between a B-57 and an ‘egg shaped white object’. The pilot reported to this to the mission controller at Holloman and was asked to ‘turn and re-encounter the object’. The pilot then radioed that the UFO had ‘landed on the ground’. When Coral Lorenzen, a UFO Investigator, published a press release on this sighting, brass at Holloman admitted the next day that they had “tracked 2 unknowns on radar”. In addition, there was another sighting on the same range by a guard, who was so frightened by what he saw that he ‘emptied his side arm at the object and then fled’ to base HQ, where he was subsequently hospitalized. On the same day in 1964, at 10:22 in the morning, NICAP investigator Ray Stanford took 2 photographs of a glowing blue object while driving back to Phoenix from Socorro. What he saw and photographed was a compound object that appeared to shimmer an odd blue along with a delta shaped object.

–April 30th, 1964: Las Cruces

A state police officer and 4 employees of the Port of Entry Station on Interstate 10 south of the city reported sighting a luminous round object moving in jerky motions and changing direction. State patrolman Raul Arteche of Anthony also sighted the object moving northwest. This was also reported independently, by a private pilot at the same time.

–May 15th, Stallion Site, Holloman

Radar , including FP-16 radar at the Stallion site, tracked 2 objects ‘performing precise, perfect flight maneuvers, including side by side flight, separating, then rejoining in formation in up and down (pogo) maneuvers’. Visual confirmation was made by a trained radar operator who saw two objects, flying low, described as ‘brown and football shaped.’ What is very interesting about this report is that Ray Stanford, the original NICAP investigator at Socorro, reported filming similar objects performing these same feats, from a highway on the north edge of White Sands in the July 19th, 1978. He also obtained ELF magnetic recordings, as well as a sound recording. These are just some of the many reports concerning egg or football shaped objects in the New Mexico area that lend credence to the Socorro UFO incident. A one off is one thing, but the data shows that this type of craft was operating in this area before and after Lonnie Zamora’s sighting, further supporting what Lonnie reported. Ray Stanford, when interviewing the other Socorro police officers, was told that ‘they all saw object’s’ at various times but would never report it after seeing the way that Lonnie was being treated. We also uncovered a report of another ‘landing’, near the canal in Socorro. We wondered where this canal was, so we got in the car and found it, parallel to the river. This is a perfect, low lying area, leading into Socorro from Albuquerque. While discussing this with several locals, we uncovered a story, spoken only to locals, that Mary (not her real name) was sitting on the porch of her house that faces the canal, and saw an egg shaped object coming along the canal from the direction of Albuquerque, and turning towards the area where the object was then spotted by the witness that stopped at Opal Grinders gas station. We reconnoitered the area, found the house, and the path that she described, and it all lines up with the witness reports. Remember that 3 independent witnesses called the Socorro dispatch from Albuquerque, reporting an object with a blue flame, heading to Socorro right before Lonnie spotted the craft. Another new and interesting piece of information was shared with us, by 2 independent people, that something was recovered on the ground, supposedly from this craft. We are looking further into this information, and recently, we got corroboration that another Investigator heard the same story, from 2 ADDITIONAL witnesses. While speaking with a few of Lonnie’s close friends, and his daughter, we were impressed by the fact that Lonnie’s fright was way beyond what was apparently reported. According to a close friend, Lonnie was so frightened by what he saw, that he spent 3 hours talking with his priest that first night. When Lonnie asked him what he should do, the priest said “Do one of 2 things. Shut up or tell the truth”. Lonnie decided on the truth, and he never wavered nor embellished it. According to his close friend, Lonnie knew when to ‘begin and end the story’. We got the impression that Lonnie, who went from saying he saw 2 small figures to talking only about ‘something white coveralls’, saw 2 entities that he knew were not human and shattered his view of the world. New Mexico State Policeman Sergeant Samuel Chavez, the first person Lonnie called after the event, arrived and said that Lonnie was white as a sheet and looked like ‘he had seen the devil.’ Lonnie responded with ‘Maybe I have’. Harold Baca told us that ‘my dad got there within 5 minutes and Lonnie was still hiding behind his car when they got there.’ Ray Stanford, when onsite a few days later in 1964 with Dr. Hynek and Lonnie, said that Lonnie stood in front of the creosote bush, and held his hand about 4 feet off the ground in front of the bush, to indicate their size. Over the years, everyone that was close to Lonnie said that he was ‘never the same’. Most friends would not bring up the encounter, but occasionally Lonnie would just need to talk about it. Towards the end of his life, he was admitting that ‘the creatures’, when asked what they were, did not ‘come from around here’. He did not know what they were, but he wished he had never seen nor talked about them. The Airforce, from the first day of their investigation, told him to not mention any occupants. We believe, that in that moment of terror, that Lonnie knew that they were not men of Earth, and as a devout Catholic, his first thought was that he had witnessed a demon.

This part of the story has become a lot more interesting, as we have indications, hinted at by Paul Hardin and others, that Lonnie had a much closer encounter with the 2 beings, and that this is the point that Lonnie realized that he was confronting 2 non-human creatures, not a couple of kids at the scene of an accident. Further documentation of this encounter is coming soon, and we cannot elaborate further until a fellow friend and researcher releases more of this material. While discussing the extent of Lonnie’s fright with Ray Stanford, we agreed that there must have been some details that Lonnie left out that caused him to react so strongly, and be so afraid of what he encountered. As Paul Hardin mentioned, Lonnie knew when ‘to start and stop the story’, and this, we believe, is directly related to his close encounter with non-human entities, perhaps as close as 50 feet away. If Lonnie had a much better, and probably closer look at the 2 occupants, this would account for the fact that what he saw changed his life forever. The authors do not know what landed in Socorro, nor the origin of said object. Our investigation has shown that all of the uncovered data points to the landing of a non-human craft with very small occupants. Despite the attempts by all of the investigative branches of the military, they could never find a company nor organization that said they constructed this craft. When you put all of the facts together, what we found is that a very strange event occurred, and the mystery of what actually landed in Socorro in 1964 will remain a mystery, probably forever. Lonnie was never the same, and we doubt that a balloon, or any type of a hoax, would have fooled this Army and Police veteran to the point of abject terror. Instead, the evidence leads us to believe that Lonnie was a witness to the great unknown, and the weight of this knowledge was so heavy, that it forever affected Lonnie to his last day on Earth. Thanks to the friendly and fine people of Socorro, New Mexico, for allowing us access to files, newspaper articles, and witnesses to this April 24th, 1964 event.

See Also: The Socorro UFO Case – Two More 'Smoking Guns' The Lost Socorro UFO Footage – Found? | VIDEO Update on the ‘Search for the Socorro UFO (Case) Footage’ Egg-Shaped UFO Lands and Takes Off, Reports City Policeman, Lonnie Zamora | SOCORRO UFO INCIDENT – 50th ANNIVERSARY

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Read more »

The Socorro UFO Incident – Facts vs Fiction http://www.theufochronicles.com/2018/07/the-socorro-ufo-incident-facts-vs.html

Homestuck: Time

Since I realized how outrageously long that post I made about Time was, I decided to make a Read More version:

anonymous  asked:

What is Time in Homestuck? What is its function, its purpose, what are timelines, what defines the Alpha and doomed timelines. How do timeloops work?

Time in Homestuck takes from a couple of theories about the workings of Time and Parallel Timelines. So, Time itself doesn’t have any Function, much like in real life, instead, Space and Time are treated as the two main building frames of a physical reality, to the point where the Universe Frog requires a Space and Time players to actually even be possible to be created.

Going in detail though, according to Homestuck’s Interpretation, there’s an Alpha Timeline that marks a path that must be followed, but there are alternate realities, sometimes required by the demands of the Alpha Timeline itself, where divergent Choices and Actions from the various characters have led to a deviation from this path that needs to be followed. A Time Loop is nothing more than ensuring no Paradoxes are created while following this Alpha. For example, according to the Alpha Timeline, Lil Cal ends up in Jack Noir’s possession, and eventually is shot through a meteor portal into Alternia. This is a stipulation that must be followed, so in the Timeline where John dies because Terezi sent him to see Typheus early? We learn with John’s ghost, that Typheus didn’t actually just insta-murder him, he gave him a Choice, to Die for the benefit of the Timeline. The thing that doomed the Timeline wasn’t John dying- It was Dave prototyping Lil Cal. Davesprite needed to exist, because without Dave preventing Lil Cal from being prototyped, Lil Cal would become a sprite, and thus never get to Alternia. This is the kind of Paradoxes Stable Timeloops want to avoid, and the reason this Timeline leaves behind a Doomed Rose. We see in a couple of occasions, Daves dying when a Time Loop is broken- When Dave screws up Time-Travelling, he creates an offshot Dave that doesn’t become ‘future Dave’, instead it’s its own iteration of Dave unrelated to the Alpha Timeline, and as such, Doomed to die. Davesprite manages to become un-Doomed by Prototyping himself into Davesprite, and thus becoming an integral part of the Alpha Timeline, rather than a Doomed Version.

Of course this still leaves the question of what the Alpha Timeline itself is. After all, we see dead God Tier Trolls, implying that actually becoming god-like is somehow not Alpha, and thus rendering the explanation of the Alpha Timeline being the ‘best’ or ‘most beneficial’ path impossible. No, in fact, the entirety of the Alpha Timeline is filled with Death and Suffering and awful things and characters being erased off the story.

This is because the Alpha Timeline is, in reality, a Time Loop that favors the Lord of Time, Caliborn. All the Alpha Timeline does is ensure Lord English is created and does what he does in the story, after all, he IS the Lord of Time, and he Commands Time itself. Paradox Space bends to his will.

[S] MSPA Reader: Mental Breakdown is a quick example of one of the Alpha Timeline’s most important devices- Lil Cal. A Juju which contains the Essence of Lord English, and needs to follow an EXTREMELY specific path to reach where it needs to reach, dividing in two at one point to become an Entry in Caliborn’s Land, through which he spreads his influence, and in which he eventually becomes trapped, and an Exit in the Lil Cal Dave has, which eventually ends in Gamzee’s Possession, and is ultimately used to convert Jack Noir into a Proxy for Lord English.

Everything in Alpha Timeline is delicately crafted to eventually lead to Caliborn’s Rise. Lil Cal is not just the Entry and the Exit, the Vessel for His Soul, it’s also the only reason why Caliborn manages to achieve full, unconditional Immortality. When he reaches Yaldabaoth’s Boon, he uses the Juju Breaker Crowbar to obtain Inconditional Immortality. Crowbar which he’s had since before he actually met ‘Crowbar’ from the Felt. Crowbar which was gifted to him by Gamzee of all people, the Troll who raised Calliope and Caliborn. Gamzee needed to be there to raise the twins, and he offered the tool that would eventually grant him Immortality. And how did both Gamzee and the Crowbar get to Caliborn? Through the Black Hole created after killing the Jack Noir possessed by Lord English through Lil Cal. Black hole which ALSO absorbed a majority of LOTAK, including its core, where the Denizen Yaldabaoth himself was, making it seem like everything relevant to Caliborn’s Session arrived there in the first place only thanks to Lil Cal.

Similarly, even the God Damn Retcon favors Lord English, even though it seems like a Canon-Breaking tool, even though it seems like something meant to bypass the Alpha Timeline in the first place, it’s actually a necessary tool for Lord English’ creation- Without the Retcon Powers, John would’ve never reached Caliborn’s Masterpiece, becoming stuck in the House Juju with the other three Betas. He wouldn’t have led the Kids that would, in turn, defeat Caliborn and suck his Soul, ARquius’ Soul and half of Gamzee’s into Lil Cal to create the amalgam known as Lord English. And without the Beta Kids stuck in the House, it would’ve never been filled in, and thus become the double-edged sword that would eventually cast Lord English into the Breach.

But of course even the Retcon favors Lord English- After all, he kills the Author. Caliborn interacts with Hussie through the Command Prompt, and physically smacks the website around on several occasions, as well as glitches the cartridge containing the data to continue the story. Doc Scratch and Vriska seem to be the only other characters in the comic to even be aware of the existence of Hussie as the Narrator- With Scratch being part Lord English, and Vriska literally getting angry at Hussie for switching the narrative just as she was about to reveal the House Juju, and tearing it back from him to show everyone what was in the Juju Chest. A Villain that messes with the Narrative itself would definitely still benefit from a tool meant to break the narrative. And in the same way, when the Villain of the Story has control over not just Reality, but the direction of the Narrative, the only two that can oppose it are a Character who Knows they are in a Story and Wants to be the Protagonist, and a Protagonist who Can Alter the Narrative and just wants to be Happy.

As such, Homestuck takes the idea of ‘parallel timelines’, and throws us a scenario in which an evil entity has basically overwritten Free Will through imposing himself in a very specific path, so if I had to give a short answer to the question of what “Time” and “The Alpha Timeline” is? I’d have to answer, The Alpha Timeline is Homestuck in itself, both the story and the struggle of the characters as they navigate through it.

( From this point downwards, these are my THOUGHTS and opinions, and may not reflect what’s strictly Canon or what may happen in the future )

This ties in to my thoughts on why I think Act 7 is good, contrary to what many in the Fandom seem to believe. We’re shown Caliborn’s rise to immortality, the beginning of his journey towards becoming Lord English, and eventually becoming the big villain of the story, contrasted with Vriska inserting herself in the role of the Heroine, even though everything was already set in the story for this exact same culmination and all she did was take the spotlight by opening the Juju Chest, and the Release of the Kids from the Alpha Timeline to live in Earth-C, free of the influence of Lord English, of the grasp he’s had on their choices and their existence.

Already at the very beginning, John himself states it clearly.

It is your thirteenth birthday, and as with all twelve preceding it, something feels missing from your life. The game presently eluding you is only the latest sleight of hand in the repertoire of an unseen riddler, one to engender a sense not of mirth, but of lack. His coarse schemes are those less of a prankster than a common pickpocket. His riddle is Absence itself. It is a mystery dispersing altogether, like the moon’s faint reflection, with even one pebble of inquiry dropped in its black well. It is the most diabolical riddle of all.

When the Kids cross the threshold of the Door to the new Universe, the story ends canonically, because they’ve escaped the Time Loop known as the Alpha Timeline, they’re beyond English’ Realm. They are no longer Stuck, and they’re free to make their choices without fearing the creation of an offshot Timeline or worrying about what may happen in the future.

It’s my belief that the fact we see Caliborn with the Ring of Life Calliope has, that two Nannasprites exist without one dying, and a few other details such as Caliborn stating seeing himself surprised at the Kids appearing to face him using John’s Retcon Powers, means that this is not following the Alpha Timeline at all by the ending. John’s ‘I’ll do it’ has sparked many theories about this being the conflict that sparks John to want to go back to fight Caliborn, but it has always seemed nonsensical to me. John is depressed, Terezi is looking for Vriska, but for most of the part, they’re happy. They’re content with having gone through the hardships of the Game, and now being able to just live their lives. I could maybe see John using a fight with Caliborn to mask his emotions, but I can’t see him convincing Rose, happily married to Kanaya, that they should go back to beat up the stupid asshole that keeps Trolling him through Snapchat, using his highly dangerous Retcon Powers.

To me, it always felt that this was the result of a Timeline we didn’t see, but may see in the Epilogue, and even though there are ways to make it work, it ties perfectly well to this theme of breaking out of the Alpha Timeline, that by the end of the comic, we wouldn’t even be following the Timeline that spawns Lord English, and rather, the one the John we’re following, seeing master these Retcon Powers, creates following Terezi’s Instructions.

Ironically enough, this Timeline ends as an empty victory for both John and Terezi. John, with his adventure over, and having never seen inclined to even think what he may want to do after it’s over, is now left alone with his thoughts, the trauma he’s went through, and missing his father, while Terezi, who in the Game Over Timeline thought all she needed to be happy was Vriska, realizes that even that is more of a patch for some deeper self-steem issues, and yet continues to try to chase after her around the crumbling Paradox Space for no avail for years.

It’s my belief, when the Epilogue comes out, that we will see a distinction between the Timeline in which John reaches Earth-C, and the one in which they all go to Caliborn’s Masterpiece, as well as have Terezi return to Earth, not with Vriska, but with Davepeta, Sollux and Aradia, who are still potentially alive and out there. But that’s mostly because I don’t think Vriska should survive the encounter with Lord English.

Vriska herself, in this case, climatically becomes what she’s always wanted to be, the protagonist, only by her desire to be as such. She treats the Game of SBURB like a Game, and similarly, she treats Homestuck like a Story, a Story in which she wants to be seen as the Heroine. Not for Noble or Heroic reasons, but merely for the hell of it. She becomes the perfect Counterpoint to Lord English- The man who set the Alpha Timeline, whose existence jeopardizes the entirety of Paradox Space, the unseen, mysterious hand behind every event. Lord English becomes the Villain of the story, and Vriska takes advantage of it. A story needs a Villain and a Protagonist, and with John more focused in his Friends than the Big Bad, she steals the role for herself, which would make seeing her never actually return, all the more fitting. Act 7 is the Finale. It’s the End of the Alpha Timeline, the End of the Story that is Homestuck. So of course, once the curtains are drawn, both Villain and Protagonist are out of the picture entirely.