one of the silliest hills i will die on is male celebs not committing to manicures. oh it's fashionable for u to waltz around with chipped black nail paint on? it's sexy and edgy? why have i never seen a woman celeb walking around w chipped nail paint in their everyday life then.*

The Images You Sell Are Problematic - The Importance of Plus Size Characters in Video Games

The video game industry is currently the biggest entertainment industry in the UK in terms of spending.  More and more people are choosing to engage with the medium whether it is through mobile apps with the dreaded microtransactions, through more traditional games such as Call of Duty or Fallout or even through the medium of interactive entertainment – Netflix’s Bandersnatch, for example.  

With increased audiences must come increased responsibility – video games pull in audiences from all walks of life.  To some extent, we have seen improvements.  We have seen stories from queer protagonists, people of colour, men, women, children, even mentally ill protagonists. Progress indeed, but there is one area that remains criminally underrepresented.

Despite all these fantastical stories taking place in far off lands, most of the character models adhere to the same mould.   Granted, we’ve come a long way since plus size representation was limited to a small rotund Italian man with a mushroom addiction and his imaginary pet dinosaur, but there is still a considerable shortage of larger characters.  

Female characters are typically thin but curvy, an ideal that is nearly impossible to recreate without surgery.  Male characters tend to be lean and overly muscled – a figure out of reach of most average joes.  Taking a cursory glance around you, you’ll see people of many different body types and shapes.  So why are we still refusing to accept this in video games?

Anastasia Wyatt, junior artist on indie title Heaven’s Vault, believes pressure from shareholders could be the problem.  She said: “With the big companies they've probably been more cautious because they think this is the only thing that sells because that's all that there’s been in the past.  A small company has less shareholders and a lot less pressure if they take what they consider as a risk with less idealized looking characters.  It's not going to be disastrous for them in that respect if it doesn't sell well.”

It is not just pressure from shareholders here either, players themselves exert pressure on publishers to use idealised figures. World of Warcraft announced a new allied race with the launch of its newest expansion – Battle for Azeroth.  The race was called Kul Tiran humans, and feature a much bulkier frame and taller than the standard human model. Plus-sized gamers rejoiced.  The rest of the community did not. Within a few hours of the announcement the Blizzard forums were full of people asking for a ‘thin’ version of the character or spewing vitriol about how this character model was ugly and shouldn’t be implemented.  It’s a difficult position to be in.

Wyatt said:  “I think that's why publishers get nervous because they see criticisms like that. They think that even if they would like to use a plus size character in the people will react badly and they don't want to see those sort of comments perhaps. Which is a shame.”

Regardless of any outside pressure however, representation is very important.  Not only for the people represented by plus-size characters, but to combat fatphobia – the fear of being fat.   A large amount of stigma still exists towards plus size people in the wild, and games that equate fat to lazy or disgusting do not help.  Representation is even more important when you consider the young age children are exposed to this type of media.  Dr Peyta Eckler, professor of social communication at the University of Strathclyde, is concerned about the effect this may have.  She said: “I think this is an industry that is made predominantly for men and unfortunately it it's feeding them unhealthy stereotypes which are hugely outdated and problematic nowadays.  Not just about body types but women in general.

We cannot ignore and be blind to the societal repercussions of such images. I'm not sure if this will come to be regulated at some point, but also I think for young women, there needs to step back and a reality check.  Realizing okay what we've talked about these are unrealistic images.  Yes they do show what's desirable but they're taken to an extreme and no one can live up to that extreme.”

The erasure of plus-size figures in games contributes to a negative perception overall, especially if children are being exposed to this erasure from a young age.  Normalisation of different body types and figures is very important in formative years.

That’s not to say all portrayals are negative however.  Take Ellie, first appearing in Borderlands 2 by Gearbox.  She is a skilled, fiercely independent mechanic who is unashamedly fat.  More than being unashamed, she is proud of her body and who she is.  A mission for her involves you collecting statuettes of her from the wreckage of bandit cars.  She said they were made to make fun of her, but she loves them and the way she looks.  She displays the collected figurines in her garage, clearly delighted with the result.  It is this kind of body positivity we need in the industry.  Ellie doesn’t let others tell her what to do with her body and loves it the way it is.  

Heaven’s Vault reliably uses varied body types and shapes.  Huang is chubby, the professor is old.  They look like bodies that have been lived in, bodies that have stories to tell.  No one is inherently evil because they look different.  This also makes the characters infinitely more engaging.  Wyatt said:  “Not everyone is going to be the man with the same build, in the same stubble. We designed the characters this way because this is what people look like. It's also a good thing to do because then you just get an interesting range of characters. If everyone is the same man with stubble that's boring.

I certainly feel like when you're playing games and especially if it's trying to be a game it's about sort of a realistic story and you're trying to emotionally connect to people; if everyone looks like this idealized super model then it seems less real.”

The world would be terribly boring if we all looked the same.  Video game worlds are similar in this respect.  Worlds populated with a varied cast of characters are more engaging, more alive.  Playing a game populated by varied characters is infinitely more satisfying, particularly from a roleplaying point of view.  

Of course, for every good example of plus size representation there are a million bad ones.   Look at all the extra difficult and physically disgusting zombie enemies that also happen to be fat.  For example, bloaters in State of Decay 2 and boomers in Left 4 Dead.  You also have Wario from the Mario series and Dr Robotnik from Sonic, both antagonists and visibly overweight.  Depictions of fat characters are not usually kind, coding them as either lazy or undesirable purely because of their size.  

Not even the God of Thunder is immune from this character coding.  Stepping away from the realm of video games for a moment, the latest instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe:  Avengers Endgame saw Thor begin drinking to forget the people he had lost, resulting in a ‘beer belly’. Completely understandable considering how traumatic the previous film Infinity War was to watch.  However, they played his weight gain for laughs.  Cheap jokes resounded about his weight for the rest of the film.  This is the sort of thing more widespread plus size representation would combat.  If plus size people were a regular occurrence in these universes, the ability to poke fun of them for being unusual would disappear.

It is clear that change is needed, but how do you change an industry still beset by outdated stereotypes and fatphobia?  Dr Eckler said: “I think there has to be change from within. I think once more women hopefully become part of the creators of these games. They would start changing some of the content, forcing change in the content.”   Wyatt has a different view.  “I think that games where there are different characters, people are really beginning to pick up on them. I think we've been slowly seeing more diverse characters in recent years.  More games with female leads for example, when I was younger there were only a handful of games that had female characters in them.  It will take time, but I believe we will see more body type diversity as the industry evolves.”

There is hope.  The indie games market is doing rather well at telling the stories of all kinds of people and players.  Away from the eyes of publishing houses and shareholders, wonderful, beautiful games are being made.  In the truest spirt of video games as communication, stories are told about people of all shapes and sizes and races and genders.  It is an amazing thing and something it is hoped will begin to be a standard, no matter what level you are publishing a game at.  

Video games can be a powerful vehicle to communicate ideas.  There is no reason why they couldn’t be used to provide some much-needed normalisation of the existence of different body types.  It is the responsible thing to do.   The power to create a world as you want it to be, or as you see it is in a developer’s hands.    Use that power for good, create a more accepting society.  Goodness knows there’s enough hate going around as it is.

My Lord: Sneaking Downstairs

This is the beginning of a two parter. 

Warning the next part I write may not be the second part of this one.

Thank you all for voting on which chapter I was going to write next earlier! You are in for a special treat! 

Looking for Parts 1-4? Search my tag Sweet Dreams for the Devil

Please tell @squigglydigglydoo and @whatisthisnonsense that they’re awesome!

And also all of you are awesome! I love reading your tags and comments! 

Sammy is looking for his sheep...

“I said, can I get an amen…”

Those words had left Henry with the biggest chill running down his spine and the terrible realization that there wasn’t just ink to be afraid of in the dark. Clutching his axe a little tighter, he turned to face whoever was with him in the studio, to find no one there. He took a steadying breath. It was probably his mind playing tricks on him. Except he had also seen that figure before when he had to wade through the knee high ink. Shaking his head to clear his mind he started to take a step to move on in his self appointed quest to get out of the studio when he paused sharply.

That was Sammy.

Sammy Lawrence, head of the music department, a man who was rarely scene besides when he came to deliver a new score for Henry and Joey to listen too. He had thought that the studio was abandoned save for him and the mockery of the little toon that he drew that had been created by Joey’s Goddamn machine. Henry’s hands gripped tighter around the axe handle as he thought of what he was going to do to Joey when he found him. Sammy though was the last person Henry would have thought would get involved, if that was even the right term for what personality change seemed to have taken over Sammy.

Sammy had been a recluse. He hid in his office and didn’t come out for anything except to yell at someone about making too much noise. He was antisocial as hell, but damn that man could write music, churning out piece after piece for each new clip that he and Joey created. It was something magical, the music Sammy created, it was a shame that he seemed to have completely lost his former self.

Suddenly something bumped into his foot causing him to turn and look wildly about. Except nothing was out of place. Covering his eyes with his left hand he breathed in and out for a few seconds to calm his racing mind. Steadied, he continued forward, deeper into the studio.

Finding another boarded up area he took to swinging his axe down onto the boards to clear a path. It was incredibly dark in here. He could barely make out the heavily decorated wall stating the area he was in was the music department. He didn’t fancy looking around too much, especially since he knew that just downstairs was the door to lead down one of the main hallways to exit the studio. Entering the staircase, he firmly put that plan to rest for the moment, it was completely flooded. Noticing a switch to turn on the power he flipped it causing a ruckus of noise, from generators beginning their hum, wires not correctly placed snapping with electric power, and the dim lights warming up.

Stepping just out of the doorway he paused again, leaning on a shelf on the wall of records there was another tape player that he had missed in the gloom of the studio, but there were also strange ink stains surrounding the wall of records. Curiosity calling him he edged towards them.

Suddenly a dripping inky torso with malformed head and arms reached for him and swiped at him. Quickly swinging his axe down the ink person fell apart. Three more came at him and were dispatched in the same manner. Breathing somewhat heavily from surprise and having to once again call on his training, he pressed play on the tape and slid down the wall.

“So first, Joey installs this Ink Machine over our heads. Then it begins to leak.” Henry chuckled to himself, the annoyance in Sammy’s voice was like how Henry remembered the man.

“Three times last month, we couldn’t even get out of our department because the ink had flooded the stairwell.” Henry blinked in disbelief, really what needs that much ink Joey.

“Joey’s solution? An ink pump to drain it periodically.”

Well whats the harm in that-

“Now I have this ugly pump switch right in my office. People in and out all day. Thanks, Joey. Just what I needed. More distractions. These stupid cartoon songs don’t write themselves, you know.”

Oh, that was the problem. Sammy hated when people interrupted him while he was working on his latest piece. Being forced to let people come and go would probably have caused the man to have an aneurysm which Henry was sure had happened. And what were these “more distractions” that Sammy had referred to, was something else besides the machine going on in the thirty years he was gone?

The thing that had Henry stuck though was the fact that Sammy had called the songs stupid. That was odd. Sammy, while a proud and rather socially inept individual, would never have called anything that he did stupid.

Henry, deciding not to dwell on it too long, especially with the new threat of those ink monsters creeping around, pushed himself up off the floor with the help of the axe. Stretching his back out and rolling his shoulders, he began to investigate the studio, unaware of the soulless eyes watching his every movement through their owner’s domain.

Ah yes, little sheep, you shall make the lord pleased with his prophet. It was thankless and tireless work to appease his lord, but he was but his servant. He only wished that by serving his lord so carefully that his lord would grant him his one wish. But these thoughts served no purpose now. For now he must become but a shepherd and bring his sheep home to rest.

He plodded forwards listening to the steady breathing of his sheep, only changing when the other inhabitants snuck up on him. Careful now his sheep cannot be harmed before his lord takes him.

It struck him as strange. This lost sheep, coming to graze in his pasture, was the first he had seen in quite a while. His lord having to be given other, less appealing, offerings at his alters. All that mattered was that his lord was appeased, the labels with his visage were unimportant, the content of the many cans scattered throughout his domain, even less so.

He then heard the wailing.

Pausing and looking towards the ceiling overhead, he crouched down into the shadows, covering his head where ears had once been visible. Not seeing or hearing his sheep running past him.

That stupid mockery of his lord. He wished his lord would take care of the imposter, but his lord seemed not to dwell on the fact there was another that used his image. This was the tenth time in the last week the imposter had started making that racket. Shaking beams and rafters occasionally with how loud and violent its sobs were. If only his lord would set them both free. The imposter from its binds to the living world. And him from the inky abyss of a body he claimed as his.

Eventually the imposter quieted down. Now it was time to get back to work preparing for his sheep to come to him.

Bendy had been content with simply letting Henry deal with the gliders, still mulling over what Henry had said in the room. It wasn’t like anything serious was going to happen to him, worse case he would reach an arm out from his puddle when Henry’s back was turned to take out any that came from the rear.

It never was simple was it. He remembered when it was just Boris, Alice, and the rest of his friends and him running around without a care. Boris hurt the worst when he lost him. It was funny though. He remembered grieving for his lost friend and going to the ink machine, but he could not recall what had happened afterwards.

With a sudden clang, pulling him out of his thoughts, Henry was on the floor. Pulling himself back to remain undetected from whatever had hit Henry and gauge his enemy.

“Rest your head, it’s time for bed.”

Sammy, that lunatic, one of the first to be affected by that poisonous machine.

Bendy was angry in a new way. How dare he touch his creator. How dare he take him from him. Henry was his. Not anyone else’s. Bendy would make sure that Sammy paid. Following the crazed prophet, carefully sneaking downstairs after him, Bendy would make sure that Sammy would not be sacrificing any new sheep any time soon.

There he was. The sheep had finally come home. His lord will be pleased.

Dragging his sheep down the stairs deeper and further into the studio to his lord’s special chamber. Making sure that his sheep wouldn’t wake from his slumber just yet. He grabbed his supplies, ink for the circle and rope to keep his sheep from escaping his pasture.

With how plump this sheep was, his lord would possibly grant his prophet’s one wish.

Tying down the first of the knots on his sacrifice he chuckled to himself.

“I never did get that amen.”

Recognizing my own long-windedness, I’ve added a TLDR after every paragraph and lesson learned for those not wanting the deeper details.Yesterday, I finally decided to give up on a business idea I've been working on for years. I say "business idea" instead of "business" because businesses generally have customers, and that's not something I ever got a lot of *insert Price is Right loser music*, and I don't want to give anyone the impression I consider myself an experienced business owner by posting this: I would very much put myself in the "wantrepreneur" stage of my entrepreneurial experience. That being said, having listened to quite a lot of “How I Built This”, listening to successful entrepreneur friends talk about how they got to where they are, and even being part of this subreddit, I’ve formed the opinion tenacity is the attribute that most contributes to the majority of entrepreneurs’ success. Because of this, I know by giving up on my project I’m defining its failure, but I feel that, due to my inexperience as a business owner, cutting this idea loose before investing further is a smarter idea as long as I take away lessons that will improve my next venture. For that reason, I decided to write this formal lessons learned and post it for those who are interested. I get a fair amount of phone notifications for success stories in this sub, but I think it’s important, especially for other lurkers/newbies like me that the failures also be heard from (in a constructive manner at least).TLDR: Shutting down my business due to lack of customers, making a formal lessons learned so I don’t feel I’m walking away from the experience empty handed, posting it here for any interested/other beginner business owners.BACKGROUNDProbably 6-7 years ago I was shooting the shit with my co-workers at lunch (all of us software developers) and talked about how the dumbest ideas are the ones that really take off, specifically, due to their virality. I’m sure you know the kind: things like MillionDollarHomePage.com, where a guy charged a dollar for each of a million pixels and made more money than would be thought for a website so ugly (not to offend, I’ve been told my website is ugly as hell and it didn’t make me a million dollars). Going further back, we can see this isn’t just a byproduct of the internet as the pet rock made its creator a millionaire in the 70s. Wanting to take advantage of what I hoped was an easily exploitable behavior, I came up with an idea, and this was my pitch: “Who do you hate more than anyone in the world? Who’s your favorite historical figure? What if, for 25 cents, I could show you what it would look like if that historical figure teabagged that person you hate?” And so was born, [NSFW] GhostTeabag.com (site is still up, but with no GIF generating/purchasing functionality, so please don’t consider this self-promotion. You can, however, see examples of what was produced on the homepage). For those who don’t want to risk visiting the site due to the NSFW or don’t know what teabagging is, I’ll give a brief explanation of what the site did: you upload an image (say of a friend, or person you hate, doesn’t really matter), you pick from an assortment of historical figures (e.g. Cleopatra, Napoleon, etc.), and the site generates a GIF image of that historical figure (caricatured), making a teabagging motion on the picture (a teabag being the act of placing one’s scrotum on another person). I’m sure many of you are wincing at this point due to the nature of the website, but it’s important you understand what it is as it was a key factor of my lessons learned.TLDR: People pay for all sorts of stupid things, and I wanted a piece of that market by making a website that generated GIFs of caricatured historical figures putting their scrotums on images you uploaded.LESSONS LEARNED1: Never start a business you aren’t willing to promote and have no idea how to market. As obvious as this seems when stated blatantly, it was by far my most crucial mistake.I live in what’s referred to as the “Bible belt” of America: people are very uptight about their scruples. Additionally, I have a very conservative, religious family. And while I generally consider myself good at living a life independent of people’s judgements, once I had a product I was able to promote, I nearly froze completely in doing so. I know the stereotypical entrepreneur answer to this is, “You just can’t care what people think,” but when you have loving, caring parents who have tried so hard to raise you to make ethically wise choices, there are very few excuses that pair well enough with, “I made a website where Abraham Lincoln puts his balls on people,” to avoid the shame they will stare into you for the remainder of your life working on said website, and for that reason, I never told them about it.My family aside, living in such a conservative area made it difficult to do the little promoting I was willing to do. I made stickers advertising the site and planned to go from bar to bar in our downtown district asking bartenders if they could place one on their freezer or wall (as bars often do). I received quite a few “No”s, a thimble full of “Yes”s, and a “I can’t put it in the main area, but I can probably put it in the bathroom,” which I was more than grateful for but have yet to see in said bathroom. There were public posting spaces and a few lamp posts I was able to tag, but my primary focus and hope had been the bars as that's where I expected my clientele would be, and that had been a nearly complete failure. A friend of mine suggested trying colleges, but if the bars had been a failure, my assumption was the local colleges would not take kindly to having my stickers posted around and figured I was more likely to end up with a fine than customers. I know the classic entrepreneurial response to this is, “You have to take risks: it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” but because of the nagging parental guilt in the back of my head, they were risks I wasn’t willing to take.Digital marketing was a little easier to attempt as I could remain anonymous. That being said, one of the first things I thought of was to join the Reddit community and make a post, but as I’m sure everyone here is aware, that’s not looked upon kindly and the last thing most people in the Reddit community want to do for self-promoting individuals is give their site a kindly visit, so I posted in the Thank You Thursday sticky with a coupon code for a free image, but did little else, as the fact it was NSFW content made it even harder to find a way to constructively post about it.I considered paid advertising, and did so with Google, which I was shocked I was able to do because so many heavily used websites (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) restrict advertisements leading to mature content. I think if I'd been more willing to self promote I could have been more creative about how to market digitally, but the anxiety of questioning my own product was continually a blocking point.TLDR: If you're ashamed or embarrassed of letting ANY particular individual/group of people know about your idea, give it up or alter it so you don't have those anxieties: they're self destructive to your business.2: When you have an idea you think is fresh, produce it while it’s still fresh. As I wrote in my background, this idea came to me 6-7 years ago. For another year or so, I talked to people about it. The next years to come I worked on it, off and on, with as large as an entire year gap in between. Likely unnoticeable to most individuals, the time period I was slowly putting the site together was also a time of peak GIF popularity and image alteration: Facebook added the GIF option to messenger, Tinder following (though much later), and Snapchat became popular, due in part to its filter abilities. By the time I finally finished my website, I felt like GIFs/animations were everywhere, but in the worst possible way: they had trended to the point of oversaturation. My site lost out on what should’ve been a key period of growth due to my lack of get-shit-done-ness. That being said, this is a much lesser lesson learned as the opposite is also possible: get shit done too early and you can be, “ahead of your time” (RIP Sega Dreamcast), but having something done early and releasing it when the time feels right is infinitely easier than have the product done late and trying to release it in a time passed.On a more technical note, aside from your idea getting old, so will how you build it. My site is built in C# and originally began, I believe, in MVC 3, and at a certain point of return from one of my longer breaks away, I found it no longer worked. If I recall correctly, the component I was using to delete images after 24 hours was deemed obsolete to the point it was no longer in the .NET library, so the code wouldn’t even run locally on my computer.TLDR: The old adage, “Strike while the iron is hot,” applies well to unique and/or technical business ideas. Get shit done while it’s fresh or you risk your idea and/or the technology it’s built on aging out.3: This whole, “Minimum Viable Product” thing...it’s a good idea. I’m sure if you’ve been around this sub enough, you’ve heard people talk about producing MVPs. I made the classic mistake of requiring a lot of things be perfect that didn’t need to be before releasing. For a long time, my delay was coupon codes. I made the decision to not save images for longer than 24 hours of inactivity because I didn’t want people to have to make an account as I believed my users would mostly be drunk in bars and therefore not want to take the time or effort to make one. Instead, their images would be tied to a 24 hour session token and be deleted once it expired. Because I wasn’t saving images though, I worried people would claim they never got them and request a refund and I’d have little to no proof if they were lying. My solution was to instead give them a coupon code as repayment. Coupons, however, tend to require a particular unit of measurement on the buying and receiving end (e.g. buy 1 image get 1 image free trades an item for an item, but buy 5$ of images get 50% off your total purchase trades money for a percentage). This required I add coupon codes and units as new tables in my database, add a datascript to populate them, and add UI and backend code to take in and process it. So how many purchases were made vs how many people requested a refund? During the lifetime of my site I received 4 purchases. 1 from my wife’s friend, 1 from my friend, 1 from my brother, and 1 lone stranger who felt his time and money was worth a generated image of a historical figure teabagging someone. None of them asked for refunds. Even the coupon code I mentioned earlier for promotional uses never got used. At least 2 weeks of effort went into planning, designing, and implementing coupon codes, and it never got used by anyone but me, but I was so sure at the time it was something I needed to have. The saving grace of this particular example is coupon codes are something I’d like to implement on future sites as well, so it wasn’t a complete waste, but this is one of several items I spent time trying to implement that never needed to be done for me to start sharing my site so I’d realize ahead of time people’s lack of interest and my lack of willingness to market.TLDR: Regardless of your aspirations, odds are against your product becoming a craze over night, so don’t treat it like it is. Be realistic about your Minimum Viable Product: you can always add more features, but you can’t get back wasted time.4: If you can, always initially offer your product for free. My original intent was to offer images to people for 25 cents. Because of the costs involved with online transactions, I changed it to 69 (seemed fitting for the site), but my next step if I continued to work on it was to make them free. Offering something for free is, on its own, a type of marketing. As I mentioned earlier, I only ever got 1 stranger to buy from the site, and that person purchased 1 image. But if my product was free, how many more images would that person have made? How many more friends would they have sent those images to? And how many of those friends would be interested in visiting the site because, hey, it’s free, what is there to lose? While my site offered a watermarked version of your final image for free, it’s just not the same thing. And if you did want to purchase an image, you had to enter credit card information, and even I, a small business owner, find myself hesitant to do such a thing on an unfamiliar website: take away that fear and you increase users, increase users and you become trusted, become trusted and people will enter their credit card information on your website. If you want people to talk about your business, give them a small piece of your service for free, no strings attached, and once people are hooked, then you charge them for it (as unethical as it's framed, think of the cliche TV drug dealer who gives out a free sample first). And this doesn’t just apply to virtual businesses: nowadays, everyone knows about Sam’s Club and Costco because they’re everyday stores, but how many people, when those businesses first came out, only heard about and paid attention to them because of the free samples? I would count myself as one.TLDR: Make your product as free as can be until people want it enough you can lose the customers that aren’t willing to pay and still grow your user base.OTHER NOTEWORTHY ITEMSWhile the above lessons learned are what I set out to do for myself as a post-business learning experience, there are a few things I learned WHILE creating GTB that might be interesting to other people starting out:-Paypal basically comes in two flavors: plug and play, and full control API. The plug and play seems easy enough to use, but the API, which I had to use (I forget for what reason at the moment), absolutely sucks. I mean, everything about it sucks: how to use it, the documentation, and the fact my business account and personal account are somehow merged now, so when I make online purchases using Paypal it’s not uncommon for my package to be labeled to “Ghost Teabag”, a happening I’m lucky my children haven’t picked up on yet. Go with Stripe. It’s easier and has better documentation. It’s not as popular yet, but I would highly suggest using it if you need a payment API for ease of programming (it may also have a plug and play version, but never looked into that).-Commenting my code was never more important than when I was building my own website. I expected the opposite starting out: it’s my program, I know everything I’m doing, so I can cowboy code the whole thing. But, and I’m sure this is in large part due to my inability to consistently work on the project, there was a surprising amount of refactoring done to my own code wondering WTF old me was thinking as well as a great deal of decrypting my logic to understand why particular methods even existed. In a normal work setting, if you don’t understand uncommented logic, you can try to track down the person who made it or ask a coworker to have a look. When you’re the only developer though, all the burden falls on you.TLDR: Paypal sucks, go with Stripe, and comment your freaking code, especially when you’re the sole developer.Hopefully this write up actually helps some people out, it certainly helps me have some closure for the situation. Feel free to ask any questions, whether it be about the technical or business side of my experience. Additionally, I’m open to all comments regarding others similar or contrasting experiences. Thanks for reading!

Pepsi’s Awful Ad isn’t an Aberration: It’s a Symptom of Commodified Dissent

On Tuesday this week, Pepsi released a shockingly offensive ad that featured Kendall Jenner parodying a #blacklivesmatter activist. The advert featured Jenner joining a protest that starkly resembles a Black Lives Matter protest. After working her way through a smiling, cheering, and apparently politically apathetic crowd, Jenner reaches a police barrier. In imagery intending to replicate Ieshia L. Evan’s iconic face-off with the police in Baton Rouge, Jenner hands one of the police officers a can of Pepsi. The officer takes the can, and the crowds erupt into cheer. In one kumbaya moment, police brutality and systemic racism is solved (by white womanhood, no less).

The ad has been correctly described by many commentators as “atrocious,” “controversial,” “tone-deaf,” and “awful.” It faced intense backlash and mockery on Twitter, and was slammed by Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. The protest to the video was so severe that it took only twenty four hours for Pepsi to take down the ad and issue a public apology. Kendall Jenner, too, swiftly deleted all tweets referencing the ad. The internet community correctly reached the consensus that the ad trivialized a powerful protest movement that fought against racist police violence, whitewashed and co-opted black and POC labor, and appropriated the struggles of oppressed minorities at a particularly politically vulnerable time in the United States.

The ad isn’t Kendall Jenner’s first foray into appropriation and offensive, tone-deaf portrayals of marginalized communities. Nor is it the first time Pepsi released such a shameful ad. But the fact that Pepsi and Jenner thought it fit to release an advertisement like this shouldn’t be attributed to the insensitivity or idiocy of Pepsi’s creative directors or Jenner alone. Pepsi’s actions are merely the logical behavior of an industry that aims to capitalize off of a newly invigorated political climate, where dissent has become commodified and extremely profitable.

Consider the slew of carefully coded Super Bowl Ads that were celebrated as being anti-Trump by the left, but whose creators refused to have the courage to even claim they had any political intent. Or the way Dove and Victoria’s Secret have appropriated the body positivity movement. Or Nike’s embrace of female athletes wearing the hijab.  Or Dior’s $710 “We Should All Be Feminists” t-shirt. Or Twitter’s “#staywoke” t-shirt. Or Gucci’s “queercore” line of capsule shoes, each costing over $1000 a pair. Or indeed the general history of advertising that has tried to take revolutionary protest, and make money off of it.

All of these ad and products do the same thing: they empty popular protest movements of their political content, and instead use them to achieve their own ends—to sell us stuff (often made under exploitative conditions). They present a world where protests are filled with beautiful people, are glamorous and easy and non-divisive, and have none of the difficult, ugly, violent tensions that burn alive in protest movements amongst us today. In Pepsi’s capitalist fever dream, the police just needed a Pepsi handed to them by a white woman in order to stop shooting twelve year old Black children.

The message in these commercials is clear: we should all get over our differences (and their deeply entrenched systemic roots and the unequal positions of the parties in conflict), hold hands, and buy whatever product we’re being sold. The key to happiness and peace isn’t any sort of change to the status quo, but is instead consumerism. These commercials take people’s life’s work and turn it into meaningless, content-less images designed to line the pockets of the very people financially backing oppressive policies in the first place. They make a mockery out of movements that have cost people their freedom and their lives.

These ads also shift our focus away from the politics behind the brands themselves. Pepsi wants to promote an image of itself as inclusive, while perpetuating human rights violations in India. Nike attempts to woo the left with a line of sportswear for hijabi women, while operating sweatshops throughout the Global South, and harassing and violently intimidating its employees. Dove strategically chooses to tell American women to love their bodies despite their size, while telling dark-skinned Indian women they need to be fairer. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey parades around in a “#staywoke” t-shirt, while running a company that has a 3% Black/Latinx workforce. Dior profits off feminism while simultaneously making money off sexualizing a fourteen year old girl. Budweiser celebrates immigrants in its widely appreciated Super Bowl Ad, while being sued for stealing property from Native Americans.

These advertisements, then, don’t just devoid popular movements of politics. They shift the politics at play in these movements towards a capitalist, exploitative and consumerist model, using a leftist mask to sell us products born of human rights abuses and unjust economic exploitation.

Pepsi’s awful ad shouldn’t make us simply reject Pepsi. It should make us question the entire tradition of “#woke” advertising as an offensive one, one that aims to perpetuate a system of oppression while profiting off of protests against it.

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