#from a longpost I did way back in 2019 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

marzgurl · 10 months

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Hi there, @katkit-42 , just saw your tags and thought, actually, that's not a bad thing to elaborate upon.

This is another kinda long post, which I think most people should read, too, but I'll be kind and put the bulk of this behind a cut here. Please do take the time to open it up and read it, though.

The real answer is, this whole experience has been me balancing out being mortified by a lot of the things that have happened to me with the fact that everybody involved in the whole thing has also been a complete and utter moron. Any time I even slightly start to get scared, I have to remind myself (or even have my husband remind me) that these are the absolute stupidest people we're talking about, none of whom are wholly capable of completing something so horrific, no matter how serious about it they might be.

I hadn't said it in the previous longpost, but in 2019, it was very clear that Vic had intended to sue me along with Monica, Jamie, Ron, and Funimation (although that never happened). I had received an E-mail copy of a letter of preservation from Vic's very, very stupid lawyers. I'll go ahead and share that here.

It was moronic for a number of reasons. One, I was told it was sent to two different E-mail addresses I have, one of which never arrived. Two, it's written REALLY badly. Three, it supposedly was also delivered via certified mail. Here's the problem: they mailed it to an address in Inglewood, California.

I have never lived in Inglewood, California.

But I know why they THOUGHT I did. Because in 2018, while walking from where I was living to my car to go to work, I got mugged! I had just recently moved and had been filling out paperwork for new jobs and things, and the bag they took still had my social security card, ID, and even my passport in it, which somebody later used to steal my identity. I remember the cops calling me back in a week or two after my mugging asking me questions because they believed they'd found people associated with who mugged me, and they asked me if I'd ever lived at an Inglewood address, and I told them no, and they were like, "Okay, great, pretty sure we know exactly where they are, thanks." So, I hope the guys who mugged me enjoyed having my identity and receiving a letter in the mail saying they were possibly gonna get sued. Thanks for taking one for me, muggers.

I mention this to say Vic has had me in his sights for a LONG time. A good four and a half years now at this point. Although I'm not the one that had any stories of him assaulting me, I was the one who made sure that people could SEE the stories of other people telling THEIR stories, and he HATES that. Clearly, he hates that a LOT.

Vic has vaguely mentioned me NUMEROUS times on his livestreams, saying, "I'm not gonna name names," but clearly intending everybody to know it's me he's talking about. In 2022, he referenced how I have a donation button on my Twitch channel and in the past have occasionally had drives to help me make ends meet. This is despite the fact that my husband and I were both working full time, but life in Los Angeles is hard. Despite this, Vic has this to say:

"These are people who start crowdfunding campaigns to pay their bills. What does that tell you about them? These are losers, everybody. These are people that are for whatever reason so disgusted with their lives--so unhappy with their lives, and instead of, like, working or going out there and, you know--and building something or creating something, they want to sit at home on their computer and look for ways to trash me an other people they don't like. And then they ask you to give them money to pay their bills. Pathetic. Pathetic. *weird snarl* Anyway--"

I feel like a donation bar isn't a "crowdfunding campaign", but we don't have to nitpick here. Vic has also expressed though private E-mails with various individuals that he believes I used crowdfunding to pay for a "cat funeral", which he also found to be distasteful. So, this was clearly a jab at me, but he got the details of it wrong. In 2019, my 14-year-old cat Siren was very sick. I was trying to get her healthcare and wasn't sure how I was going to pay for it. My friend--NOT ME, SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY--asked me if it was okay if THEY set up a GoFundMe to help me find a way to save my cat. THEY created the GoFundMe, and some people donated, and we did all we could to save Siren before it was clear that she was too far gone, and we lost her. We did NOT raise funds to have a funeral for her. Not in the slightest. The fact that this is what Vic is telling people is disgusting, and cruel to the idea of somebody who has ever had to deal with the loss of a beloved family member. On top of this, if you have ever struggled to make ends meet, let's not mince words here--Vic thinks you are "pathetic". He thinks if you don't make money, you just aren't working hard enough (even if it turns out you and your family all work full-time and take side gigs just to cover everything). Of course, he also seemed to believe that I didn't have a job at all (a long-running conspiracy theory among his fans, just because they couldn't figure out who my employer was), when I was providing hard evidence of being actively credited for my work as a subtitle and closed caption editor in the anime industry (the very same anime industry Vic was kicked out of).

But it's weird that he thinks you're a loser if you crowdfund to pay your bills! Is that not precisely how you managed to sue the very women you assaulted, Vic? To this day, the "Vic Kicks Back" GoFundMe is still open, and has raised nearly $300,000 dollars--a significantly higher amount than anything I've ever earned via Twitch donations.

In May of this year (which is exactly when Farah was ramping up her online harassment campaign against me), Vic once again vaguely talked about me, but got all the details wrong yet again. Since I can only embed one video, I'll link to this second clip here, which someone else has uploaded to Twitter.

Everybody knows Vic means me when he says that prior to 2019 I only had about 800 followers and now have more like 18,000, all because I was talking about him. Which he's very much over-inflating. I'd already had several years of a career of being an online content creator. By 2019 I had 16,000 followers. I've had my account for something like 14 years. I'm now over 19,000, pushing 20,000. That growth from 2019 to 2023 seems relatively normal to me. It was a very gradual growth that honestly doesn't look all that much different from the growth I'd had since 2009. Even one glance at Social Blade will confirm this is true.

He also keeps saying we've never met (such as in the video clip linked above). But we have! We very much have! I have video of myself--video from EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO--walking up to Vic with a camcorder and him talking directly to me. Feel free to go and watch it for yourself. You can hear my voice and everything!

AND SO! I say all this to say that I have long been aware of how much Vic Mignogna hates me. Vic Mignogna HATES ME SO. SO. SO. FUCKING. MUCH. He has done everything in his power to belittle and discredit me as somebody so much smaller and weaker and completely different from who I actually am, deliberately lying about facts of my life that I can actively prove false at any given moment with a plethora of receipts.

But you wanna hear the real eye-opening thing? In April of this year, just before Farah started going on the attack, Vic was on his livestream yet again making a very ominous statement. Once again, I link directly to it here since I can't embed it for you.

"I'm already in the middle of looking into some very aggressive retaliation and resources to deal with that."

Now, at the time, we all just thought he meant he was FINALLY gonna pursue a lawsuit against me, which, let's go bro, I'm fuckin' ready to go any time, man. But as it turns out, this sure does line up a whole lot more with the timing of Vic's Red Lobster dinner conversation with Farah about starting a cyber warfare campaign against me, on top of maybe possibly probably murder!?!?!? We know that Farah started her cyber warfare just later that very same month, so that sure sounds like convenient timing to me!

My husband and I had joked for a long, long time, like, "You know, he hates me SO damn much. You think he wants me dead?" And it was always kind of a, "Haha, yeah, we're joking, but what if for real?" And then when Farah started E-mailing me and telling me it was probably very real, I mean... yeah, katkit, that did shake me for a bit. I got the E-mail from Farah while my husband was at work, and it stopped my productivity for the day dead in its tracks. Even though it was clear that they had seriously overlooked really obvious facts (like the fact that I was literally not even going to be in the same state as Anime Expo, the event where Vic wanted me hurt), the fact that he wanted me hurt at all was concerning. Also, it was concerning to me that, if Vic at all stopped being a complete and utter fucking moron and realized I'd VERY PUBLICLY already been announced as a guest at a convention in Texas that very same weekend, it might actually be EASIER for him to have someone come to that event and hurt me, because Vic also still lives in Texas. He himself used to live in Houston, where the event was taking place, and likely still had connections there. Delta H Con is really little, without a lot of security. There was only one possible hotel for me to stay in. I was scheduled for panels and to be at my table all day, every day. Where I was going to be at all times was easily tracked for the entire weekend. To that extent, yes, I was very scared.

In fact, over that first weekend of July, I was very prepared to die.

I started trying to spend more time with my husband, trying to be more conscious of how I spoke or reacted to little things, just in general trying to be nicer and more loving. I started spending more time loving on my two cats who I love very dearly, wondering if I only had a limited time left with them. I started preparing folders of information I wanted to make sure my husband had if for some reason I didn't come back from Houston alive.

In the end, obviously, none of that was necessary. Though I guess I can't say that it was in any way a bad thing to spend more time focusing on and loving my family.

Ultimately, I guess I was saved by the stranger who sent me all those screenshots from Farah's Discord server. Surely, they have no idea what they did. To that person, I thank them. I had no idea it was going to save me, either. Had I not had those screenshots to post online and knock Farah loose from her war path, she might have continued to pursue me until she had something she really could have done to harm me for real.

Now, that's just disrupted that specific plan. Whether Vic will continue to want to pursue my death in some other way, I have no idea. I guess I am a little bit more on guard now than I was before. But also, I know there's only so much I can do. All I can do is just keep going and pretending there isn't this weird dude with a life that he could totally control all on his own and live in peace but instead wants his ability to prey on young women so badly that he would literally kill a woman to be able to continue to get away with doing it.

For right now, though, I'm mostly okay. I'm continuing to do my work, I'm going to see a movie tonight that I had a hand in localizing, and I'm feeling grateful for that success. Thank you for checking in on me. It's very kind of you. I hope you're doing well out there for yourself, too.

#anime #vic mignogna #assault #cheating #cw #death threats #harassment #voice actor #youtube #murder plot #update #updates

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lenbryant · 3 months

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(Krugman-LongPost) Can America Survive a Party of Saboteurs?

Almost four years have passed since Congress approved and Donald Trump signed a huge relief bill designed to limit the financial hardship created by the Covid-19 pandemic. The CARES Act did its job. Although around 25 millionAmericans temporarily lost their jobs — with the job losses mainly caused by fear of infection rather than officially mandated shutdowns — there was far less monetary pain than you might have expected given the magnitude of the public health crisis.

In fact, according to a Federal Reserve survey, the percentage of Americans “doing at least OK financially” was actually higher in July 2020 than it had been before the pandemic, presumably because for many people, government aid, including one-time checks and greatly enhanced unemployment benefits, more than made up for lost jobs and business.

Furthermore, fears that generous aid during the pandemic would undermine America’s work ethic — that adults would leave the labor force and never come back — proved totally wrong. A new paper from the San Francisco Fed is titled “Why Is Prime-Age Labor Force Participation So High?” It notes that Americans between 25 and 54 are more likely to be in the work force now than they were at any time since the early 2000s.

So the CARES Act was a huge policy success. But given recent political developments, I’ve found myself thinking: What would have happened if Democrats in 2020 had behaved like Republicans in 2024?

Imagine an alternative history in which Joe Biden, who was already by then the strong favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, had urged Democrats in Congress not to pass a relief bill — the same way Trump has bullied Republicans into voting against a border security bill — because he believed that reducing Americans’ misery might help Trump get re-elected.

Imagine a history in which Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House at the time, had behaved like Mike Johnson, the current Republican speaker, and prevented a bill attempting to address an urgent national priority from coming to the floor.

It seems clear that the CARES Act did, in fact, help Republicans politically. It’s true that they lost the White House in 2020, but by a less decisive margin than many expected, and that while Democrats did gain control of the Senate, they did so by the smallest possible margin. Republicans surely would have done much worse if Trump had been presiding over a full-scale Covid-induced depression.

And the G.O.P. is still, to this day, benefiting from that 2020 Covid relief package. Republicans constantly boast about how good the economy was under Trump, which is peculiar given that Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he moved in. The trick here is that they pretend 2020 never happened — a sleight of hand that only works because federal aid allowed so many Americans to emerge from the pandemic slump in good financial shape.

Now, my imaginary history didn’t happen and couldn’t have happened. For one thing, Pelosi isn’t that kind of politician. She’s partisan, of course, but has never as far as I know engaged in political extortion by holding the well-being of the nation hostage. For example, in 2019, she shepherded a bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt ceiling, averting a potential financial crisis, with a deal that Trump himself conceded contained “no poison pills.”

Even if Pelosi herself had wanted to engage in economic sabotage, her colleagues almost certainly would have refused to go along.

But Trump’s Republicans (and recent events have confirmed that Trump really does own the G.O.P.) are everything the Democrats of 2020 weren’t. They’ve rejected a border security and foreign aid bill that they themselves demandedand then negotiated, one that was far harsher than Democrats would have wanted. And they aren’t even trying to hide their naked cynicism. They want to block a border deal, even one that gives them almost everything they want, because any deal might limit their ability to attack President Biden over the issue.

Oh, and a significant fraction of Republicans, Trump included, would prefer to block aid to Ukraine because, by all appearances, Vladimir Putin is their kind of guy, and they’re content to see him steamroll his democratic neighbor.

Biden is clearly planning to make Republican sabotage a major issue in the 2024 campaign — akin to the way Harry Truman ran against the “do-nothing Congress” in 1948 — with the extra edge that this time Republicans are more or less openly trying to damage American interests for political gain. Whether this strategy will work remains to be seen.

But even if it does work, and Biden wins — even if Democrats were to regain full control of Congress — I’m worried about the future. One of America’s two major political parties is now dedicated to achieving power at all costs, and will try to make the nation ungovernable when a Democrat sits in the White House. How long can our democracy survive under these conditions?

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

#refrigerator magnet #krugman #paul krugman #nytimes #politics #maga me sick

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blaiddydbrokeit · 1 year

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I'm going to see my psychiatrist today, but finding out two weeks ago that they migrated their systems a few years ago and lost nearly all of the older, more verbose records led me to look over the ones I did have a copy of, and it led me down an interesting self-discovery, and self-rediscovery.

It gets long, and it's personal, so I'll put it under a cut so people aren't disrupted by an irrelevant longpost on their dashboards.

So, back in 2016, I warded in the psychiatric ward - by years I was 14, but for this we'll need to be a little bit more specific. This was a few months before I turned 14. I was warded for psychotic disorder.

Here's where it gets interesting. Part of the reason I bring it up is because at the time, I reported multiple voices, but that only three were distinct. I had named them due to their recurring nature, based on "what felt the most appropriate".

Voice A was a masculine voice that often demanded violent acts, usually decapitations, dismemberments or strangling. I named him after a character who was a royal with blue eyes, blonde hair and who was beheaded. He was the loudest, but I also identified as closest to him.

Voice B was another masculine voice that demanded information, really. Things like answers, reasons, the sort of things that one would use to get back at another, to stew in hatred or fuel vengeance. I named him after a snarky swordsman.

The last was.... questionable. It was the one that was unclear if it was masculine or feminine, but they berated me more than anything. Compared me to someone else I didn't know. Made me feel useless if I couldn't even give them what they wanted, but they wanted peace and I didn't know how to give that. I named them after an androgynous character who came from abroad, known for tricks, voices and unclear allegiances.

At that age, I also abruptly developed a strangely morbid obsession with decapitation, especially that which was committed not by guillotine, but by blade, and more outlandishly, by hand. I was convinced that, with enough force, one could crush the neck of another person and pull their head off with their bare hands. Of course, this alarmed my psychiatrist and subsequently became another reason for my hospitalization.

Of course, it did not stop there. It only became more strange. In my 16th year, but before my 16th birthday - I was exorcised twice for strange behaviours, but to no avail. Behaviours that would perhaps read as dissociation in psychiatry, but possession to the faithful.

My parents had noticed that I had begun to at times describe terribly violent acts, twitching and smiling, even laughing while doing so, and when provoked, would lash back out as if I was in a trance, with an excess of strength that required multiple people to even half-restrain. They sought a medium, who was certain that it was the work of "several angry spirits strongly tethered to me", and hence hundreds was spent to try and expel said spirits.

Fast forward several years, to 2019. Laughably, with the release of Fire Emblem Three Houses, the house that I initially wanted to attempt was the Golden Deer. I lost interest at Chapter 3, and put away the game for a while. When I tried once more to play, it was with the Black Eagles. I reasoned that it was because I'd heard so much about how they had a route-split, and that it had much to do with Edelgard. Unfortunately, it lost me quickly in the Academy phase too. However, when I had settled on taking one last chance with the Blue Lions, something started to click once the C supports began to unlock.

What I think was my breaking point, though, was Remire Village. At that point, I was so thoroughly and personally invested that witnessing it broke something in me. I recall that I had to put away my switch. I cried myself to sleep with a splitting headache that night. It felt like something so familiar. In some way or another. And it seemed the further I went, the more things made sense about myself.

Looking back on nearly-14-year-old me's accounts, it's oddly laughable how apt the poor lad was in describing people he could not yet recognize proper. Father... Glenn... Stepmother... you really have been there all along.

#dima in the deep end #mitya memories

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duhragonball · 3 years

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I'm fucking freezing.

It's been this cold before where I live, but for some reason my apartment feels a lot draftier than it used to. Maybe it's just me getting older, I don't know.

Anyway, my workplace is cold because the heater is a piece of shit, so I'm trying to distract myself from the urge to light a fire.

I have three goals for the year. One is to get the damn weinerfic past 850,000 words. Unless I actually finish the thing first, but I'm pretty sure that won't happen. I've got about 125k to write, so I've been slacking off this month and binging pro wrestling.

Second goal is to finish the Hellsing Liveblog, and the third is to liveblog Jojo Part 2, because it's muh favrit. I've wanted to do these for a while, but I've never been able to make the time for it, so I'm putting more emphasis on that.

However, I'm finding that that character ask thing I was doing in December was a really popular feature. I just did it because I was bored, but it started to take up more of my time, and I knew I'd have to shut it down before January, but this turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. I did a last call and I still got asks, I shut down asks on this blog and people sent me DM's. I reopened asks last week because I finished my writing goal for January and almost immediately I got an ask for this.

And I appreciate this a lot. I can't just do these 24-7 because I have other stuff to do, but there's clearly a demand here, and that's something I haven't felt in a while. It's been there, but I just haven't felt it, kind of like how I can't feel the space heater that's just out of range of my chair.

I started this blog roughly eight years ago, 8.5 maybe. I've been feeling like maybe time has passed me by, and tumblr and the DB fandom have changed enough and maybe I've grown obsolete. I knew it would be this way and that'd I'd need to move on at some point, but I don't really want to. And maybe I don't need to. This thing still serves its purpose, even if the crowd isn't the same crowd from 2015.

Dammit, I love this stuff. The big DB liveblog I did in 2019 left me wondering if there was anything left for me to say about this topic, but I still watch clips on YouTube, I still listen to DB music all the time, and I go back through my archives and find old fic chapters and longposts and catch myself thinking "Hey, this guy's pretty sharp." I got some negative feedback on Luffa the other day and that bummed me out but at the same time I couldn't find anything that I'd do differently. I'm basically like "sorry you didn't enjoy this but it's exactly what I wanted, so there's nothing I can do about it." This blog is the same deal. It may not be for everybody, but it's what I want, and there's still some interest in what some middle-aged nerd thinks about Piccolo or whatever. I'm riding that wave until it stops being fun. And if you're not down with that... etc.

So my plan is to resume answering character asks in March. I still have a lot of wrestling to watch, you understand. If you want to send them my way in the meantime, go for it, but keep in mind that it may be a while before I get to yours. And yeah, I guess that's it.

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