#i remember my 'oh fuck i've seen these guys in a bunch of stuff for years actually' moment with alfred molina and michael sheen
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one of the most interesting things about weird tv shows and movies that take off in an unexpectedly big way to me is when some middle-aged character actor who’s been quietly putting in solid work for 20-30 years suddenly gets their big moment of fame finally and the giant fandom starts crushing on them and making fanwork and searching up every minor past role they’ve ever had
#rhys darby and con o'neill must be having a hell of a time right now#i remember my 'oh fuck i've seen these guys in a bunch of stuff for years actually' moment with alfred molina and michael sheen#tbh david tennant is sort of this to me too#i never watched doctor who#so my only tennant experience pre-crowley was the five minutes he was in goblet of fire#and the occasional reaction image
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┆Dirty Talk (1)
Young Gongseob x FemReader
ूाीू ┆ ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
"Earlobes! Have you seen my favourite shirt?" I asked, looking around the tint apartment's living room.
Gongseob shrugged and plopped on the couch, "Nope, haven't seen it ever since our last fuck," he said.
"Gongseob Ji!"
"What? I'm just being honest!" He smirked and looked at me with his sharp eyes, I sighed and threw a blanket over him, "Go put on a shirt!" I huffed.
Gongseob tilted his head and wrapped his hand around his neck, "I thought you liked the view," he winked.
I blushed and looked away, "Shut up, you look ridiculous!" I stuttered.
The braided man chuckled and stood up, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me closer, his lips were close to my ear.
"Hey... Hotshot," he whispered, his voice was soft and quiet, the way his breath made contact with my skin made me shiver.
He kissed the back of my ear and quietly hummed, "I feel horny..." He said.
I squeaked and elbowed him in the stomach, "Don't just say shit like that!" I shout, I covered my face and he was laughing.
"I can't help it, it's all your fault," he cooed, I turned to him and placed my hands on my hips, "How is it my fault?!"
He grinned and held my chin, "You're so sexy, looking at you just gets me excited," he said.
I huffed and crossed my arms, "You're such a perv," I mumbled, Gongseob chuckled and let go of me.
"Let's bang," he said, my face heated up and I threw anything my hands could reach at him, "You dummy! You can't just say stuff like that out of nowhere!" I shout.
He kept chuckling and catching the things I threw, "Oh come on now, you're no fun," he whined.
I hit him on the head with a magazine, "I'm 17! I'm barely legal!" I exclaimed, Gongseob rolled his eyes and pouted his lips, "Hmph! Whatever!" He said mocking me.
꒰ ☕ ꒱ ┆ 𓏲ּ ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִֶ 𓂃
I stretched my arms up as I let out a tired yawn, I've been studying all day for the exams next week, Gongseob was out with his friends.
I sighed and stood up from the floor, I went outside to get some fresh air.
I decided to go for a walk down the streets to get a break from studying, as I walked down the quiet road, I realised... I remembered nothing.
As I walked, I heard a group of noisy boys in the distance, and one loud voice in particular caught my attention.
It was Gongseob, cussing.
A bunch of scenarios flashed in my mind, my heart raced, I thought that Gongseob was in trouble, I ran towards where the noises were and there he was.
Gongseob was laying on the ground, struggling to get up, his face was beaten up and a bunch of boys were surrounding him.
"Earlobes!" I shout, I ran towards him, the group of boys turned towards me, "Well what do we have here?" One muscular boy said.
"Hey pretty lady, what brings you here?" A fat one asked.
Gongseob was noticeably ticked off and he tried to stand up.
"Leave him alone!" I shout, they all laughed and shook their heads, "Now where's the fun in that?"
I huffed and crossed my arms, they all slowly made their way towards me, "Well, they're all idiots," I thought to myself.
One guy grabbed my hand and pulled me closer to him, his breath reeked of alcohol and cigarettes, I gagged and covered my nose as I try to look away.
The others started to surround me, blocking my view of the braided man.
I quietly whimpered and started to regret my life choices, "Why do I always find myself in these type of situation..." I quietly muttered.
Just a moment later, I felt sudden tension rising, it felt like there was something triggered.
"H-hey... Gongseob..." I muttered, "Don't kill them..."
"Hahh? What do you think that punk's gonna do? He's already beaten up!" A boy laughed, "He's fucking weak, he ain't gonna do shit!" They all agreed with each other laughing their asses.
I slightly grinned and let out a quiet chuckle, "Well... That's where you're all wrong, they don't call Gongseob the king of Daegu for nothing!"
Gongseob appeared from behind them and he yanked the fatass away from me, his eyes were cold and fierce.
He hates it when someone he's currently interested to is getting harassed, but what he hated a bit more is the people who were harassing a woman were underestimating him.
It didn't take long for Gongseob to take them all out, by the time be was done, he's all bruised and exhausted.
He was about to collapse when I had caught him, "You can put your arm on my shoulder, I'll be your support," I said.
He exhaled sharply and slapped my mother's creations.
"Gongseob!!" I exclaimed, he chuckled and looked at me, "Sorry, my hands slipped."
We got back to my small apartment and I sat him down the couch, "Stay there, I'll get the first aid kit," I said.
I took the orange pouch and grabbed a cloth and a small bucket of water.
I placed them down in front of the braided man, "Take off your glasses," I said, he hummed and took them off, his eyes kept looking at me.
I took a piece of cotton and cloth, I sat on his lap and looked at his cuts and bruises, "Let's clean these wounds..." I said quietly.
He didn't speak, which was odd but I wasn't complaining.
I damped the cloth with water and gently pressed it on his cuts, he didn't seem to be effected or hurt, so I continued to clean it.
After a while, I felt a pair of hands holding both sides of my waist, I looked at Gongseob who was blushing.
"Are you alright?" I asked, "You keep moving... It's... Distracting.."
"Would you prefer to feel pain instead?"
He chuckled and held his hands firm on my waist, "You know what, I think I like it better this way, just keep grinding on my lap sweet cheeks?"
I then had a moment of realization and tried to get off, unfortunately, I couldn't because Gongseob was quick to pull me back down.
"Don't leave," he said, his voice was soft and gentle, "Let's stay like this for a moment," I sighed and looked at him, "We both know where this will lead to," I said.
He smiled pulled out something from his pants, "We'll be safe," he winked, I felt my face heat up from looking at his grinning face and the condom that he's holding.
"G-Gongseo—...," he cut me off by kissing my lips, a sweet and passionate kiss, "Don't worry, I'll take good care of you."
I quietly hummed and he continued to kiss my lips, I couldn't resist.
His tongue pressed on my bottom lip, asking for entrance, I parted my lips and he waisted no time to slide his tongue inside my mouth.
I let out a quiet moan as his tongue massaged mine, I could feel his member twitching from his pants, his hands were firm on my hips.
When I pulled away for air, I opened my mouth to speak, "N-not here..." I murmured, he leaned closer and started to kiss the crook of my neck.
He spoke in between his kisses, "Want to take this to the bedroom?" He said.
I quietly whimpered as he nibbled and sucked on my skin, I hummed and nodded my head as I felt him smirk while kissing my neck.
"Alright then," he then let me get up, I placed down the damp cloth I was holding and watched as he stood up, he then carried me bridal style which startled me.
I wrapped my hands around his neck as he walked towards the bedroom, I felt his heart beating faster, "H-hey... Gongseob..." I said, he glanced at me and raised a brow, "Yes?"
I blushed and looked away from his sight, "P-please be gentle."
With those words I felt him get excited, he opened the bedroom door with his fingers and closed it using his foot.
He plopped me down the bed and pinned me down, his breathing has heavy and he just stood there for a moment.
"I've been waiting for this... For so long..." He muttered, he looked at me with lust in his eyes, his cheeks were tinted with red as he looked down on me.
He slowly leaned closer and softly placed a kiss on my lips, he kept doing it over and over again and began to kiss me longer.
My arms wrapped around his neck as he kissed me passionately, I slightly parted my lips giving him access to me, he swiftly slid in his tongue and began gently grinding his hips on my between region.
He pulled away to catch some air, his eyes were fixated on me, "Can I touch you?"
I slowly nodded and he grinned, his right hand slowly reached mt thighs, he backed away and began to trace the garter of my underwear.
"You're getting excited too, aren't you?" He teased, I quietly hummed and closed my eyes, nervous with what's about to happen.
He slowly slid down my underwear and chuckled quietly, "Mint green?" He said, I rolled my eyes and quietly spoke, "Why do you care about the colour?"
He grinned and shook his head, "I don't, I care about what it's covering."
His fingers then gently tapped my entrance, causing me to slightly twitch, "Haven't even started and you're already soaked," he cooed.
His fingers ran up and down from my entrance to my clit, his middle finger slightly pushing in as he dragged it up and down.
I softly whimpered as he rubbed circles on my clit, my breathing started to get heavier and faster, "G-Gongseo~..." I softly moaned.
He smiled and looked at me, "Do you want it?" He asked, I paused for a moment and felt his hands teasing me, I nodded my head and he licked his lips, "Use your words~..," he teased.
"P-please... I want it..." I mumbled,
"Good girl," he whispered.
He slowly slid his middle finger inside of me, I gasped shakily from his cold finger.
He kept pumping his slender finger inside of me, I could feel his eyes scanning me, watching me squirm under his touch.
"Don't stop... Please..." I muttered, Gongseob chuckled and looked at me, "Aww, you're being such a good girl," he cooed, he then pushed in another finger inside of me, continuing to pump both fingers inside.
"I'll give you more then~..."
My eyes rolled back as he pumped his finger lsnin and out of me, I started to drool due the pleasure.
Not long after, I came on his fingers, he chuckled and pulled his slender fingers out and licked my juices off of it.
"Fuck, you taste good, hotshot."
"You came three times on your first time, right?" Gongseob asked as he lowered his head lifted my legs to rest on his shoulders, I felt his shaky breath against my twitching walls.
I felt his lip brush against my entrance, causing me to twitch even more, "I wonder... Can I make you cum more this time."
I then felt his tongue push inside of my entrance, he dragged his tongue up from mt entrance to mt clit.
"F-fuck... Don't stop... P-please~..," I moaned, his tongue felt so good inside of me.
He kept on sucking me, licking my juices, the continuous pleasure made me shake and vulnerable to him, his breath brushed against my skin.
He kept letting out quiet hums as he kept sliding his tongue in and out of my pussy, circling it on my clit every once in a while.
"G-Gongseob~... I-I'm gonna c-cum~..!" I moaned, my hands gripped on the sheets, he kept going, he started going faster.
"A-ahh~... G-Gongseo—..," I came all over his tongue, letting out loud moans as I did, "Fuck..." He mustered, he looked up to me licking his lips.
"You taste so damn good," he smirked.
He then leaned closer to me and began to kiss me, I could taste myself on his mouth, I moaned into the kiss and he took it as an opportunity to slide in his tongue.
"Now I'm curious..." He said, he unzipped his pants and pulled down his boxers, the tip of his cock rubbed on my entrance, "How many times can I make you cum with my cock?"
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btw salad what's ur opinion on eddsworld legacy?
For the most part, i think legacy is Okay. It's not the Best, but its nice to see so many people come together to finish off the show. I can respect all the work these guys did, especially tomska.
If you came for my option on the season and thats it you can leave, because the rest of this is me going crazy mode
My only real problems lie with only 2-3 episodes, and it drives me Crazy because they're By Far the most popular, so they've caused the most problems. This one question ended up becoming a giantic essay SORRY im just passionate about ebbworld
Keep in mind these are Just my options, I'm not going to look down on you if you're the number one The End Fan. If you like it then Cool, you can continue to enjoy it. And i can continue to hate it over in my corner
I'm keeping this section on Fun Dead short, mostly because it's not really the worst offender
The "Obliviously stupid to progress the plot" trope is so bad here. They've seen zombies before how do they not recognize them now. I get them being oblivious to super obvious things is the joke ,but its just not funny
For a Zombie centric episode, there's barely any Fighting. I feel like big fight scenes are what people like most with these. But no we get a 30 second montage, one that's not even animated
They are such wusses in this episode id bully them if i was there i think
The End. Don't even get me started on The End. Legitimately i have never seen such a botched finale in my life. Fair warning this is about to get long and angry im sorry
Let me ask one question: how come in the Finale To Eddsworld Legacy, the season Dedicated to Edd Gould and his work, Edd Himself does not play a prominent role? I'm not even kidding, you could write Edd out completely and Nothing would change. Ive heard people say this was Tomska going out with a bang before leaving the show, but from what i know he also wanted eddsworld to be completely over at The End. If that's true he could have atleast let Edd shoot the harpoon or some shit, come on
This is such a disappointing finale overall. They don't do anything exciting. We just get to watch a little "do you remember this episode?" Montage, all the sudden everything gets crazy then oh! Episodes over goodbye forever.
An end fight might have been more exciting had it been set up properly. They gave us the bare minimum, which was having tords stupid little gang tag appear a few times then having two of his coworkers/soldiers appear a few times. That doesn't hint at a Tord being an evil meglomaniac who's got a giant fucking robot hidden under the house
FUTURE EDD CAME OUT OF NOWHERE AS WELL, AND HE WORKS GREAT BECAUSE HE SETS UP THE LORE IMMEDIATELY. Tords return gave us Nothing beyond "he is manipulating them!!" Instead we get the book dropped on us halfway through the LAST EPISODE OF THE SEASON without ever being given any sort of explanation. That's just it.
ALSO FUCK BRINGING TORD BACK AT ALL. the dude asked to be removed from the show and what did they do? Hinted at his return like 15 times then had him come back as this manipulative mastermind, whos got a bunch of science stuff and a russian accent. At the bare minimum you could have writtten him to atleast resemble something close to Tord. There's literally more evidence that points to him being a clone than there is him being the real Tord, and it WASN'T EVEN INTENTIONAL.
Took a character who had left with all his loose ends tied up, brought him back with completely new unexplained info, then ended the show with both the original and the new loose ends untied. I've read this was Tomska trying to write Tord out of the show for good, but he somehow managed to do the complete opposite by leaving him at a LITERAL cliffhanger. Now all the 12 year olds are @ ing eddsworld begging he comes back for a redemption episode.
I could scream forever about the end but ive already said too much SORRY. This is why im just rewritting it myself to make it good
One last thing: its somewhat heartbreaking to me how Legacy has totally overgrown the classic episodes. Of the top Ten most popular videos on the channel, Seven of them are legacy episodes, with Edds three episodes being at the very bottom of the list
I just don't like it. I dont like how legacy has become like the Face of what eddsworld is. Maybe it's just because Edds work has been one of the biggest inspirations in my life (if that wasn't obvious already) IDK it seems unfair
Tldr: i dont like what legacy has done to the series and the fandom, but it's okay for the most part. Fuck The End though
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jay hard dom mode
masterlist | main masterlist
jay gets curious with sunghoon's hard dom ways
contains: rough sex, mirror sex, light slapping, slight choking.. all that stuff
"THIS is what you guys normally do?!" Jay's eyes widened as he watched one of Dehoon's sex tapes.
"Uh," Sunghoon reached his hand out to retrieve his phone again. "We have more, wanna see?"
"What- I-" Jay's eyebrows furrowed before handing the device back. "Dude, I don't even watch porn like this."
"Della likes it rough, what can I say?" Sunghoon smiled and showed Jay another video.
"Ew- I don't need to see your dick that clearly, man," Jay scrunched his face in disgust.
"Jealous I'm bigger than you?" Sunghoon smirked.
"You're not bigger than me, be fucking for real," Jay suddenly got serious when the video kept playing. "She likes to get slapped and everything?"
"Lightly yeah. She likes a whole bunch of things," Sunghoon let him hold his phone again. "Keep scrolling if you want, I have a whole bunch of 'em."
"Do you have any Della focused ones? I really don't wanna see you naked."
"Eyy, it's nothing you haven't seen."
"Oh my fucking God- PARK JONGSEONG!" Della exited her room to search for the guy.
"What do you think?" only to find him sitting back on his gaming chair with a smirk. He let out a large grin when she grabbed his hand to pull him to her room.
"Have fun you two," Jake mumbled, not taking his eyes away from the screen.
"Oppa what is this?" Della pointed to the garment on her bed with a glare.
"I think it'll look gorgeous on you," he picked the skimpy lingerie up. "It's beige! Or light brown or something! It's your favourite colour!"
"Oppa, it's beautiful but I've told you so many times already. Stop. Buying. Me stuff," she sighed, coming closer to touch the material. "These won't cover anything, babe. My nipples, ass- everything will be visible."
"That's kinda the point?" Della couldn't help but snort.
"Their purpose is to cover, darling."
"But why would you cover when we're alone like this?" Jay stood behind Della to wrap his arms around her. His lips attached themselves to her neck while his hands moved up and down her body.
"You want me to wear this while we make love, darling?" she held his head in place and fluttered her eyes shut.
"Fuck yeah," he reached to lift up her (actually Sunoo's) shirt. "Go put it on while I turn on the SC," he gave her ass a firm slap before walking away.
"You're being extra sexy today," Della smiled to herself as she worked to put on the garments. "I'm serious though. Stop buying me stuff."
Jay only replied with a hum, returning to his previous position. He assisted her by pulling up the bottoms and his hands immediately went to caress the plump area.
"Why don't you have look at yourself," that's when Jay's intentions became clear. He dragged Della towards the mirror. "How fucking gorgeous," he whispered into her ear, groping her breasts before one hand gently gripped her neck.
"Oppa," she whimpered at the familiar, yet unfamiliar pressure. Rough sex with Jay? Yes fucking please.
"What do you think, baby?" he smirked when she placed her hand over his, instructing him to grip tighter. "Hmm?"
"Don't hold back."
"Heard you enjoy sucking dick," he turned her around to face him. "On your knees."
He pushed her down by her shoulders and felt his pants get tighter when he saw her eyes staring back at his. He's never seen her like this. He always receives head while either lying or sitting down.
"Mouth open," he loosened the drawstring to his shorts. "Tongue out.. That's it," he tapped his dick on her tongue before shoving it in.
The older swore out loud, opting to bunch her hair up so he could facefuck properly.
"You remember your safe word?" he bent down to choke her again after pulling away.
"My safe word with Sunghoon is ‘Jongseong,’" what the fuck? Is that kid obsessed with me or something?
"With me it's just 'don't,' okay?" he gave her a teasing kiss on the lips and stood up to resume.
He held her head in place as his hips thrusted into her mouth. His pace started off steady at first but soon turned erratic when she started moaning around him, as if she was the one getting pleasured.
Jay was worried that he would chicken out. He imagined giving the love of his life a certain degree of pain to be horrid, though he found himself really enjoying it.
So she actually does have a slight pain kink.
"Do you like that, sweetie?" he pulled her hair so Della could answer. She gave out a deep chuckle while sticking her tongue out. "Up," he took out her chair and helped her up.
"What are you planning?" she asked, still out of breath.
"Kneel on the chair, legs apart," he instructed. "You're gonna watch us through the mirror, yeah? If I see you close your eyes for more than three seconds, I'm gonna stop. Understand?"
"Mhm- ah!" he gave her ass a slap.
"Use words, Della."
"Okay, oppa," Jay took off his shirt before lowering her panties just to her thighs, making sure that the set he bought was still visible. "Please," Della whined when he kept stroking his tip on her wet pussy lips. "Fuck!"
It was a new sensation for both of them. Jay would always start of slow, no matter how prepped Della was. To have him thrust roughly straight off the bat left shudders for both of them.
"Fuck baby, you feel so good," Jay gritted his teeth, making eye contact with his girlfriend through the reflection.
"A-ahh oppa- you're so big- fuckk!" her eyes rolled to the back as her moans became uncontrollable.
"Ya-" he slapped her across the face lightly. "I said keep watching," he squeezed her face and held it in place. "You think you can get away with it just because you didn't close your eyes, huh?"
"I'm sorry, op- mm," her apology was cut short when Jay put three of his fingers in her mouth.
"Don't wanna hear it. Just show me," he gave one last (extra) hard thrust. "Now make me feel good and ride me."
requested:
— jay finds out how rough dehoon go
— jay hard dom mode
taglist: @duolingofanaccount @lalalalawon @clar-iii @deafeningballoonpeach
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"greek-Bros": Spared no Expense
*Ares has invited Apollo, Artemis and Dionysus to Themiscyra*
Ares: Well I hope you guys like it, dad's been complaining about me not being "productive" enough for a god so I've decided to show you what I have been working on for a few weeks now. Spared no Expense.
Apollo: Well that is fine and all but I must ask why us?
Ares: Well why ask Athena to do the work of three already competent and much more trustworthy gods am I right?
Artemis: This place is huge seriously what have you been doing this whole time? Also the fuck do you mean "spared no expense" we're gods, money is completely beneath us.
Dionysus: Duuuuuude hope you set up some farms around here this place has got some nice greens.
Apollo: Um Dionysus, I'm wondering mostly because that outfit of yours suits you but why are you wearing a black button up? And where did you get those sunglasses?
Dionysus: *dressed up like Ian Malcolm* No reason why?
Ares: *literally dressed up like John Hammond* Yeah Apollo seriously I thought you were about that whole "clothes can mean whatever you want them to mean" stuff.
Apollo: *a little huffed at that remark* well then.
Ares: Ah we're here. *Stops his chariot*
Apollo: *turns and looks in awe at the distance with the over dramatic yet relatable disbelief of someone who has seen a fucking dinosaur*
Artemis: *had picked up a huge pinecone earlier* Ares, this species of pinecone shouldn't be here, this hasn't been around since th-*Apollo gently turns her head and is in equal disbelief*
*literally sees an entire civilization of purely just women*
Apollo: ....that's....that's all women ....this is literally more women I could have ever imagined seeing in one place
Artemis: Holy shit this looks actually cool
Dionysus: *who's been in on this fucking project the whole* He did it, that crazy son of a bitch did it. *Thunder rolling in the distance because he accidentally called Hera a bitch*...oh boi.
Ares: hehehe, welcome to Themiscyra.
*Jurassic Park theme*
Apollo:..Ares how did you even achieve this also why are there no men around?
Artemis: and why is that something you want to know?
Apollo: because to sustain such a population even you had officially kidnapped thousands of women or that has to be some sort of source of procreation.
Ares: Heheh, I did it all by myself, I told I spared no expense.
Apollo: oh my chaos you asexually reproduced these women?
Ares: What the fuck NO you glittery nerd. Remember I had that falling out with Aph a few months back?
Apollo: yes.
Ares: Well, I sat on the beach, trying to make myself feel better and after I was done I was really chafed so I took a nap. After like 2 weeks I woke up and I saw a bunch a little mounds all over the beach and I heard a baby crying, I dug were the sound was coming from and someone had buried alive infant on the beach. However I put two and two together and well....I'm dad of like roughly 39768 Amazonians. *Gives that smile one would give when they don't know they have done something impossible*
Apollo:...you...masterbated on the beach....than....this?
Ares:...yeah kind of. Oh by the way be careful with some of them because I haven't taught every single one of them to be social enough to not immediate kill anyone who isn't me in this place so stick with me ok?
Artemis: well sounds like my kind of people.
Apollo:.....you.... ejaculated....all over a beach...and..
Ares: Look I spared no expense that's all I can tell you. The advanced and "organized society" thing they did that all by themselves and I'm very proud.
Apollo:...for gods sake man
Dionysus: fuck yeeeaaaah bruh. *Hi fives Ares*.
Apollo: well....at least things can't get any worse*
*everything went worse after the Amazonians saw Apollo and Dionysus and everything went to slightly shit*
Bouns Scene:
Dionysus: *after some how breaking his leg, he lays down with his bare chest out seductively* We need to call for dad maybe he can help.
Ares: No I can't let him know about this he's gonna lose his shit.
Apollo: OH YOU THINK?!?
Ares: Look NO ONE told your sociopathic twin to hostility takeover after the girls accepted her into the city as a leader. I am going to give a serious talking to.
#greek mythology#hellenistic#greek gods#greek posts#greek bros#greek myth memes#ares#dionysus#Apollo#Artemis
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DOCTOR WHO LIVEBLOG 2009 SPECIAL THE WATERS OF MARS
It has been a moment since I've watched, but in my defense I have 7 different personal projects right now including learning the guitar and finally doing drivers Ed. And a cross stitch project and an embroidery project and a song I'm learning for open mic and my band solos and the book I'm reading. AnyWHO yeah I have a whole bunch of stuff happening Coolio. Let's watch.
STATIC
Aww is a baby
STATIC
Oh look Mars
Aww he has the spacesuit on
Lol I like this dude he's funny
And he's a killjoy
Lol no trespassing
THE DOCTOR. DOCTOR. FUN.
Aww cute gadget
Carrots
Oof he ate the carrot and now he's weird
Weird sounds
OH FUCK
MY HEAD IS SO STUPID that is a mood
Wait they all die? No that's sad?
TODAY
Awww nerd sad nerd
Ooh roaring
Oof now he's all entangled
Cute robot
Aww don't get all deep on her right now Doctor
That's poetic
Don't bicker y'all
Well they're still alive lol
Manipulative monster?
Oof there he is he's very soaked
Oof she's seizing?
Oh dear is her mouth weird now
SHES DRIPPING
oh do the Mars creatures want water cuz their planet dried up
That's scary as hell holy crap
Those are really obviously contact lenses in that shot
Oh wow they're trying to get in with water
They look so funny running like that
Wow
Poetic indeed
BUT BIKES I love him
Funny noises language
Ooh ice frozen creature virus
OooOOOOOoooooOo ActIoN PrOceDurE ONe
This is making me thirsty
He's a runner he's a trackstar
Ooh medical breach thats not good
He knows your death
Something wonderful
OOF? SHE WAS THERE?! OH POOR HER
It saw her
I love her she's wonderful
I fully agree doctor. Remarkable
AWW THATS SO CUTE HER GRANDAUGHTER THATS SO CUUUUTTTEEE AAAHHH
She made a difference? People remember her?! I want to be remembered!
THEY CAN LEAVE
Aww but history says they all die anyway why
Climbing ladder?
Controlled chaos indeed
He is conflicted
Boop boop boop boop boop
They're on the roof!!
Maybe they can
He is still conflicted and sad
Okay but there's 20 minutes left I bet he changes just mind and what fun that would bring
Awww sadness sadness I hate sadness
DOCTOR YOU NEED TO PROCESS TOUR GODAMN TRAUMA
IF YOU CRY I WILL CRY THATS NOT ALLOWED
Final option
Doomed by the narrative
That's a lot of water
HE HAS TO WALK AWAY AND LISTEN TO IT ALL
Awwww her peoples that's really sad I'm gonna cry
IM CRYING
HE HAS TO HEAR ALL OF IT WHILE HE WALKS AWAY AAAAAAHHHH ITS NOT FAIR AAAHHHH
OH NO I FORGOT ABOUT HER NOOO NOW THEY CANT LEAVE
EXPLOSION
I'm crying this is torturous and an amazing axample of being doomed by the narrative and by fate and everything and all
Oh shit he's doing the thing is this the thing I've seen oh fuck has he snapped
YOURE NOT IMMORTAL BECAUSE OF A PROPHECY ABOUT KNOCKING YOURE STUPID
DONT BREAK THE TIME LAWS
NO THE LAWS DONT OBEY ANYONE YOU FUCK I GET THAT YOURE A TRAUMATISED DUDE BUT YOU DONT WIN AGAINST TIME EVER EVER EVER EVER FUCK
This is getting philosophical, it's lucky I have Philosophy this semester
Doomed is doomed by dude
THE ICE IS BREAKING
His brain is incredibly broken, this is why you should process your trauma kids
EXPLOSION SHIT
7 minutes left apparently
They're alive?
Dude you know the rules, I'm glad she has sense
TIME LORD VICTORIOUS MY GUY NO
See this is what happens when your brain gets broken don't let it get this far kiddos
Fuck this is hurting my heart he's not supposed to be like this
GIRLIE JUST DIED ANYWAY SHES BRAVE I LOVE HER FUCK
YES MY DUDE YOUVE GONE TOO FAR DID YOU ONLY JUST REALISE IT
Hello Ood
HES SO TRAGIC HIS HURTS MY HEART
FUCK
Technically I could watch another but I want to watch the part 1 and part 2 for The End Of Time all at once. Cool. This will definitely not cause me horrible emotional pain and heartbreak, nosir.
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10 fandoms 10 characters!
Tagged by @talkingsoup <3
(Man I'm definitely not IN 10 fandoms so most of these are just Blorbos from my Shows/Books/Games)
April O'Neil from TMNT is very special to me. Just a normal gal swept up in absolute cartoon nonsense and accidentally adopting 4 idiot mutant turtle sons/little brothers and you know what, she's just Rolling With It. She's smart, warm, resilient and wholesome. I love her a whole lot. Check out my tmnt sideblog @hamsterandturtlesoup if you really want to know how much xD
Squall from Final Fantasy VIII is a definite son blorbo. As a kid, I naturally thought his icy edgelord emo personality and black leather get-up was simply cool, and when I replayed it again as an adult I was just "oh you poor thing you". He's a child soldier, lost his found-family but can't remember that so just has persistent feelings of abandonment and severe social avoidance, struggles to express emotion, has Friends forced upon him against his will and starts to Feel Things . . . Aaaa ;A; You get to choose certain responses in the game and I like to have him warm up slowly over time to his friends. That character progression is just so wholesome to see. I still have a significant FFVIII fanfic WIP that explores his character development floating around . . . maybe someday I'll finish it x'D
Rung from Transformers MTMTE is a prime of example of me falliing in love with 'minor' characters who then go on to have the shittiest time ever. At this point I'm fairly sure I do this TO them by warping reality when I decide I like them a lot. But I love it when characters I love suffer, so >_>; Rung is just a soft caring psychologist without flashy function or alt mode or combat capability! LEAVE HIM ALOOOOONE-
Lara Croft from Tomb Raider - no, not the modern reboot that gave her extreme daddy issues, or the reboot before THAT that gave her mommy issues and unnecessary friends calling her in the middle of isolated ruin exploration and worries about the blood on her hands. NO, I'm talking about the OG ruthless queen trapped in an aristocratic life who lost her fiance and old life in a plane crash that only she survived, but found herself in that survival and was effectively reborn. Her family cut ties with her and she simply said 'fine, fuck off' and worked alone for the thrill of it and made her own fortune and killed what she had to with a smile. She avoided any kind of love interest until Angel of Darkness and even then it was implicit enough to be completely ignored. She was a fucking badass. Child!hamster wanted to be her. Stripping away the visual and marketing sexualisation of her, she was such an important piece of feminist history in video games. I took archaeology at AS level because of her lmao.
Thalric from the Shadows of the Apt book series (just kidding lol, SotA doesn't have a visible fandom! I AM THE FANDOM-). SotA is a really unique and interesting insect-based fantasy world that I will sing praises for forever. I could talk about a bunch of characters in it <3 However, Thalric is, bluntly, a complicated Wasp villain who has done a lot of Bad Things but starts to feel conflicted over the shitty stuff his empire is doing and making him do. His full conversion to Sort-Of-Good-Guy happens over a looong time and is one of my favourite moral turnabouts I've ever seen. He's just so interesting as an example of a soldier brainwashed by his toxic state and trying to undo that, and at various points you really feel for him even though he's done absolutely terrible things. Only a great writer and compelling character can pull that off.
Raz from Psychonauts is a special little boy and only the first psychic on my list! :D What is not to love about a little psychic boy raised in a circus cursed to die in water with the gumption to sneak into a summer camp for psychic kids. His design, his voice acting, his character writing are just so good and I want to protect him ;A; When Psychonauts 2 unravelled the truth of his family history it just about murdered me in my seat. Since he actually gets recruited, does that make him another child soldier? . . . 2 on my list so far xD
Steven from Steven Universe is just a good soft kind boy with trauma. You know I love a good soft kind boy with trauma. (He also fights in a war, technically? Child soldier number 3!)
Lessa from the Dragonriders of Pern book series is a tiny undernourished woman filled with raw psychic power, vengeance, pride and spite and I respect that. She avoids the massacre of her entire family by pretending to be a filthy servant for a decade, and then manipulates the invading murderer into a duel to the death with a dragonrider whom she also manipulates so that she can reclaim her ancestral home, but instead decides to go one better and become the forerunning Queen dragonrider, so basically rules the world instead for her lifetime. She is a queen from all angles.
Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist is I guess child soldier no 4! What can I say, he's just a spirited, talented idiot boy wrapped up in tragedy and disability and angst. This is, of course, everything I could hope for in a character because suffering is delicious to me. But suffering with a happy ending is even better, and I love FMA's ending for him :3
Samuel Vimes from Discworld is one of my favourite characters ever. He's so flawed, but with a hellish bent for justice and a heart of gold, and I just love seeing things through his eyes? A compelling character with his own layers of angst and tragedy who has always felt very real to me. RIP pterry you are always missed.
Most of these are boys, my god. Too many beautiful (pathetic loser) boys. I have a weakness. Clearly I need to open my heart to more pathetic women in media.
Tagging . . . everyone xD I have a personal rule of not tagging individuals in these things as I don't want to pressure anyone! But go for it if you feel the inclination, I would love to read your takes and blorbos :3
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I read one of your metas on my way to work and retold it to my kids who were all so invested. and to me it's funny because they are the reason I even restarted the show. I had dropped it on season 2 but it's what the 8th graders I'm teaching talk the most about and they got excited finding out I like anime. and I thought 'I can talk about being basic and liking Deku this will go great' except they hit me with "what do you think Horikoshi's view on police truly is? because Hawks narrative is happening but it's still a superhero story of Deku's foretold success" (I fucking love children) and I was speechless like "the emo goth bird??? what the fuck did he do?" but this boy hits me "oh no they now have this guy who is such a new money asshole they should admit that's a nipo-brazilian" (this is Rio he can say it) and that I had to see. but when I say they talk about it it's stuff like "does Shigaraki truly believe in nothing or is it because of AFO's presence and how will that play with Deku saving him?". not like. any doubt that Dabi's need to be seen is meant as conflicting feelings victims have for their abusers. I'm not sure what my point sharing here is but 1) BNHA hits its target audience a lot better than tumblr adults I think and 2) know that a bunch of brazilian 14 year olds think you're sooo cool and smart
Wow, let me respond through my tears...
First off, I burst out laughing at the kid who called him a new money Nipo-Brazilian. My limited knowledge of Nikkei/Sansei/Yonsei history in South America is actually more of knowing the Peru history but like Brazil famously has a bigger Japanese community and I remember reading a lot of forced assimilation efforts. But, as for Hawks, I've always been fond of "post-canon" ideas for him leaving Japan and likely going to other Japanese communities. I'm guessing current day Nipo-Brazilians have gained a lot of money in the past generation? Truly, his "new money"ness is cross-cultural.
I'm just floored by your kids. They're so smart and so right and I'm absolutely fucking loving that they're having these conversations. And out of all the instances people have told me that they shared my work/discussed it IRL, I've never been... as happy as this. This is such an honor. It's humbling you found something in my work that spoke to you and your children and then proceed to discuss it like a teaching tool? Like that's... like my work is helping those kids learn? That's uhh, well, I want to weep. I'm just... I've spent the last ten minutes crying.
It's honestly really something that a lot of the complex conversations and nuances are just readily understandable to teens rather than adults. Fascinating, actually. I wonder why. I'd love to hear about any conclusions they've come to.
And yeah, I'm just... You've made my entire month, or year. I just... reading this ask was a balm for my soul. Thank you so much.
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Just curious to know why people believe that SC girl has admitted feelings to Colby but he rejected? Like I’m new this whole mlp and her being shady and other stuff and I have noticed them both not being as close as before but why have people assumed this or have they seen something? Little lost on that part. And I also notice them both still liking eachother’s ig posts so idk what to think yk? Lol
while i'm writing this out, i'm remembering things. so that's how many fucking layers there is to this whole thing lol
so as i've said before, her and colby would always get paired up together on trips. then on the europe trip, fans assumed that they were together. they even congratulated them on coming out as a couple when that didn't happen.
cut to them all coming home from europe, ms snapchat all of sudden was out of the picture. colby was telling ppl on xplrclub that he was gonna be third-wheeling in vegas, and previously on tiktok deleted comments shipping him and her together. colby and her hung out once more before he ended up moving. that night, ms snapchat allegedly shared to her paying insta fans that she was going on date. she tried to make it seem as if it was just her and him, when in reality it was her, him, brennen, his gf, and couple other ppl.
after this, that's when it became apparent that something happened between her and the group.
she was all of sudden out of the picture. it seemed that not only did colby ignore her after the last time they hung out, but kat also ignored her when she was brought up during a livestream. then ms snapchat told fans that she felt abandoned around the same time. once she started posting more publicly, she seemed to be talking about being rejected by someone she had feelings for. she posted a bunch of tiktoks about it and also made a poetry insta account where she talked about her and some other person being close like lovers but being too afraid to love one another.
also forgot to mention, colby was seen out on a date (but highkey i don't even think it actually was one) and she literally tweeted out that same night and then deleted about how "the ppl you think actually care shock you the most" and "it was never real and meant nothing to you" and "lies".
so clearly she was going thru something, and it just made logical sense that it would be about him since seemingly there is no other guy in her life like that. is it possible that it was some other guy? sure, but if it was, you would think she would have said something like "oh no it's not about colby. me and him are just besties." especially since so many ppl assumed it was about him.
i think whatever happened between them has been worked thru, at least somewhat, by this point. i think what happened is that she always had a crush on him, and eventually told him how she felt. he didn't feel the same, and she was upset about that (rightfully so).
my thing is, we obviously don't know the whole situation. we don't know what went on behind closed doors. maybe they did have something going on, and then when she wanted more, he said no. and i get how that would feel. her being upset isn't what bothered me personally. you're allowed to feel bad when someone rejects you, regardless of whether or not you guys have history. my problem is that she made it all very public. and it's hard to side with her when colby has said constantly for months (if not literal years) that he is single. i mean, one time he literally brought a girl with him to hang out with the core four and abbey. like… what about him doing that screams he's into you??? and if that isn't enough, he deleted shipping comments on a tiktok they did together. like… what's not clicking?
also, he's allowed to not want to be with you, even if he "strung you along". why would you want to be with someone that doesn't want you back????
nonetheless, i think whatever tension was there is gone for the most part. i think they both keep their distance from one another, but i still think she still has feelings for him. but i also think that fans see things that aren't really there, or assume that something she does is related to him just bc of past stuff. clearly they are friendly with one another again. but idk if they will ever be as close as they once were.
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i don’t know if you’ve seen any orv posts ever but orv
Smirk emoji he doesnt know that I've intermittently picked up and put down orv (I used to have a rlly fucked up system where I would homemake audiobooks by taking pdfs and shoving them in text to speech and listening to them while I walked my dog) but also it has been a while so
Kim Dokja is the only fan of a webnovel abt the world ending so as thanks for being a loyal fan the creator sends him to the apocalyptic hellworld with all the characters
Hes on a train for the initial incident w his coworker yoo sangah who is nice when ruh roh the dokkaebi (<- I think that's how it's spelled) monokumas that shit
Chuunibyou boy gets it and dokja kills some bugs
His team is um yoo sangah, bug kid, a soldier, some marketing exec, and time travel gamer boy, whose full name I do not remember!
Theres like a bridge thing where dokja pulls some mad shit n hes in a dinosaur for a bit before he digs his way out. He makes the dokkaebi have a deal w him abt earnings n shit and he buys a bunch of good items and the dokkaebi is like wtf
Gamer boy is impressed by dokja's bullshit? I don't rm3meber what the consequence is. He has a teen girl who hangs abt w him too
Theres a landlord villain guy
Now for the bits I solely have osmosis for:
polyamory? Its dokja, gamer boy, and a woman who I dont think is yoo sangah so idk her
Theres a whole business w pages n shit? I've seen the metaphorical art n stuff. The furthest I got, dokja was faking a book of prophecies for some online community or whatever so maybe it that's?
Dokja either gets a white trench coat at some point or already had it and I missed it
OH YEAH THERES A WEBCOMIC ISNT THERE. Theres a panel of one of the guys shirtless I believe
And that's all my osmosing:)
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Beginning | Previous | Next
Transcript under the cut
Sorya: How are you holding up? Are you doing okay?
Juliana: Yeah! Honestly, it's not painful at all. It feels relaxing if anything.
Sorya: Okay, great! Just let me know if you need a break at any point.
Juliana: Yes, boss.
Sorya: [Snort] It feels weird having you call me that outside of work.
[Tattoo machine noises]
Juliana: Oh my God, did I tell you about this weird customer we had come in last night?
Sorya: I don't think you did! What happened?
Juliana: So this guy came in, acting all high and mighty and stuff-
Sorya: [Scoff] Typical.
Juliana: Pfft, yeah. But for some reason he would not shut up about his sex life.
Sorya: Oh God...
[Chattering]
Juliana: So Rahul was serving him- poor fucker, and out of nowhere he brings up that Isaac Osario dude.
Sorya: What did he say?
Juliana: I can't remember all of it, but if I remember correctly, he was talking about how he was going to fuck him up, and make him his bitch or something. I don't know...
Sorya: Oh...
Sorya: Huh, it'd be interesting to see how that would go. I heard Isaac's pretty brutal on the streets.
Juliana: Oh he is! I've seen him fight; he's not someone you want to mess with.
Sorya: So I've been told...
Juliana: Told?
Sorya: Yeah. I asked Tom about him the other day- only out of curiosity, and he pretty much filled me in.
Thomas: Hey, can I ask you something before I forget?
Sorya: Yeah, sure. What's up?
Thomas: I'm thinking of going up to Carlisle in mid October to surprise my Mum, and I just wanted to ask if I'm good to book some time off to do so?
Sorya: I don't see why not? It's been a while since you've last seen your family. How is she, anyway?
Thomas: She's doing okay! She's got a bit more movement in her left leg, now.
Sorya: That's great! I'm glad to hear she's doing better. Put the request through online, and I'll check with Dan.
Thomas: Thank you!
Thomas: My Mum asked about you, you know?
Sorya: Really?
Thomas: Yeah. She mostly just asked how you were- she really wants to meet you.
Sorya: We're gonna have to arrange something, then.
Thomas: Yeah. She'd like that. She really likes you.
Sorya: I see you've been saying nice things about me, then.
Thomas: Well, it's not like I have anything bad to say about you.
Sorya: I find that hard to believe, Tommy.
Thomas: Okay fine, next time I'll tell her about how you're a workaholic who doesn't know when to take a break, and that you have weird eating habits.
Sorya: Leave my eating habits out of this!
Thomas: [Laughs] But seriously, though. You're the only person I know who eats food in a certain order based on the least liked to the most liked food.
Sorya: Is that not normal? I swear everyone does it! Even Isa- my old housemate, Isaiah does it. Maybe you're the one with the weird eating habits.
Thomas: Whatever you say, weirdo.
Sorya: [Laughs]
Thomas: But seriously, though. I'd like you to meet my family one day, I think you'd get along really well.
Sorya: I'd like that, man. You'll have to be my tour guide and shit- show me around Carlisle.
Thomas: I could show you the Lake District, also.
Sorya: For real? I've always wanted to go there at least once.
Thomas: Looks like you've got some holiday requests that you'll have to put through, also.
Sorya: Right.
[Car drives by]
Thomas: Sorya?
Sorya: Yeah?
Thomas: You still down for the gym tomorrow?
Sorya: Fuck yeah, bro. Just let me know what time and I'll be there.
Thomas: Great! Just... Be careful on your way back. We've had a bunch of shit happen up this road lately. Some older man got jumped by a group of lads the other day.
Sorya: Shit... I'll be careful.
Thomas: You sure? We can get you an Uber or something to get you home quicker.
Sorya: I'll be fine. Honestly. You know me, I can take care of myself.
Thomas: I know. I just worry sometimes.
Sorya: Trust me, I'll be okay.
Thomas: Okay, fine. Just message me when you get back, okay?
Sorya: Sure. I'll see you tomorrow.
[Music playing through earbuds]
#ss:intruder#intruder: chapter 1#the sims 4#the sims 4 story#the sims 4 storytelling#ts4#ts4 story#ts4 storytelling#simblr#tw: mentions of violence#*sorya moau#*juliana hernandez#*thomas davenport#we finally get to see sorya at his other job#shared some screenshots in a server i'm in#and i'm glad we can agree on how cute these boys are#just two dudes being dudes#also if there's any errors it's because i literally just edited this post LAST NIGHT
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Let's go 3, 7, 15, 20, 27 for ask game!
3. What ideas come from when you were little
If I'm taking the question correctly, that would be my affinity for drawing beings that look like a bunch of stuff piled together. I don't remember much of my childhood drawings, but my mama keeps most of them in her filing cabinet. From what I've seen, I've always liked shit like that. I had an oc named Broomy, he was a dog like creature who had a pumpkin for a head, the body of a broom, paws (same color as the broom) and the straw end for the tail, and candle pupils. I loved that guy with my whole heart man, I need to find a picture of him or something to redraw. Other than that, gore. Don't subject your children/siblings to horror movies and adult swim shows guys, seriously
7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate
Physical/digital stim boards. I don't understand the digital appeal, but that might be because I've never had one that was like "oh damn that looks great" but I have touched a physical stim board, I hated every second because it had sequins on it (I Cannot Touch Those) but the enthusiastic explanation I got made me like it, even if I couldn't touch it. Digital ones look really cool too, I'm just very specific on what I like looking at, but I imagine that it takes forever to find the proper gifs that aren't too fucked up and do all the arrangements and border work, I would love to try one, but I'm genuinely at a loss on what to do ^^;; Tumblr stim girlies (gender neutral) I love y'all to bits
15. *Where* do you draw (don't drop your ip address this just means do you doodle at a park or smth)
I draw largely at home, having chronic pain can extremely limit what I can do during a day. I love taking my traditional shit out to draw at the park, but I don't get ideas too often for it to be worth the bag space I could use for something else. Speaking as someone who has literal drawers full of art supplies, I wish I could go out with it all and be unbothered by The General Public, because I like drawing people out and about, but the distain overwhelms me and so does the arthritis
20. Something everyone else finds hard to draw but you enjoy
Almost every time an artist friend comes to me while I work, it's "wow you're really good at eyes, that's the least favorite part for me" and I can see why. I learned how to do realism from Vogue and People magazines, the shots were clear, it had closeups of hands/eyes/clothes, and eyes were the first thing I learned how to draw properly, I love them sm, they are always in the margins of papers I'm stuck with, or color practice, or whatever I need the eye to be for. Very reliable part of the body artistically for me :>
27. Do you warm up before getting to the good stuff? If so, what is it you draw to warm up with
See number 15 for a short answer.
Long answer: I have a very small window to get a drawing done, if I can't get it within the day, or even 2 hours, I have a very hard time picking it up again due to depression, the chronic pain, and sometimes my headmates don't actually know how to use the computer to draw. I consider the amount of drawing I do something to be proud of most days, between the brain fog/deperson/derealization and aching joints, the amount of work I do can be great all things counted. Sure, others can get out more things with worse than me, or what have you, but my style is detail heavy with the line work and colors, and composition is hard for me.
Tangent here:
I would like to say that even if you get out only one drawing every once in a while due to shit getting in the way, at least it's something and you should be proud of yourself for being able to accomplish that within the parameters you have. The algorithm sucks, on every platform, even here on Tumblr with their abysmal search bar, so there's sometimes a pressure to put out a bunch to get a little recognition, but quality over quantity, y'know? No matter what, try not to stare down the cliff of having a shit ton of numbers attached to your hard work.
The incentives are great, and I completely understand that, but once you look at it as a chore, you'll never do shit for you again like you used to without giving up on the algorithm anyway. I avoid going down any tags unless I absolutely have to, because I get discouraged by the numbers, so I end up just looking at my art, and friend's art only. It's okay to stare at your own shit, I've never seen anyone say that anywhere as of recent, so for those who need it, it's okay to be in love and enamored by your own work enough to stare at it even days after posting it, I highly encourage looking at your own art like you do others, because that's a good source of encouragement, or at least for me, love what you do, give yourself a break from not being at the top of every tag/platform, because that's a double edged sword, and no one likes getting blood on their suits
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i swear every time i get into a game that has an actual community it'll feel like i just woke up on mars because i usually dig really deep into a game's lore, history, trivia, unused content, etc. and THEN i'll find stuff from the community and i don't even mean for that to happen it just works that way and it always plays out the exact same way without fail besides for when there is no community
like, a week or two ago i remembered OFF exists, watched a whole playthrough of it, have been listening to it's OST an unhealthy amount (I'm doing it right now, Unreasonable Behavior is so good), i go onto tumblr, first OFF post i see once i add it's tag to my feed is someone's art for an AU where all the characters all like hang out at a cafe together or something and everything is chill, which is like the antithesis of everything i had just experienced related to the game and i couldn't help but laugh in confusion once i realized what i was looking at
i go in the discord server for iconoclasts after obsessing over the game for like a year and annoying the fuck out of my friends about it, literally the only fanmade character i have seen is a chemico contra member who's also a phlebotomist, i had to google what a phlebotomist is and like... i didn't look into their lore by ctrl-f-ing or whatever so i'm probably missing something, but how do you come to this conclusion (actually i think i know, they mentioned they actually became one at some point after making this character which is really funny actually)
i start watching videos about pikmin after finally beginning to slowly come off one of the most intense hyperfixations i've had in my entire life to the point i had played through all 5 games in the series and dedicated weeks and entire days to trying to figure out the lore before giving up because it's nintendo lol and spending a roughly equal amount of time trying to come up with intentionally terrible ideas for more games in the series only to accidentally get WAY too into it (see my alph wraith post lol), i am greeted with Fiddlebert, and a later a dub of an AU where the player character is actually a wraith and is hiding it from the rest of the rescue corps (this post is still probably one of the funniest jokes i've ever seen) and the entire thing scarily resembles the type of shit i'd write if i was given this premise to work with down to the mention of an innocent child being consumed that's first brought up with a doodle of them saying "Oh boy I sure do hope being alive!" while holding The Goo THAT'S EXACTLY HOW I TREAT HORRIBLE EVENTS IN MY STORIES WHEN I'M TALKING ABOUT THEM
i look at the tag for ultrakill on tumblr and feel like i just got sent to hell myself with the punishment of being stuck in a permanent state of confusion due to the sheer contrast to the source material all the fanart has, same goes for most of the posts about it in general actually, i go in expecting like blood & violence and instead i'm greeted with gabriel & v1 making out. drawn by 50 different users. (i don't even need to link anything here just check #ultrakill you'll see)
and this isn't even touching on all of the ships i've seen that are utterly incomprehensible to me because. like. why magolor and the snowman enemy? why kingsly and puddle??? i thought alph didn't like louie? wait also what do you mean at least two people's headcanon is that louie is trans? (ok i couldn't re-find some of the things in this paragraph and i'm too tired to conduct an in-depth search but you could probably find it if you looked)
i'm not hating on anything i brought up here it's just a bunch of funny examples i think about a lot now that i've seen them, you guys go do whatever you want even if i don't get it go have fun lol, i just love the feeling of pure confusion when i walk into the room and get punched in the face with a complete subversion of my expectations because it feels like i'm missing SO MUCH CONTEXT and i never get used to it i love it i love the internet
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Andreea's skin?
yeah, it's bad. but like I said, she doesn't know how to fix that 😂😂😂
which is the amusing part for me...
---
it's...like...
we went to the seaside once and Andreea hid under the umbrella the whole time, half dressed, getting a lot of looks from bystanders who had never seen someone almost dressed for winter on such a hot weather.
she didn't want to get anymore freckles. she has very deep ones that go way underneath the skin. I only get the superficial type (yellow-like)
so her face looks like someone pooped on it a bunch of brown specks
it's not a pretty sight 😂
---
I remember that time on the beach because I had a strange supernatural perception phenomenon thing going on. I always know where people are looking in general, in a room. Because of shared perception.
But like, when I went on the beach that time, I knew how many people were staring at me. It was uncanny!
I was like: wtf is wrong with these people, right? Romanians are like the Mediterranean type, like Greek people, in that they think that you're giving them a licence to stare at your half naked body or something, if on the beach!
It's not a nudist beach, you idiots!
I remember that's one of the few times when the father saw the waist size, the real one. And his eyes did something odd where he was practically glued to the shape of waist. SO not only did he know my waist size is too small to be like Nela's size, he's a fucking moron! An imbecile of the highest calibre! That he would not doubt the photography as much as use it against...against who? You fucking moron, die!
So anyway, I decide to go in the water so people would stop staring at me. And I practically stayed there for like a whole week, 8 hours each day because I didn't want to stumble upon that shared perception (it was very inhibiting...this doesn't happen to me when I go swimming in pools eventually). That got me very buffed up and muscular. But like, I had no choice, I had to stay inside the water!
And I remember sunset time, the waves got too high out of nowhere and I looked to my right and there was a guy with sunglasses only 10 metres away and we both looked at each other after staring at the wave and like, we were both like: "oh shit" and he smiled with teeth, and I was the same like, "we're about to get hit by that wave, aren't we?"
And then I faced the wave, man. And I ain't even a surfer or anything.
---
I like to explore the natural stuff and landscapes that I've created. Fearlessly for that matter. For I know when they're good for me or when they harm me.
Andreea's a makeup-filled scaredy cat with more fat in her body that would traumatise a person for life if they ever stared at it! I would know! So then I made sure people don't date her: no boy ever likes her! Ever!
Hence her whoredom and her whore status: she's trying waaaaay too hard AND at my expense. Get it?
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part 1
15/16/17/09/2023
As I begin to write this post, I realised quite a lot of shit happened this week + last weekend? I went to Osaka on a 7 hour coach straight after work last friday. When I reached Osaka, it reeked of hedonism and debauchery. It was honestly hilarious, the infamous stereotype that Japanese people don't fuck now seems like a fraudulent headline made for clicks. Everyone fucks, everyone was drunk and most important of all everyone was having a damn good time. I met up with a fellow JET shortly afterwards since he was letting me stayover. A great guy, younger than me. We went on the same flight together all the way from London so it was pleasant seeing him again. We hit the local convenience store to buy drinks but I also went and bought spaghetti. I was craving it and I was craving it cold lol, much to my friend's judgement and confusion. Once we got to the apartment, it was like the smallest place I've ever seen lol. It was a studio that costs 30,000 yen more than my place. The city...sucks. Not that I'm complaining about having a place to stay, hell no. I just feel for my man. We also ordered from a Matsuya (I think), a chain of restaurants that are opened 24/7. We both got rice bowls, was pretty decent stuff. I was so hungry because I was on a coach for 7 hours and it took an additional hour to get to my friend's place. After the latest dinner, we just spoke about life. Oh yeah I showered before eating, I'm not gross. I was practically rotting on the coach - I apologise to everyone. I was in my work clothes so it was extra nasty. But I digress. It was mainly my friend talking and me asking questions. It was actually his second time applying for this programme, the first time he failed which genuinely surprised me. I automatically assume most people past the first time. After talking for a bit we were straight up exhausted since it was then 3am. We went to bed and woke up at 8am the next day lol. Despite only running on 5 hours sleep, we went straight ahead with our poorly-planned schedule. We got to the station and I finally got a Icoca card which is sort of like a rite of passage in Japan. The more popular variant used in Tokyo is called Suica but they're the same thing. Although I WILL GET A SUICA TOO. It's pretty much exactly the same as an oyster card in the UK. Afterwards we went straight to Osaka castle and did a bunch of walking and touristy stuff. I took fire photos of my friend, his photos of me not so much but I'm ugly as fuck anyway so it didn't matter. The castle grounds were beautiful, we didn't go inside the castle because the queue was immense but we walked around the perimeters. There's a shrine in the castle grounds so we went there and I threw a 5 yen coin in and prayed for luck and happiness. After the castle, we decided to walk around for a bit to waste time. We were going to meet some other fellow JETs who wanted to tag along. We found a small cafe called "Mick Cafe" and it was great. Smallest cafe ever, dude was chill as hell and was just watching his TV whilst having a smoke. Tried Osaka cider and found out cider is different in Japan and fucking America. It has no alcohol, which obviously pissed the British in me off. The American JETs kindly explained that in the US it's the same but that there exists cider with alcohol. It's called "hard cider", what the fuck is this shit man. "hard cider"?! It's 4%. Nothing hard about this fucking cider. ANYWAY back to the diary note taking. We eventually met up with another JET in the middle of Dotonbori, just under the famous glico sign. By the way, Dotonbori is so fucking jammed packed full of people jesus christ, reminds me of Camden in the UK. We went for an Indian lunch after meeting up. I had a big ass biryani and tried pani puri for the first time. Fire stuff, I could eat a thousand of those things. With all of us weebs, we decided to visit Den town or some shit, I can't actually remember the name. It was supposed to be the anime sector but it was actually crazy small.
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youtube
I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.
I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.
This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.
Transcript below the cut.
FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??
Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.
I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.
Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.
Brace yourselves.
Some quick prehistory:
In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.
And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.
(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)
Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.
Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.
We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.
Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.
The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.
Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.
This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.
Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.
In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.
In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.
Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.
Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.
In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.
After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.
In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.
Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.
Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.
[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]
In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.
It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.
To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.
They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.
A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.
But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.
Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.
(sigh) Let’s take a breath.
Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.
In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.
Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”
Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.
The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.
What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.
This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.
The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.
Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.
In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.
Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?
And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.
So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?
The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!
Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,
How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.
What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:
you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.
MEMEIFICATION
So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.
Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.
A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.
You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -
ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.
If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!
If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times
that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?
So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,
this is a rape joke.
I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.
Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.
If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.
Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.
MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS
Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.
In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”
What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.
Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.
And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.
The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.
In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.
You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.
It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.
ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL
A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.
It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.
The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.
They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.
I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.
LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP
One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”
Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.
A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.
Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.
This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”
But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.
AD CAMPAIGN
George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.
GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.
Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.
PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING
One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.
Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”
People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.
This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.
This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.
This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.
THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END
Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”
The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.
This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.
This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.
The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”
And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.
But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.
WHY GAMES?
Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:
why not games?
Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.
This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.
And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.
The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.
And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.
Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.
Sorry this was such a bummer.
Thank you for your time.
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