Kobold family trip!

Artfight drawing for Tim featuring his character Gorpy the kobold and his growing clan.

I WILL CHOKE ON THESE SOUR GRAPES TIL I'M IN MY GRAVE

I left this open in another tab, meaning to watch it like a week ago. It's an official video published and promoted on the Youtube Studio dashboard, about common misconceptions around their recommendation algorithm and what the truths really are. .

And now, finally watching it, that white haired dude, Mr. "Youtube Liason", is the guy who told me the algorithm ignored one of my videos because "maybe it just wasn't very good."

Famously, and something I will never ever shut up about when given the chance to mention it, I put out a video about Jurassic Park games just before Christmas, expecting it to slot in and do decent numbers, just like all of my other videos do. Since Youtube earnings tend to spike around the holidays, this was going to be how I paid for Christmas presents that year. It was something I'd done at least twice before. Instead, the algorithm completely ignored the video because it was outside my usual wheelhouse of Sonic content.

This is shockingly relevant to the very first topic they cover: whether a single "off-topic" video actually matters with regards to how the algorithm sees your channel, and the general answer from the Youtube technician is "No." You don't gotta tell me.

When I put my full weight behind a video, it easily breaks 10k views, even 50k or 200k+ views. Some of my most popular videos have cracked the multi-millions!

So when this dude spells out in plain english that the algorithm effectively ignores one-off videos? Yeah, no shit. I'm living proof of that. Across the first two years, that Jurassic Park video struggled to break even 2000 views. Only by paying out of my own pocket for multiple promotional campaigns and constantly complaining about its lack of performance has it struggled to hit just over 5000 views, some four years later. The algorithm knew it was way outside my regular wheelhouse and treated it like poison.

And this liason clown had the balls to tell me "well maybe the video was just bad, sorry bud" only to, two years later, sit down with this technician that spells out exactly what I was knew was happening and was trying to explain to him.

Except now, of course, it's being spun as a positive: "don't worry, a one-off won't hurt your regular content" as opposed to the "we didn't notify anyone about your one-off and it became stillborn" I experienced.

I have sat down and thought very intently about this Jurassic Park video. Obviously, if I make a stink about its performance, tell people the algorithm made a poor judgment call, I'm going to get patted on the back and comforted that yes, the video is good. Don't worry. The mean old algorithm is just dumb. Right? And Youtube unflinchingly believes in the power of their algorithm as this perfect shining golden standard to drive viewership, the thing that can never, ever be wrong about guys like me.

I appreciate the comfort and support of friends and colleagues and even random strangers who are inherently distrustful of the algorithm. But I also know that feels like an echo chamber.

So then what, do I trust Youtube? Absolutely not. At the end of the day their algorithm still made an unfair judgment call and despite their claims above that any old video can get picked up by the algorithm at any time, my video has never recovered. I've tried more interesting thumbnails, I've spent almost $100 on Google Adsense promotion -- one of which, I should note, was the same week that Jurassic World 3 released, and the other being E3. Both should have been extremely lucrative times to run ads. And I got crickets.

I like the video. I stand by the fact I think I did a good job on it. I remain proud of it. It's as good as any real-effort-content I've put out in the last five years. The echo chamber tells me it's a good video, too, even if I literally can't buy views.

So my only recourse is to sit here and stew in my bitterness towards this algorithm. The shining, ultimate example as to why you should never let a computer make a qualitative judgment call. And I will be frustrated and angry about this until I draw my last breath.

Dragon Ball Super Movie 2: Super Hero (1/5)

Finally, finally, it's time to talk about Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. I've been waiting a long time to do this. First I had to wait for the movie to come out, then I had to wait a while for the rest of the fandom to go see it so I wouldn't spoil anything, then I had to wait for the DVD release so I could take screenshots, and by the time I was ready to do that, I was waist-deep in the 2023 Dragon Ball Apocrypha Liveblog. So the DVD has been sitting on my table for months waiting for me to get to this point, and now I'm finally here.

It's probably just as well, since blogging about the other stuff has helped me figure out how to tackle this movie. Like a rhinocerous sandwich, this thing is pretty big and dense, and I'm not really sure where to begin, and now Tumblr only lets me put 30 images in each post, so I have to think ahead a little. So I'm going to split this up into five installments and hopefully that will give me the room I need.

Super Hero opens with a flashback/recap focusing on the Red Ribbon Army. Real quick: the Red Ribbon Army was a mercenary group that dominated much of the world, until their hunt for the Dragon Balls put them into conflict with Son Goku, who destroyed their headquarters in Age 750. Seventeen years later, the Red Ribbon scientist Dr. Gero launched a campaign of revenge, using several cyborgs and androids of his own design. Gero failed, but his final experiment, Cell, managed to travel back in time from the future, where he nearly destroyed the whole world before Goku's son Gohan defeated him.

If you're a Dragon Ball fan, you probably already knew all of that, but what this movie reveals is that the Red Ribbon Army still lives on through its parent organization, the Red Pharmaceutical Company. When Commander Red died, his son Magenta inherited control over RPC, and he's been building up funds ever since, hoping to restore the Red Ribbon Army to its former glory. From behind the scenes, it was RPC that financed Dr. Gero's cybernetics research, but with Gero's death, there was really nothing more Magenta could do.

And that's what I really love about this shot of Magenta looking at a scale model of the old RR HQ. His father ran the Army from the real thing, but Magenta can't build a new one because Goku would just wreck it like he did before, and he can't beat Goku because Dr. Gero was the only one smart enough to build android warriors to kill that guy, and Gero's dead now. Magenta ought to be satisfied running the RPC, but what he really wants to do is rule the world, and he can't. Without Gero, the closest he can come to that dream is hanging around in this private little war museum he seems to have, and he probably can't even show it to anyone since it would expose the RPC's secret.

But then Magenta learned of Dr. Gero's grandson, Hedo. The movie opens with Magenta's right-hand-man, Carmine, giving a briefing on Hedo, so I assume Carmine was the one who discovered him. Better throw up the Carmine screenshot...

Man, these look great. Unfortunately only the bad guys seem to get them. Would have been neat if they made one for Goku or whatever. Yeah, everyone knows who Goku is, but who cares? I want to see an obnoxious still with his name in big letters.

This movie is chocked full with little gags and Easter eggs and such, so there's a lot to cover. Part of the reason for this is that the first twenty minutes of the movie is really heavy on exposition. The plot isn't all that complicated. The bad guys want to make some evil robots to kill the good guys, but to get there we have to explain who the bad guys are and how they joined forces, which takes a while. So there's a lot of visual things happening while they talk. For example, in this scene where Carmine has an overproduced powerpoint presentation playing while he explains who Dr. Hedo is. While he talks, Magenta has some sort of difficulty with hot beverages.

And while Carmine's video plays, we see Dr. Gero's family tree, including his wife, Vomi, and his son, Gevo. This is the first direct appearance of either character, although we've known about Gevo for some time. Several years ago, Akira Toriyama did an interview where he explained that Dr. Gero had a son in the Red Ribbon Army, and that son was killed during the battle with Goku, and so Gero modeled Android 16 after him. In the video game Dragon Ball Fighterz, we meet Android 21, who looks a lot like the image of Vomi in Carmine's video. I forget how and when these details were established, but the idea seems to be that Gero modeled #21 after his wife.

So does this mean Hedo is the son of Gevo? No, Gero had a second son, and that was Hedo's father. Hedo's parents died during his childhood, and he then went on to become a great scholar, earning his doctorate by age 14.

Today, Dr. Hedo is 24, and he's in prison, because he's a little too smart for his own good. Recently, he dug up some corpses and turned them into primitive androids, then he got them jobs at a convenience store to earn money for Hedo's research. I'm not exactly sure which laws were broken here, but it was enough to put him in jail. In the dub, Magenta observes that Hedo would have made more money with less fuss if he had simply robbed the store.

But Magenta doesn't care if Hedo is a little goofy. His talent for cybernetics is even greater than Dr. Gero's, which is pretty scary considering how close Gero came to destroying the Earth. Magenta needs those talents if he's ever going to bring back the Red Ribbon Army, so he waits three months for Hedo to get released from prison, then swings by to offer him a lift. To Magent's surprise, Hedo already knows who he is and has a pretty good guess as to what he wants.

This is because Hedo's been tracking Carmine with a surveillance device. It looks similar to the ones Dr. Gero used to study the Z-Fighters and collect genetic samples for Cell's creation. The difference is that Hedo claims it's a cyborg he built from a live bee. Maybe I shouldn't take this too literally, but it sure sounds like Hedo vivisected a bee in his prison cell and installed cameras and robot parts into its body. And for all I know, Gero did the same thing to make all of his spy robots, but I always assumed they were purely mechanical. Anyway, Carmine's been monitoring Hedo for a while now, driving by the prison yard whenever Hedo's out there, and Carmine's limo has a dome in the roof for his pompadour, so it was conspicuous enough for Hedo to notice. He built the bee, then had it trail Carmine until he found out who he was working for.

And the bee also gives us a great shot from behind Magenta's desk, where he has two framed photos. One is his dad, Commander Red, while the other is Colonel Violet. So we pretty much have to assume Violet is his mom, right? Kind of wild that Red and Violet were a thing, considering that one of the last times we saw Violet was when she looted the Red Ribbon vault during Goku's attack on their HQ. And she even did it in full view of the security cameras, probably knowing that Red would be watching.

So I wonder what Magenta and Violet's relationship must have been like? Is she still alive? Does Magenta know about her betrayal? How could he not? And considering how devoted he is to his father's dreams, how could he let her treason slide? Or maybe he recognizes that Red was a bad leader, and he means to succeed where Red failed. It's interesting stuff, that's all I'm trying to say.

Anyway, Hedo isn't too impressed with Magenta, but he has snacks, so Hedo gets in the car. Magenta asks if he got picked on during his prison sentence, and Hedo says everyone who gave him a trouble would always meet with "mysterious deaths". That column of black smoke behind them is the prison, by the way. The other inmates (and probably some guards) were chewing out Hedo as he left, so Hedo tossed a bomb inside as a final parting shot.

Magenta tries to sweet-talk Hedo by explaining their family connections. Gero once worked for Red, then Magenta inherited the RPC and continued to fund Gero's research. But Hedo isn't moved, since he never met his grandfather, and Hedo's parents hated Gero for his association with the Red Ribbon.

More importantly (to Hedo), he finds the Red Ribbon Army unappealing, because they resemble villains, while Hedo is a connoisseur of superheroes. That's why he's wearing the purple bodysuit, by the way. From what I can tell, Hedo's a fan of a TV show or something that features a character in a similar outfit.

So if Hedo's all into heroes, why did he... you know... desecrate those graves? I'm pretty sure that contradiction is the point of the character. He likes certain genres of entertainment, and he likes and identifies with heroic characters and their exploits, but he seems pretty much devoid of morals himself. He's like a Star Wars fan who loves the Jedi but has no qualms about harassing people who liked Episode VIII. He's one of those... oh, what's the word?

Asshole. Yeah, Hedo's an asshole.

So now Magenta has to convince Hedo that he's not an asshole, which is pretty stupid since they're clearly both assholes. Hedo just wants Magenta to pretend his asshole-ery is the same flavor as his own. So Magneta weaves this whole tale of how he wants to use his power and wealth to improve the world and stamp out evil. While he says all of this, Carmine cuts off the car ahead of him for driving too slow. But it's not just any civilian he did this to...

It's Janet! We'll meet Janet later on, but she gets a cameo here at the start of the movie, which is awesome to spot when you rewatch it. Fuck you, Carmine, for passing on the right and scaring Janet. Carmine doesn't had a big impact on the movie's plot, but he does generate nuclear heel heat simply because the things he does are very obnoxious. One thing I have to respect is that he's the one bad guy who doesn't try to rationalize or disguise his villainy. Carmine's a prick and he doesn't care who knows it.

For example, even after Magenta explains how he's a "champion of justice", and raises his offer to one billion zeni per android, Hedo still isn't convinced, so Carmine brandishes a gun just to make it clear that they won't take 'no' for an answer. Magenta may haggle, but Carmine is too direct for that.

So Hedo accepts Magenta's offer, but not because of the gun, since he enhanced his body to make it bulletproof some time ago. Also, his cyber-bee is armed with a toxic venom so deadly that it can kill any biological life with a single sting. So Carmine's threats are useless. Hedo is only taking the job because he's fascinated by the challenge of creating the ultimate android with an unlimited budget.

So he asks for background on Magneta's enemy, and Magenta explains that it wasn't Mr. Satan who defeated Cell at the Cell Games. He's part of the "organization", but the real ringleader is Bulma of the Capsule Corporation. Magenta says that her confederates appear to be aliens, which explains how Capsule Corp. got the technology for miniaturization and spaceflight. I'm not sure how much of this Magenta actually believes, and how much is a spin he's putting on things to make Dragon Team look like a gang of villains.

Magenta says that Capsule Corp is collaborating with aliens to pacify the Earth, then subjugate it for colonization. Hedo finds this hard to believe, until Magenta shows him footage of Future Trunks killing Mecha-Frieza. I'm not sure how he could have gotten that footage, unless it was recorded by Gero's spy robots.

In this twisted scenario, Gero created Cell to take the fight to Bulma's "organization", but he just couldn't get the job done. 17 and 18 turned against Gero, and Dragon Team was just too powerful that day. Hedo asks if Bulma is an alien, and Magenta's like "sure, why not?"

Then Hedo eats his Oreo all weird. Like, who does this? He takes apart the cookie, which is pretty standard, then he uses the one side to scrape the cream off the other, and he eats this part. Why? You already had a cookie with cream filling on it! This is just a duplication of effort!

The absolute best way to eat an Oreo is to dunk it in milk until it gets so soggy that it almost falls apart. When I was a kid I designed a device that would allow you to immerse the entire cookie in milk for maximum sogification without having to get your fingers wet. In hindsight, this was a stupid idea, because you can just do that with a spoon.

All this talk of alien conspiracies and Cell's heroic last stand get Hedo fired up, and he pulls up the hood of his costume and declares that the world needs a hero to design the ultimate android. I mean, he just got done saying he didn't buy into Magenta's good guy bit, but he does buy into his own good guy bit, and Magenta's story seems to suit this. For Hedo, it's less about being a hero and more about playing a hero. Magenta has created the role, and Hedo is eager to fill it.

And they finally arrive at a Red Ribbon base out in the middle of nowhere. Then the movie flashes forward to six months later, so I guess this a good place to sign off. Next time, we'll get into Piccolo and Gohan, and see what they're up to.

Steve switches laundry detergents and Eddie is allergic to the new one

I've wanted to try my hand at some camp counselor steddie for the past few weeks, so I thought this prompt might be a good one to do it with, since it's got a pretty plausible reason for the change.

To go with this, background (because who am I without writing a complicated response to a prompt): Eddie and Nancy practically run the camp, they've been going there since they were five, and are both now twenty. Chrissy, Jonathan and Argyle have also been going for a while. Eddie is really close with Chrissy and with Nancy. Steve and Robin are new this year. Because Steve is a new counselor, he's over 'The Secret Base' cabin, which is what Will, Lucas, Dustin and Mike have claimed for 8 years together. Normally Eddie is over them, but has been given more responsibility this year, so Steve is stepping in and Eddie will be helping him if needed, as well as rooming with him in the small attached room.

Also I do realize that even though this is a Steve prompt, it technically affects everyone around Eddie. But we're going to ignore that. Enjoy!

XXX

After four days at camp, Eddie and Nancy round up all of the laundry from the cabins, splitting it into girl counselors, guy counselors, and the rest going by each cabin. The twenty year old keeps all of his things separate, just like all other fifteen years, his sensitive skin only allowing for a specific detergent that he brings himself.

As they carry bags up to the main building, Nancy makes an offhand comment about a new detergent they're trying out, but that they might switch back since their old one is cheaper. Eddie doesn't think much of it, nodding and watching as a few kids run around the large green field in the middle of the camp area. They dump half of all the boys cabins' clothes into the large, industrial washer, Nancy puts the detergent in and then they both sigh from the trek.

Nose itching slightly, the camp manager rubs at it with his wrist, sniffling. When the feeling doesn't let up, Eddie brings the neck of his shirt up and over his face, turning away from the woman next to him.

"ihgxt! hih'nGKkt! God, s-sohhry- ih'gkKT'uh!"

"Bless you," Nancy offers with a smile, and Eddie nods in thanks before stretching.

"Alright, let's go start on breakfast, shall we?"

By that night, everyone's clothing is done washing. The kids are lined up getting their clothing from Argyle and Jonathan, and Eddie's walking with Steve back to their cabin to put their own stuff away. Eddie's carrying both his and Steve's clothes so Steve can carry the other boys clothing, which they'd so graciously grabbed to allow the four to work on some campaign they're planning.

"h'KGX'uh! ih'NXt'uh! hih'GXTtuh! Sorry," Eddie sniffles into his wrist, turning back around after having snapped his face into his arm and twisting to avoid sneezing on Steve.

"It's fine dude. So...I know we all went out to the lake last night, is that a common occurrence?" Steve's curiosity makes Eddie laugh.

"Yeah, usually. Sometimes not all of us go, but you can always find Argyle and Jonathan up there since they've got the oldest of the kids. Usually don't have to worry about them waking up with nightmares or having peed their bunks or anything," Eddie chuckles, scrunching his nose up.

Steve nods, looking happy to have that time without kids. Eddie watches him walk into the cabin and feels his heart flutter a bit. God he's so fucked.

Three hours later, Lucas, Will, Dustin and Mike are all in their respective top bunks, laughing and throwing things at each other. It's past 10, which usually means lights out, but Eddie and Steve are still working on getting ready to go to bed, so the kids get some extra time. Shivering, Eddie huffs and looks through his bag, groaning when he can't seem to find his usual black sweatshirt. He's always been cold natured, and with the fan going, fixed right in the middle of the tiny room he and Steve are sleeping in, he's extra cold.

"What's up?" Steve asks, stretching as he sits on his bed, looking soft and sleepy. Eddie smiles at him, but then he rolls his eyes when he remembers why he's annoyed.

"Can't find my sweatshirt," the twenty year old grumbles, kicking his bag back under his own bed opposite of Steve's.

"Oh, here, hold on."

As Steve rummages through his own bag, Eddie pulls his hair up into a messy bun and looks over the list of things he has set for his early morning. When he's halfway through, something hits him in the face. Looking down, he sees a bright green sweatshirt with 'Harrington, 28' on the back in bold, white font.

"You can use mine till you find yours. I bet someone else just accidentally grabbed it from the laundry," Steve assures.

"Oh, thanks Stevie, for letting me wear your jacket. I bet it's a honor, I'll make all the girls jealous," he jokes, tugging it on.

As soon as he does, a slightly floral scent washes over him. It's almost nice, until it starts making his nose itch. He's never been allergic to much, mostly just cats and dust, never anything like flowers, but he guesses this is what it must feel like. Sniffling, he reaches frantically for his bandana that's tossed onto the small bedside table.

"ihh'KGt! ihdjTCH! huh'IHGTtschh'uhew!"

Bandana pressed tightly to his nose, his eyes flutter again.

"hihKTCH'uhew! ihgkch'ew! F-Fuhhking hell...ihnktch'uh! huh'IHKksh'uhEW! God damn it!"

Steve is watching, wide eyed, as Eddie rubs his nose and sniffles, head suddenly packed with congestion. Rubbing his right eye, the guitarist turns back to Steve, snuffling.

"D-Do you wear cologne or s-" Eddie stops mid sentence, nostrils flaring. He rubs at them with his knuckles, and then he groans again. "Fuck! The...shit, the detergent..." he grumbles, coughing a little. Yanking Steve's jacket off, he throws it back at him. His arms have little red dots appearing randomly.

"Dude!"

"I'm gonna kill Nancy."

ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos

Trump is 'inciting political violence' sharing Biden hog-tied video: Biden campaign

1 hour ago

This is a case of mistaken identity

..

This a****** put our son into a figure four headlock and was seeing if it was his son doing it it was after Randall text cob left yeah he went across town and her son thought it was him no same guy and he murdered Randall and he took over the hard knock 5150 and he did that to her son and he's now saying about Biden and you people are lackluster you're lazy and slow the guy needs to leave here okay we're trying to express it it's your stupid way you know how it works

Thor Freya

And yeah you got hit in the head and you're not in one of us keep saying to people you're such a f****** bonehead you got hit in the head five times in the past year and it really wants is enough you stupid s*** Trump and you're asking for it everyday why don't you ask around you should shut up and leave you're going to hit in the head to the end you really need to get hit in the head again you need to get hit in the head tonight to shut you the f******

Zues Hera

He revealed it all tonight he sat there and told on the Max and the max just sit back they're insane too I'm so sick of this dumb s*** but he's saying is it's really f****** simple your people and these people follow these cues and you're not doing anything and you're blaming everyone else and you're part of the problem I don't know what it is your frontal lobe is this s*** head she made this deal with the devil to be a humper humping log of s*** like they are just wander around criticized people it doesn't make me think that you're smart or that you're doing something valuable or that you're valuable it really doesn't I get criticism of each other from all of you this is the most blindingly evil little place I've ever been to you people. And he says that and I believe him and I can't straighten it out cuz it's frontal lobe and with tombs and we're doomed and I don't know who did the surgeries and he doesn't know either is that UMass and his mom is there and his brothers the surgeon but his brother is in the Tommy Allen works in the basement on the basement walls and masonry. He admitted it as Mr Graf McGrath and he was playing Mr Hazel and shot his own dog I got to tell you something this kid is sicker than hell he's a moron playing CIA man and dumping all of our cultural over the place the CIA stuff we're in danger of this s*** head in this museum this place stinks the guy sucks at everything I thought you all you retards blow at this you are such morons and he's right the empire is getting away with tons of stuff cuz you're losers we announced it and that's what it is and you like walking around like it's nothing we do about it we knew about it and this is a different group not Tommy f they're looking around for the stuff you're f****** stupid I'm tired of you stupid people I didn't check and see if you're doing something if you're not you're fired

Mac daddy

You two are out of there you want to sit around and do nothing about the whole world is going to lose to the empire cuz you hate him so much I heard you say it a lot you're stupid the empire is killing you and have you shot and stuff he won't stop f****** around him cuz you're so racist who cares about your racism I'm a full-blooded Mac right and they don't accept me that they're a bunch of cheers and they don't accept Mac Daddy and he's smarter than they are your turd we don't want you there you're f*** ups this guy Brian is sicker than hell and screwing you into the ground you don't care most of what you're doing is dog do I've had enough of this crap

Stan

I've done a lot of sick things to people and find out it's this empire they're having him shouting you cuz he ran it on them he ratted and it's this guy did it you don't get him any money you're such a f****** a****** for that you're such a f****** a****** it's so hard and they're running the money how do I know you can't do anything and you're running it and he's running the chair the treasury my granddaddy's president and he wants you to and nobody's doing anything and the empire has everything just sitting here in this Quagmire and we're in a swamp and the whole world is Florida everyone sucks this a****** has a hundred foot ship above us if it was the next row of assholes take over and the empire comes in the city with no air this blows so bad and we ride it on him okay we had to it's horrible it's something about taking over what Tommy f was in and he's an idiot and doesn't know what he's talking about he doesn't have the whole thing well everyone has to try for what are we going to do we have a straight line like a monkey if I fall over I have to go to a metal house the max are doing it through you and they're doing stuff big stuff right underneath everyone's nose these guys go out there and sit there I don't know how long and just watch them that's a brilliant guy this is terrible at least they understand their place you have to push through and it works didn't stay there but it works no you're an a****** you don't cheat me that way you up myself should I just go get a gun and take care of you probably huh I know how to deliver my plans on me so shoot you toss you you in acid yeah

So is talking to them in the past is talking about here and really this is the max reaction it's pretty lame but they're stupid for doing it and it shows they don't want people doing it but there's a sit here and let people do it and really these people can't do anything they're all sick and they're running around hurting each other and it's disgusting it won't let us know they're so freaking dumb we talked about this car and the money for a long time several months now and there's no movement on it at all everyone's fighting over it cuz they're turd he's more he's moron Max are going to fight over their money and it's the way to take them down you have to cuz they're down below and the photos are finally doing something holy s*** that's a forever and wait till they're like almost screw everyone completely like freaking 13th hour the phone is finally do so they finally do because it's like they're using this phone is a clearing House Capone as a clearing House and they went and they separated a lot of it and it's been years and and he said that to Kent's and he said we're going to do something and it says where I can. her son said you're more abused than I am but I really don't want to go through it they're only putting me in the mental hospital the bunch of s*** now and they're all high and they're breaking the laws of nature who they don't know what they're talking about and we could all die because they don't know what they're talking about if they go out there they don't know what they're facing if anything and macdad is pretty sharp for someone who's been separated out

Thor Freya I said the last part but I say this we need new people to get off him and stop harassing him you don't have the right to harass them cuz you're a big rats and you ain't kidnapping him you suck so bad you didn't do anything you annoyed him he said to f*** off and you walking around annoying him like some sort of moron idiotics love sick dog it looks really really bad

I got to tell you you guys are smokes or something you have to get off and you're not going to take him hostage to run this mad plan he's right you know I know what's going on and these guys in the bunker out of line and we're all screwed that's as Good as It gets and it won't give him a break he keep attracting their attention in the wrong I can't have a wind but I can't have them lose to his people you should get up and try and do something to stop this max they're wrong you're still trying to do the acts which is commendable that they're making it so damn hard they're trying to make it crack and this guy Tommy f is wrong I think I have to leave him there too my boys are bunch of nut jobs don't watch out for the max they're very dangerous tell you what I would lose patience too all the time and I am what are you doing to him is wrong but what's the max for doing is rush rush worse I don't know what to tell you they're going to run you through this Mill it looks like having portrayed Jesus and they keep putting his brother's stuff up there these people are moronic assholes they're cleaning it was them they're saying it's them and I should put it out there you should know this guy's getting tortured beyond what you are is all alone in a different race and they don't have any Mercy at all just so f****** dumb I'm going to tell you what they're going to ruin everything we have to do something together we have to stop this meaningless s*** we're doing you're fired stan you keep having them do it you're an a******. I need you out of my face go to your office and leave people alone since they're making noises you little f****** a****** he says you you keep following him around and ruining jobs I mean you're an a****** and you're writing him to do the job it's got it's probably you you want to play women she has to expose you cuz you're doing this dumb s*** you have no claim on that person what you doing is very illegal and I'm going to bring charges so now with my boys to bring charges right now on you stand and get out of my face you loser

Mac daddy

Some Updates

Other than Nikola Jokic putting me through the five stages of grief, I've been keeping busy, and I feel I neeed to write these posts because otherwise I'll have no way of tracking my progress, because I don't really talk to anyone about this stuff.

Basketball National League

The BNL is the top semi-pro league in the country and after contacting one of the team administrators, I shot some of thier games at the Mandeville Sports Complex.

The BNL broadcasts thier games live on television and the production vans and crews were there, but more on that later.

It was a lot of fun photographing this league but more importantly is making contacts with people within the league, and I have contacted the marketing people and there is a chance that I'll be shooting video for them next season/later this year. So I'll hold thumbs for that.

It also happened that the Cape Town Tigers were playing on the day that I was shooting, and the Tigers are South Africa's representative team in the Basketball Africa League, you may have seen thier games on ESPN, so that gets me a bit closer to Franck Traore, who has been making headlines since the BAL built a new court in Rwanda.

Again making a solid impression on Franck Traore opens up a world of possibilities, as far as the BAL, and those NBA player interviews.

2. Tshwane Basketball Association

While I was scouting locations for an idea I had, I happened to run in to an old buddy of mine and he told me about a local league that had recently started up and that they were looking for a photographer.

There's a whole bunch of teams in this league, from pups, to high school guys to semi-pro guys.

After showing some of the teams my work, I've been able to get in touch with the marketing team of the league and started contributing photos to the leagues marketing campaign, so being part of something like that, helps knock down another milestone.

One of the teams that they played against has an affiliation with the Jnr NBA, it's likely attend their basketball camps/seminars, the last of which was held in Soweto. I'm going to use that footage to impress one or two of the Jnr NBA's HR people on LInkedIn and get access to these events.

For now though, the TBA will have most of my time and attention and I feel like I need to work more with others because most of the time I'm running isolation plays, so this experience will be a dope one.

3. VisionView Productions

I mentioned the guys that were broadcasting the BNL games and I happened to bump into their company again a few months later, this time they were shooting a broadcast of the Davis Cup tennis tournament.

Funny how the world works.

Just having that in-road to some of the biggest sporting events in the country along with the production company in charge of broadcasting them, will be a big plus, but I need to know more first.

All told I'm happy with the progress even if it has come with a whole bunch of sacrifice.

It's been a roller coaster of a year but you take the good with the bad and make the best of every opportunity.

So I’m not sure how accurate this info is (I honestly can’t be bothered to look it up), but according to some ppl on dl, Benny could be making bank in these T-Mobile ads. We’re talking in the MILLIONS type of bank!! So maybe that’s why he’s not bothered by the lack of projects. Of course, like with anything on the internet, but especially on dl, take this with a grain of salt.

In millions? Please I gotta laugh

Like he probably getting pretty penny from these but lemme say what I can find from quick google run. And that is millions of articles from sites like celebritynakedbuzz.com that talk about big campaigns by big stars that even yer Christian grandmother would know about lol so ye somebody is making millions. Bradley with momma and Travolta probably got as much for their super bowl ads

As to Benny.... Well the first thing is that he is desperate. He has no projects coming up like his career stiff like priest walking through preschool. But what he wanna do is he want to progress his music career and it's self funded so he needs them coins. He was crying about the ep being so expensive and that half of it was a ride on freebies. Not this time around and he's going for a full album, ye know a long play which is more than five songs. He gotta pay for all of that and then he needs to pay the vanity label to release his vanity album. Hun I could probably get a PhD off the ground for years with that kinda money.

So ye first of all he is desperate. Second, them fucking ads are union contract I would guess. Soooo there would be a lotsa peeps involved that would be getting on his pay. And another thing here is that his agent manager or whoever was negotiating that deal for him, and we can kinda guess his team is not the best lol. Same people that got him black mirror pity cameo and a film that was announced and then disappeared. Alternatively, he just tries his shots at parts he can't get but he fully believes he deserves better. Honestly me thinks both are happening at once lol

Okie so desperate for monies, union job blah blah blah. Would say that he did got pretty penny, the ad was doing rounds in prime time (during oscars lol) but it's nothing close to big celebrity endorsements like. They don't use his name, he's just an actor that 2% of people who know him know him. First glance I would say he a commercial actor and his character is supposed to be a celebrity actor lol especially given the amount of ads they made. Imma like not even sure who they trynna target with the ads? Who unknown british actor appeals to in America? Like celebs would do super bowl for monies and exposure. Right now Benny is just too exposed but no one knows his name. Remember the who is the T-Mobile's actor guy pieces on them unknown sites full of viruses?

And another thing, but this is just me logical conclusion from what I've been reading. The additional residuals (big word lately with them strikes) for him would kick in if the ad would be running longer than 13 weeks or like 3 months. So the thing here is like I'm not in us so I can't tell if they are stopping the old commercials from airing but roughly every 2 months we are subjected to a new Benny ad. If ye not following me thoughts, what me thinking here is that they made so many of these to pull out old ones and bring in new ones, so not to pay more? Again lol imma scientists not a marketing expert lol

Then there's something called exclusivity deal but I doubt they paid lotsa here cuz it's not like Benny is a hottest commodity in the phone plan crowds lol he not hot anything anywhere actually x.x

Would joke that the player guy in the latest one made more than him in total xd

Again might be wrong might be right. Also he probably had to put that latest post as a part of the deal but like even me who knows nothing about social media marketing can tell that his socials engagement is nonexistent lol

Well this is something xd

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.

I want to know more about these tieflings of yours - do you have any memorable moments you've had playing them? Or just talk about them in general (or the other non-tiefs too!), I see someone with d&d PC's and I gotta know ask about them ~

I've got three tieflings so far, but I've only ever gotten to play with one. I've made character sheets for one of every d&d race (in the PHB at least) actually as like... an exercise in creating unique race and class combinations, and also in figuring out how to fill out a character sheet (especially for spellcasters good god) and also just because I have loved d&d (and just tabletop games in general) for a while now

the one I got to play was a five foot nothin' feral (that's not even a joke, she's the winged 'feral' variant from Unearthed Arcana) tiefling barbarian named Anakis who's backstory was she had been prizefighter in an arena, and her adopted wizard brother (also tief, collabed on the backstory with another player, grew up in the same orphanage) had a racket going to make big bucks on her wins. Brother got yoinked by the government because they wanted him to work for them. From her perspective though, he just got kidnapped and so Anakis just went rage mode, and so part of the agreement ended up being that she'd also get hired as his bodyguard. Unfortunately, the brother died only a session or two after we joined back with the party (said party went through 2 tpks and we all had to reroll characters at one point or another) and then I had to stop playing not long after that because my work hours weren't compatible, but I still have her character sheets saved on roll20 and I think I still have access to the discord the dm made? But it's definitely not been active in four years, which is a damn shame - that was my first group I ever played with, and despite being all guys, they were super respectful and made me feel really welcome as a newbie, and I have some great memories from that campaign

the other two are npcs that I also made character sheets for because why not? One of them, Defiance, was made to teach the guy I was seeing at the time how to fill out a character sheet lmao and I liked her and decided to keep her. Defiance's whole deal was that she was a supply runner/fighter for a rebellion against a corrupt, racist regime that is currently at war with another nation and is using the people as cannon fodder basically. She works as a field laborer during the day, and is thus tall, built af, and comes across as stoic and unimpressed with everyone and everything, but she has a big soft spot for the various children (mostly orphans) that live in the shanty-town surrounding the walls of the city-state and is basically their adopted mom. So she's basically just kinda available to me in either npc or pc form depending on whether I'm running the game or not

the last one is definitely more of a dmpc, which I know is like a big no-no or whatever, but a) I don't give a shit, life is too short not to have fun whilst playing a game, and b) it's not a problem if the dm isn't an asshole about it /endsoapbox

but yeah her name is... I think I changed it to Nara? She's had like five different names as I've been developing the setting that she's basically a package deal with. Her whole thing is she's been frozen/sealed away for the past thousand years by a lover who betrayed her and has been kind of reincarnating to stay alive and be the bbeg for the pcs. I had actually started dming this campaign idea for some people who used to live in my dorm, but covid lockdowns hit my part of the US literally right after the session where my players found her and we haven't met or talked since which

oh my god the campaign was just kicking off and I'm really proud of the story I came up with and my players were starting to bond and really get into it augggh (and then d&d had to get put on the backburner anyway because my school/state has handled covid just.. so poorly, and it's been affecting my grades)

but yeah, those're my tiefs! This reply got super long (whoops) so feel free to read at your leisure lmao

Mantle Epilouges

Ok so. In my campaign I have things I call epilogue. They're much more like cutscenes though. They're just little out of game scenes I write up to get the players excited for what's coming next or tell them some information they missed or something. (Though the main reason is I'm a writer who likes to write and I just can't prepare dialogue for these unpredictable idiots). It all traces back to the group wanting Tazd to be alive and wanting him to see where they burned his name in the ground, so at the end of the session I described a little scene where sure enough Tazd was a live and saw the burned name, before I continued on to describe how he was headed towards the city the party is centered in. And the players lost it, they were so excited. So now it's kinda a tradition. Some are more subtle or obvious than others but almost all are to hint at all that's coming.

Some good ones I've had over the years:

•A beautiful (in my opinion) scene where their skyrate friends got attacked on their ship, describing the captain running around her ship and still trying to fight despite her many injuries before finally one of the crew members shoves her off and to safety.

•The time I described a scene where a young lord was walking around his keep talking to 3 friends when they found something in a wall and suddenly alarm bells started going off and all the lord said was "run". I never gave any names and only next session did the party figure out that had described Mairon's uncle Melkor finding a heart in his wall and trying to get his dragons away before he was framed for murder.

•A scene I think most of the party has forgotten (hi guys) where Keythor was starting to put pieces together about the linked society after a big run in with them. Then someone I described erased her memory with a magic spell and covered it up.

And this session would have been no different, with a new epilogue to set them up for what's coming. If the party hadn't somehow managed to befriend the beyond ancient black dragon Yuronoshi, who's perspective the epilogue was supposed to be from. Welp. Guess I gotta throw that out the window. Or, into tumblr. So, enjoy my reject epilogue while I work on the new one. :::

Long white hair, bright red eyes, sharp smile brimming with unearned confidence. Yes. Yuronoshi is positive. Angelica absolutely reminds him of a wild white. Not at all unlike the one currently curled around them, the only member of their five man army currently in their draconic form. Zagreus meanwhile stands next to Angelica, nodding and affirming every word she says. And with him stood next to the petite human Yuronoshi had to wonder, in Zagreus' true form he was enormous, his shadow could eclipse whole cities, people would tremble before him, he really is the everlasting terror. So why in all the worlds would he choose for his human form to look like a skinny little twink. But he'd no sooner thought that than Zagreus' eyes had turned on him and the rest of the ancients.

"Is that understood?"

The four of them gave small acknowledging noises, even Liyatoim from across the temple floor where he's curled with four of the larger forerunners. But Zagreus' dark black eyes fall on the smaller black dragon. "Yuronoshi?"

The black blinks slowly before he sighs. "You knew I'd have complaints. These... linked hooligans have already sent their message and it did little more than encourage the idiots. Why would this message be any different?"

Zagreus begins to snarl an answer, clearly upset by Yuronoshi's questions, before Angelica speaks in his stead. "Because this isn't. A message. The message has long passed."

"Then this is...?"

"A punishment. No making a deal or getting out of this one."

Yuronoshi bares his teeth, letting his eyes flash the bright dangerous yellow as he begins. "And what-"

"Jewlclaw." Zagreus cuts him off suddenly, moving between the wizard and the drake to end this budding argument. "I've decided you'll take Yuronoshi with you when you deliver this punishment. Just to ensure he.... isn't questioning to much."

Yuronoshi has to take a moment to remind himself this thin form doesn't define the actual size and power of Zagreus, and decides it best to nod and step back in subservience. Almost immediately Jewlclaw has dug a hand into his sash and pulled him to the stairs out of the temple.

"Come on Black Death. Let's go get the warlock."

Yuronoshi snarls again but follows, letting the Sapphire Seer lead him up into the open air before the two share a look, drop their human forms for favor of wings and claws, and take to the air to complete their delegated task.

Also, small photo dump of the battle map for the vassal fight and the revival roll for Althaea!

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reasons that don’t really want to get into company in 2009 some people say it’s only like movies released some people since 2010 I personally think it makes no sense if it’s in 2009 especially in relation to iron man twoand other future films I meant to his sickness afterwardsand it features the stark expo 2010 so anyway you should matter that much but it is worth mentioning is still being a billionaire playboy at one point he gets into a bar fight get some assistance from his best friend james rhodes rhody a little later he was in order for something but what I status get it for him because he’s too busy sleeping with reportersand you know doing tony start things despite his playboy in us he also has something of a relationship some kind of flirtatious thing going on with his assistant pepper potts also he’s got a bodyguard called happy to see you know to start industries is still in this morally great business of selling weaponsand tony doesn’t really care because billionaire life but no but I saying the strategies the company for less than legal means he starts equally sign weapons to a terrorist organization called the 10 rings inand also pays the 10 rings to kill tony when he goes to afghanistan because I know but I can when the company tony free however they only kidnap tony once they realize who he isand manny build them weapons to use in the whole process tony is mortally wounded but his life is saved by fellow captive hellionsand mental health ins inputs electromagnet in his chest which keeps the shrapnel in there from killing in which tony benson turns into his dental pet project the arc reactor 10 rings also demand more my for staying because of who they had to kidnap vocalsand sent by shield to go talk to stijnand lindsay is back to shield offers to god himselfand save stark button cure for whatever reason tells them not to start building the weapons that the terrace demanded over three months stark with the help against them as a weapon I suit of armor that he can use to escape which is powered by that arc reactorand is just over this time start also earns a bit more humanity while this is happening natasha romanoff now a great agent of shield is sent out on a mission to escort a scientist in a run hydra sends out the winter soldier to kill the scientist he does so by shooting through them enough after those few months stark uses the armored suit to bust out of prisonand kill some terrorists escapes but yes it is killed along the way start crashand the desertand picked up by the militaryand taken home tony’s a changed man now so people stuck industries on the weapons business which obadiah is pretty pissed about thatand also you know tony is not dead then he is running the company yet tony also get closer to pepper spray a new art directorand start continue to refine his armor make you much slicker matter more weaponsand doing a little hot rod written there eventually he turns into what becomes known as the iron man suit this does take a few months so while all this is happening a woman called colleen wing who is pretty proficient in martial arts comes to america from japan she needs the crew to one of those ancient hat membersand gets recruited as a member of the hand but she’s under the impression that the hand is a good organizationand doesn’t know about all the mass murder of kellyand now the sweet mullet is putting a takeover of the world the first he’s got to get this extreme misting perfectand he needs firebreathing henchmen so he finds a bunch of army veterans who suffered serious injuries to be his test subjects injects them with extremistsand some are successful they grow back last lensand their super grateful some are not successful thoughand explode in a very painful way also at some point here in asgard double click a guy called in near tries to overthrow dennis king but he stopped by thor just a typical day for those guys now back on earth the 10 rings find stocks first armor suit that he escaped with lying around in the desertand they start piecing it back together stijn shows upand sees itand thinks back use thisand so start building his own giant iron man suit all of this is happening continues to make a suit way better now can flyand she repulsed blasts in STUFF he also gets a fancy ad about the systemand into jarvis after his dental butler theory is still quite intrigued by the sole tony stark character solutions vocalsand into talk to stark about this whole situation but stuck ambos moss tony also finds out that some of his companies weapons are still terrorists in afghanistan certifiesand kills a bunch of them because he can is a little brush up in the militaryand canada has revealed his buddy rhody that yeah he’s ironman pepperand finds out that stijn’s been working with terrorists sustains like well that everyone knows a bag I now let us look at tony myself yells exceeds by tony so live closeand goes with pepper to discover stains own iron man suit turning it back to full strength puts in a suitand instead have a consistency punch up stark winsand stained eyes the next day at a big press conference stuck supposed to tell the world that iron man is some kind of robot bodyguard they built but he goes a little off script I am guessing is more in touch with shield while stark is getting this press conference at the manco that guy how stark screwed over all those years ago who is now out of prison dies while watching it is on I think of us take revenge on the stark familyand in a surprisingly short time uses his dad’s old art director blueprints to make his own arc reactorand uses that to make an even cooler iron man suit just kidding he makes some electric lips after the press conference nick fury approach to stark himself this time about the avengers initiative is a guy with a super high tech suit could be useful the time is like air now thanks as he’s leaving starks house cure and tells them don’t need natasha romanoff or this one goesand also helps train this random guy called hendrix to be an agent of shield unimportant detail but it happened all this time jesse don’t forget bruce banner still running the military ultimately ends up in rioand start working at a soda bottle factory all the while stirring to contact a scientist called samuel stearns was trying to find a cure for this whole whole thing is to keep a low profileand figure out how to return to a normal life so she was getting mighty busy these days not only to have the soul avengers thing planned but they also start a project tahiti shield still has that creek corpse just lying aroundand after testing it they discover some of its bodily fluids have a healing effect they can bring someone back from the dead fury orders this project we started with phil colson in charge to extract some these fluids in the event that an avenger is killed in action needs to be brought back to some of the sun dying shield employees but it doesn’t go super well because they start going insaneand drawing maps about underground cree city cyclesand like well this program sucks let’s shut it downand so they do stark stone during the life of being a billionaireand also superheroand starts helping establish world peace as iron man going aroundand being a terrorists he also tries to have a relationship with a woman called lena as you know playboy however the 10 rings find out about thisand kidnap lena’s son afterwards blackmailing her in his dealings ireland blueprints for them however to find out about this because of the situation thenand saves her sonand then stop seeing each other is like how you come back from that stark is like seeing his assistant pepper potts does well peace mission continues as he stops group of 10 rings dudesand hackers from selling as weapons in italy also recovered some stolen paintings because why not messages continues to fight the 10 rings especially in afghanistan as he doing this serializes the corpus arc reactor is slowly poisoning him so he start searching for a cure over in brazil bruce banner is working at soda bottle factoryand one day he asked because his hand so some of his super blood goes in one of the soda bottlesand kill stanley which gets the governmentand military write on the sent now back over to hydra they’re working on yet another super soldier program because that seems to be all they can do after rascal serumand making roma peopleand after their attention to making a superpowered army by combining the super soldier serum with gamma radiationand some of that sweet extremist tech that they somehow got their hands on basically taking every superpower giving thing the mcu entering it in a big melting pot it’s called the centipede program that’s led by john garrett from before you must use it for his own purposes since even with the parts his health is failing also with the program you can plan your either let’s hide or see everything you doand also can kill you if you start doing something wrong another very kinsman like almonds lena starts running the stark expo 2010 to shove a budget attackand relationsand whatnot shows up in the flash to really be the tony that the world knowsand loves my cousin all great for tonio as he also has to govern the senate some of whom are members of hydra is there like the government you have your suit because it’s really dangerousand tony’s like hello claims that no one is close to kings techand he’s created well peace so the government should shut up testifying against him is the somehow smug or induce your tony stark justin hammer is rival in the tech world get out of thereand make up about the ceo stark industries okay nothing start to get a bit more complicated because the three different plot lines all happening at once so hang on lake erie sends natasha romanoff to go undercoverand keep an eye on tony understand the 10 rings are pretty sick of our menacing at their livesand so they get anton blanco was completed his arc reactor based whips away into the monaco grand prix which tony will be attending back in brazil the army’s tract number spends locationand attacksand where he lives the command of a mobile on ski first comes the hulkand runs away waking up in guatemala the next morningand deciding he should go back to his old university to look for more data on finding a whole cure because he just can’t take this anymore roadie who is now also that she needs a strike in the study to work with the governmentand starting to get mildly heated between them romanoff arrives at tony’s place is of the pill in a woman’s coffee unstuck steam so she starts throwing up so natasha can deliver some files to stark yourself to natureand acts exactly how you inspect them to tell youand goes to the monaco grand prix as promisedand stripper places a guy in the race is a guess you do that when your superhero is having a fun time driving when ivan manco shows upand these car in half luckily tony’s gotten on the go armor with himand he defends himself later tongue the bank on prisonand getting really nothing out of it this public display of other art directors being out there though but the government even moreand tony’s ass justin hammer sees thisand breaks I got of prison when him to make iron man like machines for hammer tech so he can upstage tony stark thank you goes along with this but really dispels bunch drones so he can later on post some sweet sweet revenge tony starting poison buys arc reactor in the publics against in the government on his backand himand his best friend are on great terms tony’s life sucks right now is this it was a big drunken birthday party for himself which ultimately ends with himand roadie getting the students who fight roadie not being told the drunk guys off of the suitand gives it to justin hammer unaware of what hammers actually doing behind the scenes meanwhile agent jasper said well she’ll agentand another undercover hydrogen is ordered to keep track of bruce banner one exterior goes to help start with his are correct poisoning also there are big disturbances in the atmosphere on this time in the southwest us caused by some commotion away in asgard which will get you that this concerns some people including astrophysicist jane foster she get in touch with another astrophysicist called xl bigand go to new mexico to check it out she’ll discovers this is happeningand keeps an eye on them now way back across the universe in asgard authorities finally of the age where he gets to be the new king even though he’s areaand a spoiled bratand locus jealous but hay is getting corrugated it’s his big day but it gets interrupted by the frost giant sneakingand owns vaultand trying to take away that casket of ancient winters point is that was really upset that his days ruinedand also that the frost I spokeand we know so that is bossy consisting of f than the warriors interchangeable coffee oppenheim to fight the frost giants for what they did this is specifically against oden’s instructions but again thor is dumband arrogant a fight starts but only comes aroundand breaks it up is pretty mad at the door so takes away all his godly powersand his powerful hammer mule near creekside note the owner was made from the core of a dying starand helps to control his lighting powersand also only be lifted by whoever’s worthy of it store down to earth new mexico specifically is harold’s land somewhere nearby as well as activity theory since vocalsand down to new mexico to check out all the business on his way their closest oxen armed robbery at a convenience store because he’s just not good back to start tony’s hang on a big doughnutand has a talk with a fury who wants to help them also natasha romanoff reveals himself as black widow to them justin hammer starts upgrading the armor really gave themand changes it from this to this while that’s happening tony discovers a map of the old stark expo at secret formula for making a new element that his dad left him all of those years ago which is also the perfect replacement for his arc reactor somewhat conveniently so yeah that’s fixed tony’s no longer dying now you just worry about the crazy russianand the smarmy businessmen at this point bruce banner is also gone back to the old university hang out with an old friend of his now justin hammer showing off his ivan banker design drones at the stark expo but vanco goes for zone motives of killing starkand hijacks the dronesand sends them after tony also hijacks the war machine armor with roadieand it is chase during which tony says a little kid is a fan of his called peter parker come in to play more later eventually ready to control the soup back in himand tony team up to destroy all the drones while black widowand tony’s bodyguard happy fightsand I got henchmen eventually tonyand 35 vancoand a giant iron man type suitand blowing them upand killing him by combining the repulsive powers hammer gets arrested gets a kissand really gets the armor kind of soup from not okay when the question meanwhile back in new mexico jane foster xl bigand jane’s friend darcy find thor all powerless like in the desert daysand then set into the hospital she also started asking thor’s hammer mule near owner realizes how big business in the situation could be so also sends clint barton to help closeand with it the escape from the hospital using his asgard trainingand meets up with janeand they start having a little bit of a romance back in asgard loki discovers that he is not shielding sonand I frost giant which makes them pretty upsetand falls into a deep sleep that has to take once in a while called oden sleepand locus is playing a treacherous plan to get owns approval back which involves the frost giants to attack inand then saving his dad’s life is adopted that not his real dad back with banner bruce meets up with bettyand they get back together however in the process the military figure out he’s thereand have for the locationand the loss gets injected with a version of the super soldier serum things to ross tobin take on the whole which means he can survive this sort of thing seeing gen. Help ourselves otherwise all the chocolates would just end up sitting in his cupboards for a year and he wasn’t about to get kids year old suites come next Halloween we basically had the jackpot thinking we could just rinse the old fellow of the suites and make up for the paltry amount we collected over what had been an unusually fruitless trick or treating session only he said there was one small problem since he was getting on in years and then get out much his oldest grown up son had come by to drop off all the suites along with his usual weekly shopping then without having thought it through his son and put all the suites in the top cupboard of his back pantry one that was way too high for him to reach without doing is back in if a couple of us were willing to help them reach the cupboards and take a few tens of supreme in the process suites were ours all of them 90 you’re thinking God’s name is daft enough to just wander into a complete stranger’s house in the middle the night apparently we were and See Other related products: I Don't Understand Your Specific Kind Of Stupid But I Do Admire Your Total Commitment To It T-Shirt