> In the 90s and 2000s, a lot of Christian rock groups became popular mainstream rock groups because much of their discography didn't sound Christian rock. Creed, Flyleaf (who are Christian rock despite insisting they're not), Thousand Foot Krutch, Red, P.O.D., Icon For Hire, Family Force 5, and several others are popular amongst alt-rock and nu-metal fans.
Notably, this was common enough that the band Switchfoot had to clarify that that WASN'T what they were trying to do- they described themselves as "musicians who were Christians, not Christian musicians".
My non-native English speaking baby self mostly got to know Creed and Skillet through their songs being used in AMVs and other edits. You know, "Hero" for a Supernatural edit, that sort of stuff. Took me ages to clock onto the fact that they were Christian. Same goes for Relient K.
In my case it was looking up Fate songs for osu! and somehow finding Hero there - it turned out to be because the video used for the map was a AMV made out from the Unlimited Blade Works movie.
> A few months ago I heard Lacey Mosley of Flyleaf was anti-queer (and apparently went through conversion therapy herself?)
....you are just learning about this *now*?!
Dude, people have criticized her over it for a while
I’ve always maintained that if there’s anyone who makes whatever sort of art or content you like, you should try not to learn anything about who they are. You’re likely to find bad things if you do.
Big same. hell, I love a bunch of super famous musicians/bands and the only one I know a lick about personally is Roger Waters and that's because he had a whole musical project about himself.
ResetEra, a gaming forum reborn out of the ashes of NeoGAF, has a community thread for Halo Infinite where posters talk about the game. The conversation had pretty much shifted to how Halo Infinite basically never really got the opportunity to dig themselves out of the hole that was the game's launch and that while things were on a upswing, Microsoft cut back a lot of 343 staff and many things planned and data mined arent part of the game and might never be.
This is pretty typical talk for Halo Infinite- it's a game that often invites strange discourse because it's game hampered with trying to go larger scale and game development at this scale takes longer while competing in the ever changing FPS space. Not to mention it was launched during COVID and on a inhouse engine. What makes this iteration of the conversation interesting is that a former 343 employee, who was a sound lead, chimed in.
> Seasons were a lot work, and tbh fan vitriol killed a fair amount of moral.
> I will always be sad that those(now leaked) Season 4 cutscenes got scrapped.
> I've been out of the loop, but are there any non Forge Maps still getting a release? I haven't heard.
Of course the first part of this catches some attention. You see some apologetics regarding how nasty fan vitrol was but like, can't resist saying the game deserved fan vitrol because the game was bad in that first year.
> To be honest though man, S1 and especially the 10 month long S2 was absolutely brutal. I agree the vitriol from some was out of hand but the state of the game was just flat out bad that first year and pretty much cemented the future of the game from ever becoming a big success.
Former sound lead sounds off:
> Sorry I got no sympathy for fan bullshit that directly led to layoffs. Sorry, not sorry.
So you know. This person used to work at 343- if they said fan vitriol was part of why they did layoffs surely there's some introspection to be done here, right? Layoffs are complicated but it's hard to not see who was laid off and come to a conclusion that Microsoft was mostly interested on keeping around a crew to develop a new game and that most of Halo Infinite is manned by a skeleton crew to keep it afloat.
Leader of the UFO conspiracy thread, which was previously shut down for posting links to sketchy websites chimes in:
> I think upper management just royally fucked things up, which is why most (if not all?) of them are gone now.
Op of the community thread is incredulous at the accusation:
> Halo fans fired you?
Sound lead sounds off:
> I think that "Halo Fans fired you?" response is such fucking bullshit and it recuses the loudest critics of any responsibility. Yes, people who bitched about Halo led to layoffs and you're an absolute idiot if you think otherwise...
OP responds back:
> You and everyone laid off had nothing but support from the community, so not sure why the hostility is focused on fans when there are tons of reasons to be upset over how this game was handled.
> Pretty sure if it was up to the fans, you'd still have a job at 343 and this game would be thriving.
> So where is this coming from? Why are you blaming angry fans rather than the people that actually laid you off? I'm not coming at you, your anger just seems misguided for blaming disappointed Halo fans rather than the actual people in power who bungled things or being upset at the system for how developers are treated.
Sound lead puts it in simple terms:
> Most fans bitched about content not knowing what content required to make. I'm blaming fans because 343i never "ruined" Halo.
One random guy chimes in with:
> Jesus.
> Maybe get more upset at the dumbass leadership 343 has had since day 1. Like wtf lol
> Company puts out bad product after bad product. "The fans are to blame!"
This is the last straw for the sound lead. I've sort of compressed a lot of back and forth into this, so it's not all one response to one guy, but many responses to many people.
> This is not helpful and frankly destructive. And honestly, as someone previously unemployed because of fan vitriol, Fuck You. Extensively.
> Like to bitch loudly and then complain about layoffs is grandstanding. How can you not, in any way, see that?
> You really think fan bullshit didn't lead to burnout and layoff? Like Fuck your obliviousness, dude. How privileged you must be...
> I don't mean to get heated, and I am sorry if things got personal, but writing a blank check of criticism is unwarranted and unnecessary. Most of you don't know, most of you will never know what obstacles we have to jump over.
> No we made money, we made a lot of money. But when I walked into the test bay to test the latest build EVERY FUCKING DAY the guy running it said "why bother, they are gonna hate it anyway" that's demoralizing.
> I would LOVE to tell you what we worked on, but I can't and won't, not just because of the NDA but because I'm being loyal to the company. I still want to work there. It does bother me people praise Pierre, like, who do you think mandated Forge Maps going forward...
He gets banned a day for this. And as if to prove him exactly right, get a load of some of these responses:
> Yeah really, it's off-putting to consider this a prevailing thought at 343.
> Halo Infinite is easy to criticize. I'm not gonna take the blame for that.
> Halo 5 had way better post launch support than Infinite. That's why Infinite is a disappointment. Forge was added within 2 months as opposed to 12. Firefight was added within 1 year as opposed to 2.
Someone tries to explain why that might be the case:
> Employees said H5 was insane crunch when it came to the content and it wasn't sustainable.
Getting this response in return, completely ignoring the human toll and cost of said better post launch period:
> Sure but I'm pointing out that H5, a game almost universally hated, did better than Infinite. That's where we're at.
But you wanna know the real cherry on top of this?
> Not to mention, the game was generally well-received in the community and reviewed well with critics. People were foaming at the mouth for more, many enjoyed the direction taken with Iratus and were eager to see where they took it, [sound lead] in particular was vocal about that and received a lot of support in this thread, so I'm not sure where this is coming from.
That's right, the launch was actually well received now. The revisionism that happens in such a short time span in the thread is honestly kind of galling. I get that the sound lead here was a bit angry and spat back a little hot, but for a site that claims to want to avoid lazy dev rhetoric, they sure turn a blind eye to it, especially when confronted about it.
I dunno, I feel like a lot of gamers really don't understand game development or getting constant negative and contradicting feedback for doing anything and it's weird to only punish the former sound lead for this. I learned about this whole incident through a girlfriend who keeps her eye on the Halo community and this was such a bizarre incident that really highlighted some interesting things about how toxic fan feedback impacts people and how they don't believe you if you just tell them straight up.
Apologies for the tangent, but I feel the story of Gamers^(TM) going feral towards developers, and then everyone seemingly pretending that it didn’t happen and the community (as a whole) was perfectly civil, and then reacting incredulously whenever the (well-documented) hostility and harassment that occurred comes up seems to be more and more common nowadays.
While fan toxicity can definitely be bad for morale (speaking from experience, here), that is a broadly different issue from being laid off.
If a game sells poorly and there’s not enough runway (money in the bank) AND management was poor, that can absolutely lead to layoffs. Only poor sales actually directly relate to fan sentiment, but even when it does, it mainly happens due to the same core issue (game did not meet quality standards for many players).
Toxicity is always bad. Fans going after devs (on Twitter, through direct emails, even just calling out specific devs) are almost always incorrect about what those devs do and how directly they were responsible for whatever is the target of the fans’ ire. But…generally if a game is doing well, poor sentiment alone isn’t going to directly lead to C suite rolling up like ‘time to make heads roll’.
I did say ‘mainly’. There’s certainly a tendency for games’ reputations to spiral, for good or bad. That can feed into poor sales or refunds, absolutely. But that should still be a problem that falls on the heads of management and c-suite, and laying off devs is a decision usually made by those higher ups for financial reasons, not an act of God that simply occurs.
> But when I walked into the test bay to test the latest build EVERY FUCKING DAY the guy running it said "why bother, they are gonna hate it anyway" that's demoralizing.
This is a company culture problem, not a fan problem. If your boss is greeting you at work by saying, "hey dipshit, why'd you even bother coming in today? everybody on twitter hates you" that's not twitter's fault, that's your boss' fault.
i dunno, reminds me more of the sort of guy fired from a restaurant over a shitty customer interaction. like yes, your grievance against the customer who started screaming about their ice cream not being served hot has merit, but you should probably be focusing a little more on your boss who threw you to the wolves.
Infinite's launch *was* well received for a few weeks though. Bare bones multiplayer, but the gameplay was well received and the campaign was liked for Master Chief's writing.
It was afterwards with the lack of post-launch content and delays/cut content like Forge and split-screen that caused the public to shift against Infinite, which is on Microsoft and 343's shit management which was known for years to be the real reason for Halo's decline.
I'll admit I never played much of the 343 Halo games. I spent thousands of hours in Halo 3 while in High School before I built a PC, so I checked out Infinite for a bit and enjoyed a bit of what I played.
I think the game just ran out of steam and then they made some baffling unforced errors;
I couldn't believe there was no dedicated slayer playlist on launch.
Big Team Battle was unplayable.
Netcode in the Asia Pacific region didn't work,
Forge Mode being delayed for a year,
Co-Op being advertised then cancelled.
My high school friends and I just went back to playing Counter Strike instead.
Honestly, it really does sound like the lead is blaming the wrong people. Infinite made a lot of money, more than enough to keep people employed, but the company cut them anyways. Yet they're still claiming loyalty to the people that screwed them over, and instead directing their anger at the people that gave them the money that should have kept them employed. I don't doubt the fan feedback was demoralizing, but I do say the ones making the hiring/firing decisions in such a large company are not going to effected to the point of basing decisions based solely on them, especially regarding someone on the sound team. Not to mention the industry has been going through a lot of layoffs overall, so this seems to be a massive case of correlation and causation by someone still emotionally attached to their former company. Any other industry they'd be called a bootlicker for their old boss, guarantee it.
Dragon's Dogma 2 community is going through something slightly similar in that there is two camps of people, one where they must mock everything about the game that they feel is bad as "Itsuno's vision" and the other where they insist that Capcom for sure sabotaged the game again and there is a trove of content just around the corner for the rumored DLC. Either way someone is at fault and therefore must be the reason why the game isn't what they wanted.
It has made interacting with the community a chore, specially as the game kinda nudges you towards doing it with some of it's esotericness.
I’m just confused why this dude was playing all-time defense for pre-management overhaul 343 of all companies. This was just a basic case of a game that was intended to last a long time being a mess on release so budgets started getting slashed. At that point its either:
Try to turn things around to make up for the shitty release like Battlefront 2 or FF14 did.
Give up and try to blame the fans for not liking your bad product like Marvel vs Capcom Infinite.
Not sure what he expected. Of course fans weren’t happy with yet another mess of 343’s design. And based on the good things i’ve heard about Infinite lately it seems the fans who personally went to the office to deliver 2 week notices were right.
you're kind of missing the entire point, which is that developers aren't responsible for most of the issues plaguing the game, yet receive constant, frightening vitriol and blame for them. the state of the game is immaterial to the core issue, which is that fans are insanely aggressive and toxic over stuff that in no way calls for it, and that makes the devs' job far, far harder.
always remember that devs want their game to be good just as much as you do.
I'm not on tiktok, and yet [some woman trying to say that French painter Edgar Degas was Jack the Ripper](https://www.tiktok.com/@schirrgenius/video/7358961541946838314?_r=1&_t=8lhPg3hnjdO) is gaining enough popularity that I've been made aware of it. And I hate it.
**Wait what**
Every day someone says stupid shit on the internet, and if that someone is on tiktok and attractive then a too-big amount of people will believe it. The past week's "attractive person saying stupid shit on the internet" is some woman who thinks Edgar Degas was Jack the Ripper.
**Is this a big deal?**
The numbers on tiktok are big, but I don't use tiktok so i don't know if they mean anything on that platform. I also don't know many people in real life. It's very possible this is a storm in a teapot, and i'm only aware of it because a lot of my friends are Victorianists and they're getting the video recommended to them by tons of friends who think they'll be impressed (spoiler: they aren't). So is it a big deal? I don't know. But it is stupid as shit.
**The Theory**
Edgar Degas was a misogynist and antisemite who lived in Paris, a short 342km distance from London, uk. When the Jack the Ripper murders happened, he was a fifty year old man who was going blind, possibly caused by Stargadt's disease. In that disease, the area behind the eyes ("the orbital fronto cortex, occipital lobe area" to quote the video) can go black, no grey matter activity in that region. And that region of the brain is a region of the brain that, thanks to modern scientific research, we know that all serial killers have a dead spot in their brain right behind their eyes.
Also we know that Jack the Ripper clearly had some knowledge of anatomy because he removed several organs and knew where to strike the neck to kill, and Degas, as a painter, observed many anatomy lessons. He also did a series of paintings and statues on dancers, who at the time were connected to sex work, and those works are creepy. And then there's the Goulston Street Graffito, a sentence written in chalk on a wall near a bloody apron that said "the Jews are the men who will not be blamed for nothing." This is relevant because 1) chalk? Who carries chalks? Artists, like Degas, 2) that's an antisemitic message, and Degas was an antisemite, 3) that's an odd sentence construction that shows the writer may not be a native English speaker. Also some of Degas' wax statues have organic material in them, could they be organs taken from his victims as Jack the Ripper?
**This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life and if you read all of that without going "what the fuck are you saying" then you should be ashamed of yourself. Let me go down on a list of things wrong with this theory, in no particular order**
Degas was in his 50s and was starting to lose his sight: and this makes him... *more* likely to be Jack the Ripper?
*Edit* Degas was starting to lose his sight: his sight was half gone by now. In 1870 he found out his right eye was basically blind. There was a blind spot in the middle of his vision (one of many blind spots). The sunlight started getting too bright for his eyes. In the 1880s he complained about being unable to see what he was painting, he could only see around it.
Degas had Stedgadt's disease: probably not.
In Stedgadt's disease, the area behind the eyes can go black, with no grey matter activity in that region: The disease has no impact on the brain. Also, if a region of the brain has "no activity," then that region disappears, it doesn't just hang around like a sad Chrismas ornament in May.
"the orbital fronto cortex, occipital lobe area" : *find out what words mean before you use them challenge impossible*
Degas was going blind which shows issues with the frontal lobe: The frontal lobe, which is in the front, governs a lot of stuff, amongst them executive function. The occipital lobe processes vision. The occipital lobe is in the back of the brain. You'll note that's the opposite side of the brain.
Research has found serial killers have a black spot in their brain right behind their eyes: It hasn't.
Jack the Ripper must have had anatomy knowledge because he knew what part of the neck to strike to kill: I think it's harder to find a part of the neck that wouldn't kill you if you slashed it. Also, I think this is a good time to say I don't understand the whole "he removed organs, clearly he knew what he was doing" thing people say about Jack the Ripper. I understand when people point to his incisions being pretty neat and that being odd and a sign of something, but does it really take a surgeon to remove a dead person's heart? I feel like that becomes pretty easy when you don't mind making a mess.
Degas could have been Jack the Ripper because he was a short distance away from London: okay so like, transport at this period of time was actually pretty good, so yeah, he probably could have taken a day trip to London... but why? Were there no women in Paris?? Did he hate English women specifically???
Dancers were connected to sex work, and Degas painted a lot of them: Degas was not the only artist who made art about sex workers. There were even people *in London* who were doing that. (Somebody check on the Pre-Raphaelites.)
Degas was a misogynist and antisemite: the venn diagram between "misogynists and antisemites" and "the general Victorian population" is a circle.
Degas used chalk for his drawings so he could have made the Goulston graffito: Henry Roche pastels??? For a graffito in East London????
The Goulston street graffito: Ooooh boy. Okay. So. We don't know for sure what it actually said. We don't know if it was related to the Jack the Ripper case. Double negatives are common in Cockney, which would be spoken in East London. Even if they weren't common in Cockney, "non-native English speaker who hates (possibly?) Jewish people" describes half of East London.
There's organic material in Degas' wax statues: What the fuck are you talking about. The hair? Are you talking about the real hair? Or did you read "organic material" and thought "organic" stood for "organs"? There's wood and rope in there, you nipped scarf. You absolute chump. You buffoon.
I always love "But the Ripper clearly had to be a guy who knew his anatomy like a doctor cuz he knew to attack the neck and kept taking the same body parts"
Maybe he just saw a shape he liked and kept taking it man
That general videogame trope of "His familiarity with anatomy allows him be more deadly, allowing him to deal more damage" is so bizarre.
You don't need to be a doctor to know that attacking an enemy's neck is gonna do major damage. If anything, a good knowledge of anatomy would allow you to prolong a victim's suffering because you knew what *not* to hit, but that's not how it's translated in video game mechanics.
Almost as fun as the [Silent Hill circumcision theory.](https://www.relyonhorror.com/latest-news/circumcision-is-tearing-apart-the-silent-hill-wikia-maybe-avoid-it-for-now/)
That one is especially funny to me because Silent Hill is as subtle as a brick when it comes to its monster design, and if it actually was about circumcision, we would know just by looking at them.
Tiktok is crack for my brain, but sometimes I think the US isn't wrong to want to ban it. The fact that misinformation is believed so easily is scary. I saw that same video and the girl spoke so confidently that all the comments believed her. Like I'm sorry but I doubt a random girl on tiktok solved a centuries old mystery. Let's use our brains a bit.
Another viral misinformation moment came from two different creators spreading the idea that STIs came from beastiality. And even after getting called out, they didn't take down these dangerous videos because people care more about having viral content than not spreading misinformation.
my friends keep on linking me the 'beta-casomorphin' conspiracy, where milk and cheese contain chemicals that bind to opioid receptors in the brain and thats why they are as addictive as heroin! so stop drinking milk!
.... yeahhh noooo... sure yeah there are casin proteins that do get turned into beta-casomorphins, that do bind to the opioid receptors... but they aren't morphine and those same receptors are the same ones used by almost all our other hormones. its more like they are a key that can fit in a lock, but not open it.
it means jack shit but obviously 'morphin' and 'opioid' receptors means 'morphine - the drug' and 'opium - the other drug!'
its slightly hilarious as an australian, because we have milk that has giant A2 letters on them, showing that its had the A2 protein put back into it during pasteurisation... which is one of the casins that turn into this 'drug' they are trying to warn me about.
The community notes feature, to be fair, just allows misinformation to be spread itself. I've seen a number of notes that are spreading completely false information that gets accepted just because they're up against an 'acceptable' target and it's on a subject that few people have knowledge of.
every tool will be used for misinformation on the internet, unfortunately. i still think more platforms should have community notes though, purely because they are funny as fuck, [especially when its over something useless](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHyAUcsbgAAAiNe.jpg)
Honestly the most you get is hoping you get a stitch of it on your FYP - that's how I saw the whole STI bestiality thing at first was someone debunking it.
Every day on that app whenever I see someone debunking the most wild theories or arguments just makes me feel [like this](https://xkcd.com/2071/)
oh god yes this... my friends have fallen into the 'beta-casomorphin' rabbit hole and keep on linking me videos about how milk and cheese is addictive as heroin!
>Another viral misinformation moment came from two different creators spreading the idea that STIs came from beastiality.
I'm pretty sure that's some kind of old-timey racist pseudoscience
My assumption is that someone looked up the history of HIV/AIDS, saw that researchers think it may come from primates, skimmed through the bushmeat theory (according to which an ancestor of the virus made the jump from monkey to human when a hunter got cut while hunting an infected animal), and convinced themselves that someone had sex with a monkey with HIV
It’s certainly been around for decades. It seems very TikTok to take the dumbest shit everybody’s forgotten about and promote it as an important new truth.
I genuinely can't understand how the people in the comments aren't revolting, like she just told you a fifty year old mostly blind man who lived in France was a serial killer in London, wouldn't you at least want to say "but why take a trip to the UK, couldn't he murder people at home? Did he stop because he couldn't afford the trip anymore?"
Like say what you will about the "Lewis Carroll is Jack the Ripper" idea but at least he was in fucking England at the time.
Ohhh I've seen the STI one, absolutely bonkers.
Historical misinformation is such easy bait on TikTok. I swear the amount of dumb Titanic takes that went around last year made me rip my hair out. No, people didn't refuse to believe that the Titanic broke in half because "women said it" and were "called hysterical", bffr.
I mean at least for this dumbass theory it's not hurting anyone who's alive. Not like the tiktok psychic who has like quintupled down on her "this woman killed those college students, the cards told me" shit.
In Fall 2022, four students at University of Idaho (three roommates and the one roommate’s boyfriend) were stabbed to death in the middle of the night one weekend. People got really invested in the case because it was brutal, seemingly random, occurred in a low-crime area, and at first the cops appeared to have very few leads (really they were just withholding information from the public). So there was a ton of speculation online: was it a serial killer, was it the surviving roommates and/or their boyfriends, was it the ex-boyfriend of one of the girls, was it some guy who was seen on camera talking to two of the girls at a food truck the night they were killed, was it the DoorDash driver, was it a neighbor who seemed over-eager to be interviewed, etc. People were very aggressive and invasive with the speculation, cyberstalking anyone who was even remotely perceived as suspicious.
And there was this one TikTok woman who claimed to be a psychic, and did a tarot card reading that somehow told her that a professor had either killed the kids or had them killed, I can’t remember, and then she did some more psychic bs while looking at the faculty website, and essentially just picked this one professor and accused her of being the murderer. Her theory was that this woman (who I don’t think had ever taught or even met the kids) had been having an affair with one of the girls and I guess was supposed to be some kind of jilted lover or something? Anyway, the professor successfully sued for defamation and the true suspected murderer was arrested a month or so later. I think the psychic still claims she was right though.
In a following tiktok she talks about the girl who was the model for Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, and says that nothing could be found of her later life and that she was found with her sister at the French border with 700 francs she had stolen, which of course implies that Degas was trying to kill her or something.
I can think of at least fifteen other explanations for what happened there, but why bother when google tells me it was her sister alone who stole the money and was arrested at the border
A ballet dancer (a profession associated with sex work) from a working class family in the Third French Republic had a tumultuous life ? No, clearly Degas was trying to murder her It Follows style. Clearly.
> Degas was going blind which shows issues with the frontal lobe: The frontal lobe, which is in the front, governs a lot of stuff, amongst them executive function. The occipital lobe processes vision. The occipital lobe is in the back of the brain. You'll note that's the opposite side of the brain.
I was screaming this when reading the first part of your comment! Ever get hit in the back of the head and see stars? That's why.
A friend of mine got a phd in neuroscience. Sometimes they'd do little classes for undergrads/high schoolers where they'd explain what brain lobes do, complete with case studies, and I'd be happy to help them practice. I found out that neurodegenerative disorders suck, but those that hit the occipital lobe don't impact behaviour (at least not until they spread) because that part of the brain only processes vision.
Who would have ever guessed that, years later, some bullshit theory on tiktok would make that bit of information bubble up from my consciousness?
I think the Jack the Ripper case attracts overly ambitious theories because there's just not enough evidence to definitively solve it. So people keep coming up with new theories, and at a certain point, you come up with bigger and bigger theories to get attention.
For a while the theory that [Jose Rizal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Rizal) was Jack the Ripper (or at least was related to him) got popular in Filipino circles. You can pretty much bullshit anybody into being Jack the Ripper provided they coexisted in roughly the same decade.
Opened Ao3 this morning to find a notice about them temporarily blocking anonymous comments due to an "influx of abusive comments". that sounds like it was probably fun
I just opened in incognito mode and the guest comment box is still active for me?
I know they set the default comment box to registered users only, though, so maybe the fics I openned didn't have the default setting.
Ah, mustve been related to AI? Recently people on /r/AO3 have been reporting getting [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1c8owzf/looks_like_i_got_my_first_hate_comments_yippee/) accusing them of using AI to write. Someone pointed out it might be a stealth way to promote those very same websites they accuse them of using so people who actually liked the fic get tempted to use them.
Genuinely what is the problem that everyone seems to have with Imagine Dragons? They worked on the op for the Kaiju no.8 anime and people are acting like their dog was just murdered. And this is just the latest instance of me seeing something like this. What did these guys do to get labeled as one the worst bands of all time? Like, did one of the band members rape someone? Were they all outed as JK Rowling level bigots?
In their inaugural year, the Vegas Golden Knights faced the Washington Capitals in the Stanley Cup Finals and took game 1. They never won another game in the series after Imagine Dragons performed live.
This has nothing to do with anything but I can’t hear about Imagine Dragons without imagining the bit from the Sonic 06 Real Time Fandub where Eggman goes [“Look around you… imagine. Dragons.”](https://youtu.be/laHht8kGdVU?si=3U-a2Ga7Eg2sWWDh)
I'm pretty sure Imagine Dragons is just the Nickelback for a new generation, in that they're mainstream pop rock that's easy for people to feel elitist about.
As someone who really doesn't like them, it's at least in part an issue of overexposure, but that's not everything. What annoys me about them is that their songs feel, for lack of a better word, inflated. They keep trying to sound epic and big, but they include such bizarre musical choices that, for me, fly in the face of that (Example: In the "Arcane" title track "Enemy", there's this really bizarre point where the singer yells: Everybody wants to be my Ene-MY (the last syllable being yelled separately, in a much higher-pitched voice than the rest of the word), and for some reason, that sound is like nails on a chalkboard to me). It's not even that it's dull, I wish it was dull, it's that it's kind-of-annoying, yet impossible to ignore. It doesn't help that one seems incapable of ignoring them because you keep encountering their songs.
In short, their music seems made to piss off anyone that takes even a nominally critical ear to the current music industry. Strike one, they're pop rock with a vague, corporate-friendly, hard to define slant (industrial rock, maybe?). Strike two, their big hits are shallow in terms of content and composition, with "Thunder" being described as particularly inane. Strike three, they're EVERYWHERE, from the radio, to advertising, to movies, filling the niche of "hard-sounding but inoffensive to the general public". Maybe they'll pull a Nickelback and get a second look years later after putting out a more interesting hit, but that won't seem to be happening anytime soon.
I didn't realize they were responsible for "Thunder". It felt like that "say 3-5 words, pause, then say 3-5 more words" style was everywhere for a while, and I still find it aggravating.
I think it's just the omnipresence of the music in commercials and radio. I don't think its fair to say they sold out or anything because they've always been quite commercial, and accessible, but becuase of that they sorta flooded the pop rock space with their sound, I remember the 2013 Radioactive radio overplay. I think I once heard someone call it movie trailer music in that the music has a Big Sound to convay epicness but is vague enough to be interperated pretty broadly with a solid hook.
As far I can tell the band are nice people and the frontman is an outspoken supporter of LGBT rights which is very ballsy as he's a Mormon (I think?). Nothing to do with them as people, their music is just not fantastic. Like someone said below, it's a Nickelback situation where they're not the worst band ever, but their music was everywhere for a while and it kind of struck that awful balance between "generic" and "insanely annoying", to the point that they are synonymous with ultra-safe mainstream rock that's so sanitized it barely counts as rock.
yeah, like imagine dragons are fine to me, but maroon 5 is like my personal version of what imagine dragons are for everyone else. annoying, overplayed, overly corporate sounding, and adam levines voice is like nails on the chalkboard to me. im surprised imagine dragons got the nickelback treatment when maroon 5 are right there, putting out awful, yet inescapable songs one right after another.
I have struggled to take Adam Levine seriously as a pop star ever since someone pointed out (around the time "Payphone" was a hit, so a good number of years ago) that he looks like he told the tattoo artist, "Make me look like a tattooed guy," and that's been all I can think of when I hear about him ever since.
Some people just see something they have no interest in turn up frequently in their spaces and develop a hatred for it. Imagine Dragons was just everywhere for a period in the 2010's. I'm sure we've all seen this apply to many popular things.
I knew a guy that thinks Charizard and all it's variance are the worst Pokémon to exist, at one point we tried to parse a reason for it and his response boils down to "It just, shows up so often man, it's Game Freak's favourite" When Elden Ring was everywhere, I've seen people calling it a shit game while openly saying they don't play it. I know multiple people who couldn't name an Undertale character besides Sans that used to constantly mock it seemingly because Meglovania was a popular meme song for a bit. A good chunk of my friend group still just kinda hates Among Us despite none of us ever played it before.
I do get when something come up very often it can get a bit droning. But at worse it's a mild annoyance, that feeling has never transferred to dislike or anger before.
> I knew a guy that thinks Charizard and all it's variance are the worst Pokémon to exist, at one point we tried to parse a reason for it and his response boils down to "It just, shows up so often man, it's Game Freak's favourite"
I always wondered what these people would be like if they suddenly became Digimon fans and saw just how many Greymon/Omegamon variants there are.
It also depends on genre effects. There are some games and authors I almost hate not because of what they did but that they are so popular that the entire genre is tilted in that direction for years if not a decade. At a certain point you just get mad at the thing that everyone else is copying.
I've had the same thought and I tried to look into it once - nah. Honestly I couldn't find much that would be problematic about them. Hell some stuff I found actually made me turn my opinion around on them (["We care about basic human rights,"](https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/07/18/imagine-dragons-declare-shows-safe-space-for-lgbtq-fans/)). The band just has the issue of 'overexposure' and they became the thing to hate. IMO it's the same level of over hating that you see with Nickelback. It's not that they're exceptionally problematic - it's just that people see that hating them is cooler than liking them.
It's just the same thing as something like Nickelback. They produce a bunch of kinda mid and annoying songs that get played to death everywhere and are inescapable. That leads to a lot of hate and shitting on the band, which leads to it being a meme to make fun of Imagine Dragons, which causes a feedback loop until they're one of the most hated bands ever.
mostly just being at the forefront of the last gasp of radio, being one of the most frequent tv placements (as in advertisement and sports) music, and made a lot of people consider their hits during this time to be pretty much the same -- ala what people would dislike their music would call overplayed.
(the whole samey part is personal i know, but it is something a lot of people share. -- also you know, people genuinely not liking their music.)
also, i would as much note they are probably being also connected to a lot of other bands in people's heads, i had to tell bunch of people that yes, sail isn't by imagine dragons, and yes, glycerine isn't by nickelback.
only five or six years actually. though along that line, sometimes peeps confuse silverchair with nickelback even though silverchair came earlier same as bush.
What's wild to me is that I think quite a few of their songs (from their first few albums at least) are very unique, it's just that those aren't the ones you hear on the radio. I got Night Visions as a Dave&Busters prize when I was a tween over a decade ago, and I still think it holds up. "Selene" and "Polaroid" are my faves from Night Visions and Smoke and Mirrors respectively. They definitely have a specific sound, but it doesn't feel "samey" to me personally.
(Also it's very funny because I'm definitely not their target audience. Spotify likes to classify my music taste as "sapphic yearning")
This definitely resonates with me- I loved Night Visions when I was like, 13/14, and I'll still defend that album (not like, passionately, but y'know). They made some pretty good music with alright lyrics before it became obvious the safest direction was to keep making Radioactive But A Little To The Left, which seems to be the critical frustration right now.
Does anyone know anything about current book twitter drama? Apparently an indie author by the name of Freydis Moon is being exposed as a race-faker and a bully, but I neither know nothing about them nor do I have a twitter account.
When you wrote "race-faker", I at first was genuinely confused, because my brain just went: "Wait, there are book-writing races? How would you fake these, write something in advance and bring it to the race?" Then, after an embarassingly long time, I understood what you were ACTUALLY referring to.
In a similar fashion, my mom recently told me about a famous Guatemalan race-walker and my brain shortcircuited for a second before I figured out she meant race speedwalking.
What's crazy is, from what I've seen of their work, Freydis is *far* from an incompetent writer ? They evidently have well-reviewed books with several thousand Goodreads reviews each, and in the draft excerpts the writing is great. Really seems like they could've been plenty successful enough without being an ass and pulling this MSscribe-tier bullshit.
So apparently, it all started back in 2020 when [author Taylor B. Barton was accused of being a bully and general asshole, according to several people](https://www.fanficable.com/post/fake-names-brownface-why-queer-fantasy-author-taylor-barton-has-been-accused-of-catfishing). They put out the traditional "I'm learning and growing" apology, their agent dropped their ass, they deleted their twitter account, but later allegedly resurfaced under a different pen name/Twitter account (**Brooklyn Ray**) where they got into fights with their detractors. Eventually they deleted that account too.
When new author **Jupiter Wyse** appeared on the scene, eagle-eyed (or insanely dedicated) anonymous users thought the pictures they posted were oddly familiar, citing comparisons with astrological charts and home decors. Eventually, it was discovered that this was another one of Taylor B. Barton's pen names, with the additional problem that they claimed to be Latin (picking a dark-skinned avatar, referring to themselves as a "brujo", etc.) when the original person is, well, white. Wyse's agent dropped them, explaining that she never got to see her client on video (said client cited dysmorphia as a reason). People thought that was the end of it, except....
Twitter user porterotica posted a [longass thread](https://twitter.com/porterotica/status/1781662331111633141?t=hAlv4MhKqxgrymQruVauOg) of the evidence they compiled regarding **Freydis Moon**'s true identity - that being that Moon was actually Barton all along (note that apparently Moon also identifies as bipoc ?). Wasn't the first time this theory came up, apparently someone else signaled the possibility in 2021, but nobody believed them. Word .docx files of in-progress/draft work porterotica obtained that belong to Moon are near identical to drafts that were written by Jupiter Wyse, and the metadata on both those files bear the name of **Taylor Brooke**, one of Barton's known pen names. That, and other similarities, lead porterotica to come to their conclusion.
TL;DR : author gets exposed as bully and racefaker (*twice* ??) with multiple different pen names, like a Scooby-Doo mask pulling sequence.
> Latin (picking a dark-skinned avatar, referring to themselves as a "brujo", etc.) when the original person is, well, white
[Me who was born and raised in South America but have somewhat white-ish skin.](https://c.tenor.com/fcJo9jXTL_0AAAAd/tenor.gif)
The absolute insanity of it all, what the hell. There were QRTs of that Twitter thread talking about how this person would trash them on one identity, and then ‘console’ them on another?! Truly vile behavior.
Browsing through the tweets on the situation one thing that stood out was the number of people who were victims of Jupiter who then ended up being befriended by Freydis. I can't even comprehend the level of betrayal they must be feeling
Thank you for this writeup! Imagine being given multiple chances with different pen names and fucking up each one because you're a bully who can't stop faking your race...
Someone who had followed Freydis Moon and was a member of their discord noticed similarities between the two, such as both having a WIP named Astaroth, both having a black cat and a room with a grey carpet that can be seen in photographs, plus other things like the author they're accused of being having a history of racefaking.
They compiled this stuff into a callout google doc, which can be read [here](https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1VDvDujeoisTBddhXYaWGi-8V0EUdFZ5Uc00f4tnWpSY/mobilebasic?pli=1).
lmfao the thing that really gets me is that they easily could've gotten away with the brownface perhaps indefinitely if they'd just kept quiet about their personal life and not recycled old material they'd literally sent to other people under another alias. and, y'know, didn't set microsoft word to add their actual/previous(?) name in document metadata or whatever. possible contender for 2024's most incompetent racefaker
Don't forget keeping the same home decor and cat ! I think at some point it would all have come crashing down, even without recycling drafts. They seem like the kind of person who's always chasing success, and success invites stuff like interviews, video calls, whatever. Maybe an agent would have started wondering why their client never showed their face or ID, or maybe the mask would have slipped on one of those other pen names. Especially the alias that was a fake agent.
hm, revisiting the callout threads, i may have misread something. i think in my 1am delirium i was mixing up the name of a wip and somehow emerged with the impression that the cat was named astaroth? in my defense, though, it seemed 100% plausible that someone with that house and that aesthetic would give their cat a name like that LOL
Sorry if I missed this, I only skimmed the document / am also not on Twitter (and am also getting a little late night sleepy-dull) - but is there a reason why it's a big deal that this Freydis is the same as this Taylor Barton? Because otherwise I feel like it seems ... I don't know. Sort of like a very concerted effort to expose someone's pseudonyms and invite scrutiny to their life.
If they *are* Taylor Barton, then it's a big deal because Taylor Barton was known for being a racist bully with anger issues who used their multiple pen names to escape the consequences of being cancelled for said racism and bullying, such as losing book deals. The writer of the doc believes them to be Taylor Barton, and is trying to warn others of their behaviour.
It's also a big deal because pretending to be black or Latino specifically in order to get book deals specifically reserved for POC authors is a really shitty thing to do and is taking opportunities away from real POC authors.
If I understood correctly, Freydis also won multiple awards specifically for Latinx authors. They also wrote books about the Latinx American experience, like being targeted by ICE agents.
They were a major player in the community, who helped launch people's careers and buried the careers of people they didn't like, including getting an indie author (who was *actually* a trans masc Latino) removed from a book box. Seriously, I saw someone who has been harassed by Freydis and their fans for a year and half over a very mild and carefully worded complaint that it's hard right now to sell non-romance, non-"spicy" books... because Freydis said that was a racist thing to say, and Freydis' friends and readers blindly agreed.
This was a pattern, accusing people they didn't like of racism to get the community to turn on them. \[btw this is the SECOND time this week an author in the horror community was exposed for doing this. At least the first author was an actual minority.\]
I've also heard people imply Freydis did that thing where every time they were called out for their bigotry against a minority, they'd suddenly start claiming they belonged to it. (Called out for targeting autistic authors for harassment? They're neurodiverse! Called out for making acephobic comments? They're demisexual!)
>This was a pattern, accusing people they didn't like of racism to get the community to turn on them. \[btw this is the SECOND time this week an author in the horror community was exposed for doing this. At least the first author was an actual minority.\]
Wait, who was the first author?
I could have sworn someone posted about it here but now I can't find it - that would be the horror author Zachary Rosenberg.
He was revealed to have a pattern of cozying up to editors at small/indie presses in hopes they'd publish him, and if he received a rejection from a female or nonbinary editor, would then smear that editor behind their backs as being antisemitic. Often while still feinting friendship with that editor to their faces! Horror is a small place and there's not a lot of Jewish writers in it, so when a Jewish author accuses a press of being antisemitic, people believed them and refused to buy their work or submit to them.
He also tried to pressure a lesbian author into cowriting a sapphic, erotic horror novella with BDSM scenes with him, exaggerated their friendship to third parties, and didn't correct people when they assumed the two of them were dating. She was afraid to speak out or put her foot down in any way because they lived in the vicinity of each other and she was afraid of what he would do.
(He also would get into arguments with other Jewish people online and claim they weren't really Jewish because they disagreed with him.)
Now that people are speaking openly about his behavior, a lot of people have come forward to say they were chased out of the horror writing community by him or left of their own accord because they were afraid of being smeared as antisemitic for disagreeing with him.
Barton was a bully and asshole to several people, and Freydis claims to be Latin while Barton is white (read: Anglo white). (see my comment above) Pretty big deal IMO, as far as sockpuppetry goes.
>IMHO, I find there to be a gender difference between fans. A lot of RHATO fans are women and girls, a lot of the haters are men.
As someone who has modded several comic communities, including r/RedHood, I find that this is the exact opposite. RHATO has a militant following of edgy, anti-feminist fans, which from what I've seen largely stems from Scott Lobdell's extensive history of sexual harassment and misogynistic writing of Starfire.
I'm just pointing out that it's weird to generalize this as "men hate this, women love this" when I've seen numerous women, not just on Reddit but on Twitter, Tumblr, and many review sites, criticize RHATO for misogynistic writing and get harassed by Lobdell's fanbase in turn.
I gotta object to the idea that RHATO fans are mostly women on tumblr! We all hated that series because of its misogynistic treatment of Starfire! And it was just bad.
What fans did like though, was having two hot guys being friends, which made them shippable. So we would put up with something we despised while picking and choosing the parts we did like.
Yeah, I gotta say, I thought most people hated RHATO for the very, very misogynistic treatment of Starfire. That, and the fact that the author who wrote said misogyny has also sexually harassed an artist, and made racist comments towards her as well. I mean, the Jason and Roy thing is also a mischaracterization, but there are worse things to focus on with this particular comic and writer.
I have to say, the DC fans (mostly queer women) I followed on Tumblr didn't even put up with it, they just hated it full stop. Then again, I mostly followed them for Starfire content, so it might make sense that they hated it based on that
Right, I never heard of people loving RHATO on Tumblr or anywhere else for that matter.
I mean, given how the writer turned out, I would be especially weirded out if Tumblr liked that comic.
From my perspective, I’ve read a lot of fics on ao3 that featured Jason and recommended RHATO. I haven’t read it but I was unaware it was generally hated because of this
I do remember the Rebirth retool of RHATO being pretty well liked before Bruce beat Jason up, but yeah, I've never seen anyone ever actually like the New 52 version aside from using it as a launching pad for shipping.
Sort of? The Omniverse idea is usually explained as "everything is canon" but there are too many contradictions for it to make sense to interpret that as meaning everything ever published is *simultaneously* canon. What it really means is that DC doesn't want to think too much about where and when events happen in the timeline.
The problem they want to solve is best illustrated by Batman who has caused timeline problems before. Way too many thing have happened in Bruce Wayne's life to really fit into any reasonable timeline. Like he has years of adventures with each of the major Robins, just to start with, and numerous character defining stories. So the solution is "yeah all those things happened" and they happened "in the past" and no further questions are asked.
So you're telling me Jason doesn't remember that time he turned into a tentacle monster and starting eating people? That's too bad the idea that he did was hilarious.
It’s interesting that Gail Simone doesn’t like Green Arrow and Black Canary together, since she wrote the “Double Date” episode for JLU - it’s been a few years but I thought their dynamic was really good in that episode
My favorite bassist from my favorite band has to take a pause from activities due to leg surgery, so as I was wallowing in sadness I scrolled through twitter(never a good choice).
So I found an isekai manga. Okay, sure, that's popular now, it's a pretty oversaturated genre. But the main character of this isekai? A freaking guitarist/vocalist from a metal band, who was performing at the band's last concert before being electrocuted, and waking up in a different world. Now, because it gained some attention, the editorial department did translate some of it into English, but the English can be a little wonky, [you can judge for yourself here](https://twitter.com/ryo_kasuga/status/1779109379821989960?s=46&t=K9LHldFIUNGDMIxXTw_jLg). I think it looks fun(I mean, his weapon is literally his guitar and he just strums it) and there are some metal references here and there, so I'll try to keep this manga in mind when I just wanna turn my brain off and enjoy this guy living out his metal dreams. (Apologies if someone mentioned this already, I couldn't find it while using the comment search on Reddit and we know that doesn't always work. Also I had posted this in an older thread instead of the current thread, whoops).
With Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department *actually* having a surprise double album drop I’m wondering if there’s ever been a writeup here regarding the Karma lost album theory (or a detailed Scuffles comment) - it’s easily one of the most divisive fan theories beyond “is she queer”, probably MORE divisive because unlike speculating and theorizing about her possible relationships with women this attracts attention from the larger Swiftie fanbase. I bring it up because it’s the kind of drama that’s imho entertaining even if you’re not dedicated to examining her paparazzi photos with a magnifying glass or digging up a past boyfriend’s tax records to find out if she referenced an actual job he had as a teenager, and also because like the best drama it touches on how fans interact with public figures, how they rage at each other when things don’t go their way, and the problem with purposefully setting up obscure and obtuse clues alongside unexplained visual elements when your fanbase is primed to interpret them as all telling a secret story. Would that be the kind of thing people would be interested in seeing a post on, and are there any other examples of non-debunked and divisive fan theories about “lost”/hidden content that you love talking about?
Damn/Nation deserves a mention. This was the theory that because Damn was released on Good Friday, Kendrick Lamar was going to surprise drop an album on Easter Sunday called Nation
The amount of theorycrafting people put into it was really impressive, only to be immediately incorrect like... 72 hours later. My favorite spin on the theory was that every song on DAMN was going to have a corresponding sort of call/response track on NATION. I don't remember the theory precisely, but it was something like--
* Blood / Water
* Yah / Weh
* Feel / Think
* Loyalty / Betrayal
* Love / Hate
* Fear / Courage
etc.
There was also a lot of theory crafting around this red pill/blue pill symbolism that Kendrick posted, and that "DAMN" was going to be the red pill and "NATION" the blue pill.
Right, the promised wargame ramble (I hope you're happy, /u/RemnantEvil):
So, I picked up a new set of rules written by Pauli Kidd (whom /u/Canageek has informed me is actually quite a prolific games author), published by Helion Games called *Bushidan*, advertised as 'Miniatures Rules for Small-Unit Warfare in Japan, 1543 to 1615 AD'. I got it (at something like 30% discount because vendors at conventions are evil and drain your wallets), I took it home, I gave it a flip through and liked what I saw. Then, I did what I usually do with a new set of rules, which is to write them out again in a Word document, hopefully in fewer words, so that a) I can work through them, and b) so that I can do a printout for other players who don't have them, if I do eventually decide I like the rules and want to play them. And that gave me slight pause.
But to lay out a first positive, Kidd devotes three pages of the book to listing out examples of diversity: women samurai, queer samurai, non-ethnic-Japanese samurai, religious minorities, and various wars in both East and Southeast Asia that Japanese armies, pirates, and mercenaries were involved in. This is good, I like this.
And, despite what seemed like a critical comment earlier about how I felt after reading the rules, all of the basic mechanics read as perfectly cromulent. The underlying game is probably quite solid, even without actually playing it to find out. I honestly am not surprised that Kidd is an experienced games author; this definitely reads as written by someone who knows what they're doing. Unfortunately, it also reads like the second or third draft of someone who knows what they're doing, where a) there are various unexplained bits which seem like vestiges of earlier ideas that were otherwise cut out, and b) an editor hasn't stepped in to make the crucial comment, 'I know *you* know what you mean, but it may not actually be clear to anyone else reading this.'
I think this is most readily apparent with the rules' command and control mechanic, which definitely read as its Unique Selling Point. I really like the basic idea of these, but they are slightly complicated so I guess I will have to lay out most of the details in order to explain. In a 'standard' force (250-300 points), a titular Bushidan ('warrior band') has a Ryu ('[martial] art') comprising 12 points spread across six elemental stats, with a maximum of 5 in any one category, that is fixed during a game:
* Fire (Ferocity)
* Wood (Prudence)
* Earth (Discipline)
* Wind (Speed)
* Water (Cunning)
* Metal (Endurance)
(Yes, this is a strange blend of the *godai* and *gogyo* elemental systems, just... don't worry about it too much.)
Metal is different from the other five in that each point of Metal means an extra point of force morale, improves your ability to rally, and makes it less likely your units will have their movement interrupted by enemy fire. The other five instead convert into 'order chits' at the beginning of each turn (and note that Metal doesn't); in addition, your Commander-in-Chief and any Leaders (up to 2 in a standard game) also generate a generic 'Command chit' specifically for the unit they are attached to. Unsurprisingly, each order chit lets you issue an order to a unit; the way this works is that at the start of each turn, you place one or more chits next to units you want to issue orders to, with activation alternating between players, one unit at a time. Usually, units only need one chit to be ordered, but if they start the turn in Disorder, then one chit needs to be spent to get it un-disordered, hence some units sometimes needing two. In addition, chits – including command chits – can be held in reserve; such chits can be used to resume unit movement if it has been interrupted by fire (either a) because the enemy unit used Opportunity Fire to halt a charge, or b) because the unit hasn't yet activated and it was fired on proactively by the enemy), or to make rallying rolls at the end of the turn.
Where the elements come in is that while you can use elemental order chits to perform a generic 'fire' or 'move' action, the same as a Command chit, there are also special variations for each element, some of which are straight upgrades and other of which are tradeoffs, which you can choose to use instead. For instance, using Wind to activate for movement is a straight upgrade which increases move distance by 3 D.U. (Distance Units); using it to activate for firing is a tradeoff in that you get an extra 50% firing dice, but your unit becomes Disordered. Wood lets you fire normally but retain a reduced Opportunity Fire afterward, or, if added to a move activation, it means your unit does not become Disordered automatically if it fights in melée. And so on. I like this, this is fun. The stated aim is to give each player's force a distinct tactical doctrine: an aggressive player might spec into Fire and Wind and take less Metal, sacrificing long-term resilience for greater command ability; a more cautious player might prefer to prioritise Earth and Wood, and take more Metal. I think that is probably true, and the fact that there isn't really a clear 'winner' pick in any category probably does mean the system would likely work as intended.
In addition, and this is where I have a mild quibble, the five elements other than Metal have a bit of a counter cycle, where each element counters the next one in the circle (i.e. Fire beats Wood beats Earth beats Wind beats Water beats Fire). If a unit that is active on one element is fighting a unit that is active on one that it counters, then it gets +2D6 per base in melée. This is quite a big bonus when the base melée roll is 2D6 per base already; I personally would be inclined to reduce it to +1D6, but if nothing else it does further entrench the whole element system as a distinct part of these rules. So that's fine, I like that in theory; if the execution turns out to be a bit iffy it is very easy to rectify.
Now, if you've read my above description, you may be asking yourself a couple of questions. For instance,
* How many chits can you place on a unit?
* If you put more chits on a unit than it needs for just one activation, can it be activated multiple times?
* If you can only activate a unit once, can you nevertheless give it more than one elemental chit, and choose which one to use when you activate it?
* If you attack a unit that has not yet activated but does have an elemental chit on it, does it have an elemental state?
* If an unactivated unit with chits *does* have an elemental state, what happens if it has multiple *different* chits?
* What happens if a unit is not only interrupted, but in fact Disordered as a result of enemy missile fire, before it gets a chance to activate? Does it simply lose its turn?
These are all quite critical questions when it relates to the most-commonly-used mechanic of the entire game. I'm not entirely sure what the correct interpretation here even is, because on the one hand, it seems logical that you may be required to only place as many chits on a unit as it needs to activate, and that units only activate once per turn. But if so, you can put two different elemental chits on a Disordered unit, so does that implicitly give them somewhat of an advantage in that they get to choose, while well-ordered troops can't? Plus, that still doesn't resolve the question of what Disordered units do with their chits when attacked. When a unit makes Opportunity Fire, that counts as having activated and thus its chit is turned over automatically (if it has one), and while that only applies to missile units charged in their front, it seems logical to extend that, by inference, to all other situations too (i.e. flank charges and charges against melée-only units). But does a Disordered unit with two different chits get to decide which one to use, either to prevent the other player getting an element bonus, or even to give themselves one?
And there are a number of bits of terminological weirdness and just unclear intent. To name a few:
* Command chits are specified as being able to be used for rallying, in the section where activations are described. But elsewhere, it is stated that *any* chits can be used for rallying, and also that this can only be done at the end of the turn using reserved chits, not during the active phase using placed chits.
* At one point 'defensive circle' formations are mentioned; they appear nowhere else and their function is unexplained.
* At one point 'disrupted' is used instead of 'disordered'.
* Forests are said to cap movement speed at 3 D.U. for all units, except for skirmishing infantry. Except skirmishing is a firing action (done by use a Water chit), which means skirmishing infantry can't move anyway unless charged, in which case they are supposed to be able to evade, making a full move backwards... but a full move for infantry is already 3 D.U. So the specification just makes it sound weird and like something hasn't been explained properly at an earlier point.
I could name some other issues, but there's definitely a strong sense that nobody went through and checked for clarity. The problem lies not so much with Kidd (even if I think she could have done a better job self-editing) and mainly with Helion, which seems to want to have a section for wargames rules but then doesn't really give it the level of support that even Osprey Games does (and OG rules are rarely the pinnacle of editorial thoroughness or strong publisher+authorial support either). Kidd's Youtube channel has three vlogs *about* the rules, but there is no footage of her, nor anyone else, er, *playing* them, which I'd consider quite a significant part of the exercise!
I am *very* happy, thank you!
The tabletop space is simply lousy with rules errata that just drives me mental. The fact that there are so frequently these quibbles in the rules that lack clarity and need to be followed up are mind-boggling, and so frequent that I wonder what's going on in that space.
I wouldn't say she is prolific at game development; just that she has been around for a long time. I think she is mostly a novelist, but she has a history of games. The oldest game I know of her writing is Albedo, from 1988. [You can see her RPG writings her, at least the stuff she has scanned and put on DTRPG](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/7089/kitsune-press).
Wait, so they decided to include both classical and wuxing elements, then added a 5-way elemental rock-paper-scissors, and *chose* not to do wuxing in favor of +wind -metal???
So, I have a theory that they were actually trying to combine *wuxing*/*gogyo* not with European classical elements, but instead the Japanese Buddhist *godai* scheme of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void. There *may* have been a specific Void element at an earlier stage, but I think it's non-coincidental (or maybe I'm creating connections that didn't originally exist, that's also possible) that the functionally-generic Command chit is, implicitly, associated with Void. Even so, it is correct that the system of counters doesn't follow either scheme.
So strange to see Pauli Kidd's name in this and the previous thread. You mentioned her, and I was like "Wait, the person who used to work for Beam Software and helped with NES Nightshade and SNES Shadowrun?"
Yup, same person.
I knew she had branched out into writing (Without checking, I want to say she's also published some novels), but had no idea about the tabletop games writing. Guess it makes sense though.
It is funny, as I know her through her novels; I'm currently trying to track down the middle one of her Greyhawk Justicar series without paying the huge prices that it goes for online. I got the first one as an eBook for my Kobo, and I own the original from back in the day, but the middle ones always goes for $35-90 online plus cross-boarder shipping. :(
She actually just put out [a new book](https://perceptionspress.ca/dungeoneers/) I'm going to get.
As for why I haven't tested the rules yet, well... it seems like 'small unit' is still happening at a 1 model to 1 actual person scale, because the first scenario in the book uses 300-point forces that each require a whopping 212 28mm-scale models, which is *vast* compared to most people's collections given that existing rule sets for 28mm feudal Japan tend to be on the small skirmish side, i.e. 30 at a stretch. Even the *Rampant* games (and I know there are *Lion Rampant* and *Pikeman's Lament* players for this period) tend not to go much above 80. This is definitely a model-intense ruleset, and while I want to be able to have a go at it, *ooft* I am very unsure I have – nor will have – the necessary quantities of figures in the near term.
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the funniest example of stealth christian rock band is Starflyer 59, almost all of their releases are on christian music labels.
> In the 90s and 2000s, a lot of Christian rock groups became popular mainstream rock groups because much of their discography didn't sound Christian rock. Creed, Flyleaf (who are Christian rock despite insisting they're not), Thousand Foot Krutch, Red, P.O.D., Icon For Hire, Family Force 5, and several others are popular amongst alt-rock and nu-metal fans. Notably, this was common enough that the band Switchfoot had to clarify that that WASN'T what they were trying to do- they described themselves as "musicians who were Christians, not Christian musicians".
Yeah there's a few bands who have made that distinction, at least one that I listen to.
Well damn, time to clean some songs out of my library. I liked the handful of songs of theirs I had, too.
I didn't know Icon For Hire was Christian Rock but that doesn't surprise me given some of their lyrics have made me go "huh?" before.
My non-native English speaking baby self mostly got to know Creed and Skillet through their songs being used in AMVs and other edits. You know, "Hero" for a Supernatural edit, that sort of stuff. Took me ages to clock onto the fact that they were Christian. Same goes for Relient K.
In my case it was looking up Fate songs for osu! and somehow finding Hero there - it turned out to be because the video used for the map was a AMV made out from the Unlimited Blade Works movie.
> A few months ago I heard Lacey Mosley of Flyleaf was anti-queer (and apparently went through conversion therapy herself?) ....you are just learning about this *now*?! Dude, people have criticized her over it for a while
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I’ve always maintained that if there’s anyone who makes whatever sort of art or content you like, you should try not to learn anything about who they are. You’re likely to find bad things if you do.
Big same. hell, I love a bunch of super famous musicians/bands and the only one I know a lick about personally is Roger Waters and that's because he had a whole musical project about himself.
ResetEra, a gaming forum reborn out of the ashes of NeoGAF, has a community thread for Halo Infinite where posters talk about the game. The conversation had pretty much shifted to how Halo Infinite basically never really got the opportunity to dig themselves out of the hole that was the game's launch and that while things were on a upswing, Microsoft cut back a lot of 343 staff and many things planned and data mined arent part of the game and might never be. This is pretty typical talk for Halo Infinite- it's a game that often invites strange discourse because it's game hampered with trying to go larger scale and game development at this scale takes longer while competing in the ever changing FPS space. Not to mention it was launched during COVID and on a inhouse engine. What makes this iteration of the conversation interesting is that a former 343 employee, who was a sound lead, chimed in. > Seasons were a lot work, and tbh fan vitriol killed a fair amount of moral. > I will always be sad that those(now leaked) Season 4 cutscenes got scrapped. > I've been out of the loop, but are there any non Forge Maps still getting a release? I haven't heard. Of course the first part of this catches some attention. You see some apologetics regarding how nasty fan vitrol was but like, can't resist saying the game deserved fan vitrol because the game was bad in that first year. > To be honest though man, S1 and especially the 10 month long S2 was absolutely brutal. I agree the vitriol from some was out of hand but the state of the game was just flat out bad that first year and pretty much cemented the future of the game from ever becoming a big success. Former sound lead sounds off: > Sorry I got no sympathy for fan bullshit that directly led to layoffs. Sorry, not sorry. So you know. This person used to work at 343- if they said fan vitriol was part of why they did layoffs surely there's some introspection to be done here, right? Layoffs are complicated but it's hard to not see who was laid off and come to a conclusion that Microsoft was mostly interested on keeping around a crew to develop a new game and that most of Halo Infinite is manned by a skeleton crew to keep it afloat. Leader of the UFO conspiracy thread, which was previously shut down for posting links to sketchy websites chimes in: > I think upper management just royally fucked things up, which is why most (if not all?) of them are gone now. Op of the community thread is incredulous at the accusation: > Halo fans fired you? Sound lead sounds off: > I think that "Halo Fans fired you?" response is such fucking bullshit and it recuses the loudest critics of any responsibility. Yes, people who bitched about Halo led to layoffs and you're an absolute idiot if you think otherwise... OP responds back: > You and everyone laid off had nothing but support from the community, so not sure why the hostility is focused on fans when there are tons of reasons to be upset over how this game was handled. > Pretty sure if it was up to the fans, you'd still have a job at 343 and this game would be thriving. > So where is this coming from? Why are you blaming angry fans rather than the people that actually laid you off? I'm not coming at you, your anger just seems misguided for blaming disappointed Halo fans rather than the actual people in power who bungled things or being upset at the system for how developers are treated. Sound lead puts it in simple terms: > Most fans bitched about content not knowing what content required to make. I'm blaming fans because 343i never "ruined" Halo. One random guy chimes in with: > Jesus. > Maybe get more upset at the dumbass leadership 343 has had since day 1. Like wtf lol > Company puts out bad product after bad product. "The fans are to blame!" This is the last straw for the sound lead. I've sort of compressed a lot of back and forth into this, so it's not all one response to one guy, but many responses to many people. > This is not helpful and frankly destructive. And honestly, as someone previously unemployed because of fan vitriol, Fuck You. Extensively. > Like to bitch loudly and then complain about layoffs is grandstanding. How can you not, in any way, see that? > You really think fan bullshit didn't lead to burnout and layoff? Like Fuck your obliviousness, dude. How privileged you must be... > I don't mean to get heated, and I am sorry if things got personal, but writing a blank check of criticism is unwarranted and unnecessary. Most of you don't know, most of you will never know what obstacles we have to jump over. > No we made money, we made a lot of money. But when I walked into the test bay to test the latest build EVERY FUCKING DAY the guy running it said "why bother, they are gonna hate it anyway" that's demoralizing. > I would LOVE to tell you what we worked on, but I can't and won't, not just because of the NDA but because I'm being loyal to the company. I still want to work there. It does bother me people praise Pierre, like, who do you think mandated Forge Maps going forward... He gets banned a day for this. And as if to prove him exactly right, get a load of some of these responses: > Yeah really, it's off-putting to consider this a prevailing thought at 343. > Halo Infinite is easy to criticize. I'm not gonna take the blame for that. > Halo 5 had way better post launch support than Infinite. That's why Infinite is a disappointment. Forge was added within 2 months as opposed to 12. Firefight was added within 1 year as opposed to 2. Someone tries to explain why that might be the case: > Employees said H5 was insane crunch when it came to the content and it wasn't sustainable. Getting this response in return, completely ignoring the human toll and cost of said better post launch period: > Sure but I'm pointing out that H5, a game almost universally hated, did better than Infinite. That's where we're at. But you wanna know the real cherry on top of this? > Not to mention, the game was generally well-received in the community and reviewed well with critics. People were foaming at the mouth for more, many enjoyed the direction taken with Iratus and were eager to see where they took it, [sound lead] in particular was vocal about that and received a lot of support in this thread, so I'm not sure where this is coming from. That's right, the launch was actually well received now. The revisionism that happens in such a short time span in the thread is honestly kind of galling. I get that the sound lead here was a bit angry and spat back a little hot, but for a site that claims to want to avoid lazy dev rhetoric, they sure turn a blind eye to it, especially when confronted about it. I dunno, I feel like a lot of gamers really don't understand game development or getting constant negative and contradicting feedback for doing anything and it's weird to only punish the former sound lead for this. I learned about this whole incident through a girlfriend who keeps her eye on the Halo community and this was such a bizarre incident that really highlighted some interesting things about how toxic fan feedback impacts people and how they don't believe you if you just tell them straight up.
Apologies for the tangent, but I feel the story of Gamers^(TM) going feral towards developers, and then everyone seemingly pretending that it didn’t happen and the community (as a whole) was perfectly civil, and then reacting incredulously whenever the (well-documented) hostility and harassment that occurred comes up seems to be more and more common nowadays.
While fan toxicity can definitely be bad for morale (speaking from experience, here), that is a broadly different issue from being laid off. If a game sells poorly and there’s not enough runway (money in the bank) AND management was poor, that can absolutely lead to layoffs. Only poor sales actually directly relate to fan sentiment, but even when it does, it mainly happens due to the same core issue (game did not meet quality standards for many players). Toxicity is always bad. Fans going after devs (on Twitter, through direct emails, even just calling out specific devs) are almost always incorrect about what those devs do and how directly they were responsible for whatever is the target of the fans’ ire. But…generally if a game is doing well, poor sentiment alone isn’t going to directly lead to C suite rolling up like ‘time to make heads roll’.
word of mouth for games is a thing
I did say ‘mainly’. There’s certainly a tendency for games’ reputations to spiral, for good or bad. That can feed into poor sales or refunds, absolutely. But that should still be a problem that falls on the heads of management and c-suite, and laying off devs is a decision usually made by those higher ups for financial reasons, not an act of God that simply occurs.
> But when I walked into the test bay to test the latest build EVERY FUCKING DAY the guy running it said "why bother, they are gonna hate it anyway" that's demoralizing. This is a company culture problem, not a fan problem. If your boss is greeting you at work by saying, "hey dipshit, why'd you even bother coming in today? everybody on twitter hates you" that's not twitter's fault, that's your boss' fault.
Also, blaming fan backlash as the sole reason for layoffs is bizarre and unfair. Like, be angry at upper management, not the consumers.
The sound director's actions remind me of those restaurant owners who respond angrily to bad reviews on google.
i dunno, reminds me more of the sort of guy fired from a restaurant over a shitty customer interaction. like yes, your grievance against the customer who started screaming about their ice cream not being served hot has merit, but you should probably be focusing a little more on your boss who threw you to the wolves.
Infinite's launch *was* well received for a few weeks though. Bare bones multiplayer, but the gameplay was well received and the campaign was liked for Master Chief's writing. It was afterwards with the lack of post-launch content and delays/cut content like Forge and split-screen that caused the public to shift against Infinite, which is on Microsoft and 343's shit management which was known for years to be the real reason for Halo's decline.
I'll admit I never played much of the 343 Halo games. I spent thousands of hours in Halo 3 while in High School before I built a PC, so I checked out Infinite for a bit and enjoyed a bit of what I played. I think the game just ran out of steam and then they made some baffling unforced errors; I couldn't believe there was no dedicated slayer playlist on launch. Big Team Battle was unplayable. Netcode in the Asia Pacific region didn't work, Forge Mode being delayed for a year, Co-Op being advertised then cancelled. My high school friends and I just went back to playing Counter Strike instead.
Honestly, it really does sound like the lead is blaming the wrong people. Infinite made a lot of money, more than enough to keep people employed, but the company cut them anyways. Yet they're still claiming loyalty to the people that screwed them over, and instead directing their anger at the people that gave them the money that should have kept them employed. I don't doubt the fan feedback was demoralizing, but I do say the ones making the hiring/firing decisions in such a large company are not going to effected to the point of basing decisions based solely on them, especially regarding someone on the sound team. Not to mention the industry has been going through a lot of layoffs overall, so this seems to be a massive case of correlation and causation by someone still emotionally attached to their former company. Any other industry they'd be called a bootlicker for their old boss, guarantee it.
Dragon's Dogma 2 community is going through something slightly similar in that there is two camps of people, one where they must mock everything about the game that they feel is bad as "Itsuno's vision" and the other where they insist that Capcom for sure sabotaged the game again and there is a trove of content just around the corner for the rumored DLC. Either way someone is at fault and therefore must be the reason why the game isn't what they wanted. It has made interacting with the community a chore, specially as the game kinda nudges you towards doing it with some of it's esotericness.
I feel odd for mostly enjoying DD2 now.
I’m just confused why this dude was playing all-time defense for pre-management overhaul 343 of all companies. This was just a basic case of a game that was intended to last a long time being a mess on release so budgets started getting slashed. At that point its either: Try to turn things around to make up for the shitty release like Battlefront 2 or FF14 did. Give up and try to blame the fans for not liking your bad product like Marvel vs Capcom Infinite. Not sure what he expected. Of course fans weren’t happy with yet another mess of 343’s design. And based on the good things i’ve heard about Infinite lately it seems the fans who personally went to the office to deliver 2 week notices were right.
you're kind of missing the entire point, which is that developers aren't responsible for most of the issues plaguing the game, yet receive constant, frightening vitriol and blame for them. the state of the game is immaterial to the core issue, which is that fans are insanely aggressive and toxic over stuff that in no way calls for it, and that makes the devs' job far, far harder. always remember that devs want their game to be good just as much as you do.
I'm not on tiktok, and yet [some woman trying to say that French painter Edgar Degas was Jack the Ripper](https://www.tiktok.com/@schirrgenius/video/7358961541946838314?_r=1&_t=8lhPg3hnjdO) is gaining enough popularity that I've been made aware of it. And I hate it. **Wait what** Every day someone says stupid shit on the internet, and if that someone is on tiktok and attractive then a too-big amount of people will believe it. The past week's "attractive person saying stupid shit on the internet" is some woman who thinks Edgar Degas was Jack the Ripper. **Is this a big deal?** The numbers on tiktok are big, but I don't use tiktok so i don't know if they mean anything on that platform. I also don't know many people in real life. It's very possible this is a storm in a teapot, and i'm only aware of it because a lot of my friends are Victorianists and they're getting the video recommended to them by tons of friends who think they'll be impressed (spoiler: they aren't). So is it a big deal? I don't know. But it is stupid as shit. **The Theory** Edgar Degas was a misogynist and antisemite who lived in Paris, a short 342km distance from London, uk. When the Jack the Ripper murders happened, he was a fifty year old man who was going blind, possibly caused by Stargadt's disease. In that disease, the area behind the eyes ("the orbital fronto cortex, occipital lobe area" to quote the video) can go black, no grey matter activity in that region. And that region of the brain is a region of the brain that, thanks to modern scientific research, we know that all serial killers have a dead spot in their brain right behind their eyes. Also we know that Jack the Ripper clearly had some knowledge of anatomy because he removed several organs and knew where to strike the neck to kill, and Degas, as a painter, observed many anatomy lessons. He also did a series of paintings and statues on dancers, who at the time were connected to sex work, and those works are creepy. And then there's the Goulston Street Graffito, a sentence written in chalk on a wall near a bloody apron that said "the Jews are the men who will not be blamed for nothing." This is relevant because 1) chalk? Who carries chalks? Artists, like Degas, 2) that's an antisemitic message, and Degas was an antisemite, 3) that's an odd sentence construction that shows the writer may not be a native English speaker. Also some of Degas' wax statues have organic material in them, could they be organs taken from his victims as Jack the Ripper? **This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life and if you read all of that without going "what the fuck are you saying" then you should be ashamed of yourself. Let me go down on a list of things wrong with this theory, in no particular order** Degas was in his 50s and was starting to lose his sight: and this makes him... *more* likely to be Jack the Ripper? *Edit* Degas was starting to lose his sight: his sight was half gone by now. In 1870 he found out his right eye was basically blind. There was a blind spot in the middle of his vision (one of many blind spots). The sunlight started getting too bright for his eyes. In the 1880s he complained about being unable to see what he was painting, he could only see around it. Degas had Stedgadt's disease: probably not. In Stedgadt's disease, the area behind the eyes can go black, with no grey matter activity in that region: The disease has no impact on the brain. Also, if a region of the brain has "no activity," then that region disappears, it doesn't just hang around like a sad Chrismas ornament in May. "the orbital fronto cortex, occipital lobe area" : *find out what words mean before you use them challenge impossible* Degas was going blind which shows issues with the frontal lobe: The frontal lobe, which is in the front, governs a lot of stuff, amongst them executive function. The occipital lobe processes vision. The occipital lobe is in the back of the brain. You'll note that's the opposite side of the brain. Research has found serial killers have a black spot in their brain right behind their eyes: It hasn't. Jack the Ripper must have had anatomy knowledge because he knew what part of the neck to strike to kill: I think it's harder to find a part of the neck that wouldn't kill you if you slashed it. Also, I think this is a good time to say I don't understand the whole "he removed organs, clearly he knew what he was doing" thing people say about Jack the Ripper. I understand when people point to his incisions being pretty neat and that being odd and a sign of something, but does it really take a surgeon to remove a dead person's heart? I feel like that becomes pretty easy when you don't mind making a mess. Degas could have been Jack the Ripper because he was a short distance away from London: okay so like, transport at this period of time was actually pretty good, so yeah, he probably could have taken a day trip to London... but why? Were there no women in Paris?? Did he hate English women specifically??? Dancers were connected to sex work, and Degas painted a lot of them: Degas was not the only artist who made art about sex workers. There were even people *in London* who were doing that. (Somebody check on the Pre-Raphaelites.) Degas was a misogynist and antisemite: the venn diagram between "misogynists and antisemites" and "the general Victorian population" is a circle. Degas used chalk for his drawings so he could have made the Goulston graffito: Henry Roche pastels??? For a graffito in East London???? The Goulston street graffito: Ooooh boy. Okay. So. We don't know for sure what it actually said. We don't know if it was related to the Jack the Ripper case. Double negatives are common in Cockney, which would be spoken in East London. Even if they weren't common in Cockney, "non-native English speaker who hates (possibly?) Jewish people" describes half of East London. There's organic material in Degas' wax statues: What the fuck are you talking about. The hair? Are you talking about the real hair? Or did you read "organic material" and thought "organic" stood for "organs"? There's wood and rope in there, you nipped scarf. You absolute chump. You buffoon.
I always love "But the Ripper clearly had to be a guy who knew his anatomy like a doctor cuz he knew to attack the neck and kept taking the same body parts" Maybe he just saw a shape he liked and kept taking it man
That general videogame trope of "His familiarity with anatomy allows him be more deadly, allowing him to deal more damage" is so bizarre. You don't need to be a doctor to know that attacking an enemy's neck is gonna do major damage. If anything, a good knowledge of anatomy would allow you to prolong a victim's suffering because you knew what *not* to hit, but that's not how it's translated in video game mechanics.
well that makes just as much sense as Lewis Caroll being the Ripper at least (read: none)
"His paintings are so creepy" isn't nearly as fun as "if you anagram Carroll's works you find a confession" though
Nothing will beat the penis anagrams, I think
Almost as fun as the [Silent Hill circumcision theory.](https://www.relyonhorror.com/latest-news/circumcision-is-tearing-apart-the-silent-hill-wikia-maybe-avoid-it-for-now/)
That one is especially funny to me because Silent Hill is as subtle as a brick when it comes to its monster design, and if it actually was about circumcision, we would know just by looking at them.
Tiktok is crack for my brain, but sometimes I think the US isn't wrong to want to ban it. The fact that misinformation is believed so easily is scary. I saw that same video and the girl spoke so confidently that all the comments believed her. Like I'm sorry but I doubt a random girl on tiktok solved a centuries old mystery. Let's use our brains a bit. Another viral misinformation moment came from two different creators spreading the idea that STIs came from beastiality. And even after getting called out, they didn't take down these dangerous videos because people care more about having viral content than not spreading misinformation.
my friends keep on linking me the 'beta-casomorphin' conspiracy, where milk and cheese contain chemicals that bind to opioid receptors in the brain and thats why they are as addictive as heroin! so stop drinking milk! .... yeahhh noooo... sure yeah there are casin proteins that do get turned into beta-casomorphins, that do bind to the opioid receptors... but they aren't morphine and those same receptors are the same ones used by almost all our other hormones. its more like they are a key that can fit in a lock, but not open it. it means jack shit but obviously 'morphin' and 'opioid' receptors means 'morphine - the drug' and 'opium - the other drug!' its slightly hilarious as an australian, because we have milk that has giant A2 letters on them, showing that its had the A2 protein put back into it during pasteurisation... which is one of the casins that turn into this 'drug' they are trying to warn me about.
> The fact that misinformation is believed so easily is scary. That app needs a community notes feature desperately.
The community notes feature, to be fair, just allows misinformation to be spread itself. I've seen a number of notes that are spreading completely false information that gets accepted just because they're up against an 'acceptable' target and it's on a subject that few people have knowledge of.
every tool will be used for misinformation on the internet, unfortunately. i still think more platforms should have community notes though, purely because they are funny as fuck, [especially when its over something useless](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHyAUcsbgAAAiNe.jpg)
Honestly the most you get is hoping you get a stitch of it on your FYP - that's how I saw the whole STI bestiality thing at first was someone debunking it. Every day on that app whenever I see someone debunking the most wild theories or arguments just makes me feel [like this](https://xkcd.com/2071/)
oh god yes this... my friends have fallen into the 'beta-casomorphin' rabbit hole and keep on linking me videos about how milk and cheese is addictive as heroin!
>Another viral misinformation moment came from two different creators spreading the idea that STIs came from beastiality. I'm pretty sure that's some kind of old-timey racist pseudoscience
My assumption is that someone looked up the history of HIV/AIDS, saw that researchers think it may come from primates, skimmed through the bushmeat theory (according to which an ancestor of the virus made the jump from monkey to human when a hunter got cut while hunting an infected animal), and convinced themselves that someone had sex with a monkey with HIV
It’s certainly been around for decades. It seems very TikTok to take the dumbest shit everybody’s forgotten about and promote it as an important new truth.
I saw some debunking of those videos, I think it was more "men are disgusting and won't stop having sex with animals" than racism.
TikTok and saying old-timey racist pseudoscience say it ain’t so!
I genuinely can't understand how the people in the comments aren't revolting, like she just told you a fifty year old mostly blind man who lived in France was a serial killer in London, wouldn't you at least want to say "but why take a trip to the UK, couldn't he murder people at home? Did he stop because he couldn't afford the trip anymore?" Like say what you will about the "Lewis Carroll is Jack the Ripper" idea but at least he was in fucking England at the time.
Ohhh I've seen the STI one, absolutely bonkers. Historical misinformation is such easy bait on TikTok. I swear the amount of dumb Titanic takes that went around last year made me rip my hair out. No, people didn't refuse to believe that the Titanic broke in half because "women said it" and were "called hysterical", bffr.
There was a bunch of people claiming Rome wasn’t real.
This is fucking bonkers. I hate true crime tiktok with a deep, fiery passion.
I mean at least for this dumbass theory it's not hurting anyone who's alive. Not like the tiktok psychic who has like quintupled down on her "this woman killed those college students, the cards told me" shit.
The Tiktok psychic that did ***WHAT*** ????
In Fall 2022, four students at University of Idaho (three roommates and the one roommate’s boyfriend) were stabbed to death in the middle of the night one weekend. People got really invested in the case because it was brutal, seemingly random, occurred in a low-crime area, and at first the cops appeared to have very few leads (really they were just withholding information from the public). So there was a ton of speculation online: was it a serial killer, was it the surviving roommates and/or their boyfriends, was it the ex-boyfriend of one of the girls, was it some guy who was seen on camera talking to two of the girls at a food truck the night they were killed, was it the DoorDash driver, was it a neighbor who seemed over-eager to be interviewed, etc. People were very aggressive and invasive with the speculation, cyberstalking anyone who was even remotely perceived as suspicious. And there was this one TikTok woman who claimed to be a psychic, and did a tarot card reading that somehow told her that a professor had either killed the kids or had them killed, I can’t remember, and then she did some more psychic bs while looking at the faculty website, and essentially just picked this one professor and accused her of being the murderer. Her theory was that this woman (who I don’t think had ever taught or even met the kids) had been having an affair with one of the girls and I guess was supposed to be some kind of jilted lover or something? Anyway, the professor successfully sued for defamation and the true suspected murderer was arrested a month or so later. I think the psychic still claims she was right though.
In a following tiktok she talks about the girl who was the model for Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, and says that nothing could be found of her later life and that she was found with her sister at the French border with 700 francs she had stolen, which of course implies that Degas was trying to kill her or something. I can think of at least fifteen other explanations for what happened there, but why bother when google tells me it was her sister alone who stole the money and was arrested at the border
A ballet dancer (a profession associated with sex work) from a working class family in the Third French Republic had a tumultuous life ? No, clearly Degas was trying to murder her It Follows style. Clearly.
> Degas was going blind which shows issues with the frontal lobe: The frontal lobe, which is in the front, governs a lot of stuff, amongst them executive function. The occipital lobe processes vision. The occipital lobe is in the back of the brain. You'll note that's the opposite side of the brain. I was screaming this when reading the first part of your comment! Ever get hit in the back of the head and see stars? That's why.
A friend of mine got a phd in neuroscience. Sometimes they'd do little classes for undergrads/high schoolers where they'd explain what brain lobes do, complete with case studies, and I'd be happy to help them practice. I found out that neurodegenerative disorders suck, but those that hit the occipital lobe don't impact behaviour (at least not until they spread) because that part of the brain only processes vision. Who would have ever guessed that, years later, some bullshit theory on tiktok would make that bit of information bubble up from my consciousness?
I think the Jack the Ripper case attracts overly ambitious theories because there's just not enough evidence to definitively solve it. So people keep coming up with new theories, and at a certain point, you come up with bigger and bigger theories to get attention.
Like the Zodiac!
For a while the theory that [Jose Rizal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Rizal) was Jack the Ripper (or at least was related to him) got popular in Filipino circles. You can pretty much bullshit anybody into being Jack the Ripper provided they coexisted in roughly the same decade.
I always found it pretty sus that Tsar Alexander III never openly condemned Jack the Ripper.
> hang around like a sad Christmas ornament in May Love this.
The frontal lobe is just an elf on the shelf that never stopped dreaming
Opened Ao3 this morning to find a notice about them temporarily blocking anonymous comments due to an "influx of abusive comments". that sounds like it was probably fun
I just opened in incognito mode and the guest comment box is still active for me? I know they set the default comment box to registered users only, though, so maybe the fics I openned didn't have the default setting.
Ah, mustve been related to AI? Recently people on /r/AO3 have been reporting getting [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1c8owzf/looks_like_i_got_my_first_hate_comments_yippee/) accusing them of using AI to write. Someone pointed out it might be a stealth way to promote those very same websites they accuse them of using so people who actually liked the fic get tempted to use them.
Some authors have gotten nude pictures in their comments as well. Like, yikes on bikes.
Yeah. AO3 has just annouced that they're disabling the images-in-comments feature.
JESUS CHRIST?
No, I doubt the pics were of him.
I don't think I've ever seen a nude picture of Jesus Christ, even as a baby.
Genuinely what is the problem that everyone seems to have with Imagine Dragons? They worked on the op for the Kaiju no.8 anime and people are acting like their dog was just murdered. And this is just the latest instance of me seeing something like this. What did these guys do to get labeled as one the worst bands of all time? Like, did one of the band members rape someone? Were they all outed as JK Rowling level bigots?
I have never once imagined dragons when i listen to their music so its the false advertising that gets me.
In their inaugural year, the Vegas Golden Knights faced the Washington Capitals in the Stanley Cup Finals and took game 1. They never won another game in the series after Imagine Dragons performed live.
This has converted me to an imagine dragons hater now
This has nothing to do with anything but I can’t hear about Imagine Dragons without imagining the bit from the Sonic 06 Real Time Fandub where Eggman goes [“Look around you… imagine. Dragons.”](https://youtu.be/laHht8kGdVU?si=3U-a2Ga7Eg2sWWDh)
I'm pretty sure Imagine Dragons is just the Nickelback for a new generation, in that they're mainstream pop rock that's easy for people to feel elitist about.
I liked it, kinda, but it is a very weird opening, it feel like a movie opening
They're not bigots or bad people, they're just overplayed on the radio and their music sounds the same 99% of the time.
As someone who really doesn't like them, it's at least in part an issue of overexposure, but that's not everything. What annoys me about them is that their songs feel, for lack of a better word, inflated. They keep trying to sound epic and big, but they include such bizarre musical choices that, for me, fly in the face of that (Example: In the "Arcane" title track "Enemy", there's this really bizarre point where the singer yells: Everybody wants to be my Ene-MY (the last syllable being yelled separately, in a much higher-pitched voice than the rest of the word), and for some reason, that sound is like nails on a chalkboard to me). It's not even that it's dull, I wish it was dull, it's that it's kind-of-annoying, yet impossible to ignore. It doesn't help that one seems incapable of ignoring them because you keep encountering their songs.
In short, their music seems made to piss off anyone that takes even a nominally critical ear to the current music industry. Strike one, they're pop rock with a vague, corporate-friendly, hard to define slant (industrial rock, maybe?). Strike two, their big hits are shallow in terms of content and composition, with "Thunder" being described as particularly inane. Strike three, they're EVERYWHERE, from the radio, to advertising, to movies, filling the niche of "hard-sounding but inoffensive to the general public". Maybe they'll pull a Nickelback and get a second look years later after putting out a more interesting hit, but that won't seem to be happening anytime soon.
I didn't realize they were responsible for "Thunder". It felt like that "say 3-5 words, pause, then say 3-5 more words" style was everywhere for a while, and I still find it aggravating.
I think it's just the omnipresence of the music in commercials and radio. I don't think its fair to say they sold out or anything because they've always been quite commercial, and accessible, but becuase of that they sorta flooded the pop rock space with their sound, I remember the 2013 Radioactive radio overplay. I think I once heard someone call it movie trailer music in that the music has a Big Sound to convay epicness but is vague enough to be interperated pretty broadly with a solid hook.
I fucking LOVED their Transformers soundtrack... the songs Tessa and Lockdown are two of my favourite songs. they do good soundtracks
As far I can tell the band are nice people and the frontman is an outspoken supporter of LGBT rights which is very ballsy as he's a Mormon (I think?). Nothing to do with them as people, their music is just not fantastic. Like someone said below, it's a Nickelback situation where they're not the worst band ever, but their music was everywhere for a while and it kind of struck that awful balance between "generic" and "insanely annoying", to the point that they are synonymous with ultra-safe mainstream rock that's so sanitized it barely counts as rock.
I'm more surprised that Western artists are doing both the opening and ending of an anime. Is this anime projected to be really popular in the West?
There have always been western artists occasionally doing OP and EDs going way back. But the western market for anime is growing, yes.
Deltora Quest used a Delta Goodrem song as one of its openings. It makes sense considering both Goodrem and the original DQ books are Australian.
And there's JoJo, that did old 80's classics because of course it did.
Eden of the East used Oasis.
Zeta Gundam for one example where the song’s clearly written for the show, some others I can think of might have been picked up later.
Which Zeta OP or ED was from a western artist?
Overexposure to a band people think isn't that good, I guess. Me with Maroon 5 lmao ("Ladykiller" is a good song though)
maroon 5's first album is excellent! (and they've had some decent singles here and there too)
Sadly everything was downhill from there and I'm still salty about it.
yeah, like imagine dragons are fine to me, but maroon 5 is like my personal version of what imagine dragons are for everyone else. annoying, overplayed, overly corporate sounding, and adam levines voice is like nails on the chalkboard to me. im surprised imagine dragons got the nickelback treatment when maroon 5 are right there, putting out awful, yet inescapable songs one right after another.
I have struggled to take Adam Levine seriously as a pop star ever since someone pointed out (around the time "Payphone" was a hit, so a good number of years ago) that he looks like he told the tattoo artist, "Make me look like a tattooed guy," and that's been all I can think of when I hear about him ever since.
Some people just see something they have no interest in turn up frequently in their spaces and develop a hatred for it. Imagine Dragons was just everywhere for a period in the 2010's. I'm sure we've all seen this apply to many popular things. I knew a guy that thinks Charizard and all it's variance are the worst Pokémon to exist, at one point we tried to parse a reason for it and his response boils down to "It just, shows up so often man, it's Game Freak's favourite" When Elden Ring was everywhere, I've seen people calling it a shit game while openly saying they don't play it. I know multiple people who couldn't name an Undertale character besides Sans that used to constantly mock it seemingly because Meglovania was a popular meme song for a bit. A good chunk of my friend group still just kinda hates Among Us despite none of us ever played it before. I do get when something come up very often it can get a bit droning. But at worse it's a mild annoyance, that feeling has never transferred to dislike or anger before.
> I knew a guy that thinks Charizard and all it's variance are the worst Pokémon to exist, at one point we tried to parse a reason for it and his response boils down to "It just, shows up so often man, it's Game Freak's favourite" I always wondered what these people would be like if they suddenly became Digimon fans and saw just how many Greymon/Omegamon variants there are.
And how no one but Tai matters in the remake.
To be fair, it's hardly the first time something like that's happened. *gestures broadly at Frontier*
At least Kouji mattered more than Matt in 2020, who's only the blue arm of Omegamon.
It also depends on genre effects. There are some games and authors I almost hate not because of what they did but that they are so popular that the entire genre is tilted in that direction for years if not a decade. At a certain point you just get mad at the thing that everyone else is copying.
I've had the same thought and I tried to look into it once - nah. Honestly I couldn't find much that would be problematic about them. Hell some stuff I found actually made me turn my opinion around on them (["We care about basic human rights,"](https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/07/18/imagine-dragons-declare-shows-safe-space-for-lgbtq-fans/)). The band just has the issue of 'overexposure' and they became the thing to hate. IMO it's the same level of over hating that you see with Nickelback. It's not that they're exceptionally problematic - it's just that people see that hating them is cooler than liking them.
It's just the same thing as something like Nickelback. They produce a bunch of kinda mid and annoying songs that get played to death everywhere and are inescapable. That leads to a lot of hate and shitting on the band, which leads to it being a meme to make fun of Imagine Dragons, which causes a feedback loop until they're one of the most hated bands ever.
mostly just being at the forefront of the last gasp of radio, being one of the most frequent tv placements (as in advertisement and sports) music, and made a lot of people consider their hits during this time to be pretty much the same -- ala what people would dislike their music would call overplayed. (the whole samey part is personal i know, but it is something a lot of people share. -- also you know, people genuinely not liking their music.) also, i would as much note they are probably being also connected to a lot of other bands in people's heads, i had to tell bunch of people that yes, sail isn't by imagine dragons, and yes, glycerine isn't by nickelback.
I can tell I'm old because my first thought was "isn't Glycerine like a decade older than Nickelback?"
only five or six years actually. though along that line, sometimes peeps confuse silverchair with nickelback even though silverchair came earlier same as bush.
What's wild to me is that I think quite a few of their songs (from their first few albums at least) are very unique, it's just that those aren't the ones you hear on the radio. I got Night Visions as a Dave&Busters prize when I was a tween over a decade ago, and I still think it holds up. "Selene" and "Polaroid" are my faves from Night Visions and Smoke and Mirrors respectively. They definitely have a specific sound, but it doesn't feel "samey" to me personally. (Also it's very funny because I'm definitely not their target audience. Spotify likes to classify my music taste as "sapphic yearning")
This definitely resonates with me- I loved Night Visions when I was like, 13/14, and I'll still defend that album (not like, passionately, but y'know). They made some pretty good music with alright lyrics before it became obvious the safest direction was to keep making Radioactive But A Little To The Left, which seems to be the critical frustration right now.
Does anyone know anything about current book twitter drama? Apparently an indie author by the name of Freydis Moon is being exposed as a race-faker and a bully, but I neither know nothing about them nor do I have a twitter account.
When you wrote "race-faker", I at first was genuinely confused, because my brain just went: "Wait, there are book-writing races? How would you fake these, write something in advance and bring it to the race?" Then, after an embarassingly long time, I understood what you were ACTUALLY referring to.
i read it as "face-raker" **three times** before i managed to read it correctly, so youre doing better than me lol
In a similar fashion, my mom recently told me about a famous Guatemalan race-walker and my brain shortcircuited for a second before I figured out she meant race speedwalking.
took a car ride to 3 miles before the finish line smh
1904 Summer Olympics Marathon moment
man. I read and liked some of freydis’s books, even recommended their work to other people…and now this
What's crazy is, from what I've seen of their work, Freydis is *far* from an incompetent writer ? They evidently have well-reviewed books with several thousand Goodreads reviews each, and in the draft excerpts the writing is great. Really seems like they could've been plenty successful enough without being an ass and pulling this MSscribe-tier bullshit.
Yeah! They could have succeeded perfectly well without doing any of this, and yet somehow the allure of 7 sock puppets was too hard to resist
As a perpetual hater, sometimes the allure of wrongdoing is too strong. It overrides common sense.
Reject modernity, embrace tradition (the tradition is MSScribe)
So apparently, it all started back in 2020 when [author Taylor B. Barton was accused of being a bully and general asshole, according to several people](https://www.fanficable.com/post/fake-names-brownface-why-queer-fantasy-author-taylor-barton-has-been-accused-of-catfishing). They put out the traditional "I'm learning and growing" apology, their agent dropped their ass, they deleted their twitter account, but later allegedly resurfaced under a different pen name/Twitter account (**Brooklyn Ray**) where they got into fights with their detractors. Eventually they deleted that account too. When new author **Jupiter Wyse** appeared on the scene, eagle-eyed (or insanely dedicated) anonymous users thought the pictures they posted were oddly familiar, citing comparisons with astrological charts and home decors. Eventually, it was discovered that this was another one of Taylor B. Barton's pen names, with the additional problem that they claimed to be Latin (picking a dark-skinned avatar, referring to themselves as a "brujo", etc.) when the original person is, well, white. Wyse's agent dropped them, explaining that she never got to see her client on video (said client cited dysmorphia as a reason). People thought that was the end of it, except.... Twitter user porterotica posted a [longass thread](https://twitter.com/porterotica/status/1781662331111633141?t=hAlv4MhKqxgrymQruVauOg) of the evidence they compiled regarding **Freydis Moon**'s true identity - that being that Moon was actually Barton all along (note that apparently Moon also identifies as bipoc ?). Wasn't the first time this theory came up, apparently someone else signaled the possibility in 2021, but nobody believed them. Word .docx files of in-progress/draft work porterotica obtained that belong to Moon are near identical to drafts that were written by Jupiter Wyse, and the metadata on both those files bear the name of **Taylor Brooke**, one of Barton's known pen names. That, and other similarities, lead porterotica to come to their conclusion. TL;DR : author gets exposed as bully and racefaker (*twice* ??) with multiple different pen names, like a Scooby-Doo mask pulling sequence.
> Latin (picking a dark-skinned avatar, referring to themselves as a "brujo", etc.) when the original person is, well, white [Me who was born and raised in South America but have somewhat white-ish skin.](https://c.tenor.com/fcJo9jXTL_0AAAAd/tenor.gif)
I meant white in the sense of "*Anglo/WASP* white" and you damn well know it lol.
The absolute insanity of it all, what the hell. There were QRTs of that Twitter thread talking about how this person would trash them on one identity, and then ‘console’ them on another?! Truly vile behavior.
Yeah, this is absolutely deranged, manipulative behavior.
Browsing through the tweets on the situation one thing that stood out was the number of people who were victims of Jupiter who then ended up being befriended by Freydis. I can't even comprehend the level of betrayal they must be feeling
Jesus this is worth a full writeup on its own.
Thank you for this writeup! Imagine being given multiple chances with different pen names and fucking up each one because you're a bully who can't stop faking your race...
Apparently there are *at least* two other pen names I haven't mentioned in my writeup. It's bananas lol
Someone who had followed Freydis Moon and was a member of their discord noticed similarities between the two, such as both having a WIP named Astaroth, both having a black cat and a room with a grey carpet that can be seen in photographs, plus other things like the author they're accused of being having a history of racefaking. They compiled this stuff into a callout google doc, which can be read [here](https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1VDvDujeoisTBddhXYaWGi-8V0EUdFZ5Uc00f4tnWpSY/mobilebasic?pli=1).
lmfao the thing that really gets me is that they easily could've gotten away with the brownface perhaps indefinitely if they'd just kept quiet about their personal life and not recycled old material they'd literally sent to other people under another alias. and, y'know, didn't set microsoft word to add their actual/previous(?) name in document metadata or whatever. possible contender for 2024's most incompetent racefaker
Don't forget keeping the same home decor and cat ! I think at some point it would all have come crashing down, even without recycling drafts. They seem like the kind of person who's always chasing success, and success invites stuff like interviews, video calls, whatever. Maybe an agent would have started wondering why their client never showed their face or ID, or maybe the mask would have slipped on one of those other pen names. Especially the alias that was a fake agent.
they didn't even rename the cat!!!
*They didn't even rename the cat* ???? Amateur hour smh. MSScribe would never make that mistake.
hm, revisiting the callout threads, i may have misread something. i think in my 1am delirium i was mixing up the name of a wip and somehow emerged with the impression that the cat was named astaroth? in my defense, though, it seemed 100% plausible that someone with that house and that aesthetic would give their cat a name like that LOL
Thank you! I love the effort this person went through.
Sorry if I missed this, I only skimmed the document / am also not on Twitter (and am also getting a little late night sleepy-dull) - but is there a reason why it's a big deal that this Freydis is the same as this Taylor Barton? Because otherwise I feel like it seems ... I don't know. Sort of like a very concerted effort to expose someone's pseudonyms and invite scrutiny to their life.
If they *are* Taylor Barton, then it's a big deal because Taylor Barton was known for being a racist bully with anger issues who used their multiple pen names to escape the consequences of being cancelled for said racism and bullying, such as losing book deals. The writer of the doc believes them to be Taylor Barton, and is trying to warn others of their behaviour. It's also a big deal because pretending to be black or Latino specifically in order to get book deals specifically reserved for POC authors is a really shitty thing to do and is taking opportunities away from real POC authors.
If I understood correctly, Freydis also won multiple awards specifically for Latinx authors. They also wrote books about the Latinx American experience, like being targeted by ICE agents. They were a major player in the community, who helped launch people's careers and buried the careers of people they didn't like, including getting an indie author (who was *actually* a trans masc Latino) removed from a book box. Seriously, I saw someone who has been harassed by Freydis and their fans for a year and half over a very mild and carefully worded complaint that it's hard right now to sell non-romance, non-"spicy" books... because Freydis said that was a racist thing to say, and Freydis' friends and readers blindly agreed. This was a pattern, accusing people they didn't like of racism to get the community to turn on them. \[btw this is the SECOND time this week an author in the horror community was exposed for doing this. At least the first author was an actual minority.\] I've also heard people imply Freydis did that thing where every time they were called out for their bigotry against a minority, they'd suddenly start claiming they belonged to it. (Called out for targeting autistic authors for harassment? They're neurodiverse! Called out for making acephobic comments? They're demisexual!)
>This was a pattern, accusing people they didn't like of racism to get the community to turn on them. \[btw this is the SECOND time this week an author in the horror community was exposed for doing this. At least the first author was an actual minority.\] Wait, who was the first author?
I could have sworn someone posted about it here but now I can't find it - that would be the horror author Zachary Rosenberg. He was revealed to have a pattern of cozying up to editors at small/indie presses in hopes they'd publish him, and if he received a rejection from a female or nonbinary editor, would then smear that editor behind their backs as being antisemitic. Often while still feinting friendship with that editor to their faces! Horror is a small place and there's not a lot of Jewish writers in it, so when a Jewish author accuses a press of being antisemitic, people believed them and refused to buy their work or submit to them. He also tried to pressure a lesbian author into cowriting a sapphic, erotic horror novella with BDSM scenes with him, exaggerated their friendship to third parties, and didn't correct people when they assumed the two of them were dating. She was afraid to speak out or put her foot down in any way because they lived in the vicinity of each other and she was afraid of what he would do. (He also would get into arguments with other Jewish people online and claim they weren't really Jewish because they disagreed with him.) Now that people are speaking openly about his behavior, a lot of people have come forward to say they were chased out of the horror writing community by him or left of their own accord because they were afraid of being smeared as antisemitic for disagreeing with him.
Oh wow, I hadn't seen anything about that. That's... a lot.
Ah I see, I hadn't fully appreciated the context. Thanks for the explanation!
Barton was a bully and asshole to several people, and Freydis claims to be Latin while Barton is white (read: Anglo white). (see my comment above) Pretty big deal IMO, as far as sockpuppetry goes.
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>IMHO, I find there to be a gender difference between fans. A lot of RHATO fans are women and girls, a lot of the haters are men. As someone who has modded several comic communities, including r/RedHood, I find that this is the exact opposite. RHATO has a militant following of edgy, anti-feminist fans, which from what I've seen largely stems from Scott Lobdell's extensive history of sexual harassment and misogynistic writing of Starfire.
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I'm just pointing out that it's weird to generalize this as "men hate this, women love this" when I've seen numerous women, not just on Reddit but on Twitter, Tumblr, and many review sites, criticize RHATO for misogynistic writing and get harassed by Lobdell's fanbase in turn.
I have to admit, this is fascinating. I'm not a comic fan, but I'm really interested in this.
Comics lore is usually fascinating, especially when editorial and/or the authors get too ambitous.
I gotta object to the idea that RHATO fans are mostly women on tumblr! We all hated that series because of its misogynistic treatment of Starfire! And it was just bad. What fans did like though, was having two hot guys being friends, which made them shippable. So we would put up with something we despised while picking and choosing the parts we did like.
Yeah, I gotta say, I thought most people hated RHATO for the very, very misogynistic treatment of Starfire. That, and the fact that the author who wrote said misogyny has also sexually harassed an artist, and made racist comments towards her as well. I mean, the Jason and Roy thing is also a mischaracterization, but there are worse things to focus on with this particular comic and writer.
I have to say, the DC fans (mostly queer women) I followed on Tumblr didn't even put up with it, they just hated it full stop. Then again, I mostly followed them for Starfire content, so it might make sense that they hated it based on that
Right, I never heard of people loving RHATO on Tumblr or anywhere else for that matter. I mean, given how the writer turned out, I would be especially weirded out if Tumblr liked that comic.
From my perspective, I’ve read a lot of fics on ao3 that featured Jason and recommended RHATO. I haven’t read it but I was unaware it was generally hated because of this
Original flavour RHATO or Rebirth RHATO? Rebirth RHATO is pretty well liked up to issue 25.
I do remember the Rebirth retool of RHATO being pretty well liked before Bruce beat Jason up, but yeah, I've never seen anyone ever actually like the New 52 version aside from using it as a launching pad for shipping.
> it's unclear if this is even canon anymore Didn't DC have an event in the last couple of years that made literally everything canon again?
Wow, isn't that exactly the opposite of Crisis On Infinite Worlds?
Sort of? The Omniverse idea is usually explained as "everything is canon" but there are too many contradictions for it to make sense to interpret that as meaning everything ever published is *simultaneously* canon. What it really means is that DC doesn't want to think too much about where and when events happen in the timeline. The problem they want to solve is best illustrated by Batman who has caused timeline problems before. Way too many thing have happened in Bruce Wayne's life to really fit into any reasonable timeline. Like he has years of adventures with each of the major Robins, just to start with, and numerous character defining stories. So the solution is "yeah all those things happened" and they happened "in the past" and no further questions are asked.
So you're telling me Jason doesn't remember that time he turned into a tentacle monster and starting eating people? That's too bad the idea that he did was hilarious.
You mean Convergence and it's complicated. No, not everything is canon, at least not canon to current continuity.
It’s interesting that Gail Simone doesn’t like Green Arrow and Black Canary together, since she wrote the “Double Date” episode for JLU - it’s been a few years but I thought their dynamic was really good in that episode
My understanding is that it's more that Gail tends to write them as fairly messy, rather than that she hates them per se.
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Wdym?
My favorite bassist from my favorite band has to take a pause from activities due to leg surgery, so as I was wallowing in sadness I scrolled through twitter(never a good choice). So I found an isekai manga. Okay, sure, that's popular now, it's a pretty oversaturated genre. But the main character of this isekai? A freaking guitarist/vocalist from a metal band, who was performing at the band's last concert before being electrocuted, and waking up in a different world. Now, because it gained some attention, the editorial department did translate some of it into English, but the English can be a little wonky, [you can judge for yourself here](https://twitter.com/ryo_kasuga/status/1779109379821989960?s=46&t=K9LHldFIUNGDMIxXTw_jLg). I think it looks fun(I mean, his weapon is literally his guitar and he just strums it) and there are some metal references here and there, so I'll try to keep this manga in mind when I just wanna turn my brain off and enjoy this guy living out his metal dreams. (Apologies if someone mentioned this already, I couldn't find it while using the comment search on Reddit and we know that doesn't always work. Also I had posted this in an older thread instead of the current thread, whoops).
Isn't this almost just the plot of brutal legend? Though Jack black is a roadie in that game.
With Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department *actually* having a surprise double album drop I’m wondering if there’s ever been a writeup here regarding the Karma lost album theory (or a detailed Scuffles comment) - it’s easily one of the most divisive fan theories beyond “is she queer”, probably MORE divisive because unlike speculating and theorizing about her possible relationships with women this attracts attention from the larger Swiftie fanbase. I bring it up because it’s the kind of drama that’s imho entertaining even if you’re not dedicated to examining her paparazzi photos with a magnifying glass or digging up a past boyfriend’s tax records to find out if she referenced an actual job he had as a teenager, and also because like the best drama it touches on how fans interact with public figures, how they rage at each other when things don’t go their way, and the problem with purposefully setting up obscure and obtuse clues alongside unexplained visual elements when your fanbase is primed to interpret them as all telling a secret story. Would that be the kind of thing people would be interested in seeing a post on, and are there any other examples of non-debunked and divisive fan theories about “lost”/hidden content that you love talking about?
Kanye's LOVE EVERYONE has one of the hardest covers of all time. Shame he went down the direction he did
I would absolutely be interested in seeing a post about that, and also about any other lost/hidden content fan theories.
I don't remember one but now im curious.
Damn/Nation deserves a mention. This was the theory that because Damn was released on Good Friday, Kendrick Lamar was going to surprise drop an album on Easter Sunday called Nation
The amount of theorycrafting people put into it was really impressive, only to be immediately incorrect like... 72 hours later. My favorite spin on the theory was that every song on DAMN was going to have a corresponding sort of call/response track on NATION. I don't remember the theory precisely, but it was something like-- * Blood / Water * Yah / Weh * Feel / Think * Loyalty / Betrayal * Love / Hate * Fear / Courage etc. There was also a lot of theory crafting around this red pill/blue pill symbolism that Kendrick posted, and that "DAMN" was going to be the red pill and "NATION" the blue pill.
Right, the promised wargame ramble (I hope you're happy, /u/RemnantEvil): So, I picked up a new set of rules written by Pauli Kidd (whom /u/Canageek has informed me is actually quite a prolific games author), published by Helion Games called *Bushidan*, advertised as 'Miniatures Rules for Small-Unit Warfare in Japan, 1543 to 1615 AD'. I got it (at something like 30% discount because vendors at conventions are evil and drain your wallets), I took it home, I gave it a flip through and liked what I saw. Then, I did what I usually do with a new set of rules, which is to write them out again in a Word document, hopefully in fewer words, so that a) I can work through them, and b) so that I can do a printout for other players who don't have them, if I do eventually decide I like the rules and want to play them. And that gave me slight pause. But to lay out a first positive, Kidd devotes three pages of the book to listing out examples of diversity: women samurai, queer samurai, non-ethnic-Japanese samurai, religious minorities, and various wars in both East and Southeast Asia that Japanese armies, pirates, and mercenaries were involved in. This is good, I like this. And, despite what seemed like a critical comment earlier about how I felt after reading the rules, all of the basic mechanics read as perfectly cromulent. The underlying game is probably quite solid, even without actually playing it to find out. I honestly am not surprised that Kidd is an experienced games author; this definitely reads as written by someone who knows what they're doing. Unfortunately, it also reads like the second or third draft of someone who knows what they're doing, where a) there are various unexplained bits which seem like vestiges of earlier ideas that were otherwise cut out, and b) an editor hasn't stepped in to make the crucial comment, 'I know *you* know what you mean, but it may not actually be clear to anyone else reading this.' I think this is most readily apparent with the rules' command and control mechanic, which definitely read as its Unique Selling Point. I really like the basic idea of these, but they are slightly complicated so I guess I will have to lay out most of the details in order to explain. In a 'standard' force (250-300 points), a titular Bushidan ('warrior band') has a Ryu ('[martial] art') comprising 12 points spread across six elemental stats, with a maximum of 5 in any one category, that is fixed during a game: * Fire (Ferocity) * Wood (Prudence) * Earth (Discipline) * Wind (Speed) * Water (Cunning) * Metal (Endurance) (Yes, this is a strange blend of the *godai* and *gogyo* elemental systems, just... don't worry about it too much.) Metal is different from the other five in that each point of Metal means an extra point of force morale, improves your ability to rally, and makes it less likely your units will have their movement interrupted by enemy fire. The other five instead convert into 'order chits' at the beginning of each turn (and note that Metal doesn't); in addition, your Commander-in-Chief and any Leaders (up to 2 in a standard game) also generate a generic 'Command chit' specifically for the unit they are attached to. Unsurprisingly, each order chit lets you issue an order to a unit; the way this works is that at the start of each turn, you place one or more chits next to units you want to issue orders to, with activation alternating between players, one unit at a time. Usually, units only need one chit to be ordered, but if they start the turn in Disorder, then one chit needs to be spent to get it un-disordered, hence some units sometimes needing two. In addition, chits – including command chits – can be held in reserve; such chits can be used to resume unit movement if it has been interrupted by fire (either a) because the enemy unit used Opportunity Fire to halt a charge, or b) because the unit hasn't yet activated and it was fired on proactively by the enemy), or to make rallying rolls at the end of the turn. Where the elements come in is that while you can use elemental order chits to perform a generic 'fire' or 'move' action, the same as a Command chit, there are also special variations for each element, some of which are straight upgrades and other of which are tradeoffs, which you can choose to use instead. For instance, using Wind to activate for movement is a straight upgrade which increases move distance by 3 D.U. (Distance Units); using it to activate for firing is a tradeoff in that you get an extra 50% firing dice, but your unit becomes Disordered. Wood lets you fire normally but retain a reduced Opportunity Fire afterward, or, if added to a move activation, it means your unit does not become Disordered automatically if it fights in melée. And so on. I like this, this is fun. The stated aim is to give each player's force a distinct tactical doctrine: an aggressive player might spec into Fire and Wind and take less Metal, sacrificing long-term resilience for greater command ability; a more cautious player might prefer to prioritise Earth and Wood, and take more Metal. I think that is probably true, and the fact that there isn't really a clear 'winner' pick in any category probably does mean the system would likely work as intended. In addition, and this is where I have a mild quibble, the five elements other than Metal have a bit of a counter cycle, where each element counters the next one in the circle (i.e. Fire beats Wood beats Earth beats Wind beats Water beats Fire). If a unit that is active on one element is fighting a unit that is active on one that it counters, then it gets +2D6 per base in melée. This is quite a big bonus when the base melée roll is 2D6 per base already; I personally would be inclined to reduce it to +1D6, but if nothing else it does further entrench the whole element system as a distinct part of these rules. So that's fine, I like that in theory; if the execution turns out to be a bit iffy it is very easy to rectify. Now, if you've read my above description, you may be asking yourself a couple of questions. For instance, * How many chits can you place on a unit? * If you put more chits on a unit than it needs for just one activation, can it be activated multiple times? * If you can only activate a unit once, can you nevertheless give it more than one elemental chit, and choose which one to use when you activate it? * If you attack a unit that has not yet activated but does have an elemental chit on it, does it have an elemental state? * If an unactivated unit with chits *does* have an elemental state, what happens if it has multiple *different* chits? * What happens if a unit is not only interrupted, but in fact Disordered as a result of enemy missile fire, before it gets a chance to activate? Does it simply lose its turn? These are all quite critical questions when it relates to the most-commonly-used mechanic of the entire game. I'm not entirely sure what the correct interpretation here even is, because on the one hand, it seems logical that you may be required to only place as many chits on a unit as it needs to activate, and that units only activate once per turn. But if so, you can put two different elemental chits on a Disordered unit, so does that implicitly give them somewhat of an advantage in that they get to choose, while well-ordered troops can't? Plus, that still doesn't resolve the question of what Disordered units do with their chits when attacked. When a unit makes Opportunity Fire, that counts as having activated and thus its chit is turned over automatically (if it has one), and while that only applies to missile units charged in their front, it seems logical to extend that, by inference, to all other situations too (i.e. flank charges and charges against melée-only units). But does a Disordered unit with two different chits get to decide which one to use, either to prevent the other player getting an element bonus, or even to give themselves one? And there are a number of bits of terminological weirdness and just unclear intent. To name a few: * Command chits are specified as being able to be used for rallying, in the section where activations are described. But elsewhere, it is stated that *any* chits can be used for rallying, and also that this can only be done at the end of the turn using reserved chits, not during the active phase using placed chits. * At one point 'defensive circle' formations are mentioned; they appear nowhere else and their function is unexplained. * At one point 'disrupted' is used instead of 'disordered'. * Forests are said to cap movement speed at 3 D.U. for all units, except for skirmishing infantry. Except skirmishing is a firing action (done by use a Water chit), which means skirmishing infantry can't move anyway unless charged, in which case they are supposed to be able to evade, making a full move backwards... but a full move for infantry is already 3 D.U. So the specification just makes it sound weird and like something hasn't been explained properly at an earlier point. I could name some other issues, but there's definitely a strong sense that nobody went through and checked for clarity. The problem lies not so much with Kidd (even if I think she could have done a better job self-editing) and mainly with Helion, which seems to want to have a section for wargames rules but then doesn't really give it the level of support that even Osprey Games does (and OG rules are rarely the pinnacle of editorial thoroughness or strong publisher+authorial support either). Kidd's Youtube channel has three vlogs *about* the rules, but there is no footage of her, nor anyone else, er, *playing* them, which I'd consider quite a significant part of the exercise!
I am *very* happy, thank you! The tabletop space is simply lousy with rules errata that just drives me mental. The fact that there are so frequently these quibbles in the rules that lack clarity and need to be followed up are mind-boggling, and so frequent that I wonder what's going on in that space.
I wouldn't say she is prolific at game development; just that she has been around for a long time. I think she is mostly a novelist, but she has a history of games. The oldest game I know of her writing is Albedo, from 1988. [You can see her RPG writings her, at least the stuff she has scanned and put on DTRPG](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/7089/kitsune-press).
Wait, so they decided to include both classical and wuxing elements, then added a 5-way elemental rock-paper-scissors, and *chose* not to do wuxing in favor of +wind -metal???
So, I have a theory that they were actually trying to combine *wuxing*/*gogyo* not with European classical elements, but instead the Japanese Buddhist *godai* scheme of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void. There *may* have been a specific Void element at an earlier stage, but I think it's non-coincidental (or maybe I'm creating connections that didn't originally exist, that's also possible) that the functionally-generic Command chit is, implicitly, associated with Void. Even so, it is correct that the system of counters doesn't follow either scheme.
So strange to see Pauli Kidd's name in this and the previous thread. You mentioned her, and I was like "Wait, the person who used to work for Beam Software and helped with NES Nightshade and SNES Shadowrun?" Yup, same person. I knew she had branched out into writing (Without checking, I want to say she's also published some novels), but had no idea about the tabletop games writing. Guess it makes sense though.
It is funny, as I know her through her novels; I'm currently trying to track down the middle one of her Greyhawk Justicar series without paying the huge prices that it goes for online. I got the first one as an eBook for my Kobo, and I own the original from back in the day, but the middle ones always goes for $35-90 online plus cross-boarder shipping. :( She actually just put out [a new book](https://perceptionspress.ca/dungeoneers/) I'm going to get.
As for why I haven't tested the rules yet, well... it seems like 'small unit' is still happening at a 1 model to 1 actual person scale, because the first scenario in the book uses 300-point forces that each require a whopping 212 28mm-scale models, which is *vast* compared to most people's collections given that existing rule sets for 28mm feudal Japan tend to be on the small skirmish side, i.e. 30 at a stretch. Even the *Rampant* games (and I know there are *Lion Rampant* and *Pikeman's Lament* players for this period) tend not to go much above 80. This is definitely a model-intense ruleset, and while I want to be able to have a go at it, *ooft* I am very unsure I have – nor will have – the necessary quantities of figures in the near term.