TAYLOR SWIFT Vs HATSUNE MIKU

what are we, some kind of league of legends?

y’all remember we’re talking ab allegations of pedophilia and human trafficking and domestic violence right. real-life abuse. this isn’t fucking hannibal or Genshin or some shit these posts are fucking weird

A mouth-watering fuck-ton of hand angle references.

By Shadowcross on DA.

wdym an average platonic bond cant be deep and meaningful do none of you remember the power of friendship

This is a meteorite that has fallen from a clearly superior part of the galaxy.

wip wednesday

Thank you @nirikeehan and @theluckywizard for the tags last week!! I am tagging you back and also @junkbabelna and @rowanisawriter if you have anything you want to share :))

I'm playing Fields of Mistria and have suddenly been seized with Celine and Balor ideas, so:

He extends his palm; in it lies an ornate key that’s carved of wood.

“It reminded me of you,” he says.

“How much?” she asks, and he laughs.

“Can’t fool the shopkeeper’s daughter,” he murmurs. “How much would you pay for a key that doesn’t lead anywhere?”

Functionally useless, she thinks. She wishes she could stop thinking for once. It’s a beautiful night out. Balor looks beautiful, too, in the soft light coming from her parlor. His palm dips a little, and she moves to take the key. His smile grows.

“Good night, Celine,” he says, before he turns and takes the steps down. The wood barely creaks under his light tread. Her dad offered to fix it, but she likes knowing if something's coming. She doesn't want to think what. Except Balor, who barely makes a sound, free to come and go as much as he’d like. She watches his cloaked back disappear up the trail, all of her slack and leaned up against the heavy wood of her door. She closes her eyes and lets the breeze ruffle her hair, her clothes. 

She slips into her bed and tries not to think about his little caravan, parked across the road, nor about Balor himself in his own room, maybe sitting on the bed, peeling off his stockings and his cloak. She likes this image, him in his bare feet, all alone. Familiar, and therefore safe. 

sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour

*sips hot chocolate* what a good day to remember that undyne is taller than papyrus and rouge is taller than shadow

Happy Kagepro day to all those who celebrate! Everyone else make sure to not chase any cats across the road

re: Somerton

Not for nothing, but I think we should remember that James Somerton's fans and subscribers are normal people, just like you. They are people who received his output in good faith, and extended to him a normal amount of grace and benefit of the doubt, which he took advantage of.

I don't think it's helpful to respond to the exposé on Somerton with sentiments along the lines of "wow, how could anyone ever think THIS GUY'S videos were any good, ha ha ha, how did he ever get subscribers?" because 1) you have the substantial benefit of hindsight and a disengaged outsider perspective, and 2) it's a rhetoric that creates a divide between you (refined, savvy, smart, sophisticated) and Somerton's audience (gullible, unrefined, easily taken advantage of, terrible taste), which is a false divide, with a false sense of security.

Somerton's success happened because he stole good writing. He found interesting, insightful, in-depth work done by other people, applied the one skill he actually has which is marketing, and re-packaged it as his own. He targeted a market which is starving for the exact kind of writing he was stealing, and pushed his audience to disengage from sources that conflicted with him.

Hbomberguy makes this point in his exposé video: good queer writing is hard to find and incredibly easy to lose. The writers Somerton stole from were often poor or precarious, writing freelance work for small circles under shitty conditions, without the means or the reach or the privileges necessary to find bigger markets. And, as Hbomb demonstrated, when people did discover Somerton's plagiarism, he used his substantial audience to hound them away and dissuade anyone else from trying to hold him accountable.

He stole queer writing by marginalized people, about experiences and perspectives that people are desperate to hear more about, and even if his delivery and aesthetics were naff, his words resonated with people because the original writers who actually wrote them poured their goddamn hearts and souls into it.

Somerton also maintained a consistent narrative of persecution and marginalization about himself. He took the plain truth, which is that queer people and perspectives are discriminated against, and worked that into a story about himself as a lone, brave truth-teller, daring to voice an authentic queer perspective, constantly beset by bigots and adversaries who sought to tear him down. As @aranock, who works with some of the people he targeted, writes in this post, Somerton weaponized whatever casual bias and bigotry he could find in his audience to reinforce his me vs them narrative (usually misogyny and various forms of transphobia), which is what grifters do. They find a vulnerable thread in a community and pull on it. And while you may not have the particular vulnerability that he exploited, you do have vulnerabilities, and they can be exploited too.

People felt compelled to support him, even if his work was sometimes shoddy, because he presented himself as a vulnerable, marginalized person in need of help, he pulled on that vulnerable thread.

Again, he has a degree in marketing, and just like propaganda, nobody is immune to marketing.

YouTube as a system is set up to push for more, constantly more. More content, more videos, more output, more more more more, and part of Somerton and Illuminaughty's success was their ability to push out large amounts of content to the hungry algorithm, even if it was of inferior quality. The algorithm rewarded their volume of output with more eyeballs and attention, and therefore more opportunities to find people who were vulnerable to their grift.

It is a system which quite literally rewards the exact kind of plagiarism that they do, because watch-time and engagement are easily measurable metrics for a corporation, and academic rigor is not. There is pressure to deliver, and a lot of rewards to gain from cutting corners to do it.

Somerton and Illuminaughty and Internet Historian are extreme and very obvious cases, so blatant that you can make a four hour video essay exposing what they've done, but the vast majority of this kind of plagiarism isn't going to be obvious - sometimes it might not even be obvious to the people who are doing it. Casual plagiarism is endemic to the modern internet, and most people don't get educated on what the exact boundaries are between proper sourcing and quoting vs plagiarizing. We had an entire course module at my university aimed at teaching students the exact differences and definitions, and people still made good faith mistakes in their essays and papers that they had to learn to correct during their education.

All of this to say: it is extremely easy in hindsight to call Somerton's work shitty and shoddy, his aesthetics flat and uninspired, and to imagine that as a sophisticated person with good taste and critical faculties, you would never be taken in by this kind of grifter. It is extremely easy to distance yourself from the people he preyed on, and imagine that you will never have to worry about your fave doing your dirty like that.

But part of the point of Hbomberguy's video is that plagiarism is extremely easy to get away with, and often difficult for the average person to spot and call out, and with the rise of AI tools blurring the lines even further, it is not going to get any easier.

So I think we should resist the temptation to think of Somerton's audience as people with bad taste and poor faculties. We should resist the temptation to distance ourselves from the perfectly normal people he preyed on. Many times in your life, a modestly clever man with a marketing degree has fooled you too.

On a personal note, by the same token, I am resisting the temptation to assume that I am too good to be vulnerable to the systemic pressures that produced Somerton and Illuminaughty. No, I've never made a video by word-for-word reciting someone else's work, but I know for a fact that I could do a better job of double-checking my work and citing my sources. I feel the exact same pressure to get a video out as fast as possible, I have the exact same rewards dangled in front of me by YouTube as a platform, and I can't pretend it doesn't affect my work. To me, Hbomb's video felt like a wake-up call to do better.