#edit found a better one! also this game is on switch I might buy it

[thegreatcrowdragon]

HEAR ME OUT.

Vanilla Milkshake au.

#cookie run kingdom #cookie run #shadow milk cookie #pure vanilla cookie #pureshadow #shadowvanilla #vanilla milkshake #this game is an old favorite of mine #in story btw I don’t care about the gameplay #I like the liar princess’ monster design #SORRY THE PICTURE IS CRUNCHED IM LOOKING FOR A BETTER ONE #edit found a better one! also this game is on switch I might buy it

[anim-ttrpgs]

Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

Try showing them this post.

If that doesn’t work: Make them. Put your foot down. This works especially well if you are the DM. Tell them you won’t run another session of D&D5e until they agree to give what you want to do at least one try instead of always doing only what they want to do. This is, like, playing 101. We learned this in kindergarten. If your friend really wants to play something else, you should give their game a try, or you’re not really being a very good friend.

If that doesn’t work, find another group. This doesn’t even mean that you have to leave your existing group. A good place to start would be the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club which will be mentioned and linked below. You can also go to the subreddit of any game you’re interested in and probably meet people there who have the same problem you do and want to put together a group to play something other than D&D5e. You might get along great with these people, you might not, but you won’t know until you try. Just make sure to have a robust “session zero” so everyone is on the same page. This is a good practice for any group but it is especially important for a group made of players you’ve just met.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

#dnd #dnd5e #dnd 5e homebrew #dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d 5e #dungeons and dragons 5e #dnd 5e #5e #homebrew #dungeons & dragons #critical role #crit role #dimension 20 #actual play #matt mercer #wizards of the coast #wotc #hasbro #ttrpgs #ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg tumblr #tabletop #roleplay #roleplaying #roleplaying games #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop role playing game #fantasy rpg

[shaafimaano]

HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM YOUTUBE

How to Make Money from YouTube CLICK  HERE

Have you ever found yourself in a YouTube rabbit hole, clicking from one trending video to another and then wondering, "Gosh, can't I turn my crazy love for YouTube into a cash-machine?" Well folks, I'm here to say, yes, you absolutely can. Say 'Adios' to the days of YouTube just being your favorite time-killer, now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and switch to the money-making mode. Let's dive right in!

Find your Niche 

The first thing folks often overlook when they start their YouTube journey is their niche. Yep, it's not just about uploading random videos and hoping for the best. You need something unique - a niche that not only interests you but is also loved by a broader audience.

Think about what you are passionate about - gaming, makeup tutorials, cooking, travel, you name it. There’s a simple mantra here: if you love what you do, you do it better! So why not pair passion with profit? It's like butter with a hot toast, they just work beautifully together.

Produce Quality Content

If your content said it's going for a 'no-filter' selfie, would it be Instagram-ready? Your answer should be "Yes, Sir!"

Content is, and will always remain, king. Produce content that’s engaging, entertaining, and most importantly, keeps the audience coming back for more. Get creative, toss away those same-old "how-to" guides and try something new and unheard of. Who knows? You might be the next trendsetter on the block.

Invest in a good camera, learn basic video-editing techniques, focus on your video thumbnails (they're your first impression, after all), and pay attention to the qualities that make a video go viral.

Become a YouTube Partner click here

Now, this part is crucial, folks. Becoming a YouTube Partner is like getting into an exclusive club - there are perks galore. It lets you access features like monetization, super chat, channel memberships, and much, much more!

Time for a little reality check though - it ain't as easy as stealing candy from a baby. To become a partner, you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year. Sounds intimidating, right? But fear not, with your excellent content and consistent effort, you're just a few uploads away from hitting those numbers.

Get Ad Revenue through AdSense

Let me introduce you to one of YouTube's oldest friends: AdSense. It's a relationship that's like peanut butter and jelly, working together to put money in your pocket.

Add advertisements to your YouTube videos, and you'll earn money every time someone clicks on an ad or watches it. Just remember, even though ads can be a significant source of income, you have to balance it out. Tons of annoying ads might drive your audience away.

Explore Affiliate Marketing  CLICK HERE

Have you ever watched a video and heard, "I've left a link in the description below"? Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing, my friend.

You can partner with different brands, promote their products in your videos, and earn a commission when people buy from your referral link. It's a win-win for both you and the product company. You're basically like a matchmaker, introducing your audience to products they'll love, and making a few bucks while you're at it!

Start Selling Merch

Now let's get down to a little retail therapy, shall we? You've built a brand, you have an army of loyal fans; why not expand by selling custom merchandise? Whether it's coffee mugs, graphic tees, or whatnot, your fans will love to have a piece of their favorite YouTuber. I mean, who wouldn't want a t-shirt with your quirky logo on it?

One big red caveat here: be creative and thoughtful. Your merch isn't just about making money; it's a physical extension of your brand. It needs to be something your subscribers would proudly show off to their friends.

Dollars and cents might not start raining immediately, but don't give up. It's a game of patience and persistence. Keep the faith, get creative, keep pushing the boundaries, and soon enough, you'll see your bank account tick happily upwards. Always remember, even the biggest YouTubers started from zero. So, hold your head high, roll out your strategy, and let the YouTube money-making journey begin!

CLICK HERE

#youtube #youtube channel #youtube video #make money from home #makemoney online #make money easy

[televinita]

All right, I returned all my library checkouts last week and started over, but I’m already antsy and might need to refresh them again because my reading moods are turning on a dime lately, soooo, let’s look at my newest options:

(in no order except that in which I thought of them)

A Baby’s Bones - Rebecca Alexander: I just read and loved the sequel so I’m going back to the start with another archaeology x modern crime mystery.

That Weekend - Kara Thomas: grabbed it spontaneously when I found myself in immediate need of thrillers/murder mysteries. But then I read five other ones in a row so I might save this YA one for next year, when I want more hiking inspo.

I Am Princess X - Cherie Priest: this sounded kind of interesting when I ran across it on a whatsthatbook thread (Years after writing stories about a superheroine character she created with a best friend who died in a tragic car accident, sixteen-year-old May is shocked to see stickers, patches, and graffiti images of the superheroine appearing around Seattle,), and since it was available I grabbed it. I mean, 2015 YA? Tick-tock, I’m on the clock before it gets weeded; already only 1 copy left.

The Game - Linsey Miller: another “game of Assassin turns into Real Murder” book, I saw it Half Price Books for $5, which is a decent deal, but it’s very slim and I am very doubtful I’ll want to keep it. But I also REALLY intensely wanted to read it, so Interlibrary Loan. I wish I’d had it when I really wanted it, 2 days before Thanksgiving. Now that I’ve read a bunch of other action-packed books,  my interest in this has really sagged despite its brevity. But I will probably persevere.

edit: I give up. DNF. Thank god I didn’t buy it. It’s barely 200 pages and I still couldn’t get more than a quarter of the way through because MC is whiny as hell and I hate every character/want them to be murdered for real so bad that I can’t even enjoy the plot where that might happen.

Lease on Love - Falon Ballard: I have not heard a THING about this book or author, but it popped up on the library homepage and immediately looked like it might be the kind of romance I’m craving, specifically, the kind of Extremely Pleasant male love interest that is ridiculously hard to find in this sea of literary assholes and bad boys and men who take an immediate dislike to a woman because she’s too pretty/social/whatever other normal thing and they Disapprove. Fingers crossed this author doesn’t do explicit scenes. I don’t want to know, I’ll just take my chances. It’s too promising to be pre-ruined. P.S. Brooklyn brownstone!! my DREAMS (minus the living in New York part. my architecture dreams)

Christmas at Silver Falls - Jenny Hale: the book that is hopefully going to go a hell of a lot better in terms of meeting my need for sweet and decidedly not explicit Christmas romance than “A Princess for Christmas.” Maybe closer to the actual holiday? Or should I read it now to fast-kick myself into the spirit.

(seriously, I’m always so bad at switching out of the November read-all-the-thrillers-and-watch-the-last-straggling-Halloween-horror-movies mode and into the holiday one. by the time I get there I usually have about a week left. I almost wish I was That Person who starts prepping for the season roughly two days after Halloween.)

#adding to my antsiness: the prospect of between 1 and 3 book sales on Saturday #small ones but each one close enough to the next that it's not REALLY out of my way once I'm at the first one... #(and the first one isn't really that far; it's in my home county) #also I may or may not have a package from BookOutlet coming SHHH #goodness has it been OVER TWO MONTHS since my last such post?? i guess I kept drafting and not publishing them #library triage

[honeyabyss]

Mc falling asleep next to them

Lucifer:

he had been working nonstop for hours now and the pile of yet to be read and signed documents wasn't getting any smaller

you had been sitting in his study silently working on your own assignments, that was until you've finished them about an hour ago

pacing his room in boredom and looking at the stuff he keeps in his closets (mostly books, records and demonus)

"Could you stop wandering around, you're irritating me!" Lucifer is stressed, annoyed, etc and your sighs, constant footsteps and opening and closing of closet doors, didn't help him to concentrate

you could have left the room and found something else to do, but you were determined to spend some time with him, as the evening work hours are quite literally the only hours where you can be alone with him

so instead you seeked permission for putting on a record to have at least some entertainment, which was both a good and a bad choice at the same time

yes you had something to enjoy and relax to, but the relaxing part worked a little bit too well

after a good ten minutes you were sleeping peacefully, stretched out all over his sofa with no care in the world

"I'm going to take a small break and get some coffee. Do you want something as well?" Lucifer asked only to be met with silence, which he didn't appreciate

he was about scold you for being rude, when his gaze fell on your sleeping form and the words seemed stuck in his throat

how could you sleep so peacefully right next to one of the strongest demons of hell, he honestly didn't know if he was pleased you found comfort in his presence or if he should be annoyed that you don't take him serious enough

nonetheless you seemed to have a good sleep and as this is often near impossible in the House of Lamentation, he decided to let you sleep

he got himself his coffee and once back in his study he moved his workplace to the small coffee table and took a seat next to you on the sofa

he adjusted your form so you weren't hanging half of the edge and put his coat over your sleeping form for some warmth

"Foolish little lamb, letting your guard down in a house of wolves, good thing I'm here to protect you..."

Mammon:

"And then I, the Great Mammon, made an action movie worthy escape and totally didn't run away in a panic, because Lucifer was chasing me..."

he had been telling you how exactly he got into the situation of hanging from the ceiling once again, as you've tried as careful as possible to cut him free, which was harder then expected with the way he kept moving around

once finally free, he dropped onto the ground, whining about the rope burns he got basically all over his body, though demons heal quicker, it still wasn't a nice feeling

with a sigh you offered him your hand and pulled him up and away to your room to give him some of the salve Satan had made you the last time you had accidentally cut yourself while cooking

you sat a flustered Mammon onto your bed while you went ahead and searched through your bathroom cabinets that were filled with products Asmo had gifted you, when you finally found it you asked Mammon to hold still while you put some salve onto his burned skin

"W-what?! N-no way! I don't need your help, I can do that on my own!" and with that Mammon stormed away with your salve and locked himself into your bathroom

you knew better then to argue at this point, Mammon would do what Mammon wants to do...until he fails and seeks protection behind your back...

be it because he is embarrassed, doesn't know how to open the salve tube, or because there were so many rope burns...but Mammon took quite long to apply the crème, leaving you to wait for him for at least half an hour now

helping out Mammon can become quite tiring, not that you mind helping him or don't like being around him, but a nap sounds nice right now

and so you lay down in your bed, it is after all your room, and just because Mammon is currently camping out in your bathroom, doesn't mean that you can't take a nap

Mammon comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he probably needed a few more minutes to build up courage to face and thank you, but he is met with the sight of you sleeping on your bed

Mammons brain is working overdrive, trying to figure out if he should leave the room quietly, wake you up or stay and watch over you...then again he doesn't want to be seen as a creep by you, but he can't deny that he would like to stay with you

he carefully climbs into bed and pushes you a bit further in so you sleep on the wall side and don't fall off in case you move, it takes five more minutes until Mammon risks putting his arm around you all while holding his breath in anticipation of your rejection, when none comes he settles a little closer to you and falls asleep as well

"Don't worry my human, the Great Mammon is gonna keep you warm and protected in your sleep!"

Bonus: even though you two fall asleep next to each other with only Mammons arm wrapped around you, expect him to wake up on top of you holding you like your his pillow

Leviathan:

it was 5am and Levi and you were currently waiting in line in front of a shop to get your hands on a new limited edition Ruri-Chan figurine

surprisingly enough even though you turned up quite early, there were a good amount of people in front of you

the shop would only open a 9am so you still had a long time to queue in the coldness of the devildom morning

"Ah that is not fair! We planned everything so carefully, it was the perfect timing, why aren't we first in line?" Levi complained while standing on his tiptoes to be able to see and count the demons in front of him, coming to the conclusion that if everyone were to buy one figurine he'd still be able to buy one for himself...and whatever you might want

you weren't the happiest when he told you about his plan a few weeks prior and getting woken up this early you might have been a little slower than usual in getting yourself ready, now that you were here you couldn't help but feel a little guilty

you tried to cheer Levi up with the argument that if you were longer in line that also meant you could spend more time together, which resulted in Levi turning into a blushing but happy mess

you put down the blanket you've brought and made yourself comfortable on it, Levi joining you but looking a bit stiff from the closeness

you ate a breakfast consisting out of sandwiches made with whatever was left after Beels midnight snack, which wasn't much but better than nothing

afterwards as there was still a lot of time to pass you started to play some games on his Switch, trying to stay awake

the emphasis lies on 'trying', because after 2 hours or so you start to fall asleep, eyelids and limbs heavy, you don't have the energy left in you to fight the sleep and so you nod off, your head falling onto Levis shoulder who had been inching closer over the period of time...to be able to better see the Switch display not to be closer to you...

Levi.exe has stopped working

there he sits red as a tomato with Mc sleeping on his shoulder, the queue in front of him starts to pack up and move as the shop gets ready to open up, his Switch display is showing the game over screen, his mind feels fogged over and he has no idea how to react now

Mc just fell asleep and Levi feels guilty to wake them...but they have to move...

"H-hey Mc? T-the line i-is moving? Wake up....please..." his attempts are way to quiet for you to hear and even as he gently shakes your shoulder you do not wake, leaving Levi quiet in a dilemma

"N-no other choice..." he says as he packs up the stuff alone, leaving only you sitting on the cold floor...he can't just leave you here..

Levi turns into his demon form, his hands shaking and eyes flitting across your from and over the crowd of other demons, before he carefully lifts you into his arm, his tail wrapping around you as well for more stabilization, so he has one hand free to carry his shopping bag later

he never bought something faster than that day, he got his figurine and even bought you some anime merch he knew you had stated to like, all while feeling like he was running the worst fever of his life and receiving stares, giggles and smug smiles from way too may people, that was enough attention for at least a century for Levi...but he did like holding you in his arms

"This is not fair! I have to deal with all the embarrassment while you sleep...but I guess it's okay if it's for you..."

Satan:

Satans last anger fit had caused way more damage than usually, it had taken place in the library when Mammon had tried to steal a very rare book about spells, to sell it after he found out how rare it actually is...now that lead to Satan throwing down and emptying almost all bookshelves and kicking Mammon through the room

While Mammon was strung upside down from the ceiling, Satan was forced to clean up the library alone, but you had pity on him as there were quite a lot to clean up, if Lucifer doesn't find out you helped there will be no consequences

Satans opinion about you helping was split, first of all he was really thankful for the help even though he was at fault for the chaos, having to clean up all alone was a bit much, but on second thought Satan was worried that you tried to go against Lucifers orders, he's proud of you for defying his eldest brother but also feels like it's a stupid idea

but you have made your mind up and so while Satan repairs and stands up the shelves, you begin to put the books in, you might not know the exact way they stood like Satan, but for now getting them off the floor is the priority

there aren't many words spoken as you silently work away, only once in a while you point out a book which got a bit more damage, the cover hanging off loosely or a few pages ripped out, you two decide depending on the damage if it can be fixed or not

every now and then Satan asks you to hold a piece of a shelf together while he fixes it, he is surprisingly fast and knows exactly how to repair it...just as if he had to do it more than once in a while...

"Oh Mc? Can you give me the screwdriver? No no that one, the one with the cross head is what I need..." you had no idea there were so many different tools, and wouldn't be the slotted one sufficient if you just angled it right? Satan just laughs and let's you try it for yourself, only for you to fail, he then shows you how to do it correctly guiding you through fixing your first shelf

"The last shelf is standing again, I'll help you with the book now." Satan pointed out, a small ray of hope now that only the books were left, you didn't reply, which honestly wasn't really necessary, but a small affirming noise would have been nice, so Satan tries to keep the 'conversation' going, while he works on the books with his back turned to you

"...you're still ignoring me? Are you angry at me for making such a mess? You know you didn't have to help...you can go, no need to act like all high and mighty!" he was getting angry again, yes he did make a mess, but he didn't do anything to you! Had he? He couldn't remember, but humans might interpret actions and words differently…he didn't want you to be mad at him, and neither did he want to get angry at you, but with you ignoring him it became quite difficult to keep his voice low

having enough and wanting to make up before it gets worse, he makes his way over to you, who was leaning against a shelf with a book in your hand

as he sits down next to you and turns your body to him through a guiding hand on your shoulder, he startles, you fell asleep in a sitting position? That sounds more like something Belphie would do...Isn't that uncomfortable?

You must have been exhausted after filling up three shelves of books and fell asleep midway on your fourth shelf, Satan chuckles amused and relieved you aren't mad at him but simply sleeping

He picks you up and brings you to your room where he lies you down in your bed, covering you with the blanket and hesitantly stroking your hair before going back to cleaning up the library

"Thank you for being so patient with me and helping me! You can rest now and I'll make it up to you later!"

Bonus: he will most definitely take you out on a date of your choice, even if he doesn't enjoy the idea as much as you

Asmodeus:

Asmo had taken you out shopping, as he claimed his wardrobe was not having the right clothes anymore so he had to get new ones fast

he had dragged you through town for the whole day and you two only returned home late in the afternoon, you completely exhausted and ready to drop in your bed, while Asmo while being slightly tired, still insisted on putting on all the clothes and showing them off to you and his followers on Devilgram

he entrusted you with his D.D.D to take some nice amazing shots of him to gain even more followers, though that seemed impossible as it already felt as if the whole population of hell was already subscribed to his account

but as long as all you had to do was hold the D.D.D up and click the screen for a picture, you were fine, you sat down on Asmos bed trying not to disturb the bags of clothes that lay there as well

Asmos screen lit up nearly every few seconds with a new message, how did this man not get crazy with all the message?! And he must check them all, because whenever you write him, he is on and writing back instantly...maybe you should steal his D.D.D from time to time to get him away from it...

While Asmo was changing into new clothes in the bathroom, you could hear him humming a happy tune, clearly in his element and enjoying his time, which made you happy as well, but the exhaustion was still plaguing you and the bed felt unbelievably comfy and on top of that the humming of Asmo was slowly lulling you into sleep

"Oooh Mc~ I especially like this top! Just look how nicely it fits, it shows of my best parts, which are all of me haha...hey Mc?~ Look at me!" Asmo pouted as you stayed put on his bed, and climbed over your form, already expecting you to start pushing him off, only to get concerned when you don't

then he sees your eyes are closed and you seem to be peacefully asleep, he instantly coos at your sweet sleeping expression, the back of his hand caresses you cheeks softly, but you don't react much besides moving a bit into am ore comfy position

Asmo backs off and begins to put down his bags, then he tucks you under his covers and climbs right in with you, pulling you close so that you lie on his chest, his arms encircling you to keep you put

the pictures for Devilgram are forgotten for now, they're not running away anyway, you two can continue another time, but for a beauty nap sounds good

"Oh Mc! You look so cute when you're sleeping...next time tell me you need a break, I'm happy to cuddle you while you're recovering!"

Beelzebub:

you had decided to stay a bit longer at RAD today, because you still had something to discuss with one of the teacher, as well as doing some research for an essay that was due next week

most of the brothers had already left for home or different work related activities, except Beel who had Fangol practice today after school, and as you were not allowed to walk around the Devildom without someone accompanying you for protection, all that was left for you was to wait for Beel to finish his practice, which usually took place for about two hours

you sat down on one of the benches at the side of the field, waving to Beel so he knew you where you were and could keep an eye on you

you worked away on your homework and checked you D.D.D from time to time replying to all the messages you got

the practice seemed to be still not finished even after two hours had passed and you were getting a bit tired from sitting around, but you also couldn't just wander off, Beel might start worry...plus the risk of running into a less friendly demon was still a thing

so you shifted from one position into another not really being able to get comfortable on the hard wooden bench

the ground seemed to be comfier with every minute passing, and so you lay down ignoring the weird looks of the team and trainers, you're body simply wasn't made to sit on this bench longer than necessary

"Here you can wrap yourself in this...it's getting cold. Training is almost over, just hold out a few more minutes!" Beel came over and gave you his jacket and you quickly put it on revelling in his warmth

but here is the problem the jacket made you feel so comfortable that you fell asleep, right on the floor next to a few dozen demons

"We're finished! I'm hungry, let's go get something to eat, any wishes what you want?" Beel was packing his stuff and rambling on about how he could eat at least one year worth of food, training having starved him quite a lot

but when you didn't respond he grew worried and kneeled down next to you, gently resting his hand on your side, he simply laughed when he saw you fell asleep, he is used to it due to Belphie, so he carefully picks you up and carries you home, deciding to order food once there

just Beel giving you a piggy back home, softly smiling to himself and being happy you've come to be so at ease around demons..still at bit worried, but he'll protect you, no worries

"I'll stay by your side until you wake up...and then we can eat lots of good food...please just don't sleep too long or I might have to eat before you wake up."

Belphegor:

so there he was, sleeping, on your bed, in your room, without an invitation...and honestly it wasn't even a surprise anymore, coming home after a work shift at Hell's Kitchen and just wanting to sleep, but no there was no space for you on the bed

I have no idea how, but he manages to occupy the whole bed, and hog blanket and pillows to himself as well

if only he was easy to wake, just to tell him to move over, but no he wouldn't wake up unless you pulled the big guns and nobody wants to face the consequences after one dumped water bottle on his head, it would be a hundred times easier and less dangerous to wake Satan

but you were really tired and just wanted to cuddle into your bed, maybe you could maneuver him with a bit strength..actually forget that...you could always call Beel for help to carry him to his own bed, but by the way he was clinging to your blanket and pillows, that would only end in a empty mattress to sleep on and then you would get cold...

honestly it was his own fault at this point you had threatened him to do it, but he had just laughed it off...

and so you climbed into bed and lay down on top of him, wrapping your arms around him so that you would get at least his body warmth if not the blanket

to your surprise he didn't wake up and he was really comfy, his rhythmic breathing was really relaxing and it didn't take you long to fall asleep

after some time Belphie wakes up with you wrapped around him, he quickly realises that you're asleep, but is stunned nonetheless that you would actually have the guts to sleep on top of him with the risk of waking him up in a bad mood

"That's quite bold of you! You didn't think I will let that slip though, right?" he chuckles amused but shifts nonetheless to make room for you, his embrace is tight, and he hopes just a little bit that you wake up, so he can tease you, but you stay asleep looking content with your new position

"I suppose I could go for another nap...now that I have my favourite pillow with me, sleeping will be even better!" he cuddles you, just like the blanket and pillows...which you don't get any of by the way, but you get Belphie so that's even better, he's gonna keep you warm, don't worry

"You're such a odd human...no idea why I like you...anyway just stay here in my arms and sleep!"

Diavolo:

yesterday was amazing, Dia had taken you to a trip in the human world and you had showed him around, visiting as many places as you two could

what you didn't know was that he had actually sneaked out of the castle to spend time with you

well you didn't know until a very angry Barbatos opened a portal right in front of you two and started lecturing Dia for at least one hour

you felt a bit guilty that you were the indirect cause of this and quickly apologised to him promising to make it up

so here you were in Dias office, overseeing him to do his work so he couldn't sneak out again and Barb didn't have to find him

after all if the reason for sneaking out was right in his room then he had no reason to go, besides the intimidating amount of work left on his desk after yesterdays excurse

Dia worked concentrated for most of the time, only now and then staring out of the window or talking to you

"Isn't it boring to watch me work? I can work alone, I promise to run away...or else Barbatos might get a heart attack from shock of seeing me gone again" he chuckled while signing another document

you reassured you didn't mind sitting next to him in silence, you had a good book borrowed from Satan, tea and cookies from Barbatos and you could stare at Diavolo all day long

your last statement made Dia flush red quite quickly and he tried to distract himself with his work, he slouched over in his chair trying to escape your gaze, but you were having none of it

your arms snaked around his waist and your head came to lean on his shoulder, Dia stiffened not sure how to react he liked the feeling of you hugging him, but now he was scared to move too much as not to disturb you or accidentally hit you with his elbow while trying to write

after a few more documents his eyes flit over to your face, cheek squished against his shoulder, eyes closed and breathing calmly

"Mc? Are.. are you sleeping?" he is whispering trying not to be too loud in case you are truly sleeping, and that you are! A soft smile graces his lips, nobody was ever this relaxed around him, he is proud and wants you to stay asleep as long as possible

he keeps working until Barbatos knocks on the door, coming in and announcing to have brought more tea, only to stop when he sees the sight in front him, Mc holding onto Dia, head resting on his shoulder and sleeping, while Dia put his finger to his lips to tell him not to be too loud

you sleep for an hour or so until Dia really has to move, apologising multiple times for having to wake you

"I'm glad you're able to relax around me, please continue to be yourself! My shoulder is always there for you to nap!"

Barbatos:

"You liked the cake that much? I'm flattered! I could teach you how to make it if you'd like?"

you had been over for tea at the castle and the chocolate cake with black-as-hell cherries was the best cake you've ever ate, it was bittersweet in taste not too much sweetness and not too much bitterness, paired with the melting chocolate, you could have eaten the whole cake on your own

you doubt you'd be able to get the same ingredients in the human realm but maybe you could find similar ones, so you were more than willing to learn with Barbatos

and so you arranged to meet the next Sunday afternoon for a baking session

Barb let you into the castle already awaiting you at the door even though you were early

you two worked on the cake, Barb explaining each step carefully, even for the easiest steps he takes his time to explain and help you, being very patient with you no matter how much you screw up

"Next we have to melt the chocolate in a pot. Wait a minute I turn on the stove for you" while you put the chocolate pieces into a pot, Barb moves behind you and turns on the stove, his arms brushing your sides, yet he stays fully focused, what can't be said for you

the cake is put together quickly with you two working together and while it bakes in the oven and the chocolate is meting, you two go ahead and start cutting and coring the rest of the cherries to decorate the cake later

"Here have a taste, they're bitter at first but the aftertaste is nicely sweet!" He holds out a cored cherry for you to taste and eats one himself, smiling gently at you while you sniff at the fruit first, which smells exactly like a normal human world cherry

the only thing left to do is wait for the cake so you two sit down for some tea at a small table in the kitchen, talking about the week, when Diavolo calls for Barb and he quickly excuses himself to help the prince out

the sweet aroma of the baking cake, the warmth of the tea and the very comfy chair you're sitting in, are a dangerous combination making you fall asleep

as Barb returns he sees you with your head lying on your folded arms on the table, clearly asleep, Barb decides to eave you there while cleans the kitchen and checks on the cake half an hour later

"Mc? The cake is ready to be decorated do you want sleep or do you want to help me?" somewhat embarrassed you stand up and help him with the decorations , Barb acts if nothing happened but he can't help but think about your gentle expression while you slept

"Next time I'll let you sleep longer... I wouldn't mind if you visited me for your naps if that meant I could see you more often."

Solomon:

learning magic was many things: exciting, frustrating, dangerous, fun...but sometimes it also was unbelievable boring

like when you think about magic, you think about casting charms, curses, making potions and all that stuff, but nobody told you that beforehand you have to learn everything about the new spell or etc in theory!

so here you were sitting with Solomon as he rambled on about how while the shrinking charm could have really bad side effects if casted wrong, sure it was important to know how to cast it correctly but did you really have to listen on to everything that might go wrong?

listening to all this just make you feel less confident, I mean technically you were practicing with a tea cup to shrink, so shrinking only a part of it wouldn't be too bad of a side effect, but what if you used too much pressure and made the cup explode and you'd hurt Solomon in the process?!

You took a deep breath, which made Solomon stop talking as he looked at you questioningly

"Anything wrong? Already giving up? Is it toom much?" his light teasing was meant to make you relax, but all you could do was give a small, stiff smile, signalling for him to continue and he did, after messing up your hair with his hand giving you a huge grin, but he talked slower now giving you more glances to make sure you were still alright

"How about a small break? I'll make us some tea..." he stood up and made some tea...in a beaker over a Bunsen burner..this weirdo..

the tea didn't taste weird though, it was just normal tea, even though the preparation would have made Barbatos get a stroke

after the break he was back to full tutor mode and your concentration slipped with each new word, until your head falls down, your chin resting on your chest comfortably, you had fallen asleep right before him

Solomon notices instantly that you're asleep and starts laughing so loud that you wake up again, he is crying and gasping for breath at your flustered state and you hit for good measurement on the arm

"Am I that boring? Fine if you're tired you can rest on my bed. I'll read you a bedtime spell book..." he doesn't stop laughing and teases you endlessly, you better be on your toes around him, you won't be hearing the end of this

"Hey sleepyhead? Do you want me to read you into boredom? I won't take pictures of your sleeping and drooling self...No promises made though..."

Simeon:

He was staring blankly at his manuscript, writers block had been plaguing him for quite some while now, but the new chapter had to be sent to the company until next week

you had offered to help him out maybe you could give him some ideas, so he invited you over and let you read the latest chapter so you'd know what had happened

you sat in his room brainstorming ideas on a small extra sheet trying your best to help Simeon out who looked quite lost

"Do you think that would work? Doesn't if feel a bit too rushed? But maybe if we combined these two ideas together..." he seemed to had found something and began to roughly write up a plan for his further writings

he continuously asked you questions about the smallest details, it was kind of cute that he relied so much on you, he probably could have done the rest himself as well, yet he kept involving you into the whole process

while his one hand scribbled like a madman, his other rested on your arm occasionally lightly squeezing it, reminding you that he didn't forget about you

you slowly fell asleep, the sounds of each others breathing, the pen scratching over paper and the ticking of the clock hanging on the wall, the inly sounds to be heard

"What about this part? How do you think it could go from here?...Mc?" he wasted no time in making sure you were lying comfortably, putting his cloak over your form and still squeezing your arm from time to time while he continued to write late into the night

only then did he notice, the brothers might worry about your absence, should he wake and bring you home? or should he let you sleep here and inform Lucifer about your safety? but the sofa you were currently sitting on, would make your back hurt if you continued to sleep here

it took him some time debating with himself, but came to the conclusion to carry you to his bed and tuck you in, giving you a forehead kiss like he was used to with Luke, only to realise what he'd done and quickly scrambling away in embarrassment to give Lucifer a quick call about the situation

"Have sweet dreams my lamb! I'll be guarding you in any realm, even the dream realm!"

Luke:

Luke, Simeon and you were having a small movie evening, watching some old Disney movies

Simeon didn't allow you to watch something else to protect Luke, but you didn't mind too much

you were having some freshly made desserts by Luke who had worked on them the whole day, as he was very excited for your meetup

you watched a few movies, talking, laughing and joking together, just having fun

"Huh? They called the mean cat Lucifer? Hahah how fitting, he kind of even looks like the real Lucifer! Ah, don't tell him that though!" Luke really liked to compare the different characters to the people he knows, but when there actually were a cat called Lucifer he was quite surprised...who would want their cute pet to be called like a demon? Why not call them angel names? Michael is a pretty cool name...

over the time you became more and more tired and Simeon seemed to notice, suggesting on stopping for today and continuing another time, but Luke convinced you two of one more movie

unfortunately you didn't last the final movie and fell asleep cuddled underneath the blanket between Simeon and Luke

Luke took some time to notice, only seeing it when he turned to you wanting to tell you his opinion about the last scene

"Oh! Simeon... Mc fell asleep..." Simeon already knew, as you had fallen onto his shoulder, not that he minded, he just told Luke to stay quiet and watch the rest of the movie

Luke cuddled up to you to keep you warm and occasionally glanced at you to make sure you were okay, and there cuddled next to you he as well fell asleep...trapping Simeon underneath your combined weight, making it impossible for Simeon to get out of the bed, so you three just slept together that night

"Don't worry Mc! I'll keep all demons away from you while you sleep!"

#obey me headcanons #obey me #swd obey me #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me belphegor #obey me beelzebub #obey me simeon #obey me diavolo #obey me barbatos #obey me luke #obey me solomon #obey me shall we date #headcanon

[innuendostudios]

I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

[keplercryptids]

for the ama, how did you come up with the idea for your campaign? Are there any story elements you really loved but had to scrap?? 🍤🍤🍤

god, this got long lmao. i'm sorry.

the idea for this campaign came about shortly after reading the broken earth trilogy by nk jemisin. it was a super vague concept at first: i wanted to run a campaign in a world that was extremely broken and volatile. i obviously d&d-ified everything from there, and so the campaign doesn't resemble that trilogy at all. 

in the campaign, the celestial and material planes used to exist in the same time and space, until 50 years ago when a cataclysmic planar event occurred and shifted everything around. the celestial plane is missing, the gods haven't been seen since, and other planes have contact with the material in new and disastrous ways. wars broke out and there's elemental chaos everywhere. in the beginning, i only had a vague idea of how/why this happened, and currently in-game, the players are just starting to learn more - breadcrumbs! just the smallest breadcrumbs for now.

the original idea i had for the overarching plot was that the campaign would be about the PCs working to restore things how they used to be. but the longer this story goes on, the more i realize that isn't the goal. it never was the goal. the way things were before wasn't perfect, or even ideal. sure, there was more peace, but peace doesn't necessarily equal justice. anyway, the way the story has moved really is one of a world being reforged. a world made new, made different. campground rules, y'know? leave this world better than you found it. (it's a much, much better story than what i thought it might be.)

as for there being story elements i loved but had to scrap, not really??? i mean, listen. i have the world's greatest d&d players who always buy into the immersion, who always act in respect of the world as if it's a real, breathing place. and there are definitely directions the campaign could have gone that would have been really interesting, but for whatever reason, it verged in a different way. 

for instance, one of the players started the campaign as a cleric who was secretly an angel, the last angel left on this plane (as far as they knew), but switched characters about a year in - and that would have been a different story, you know?? it would have leaned more heavily into the god/angel lore (which i'm still sprinkling in, just probably not to the extent that i would have). there was also a time when the party could have formed a really strong alliance with the emperor of their country, but chose not to. and again, that would have moved the campaign in a different, more political direction that could have been cool.

but the thing is, i don't plan any plots. i plan NPCs, i plan events, i plan problems, and i see what the players do with them. what they do is always more interesting and dynamic and heartfelt and powerful than anything i could imagine. so yeah, there's truly nothing that i've scrapped that was worth keeping, in the scheme of this amazing story my players are telling with me.

AMA - dnd edition!

#x me a q #ask game #reforged campaign #jd&d #dm stuff

[yandere-sins]

A (tiny) tutorial on how to download Twisted Wonderland if you are not US/CA for IOS

Because I know some of you also struggled with this, here is how I did it! Before I go into detail, please note these little problems I encountered:

You won’t be able to connect your Paypal account with an Apple ID that is not located in the same country. I am not sure about the credit card option, but gift cards won’t work either since they are country-locked (aka, it will tell you that your gift card can only be used in an Apple store of the same country where you bought the card) That means you will be F2P if you want or not.

Even if you change back to your original Apple ID you won’t be able to charge that one if you want to buy anything in-app. It’ll give you an error message that payments need to be done on the Apple ID that the app was downloaded with, so tough luck with that...

I am not sure about the legality of creating a new Apple ID account. You will need to put in an address before accessing it, and I am not sure if that is actually a bit fraud-ish. Thus, I don’t take responsibility if you decide to do this method and somehing happens! (Though so far I haven’t heard about anything like that. Just don’t try to scam with that ID lol)

Additional Edit 02/16/22:

You can absolutely buy gift cards from those regions to use on your US/CA account if you don’t want to stay F2P. You’ll need to switch back to that account and redeem it there but it should work. However, there might be an additional cost to the gift card instead of just the price you are purchasing! Remember to stay on that account for the purchase before switching back to your regular Apple ID!

Important if you are using Apple Music: Your entire library will be deleted upon switching accounts! If you have a Apple Music backup on your computer, you can just transfer all the music files back onto your device, or alternatively, you need to make one or several playlists with all the songs and enable “Sync Library” in the settings. Apple will delete all songs and albums but it keeps your playlists; with this method, you can quickly redos load everything without manually searching for each and every song.

Those are the only negative points I found so far trying around and testing things, now, here’s how I did it:

You need an US or CA Apple-ID, however, after using it to download the app, you can switch back to your normal one! To get a new one, log out of your old one (make sure you know your login for this one again later!) and when logging in again choose ‘new account’. I had the problem that I couldn’t find this option on my mobiles, so I went to   appleid.apple.com   and in the top corner chose ‘create your apple ID’

Once you followed the creation process (you can choose the same telephone number but different emails as your other ID), take your new ID back to the mobile device of your choosing and log in. It should automatically prompt further inquirement from Apple to add Name & Address. You will absolutely need a postal code from the country you chose, everything else seems to be open for wrong information. Though it will also accept if you use your personal information and then just change the city & postal code to one from the country you chose for your ID.

Once you’re done, you should be able to finally download the game yay! (Please download the game first before changing back to your original ID) You don’t need to worry about updates as they will still work as long as you are connected to the internet, even when you change back to your original Apple ID (and I recommend going back to your normal one for your other apps, payments, music, etc. If you have automatic payments they don’t seem to be cancelled while you are changing around, but it might be better to check them afterwards!)

Enjoy playing! ♥

The thing I was afraid of was having to constantly having to change back and forth between IDs to update the app, however, updates can be done even if your Apple ID is not the same that downloaded an app, so it should be fine! Lmk if you try the same and find more additions so I can add them to the post! I hope you guys can enjoy the game ♥

Also, I just want to say that without the help of my good friend Hime I probably wouldn’t have come this far, so all the credit for helping me and setting me up to Hime! ♥

#Admin #Twisted Wonderland

[saltypiss]

Day 1 Payday 3

Imagine Payday 2, but worse. Now imagine when Payday 2 shot itself in the foot every couple of weeks, now imagine when they added micro-transactions, and remember all the fucking overpriced DLC with way below bare minimum content?

Okay, now imagine when Payday 2 had that massive shitstorm that thank fuck, stopped the microtransaction shit.

Yeahhh, sorry but they’re not dropping that goldmine of integrity loss. That’s Day 1. And yes, you best believe the game is gonna become Pay2Win again with stats you can only buy. Now with no reason to remove it.

Why stop there? You get millions of dollars every contract! What if we juuuuust cut 1/2 of that and make it so you can get it instantly with a 4.99 “dlc” that gives you both 2 million, AND lets you earn 1.8/3 of the usual amount!

Oh and you BEST FUCKING BELIEVE THIS BITCH RUNNIN ON FUCKIN DIESAL, WHAT KINDA FUCK IDIOT ARE YOU TO BELIEVE THEY’D SWITCH TO ONE OF THE INFINITELY LESS FUCKING DINOSAUR AGED TECH????

Day 1 Patches and DLC, a Premium Edition is already planned which is infinitely more gross than anything you’d think it should be but absolutely is. Hell, why not make the game only P2P again. Because fuck it, when using an engine from the IBM era, you might as fucking well make the game’s networking shit fucking Dial Up quality too!

And hey, why not just say fuck it, and RESELL every character from Payday 2! Hell, you best believe Wolf is gonna be DLC in the future. And hey! Why not make the shitty prestige system more cumbersome? Let’s not fix how it was handled with your saved set ups, or generally being...dumb and useless. Nah, let’s double down and add some bugs too! Let’s have weapons equipped dissapear! Let’s have skill points NOT be given sometimes? Hell, why not just drop that skill system entirely and just make it an RPG where you can buy EXP upgrades too.

Oh, you don’t like that a vast vast vast majority of what PD2 offered is being resold to you at a higher price on the same fucking engine??? Fuck you! We’ll get our UNPAID moderators to stalk your fucking profile and find reasons to remove community rewards! Even further we’ll offer them special masks they can only have as UNPAID moderators and fuel their egos to the point of a PR disaster!

Day 2:

A patch comes out that appears to fix alot but somehow breaks super basic features that anyone who’d playtest would’ve found within schmeconds (that’s smaller seconds)

Let’s also make it an Epic Exclusive. Because really, if you’re gonna fuck your customers, you better go for the most Right Wing feeling ass fucking alternative to Steam’s reason-ability and fuck your absolute DUMBEST into dropping 120$ Day 1, for a store I’m certain has no refund policy that would actually function.

You best believe if we’re using Grandma’s Remaining Life Force the Engine that the performance is going to be below 24fps a majority of the time. And absolutely never be solved in the next 3 years where every week in the 3rd year we hear about how they’re basically going out of business and being bought by Ubisoft or EA.

Yeah no, I still haven’t forgotten nor forgiven the full on bullshit they pulled in PD2. Train wreck. Whole time. Whoooole fucking time. Now it’s barely the game I paid for and while yeah not terrible, isn’t very fun anymore. There’s like, no limitations to learn from and grow around, it’s just “go go go bang bang bang” and stealth is “wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait okay done” And no, I expect nothing to be improved from PD2 other than the Main Menu might look cooler, but if I just have to trust my heart, I know it’s going to be fundamentally flawed in no respectable way.

#Payday 3 #PD3

[mack1s]

meet the admin! (basic info masterlist)

hi-hello! so~ i don’t know if people will actually look at this account but just to be sure, i’d better introduce myself don’t you think? well... here goes nothing!

first off, my name’s rye! my pronouns are she/her,, though if you find it more comfortable using they/them when mentioning me, i don’t mind at all! so as long as it’s not he/him /: hhh

eng/한국어/中文 = ok! (i’m most fluent in english, so please do speak to me in eng ♡; i can understand a bit of chinese and i can read korean just fine ... i just can’t really speak fluently in those languages).

byf, byi; prone to swearing A LOT, sometimes texts in all caps, i’m a very private person... so i won’t use any tags to reach more ppl (if u come across my acc and wanna interact, don’t be afraid to tho!), no socials at all except discord !! (my insta and twt are private spams, i REFUSE to ever make a main ever again ... pls message me for my discord code if u wanna chat).

dni, dnf; basic dni-dnf criteria, sexualizing minors, hardcore nsfw acc, hardcore shipping.

p.s. if i use a strikethrough in phrases like this; i love jyuto iruma!!!! - it means im embarassed of what im saying but it needs to be said somehow hhh /srs

— ^_^ ☆ !?

some extra information about me !! (i might just ramble here so you can choose to read or not,,)

my mbti type switches between infj and isfp, though my impression comes off as type infj— i’m an october libra and my type is 5w4 !!

genshin info; na server, uid in blog page description, ar 55, childe main (he’s also my husbando!) ... don’t be afraid to ask for help or ask to play bc i’m a childe main — i’m one of sane ones— i hope.

interests; i’m into mostly anime and butai! atm... the more dominant franchises i’m into are tourabu, messiah project, HYPNOSIS MIC, jujutsu kaisen, the royal tutor, danganronpa, real-fake, gantz, and moriarty the patriot.

side note (butai-related): i just wanna say a HUGE thank you to the butai community on tumblr and on lj ... as i’m more of a freeloader who leeches off everything everyone shares — rest assured, i plan to buy my own stages and other merch soon and i will be more than happy to share with the community as a way of saying thank you! (since i don’t live in jp, it’s quite hard to pay for stuff on dmm ><) but the time will come soon!

— lomls;

highest rank; ICHIGO HITOFURI, JYUTO IRUMA, & SHUUSUKE SHIBA !!!! ♡

tag, takenbyrye; vyn richter, ibara saegusa, sakuma ritsu, luke pearce, ren kisaragi, yamanbagiri kunihiro, ichiro yamada, jyushi aimono, saburo yamada, sasara nurude, yuuri kaito, mamiya seiren, byakuya togami, tartaglia, ruki mukami, subaru sakamaki, reiji sakamaki, horikawa kunihiro, yagen toushirou, joichiro nishi, william james moriarty, rika honjo, teru minamoto, leonhard von grannzreich, toge inumaki, gundham tanaka, kiibo, ryouta mitarai, kurou yatogami, haruka nanase, licht jekylland todoroki, daisuke kambe, soujirou seta, heshikiri hasebe, ikuya kirishima, rod benedikt widdensov.

kins; yamanbagiri kunihiro (tkrb), itadori yuuji (jjk), doppo kannonzaka (hypmic), and bruno von grannzreich (ry).

fav actors, highest rank; ARAMAKI YOSHIHIKO + AKIRA TAKANO !! do hirose daisuke and kyousuke hamao still count ):

fav actors, sub rank; kenta mizue, kitamura ryo, masanari wada, kanata hongo, someya toshiyuki, matsuda ryo, kimura tatsunari, sakurai keito, keisuke higashi, konishi eito (pls don’t attack me jjj these r mostly from the tourabu butai).

seiyuu; nobunaga shimazaki, JUNYA ENOKI (aaa enojun!!).

games; tears of themis, helios rising, obey me, enstars, hypnosis mic, idolish7, a3, genshin impact, touken ranbu, cinderella phenomenon.

— ☆彡

theme and pfp credit!

pfp; @fufefefe (found on tourabu.blog.jp)

theme; @wordbite via theme-hunter.com

*the edit as the media above is made by me ,, it’s rlly poorly made (and masked LMAO) but i’ll make better ones next time <3 remake of insomnish’s edit on yt (using live action nishi!!)

[sweetdevil-sims]

Hi, I‘m a frequent visitor of your blog and I really love your work :) I‘ve been using your CAS-hiders for quite some time now, but when I saw your last post on hiding patterns in CAST, it made me think about the possibility of also hiding some of the EA build/buy objects I never use. I‘ve found a tutorial on MTS, but no actual, already existing hiders. Do you know if anyone has ever made such thing? I‘m always a little hesistant on messing around with game files myself. Thanks in advance! :)

Hello, and thank you! 😘 I think there was an effort to recategorize/hide certain things, but from what I know nothing was ever finalized (for every EP, SP etc.). But it’s totally safe to mess with game files as long as you don’t work on the originals directly. And it’s better, IMO, because you might want to keep stuff that other people have hidden.

I know you didn’t ask for this, but here’s a quick - and safe - guide on how to recategorize/hide things:

1. Open S3OC -> Cloning -> Normal objects. Let it load.

2. Navigate to your install folder, to a path similar to this, for the basegame: D:\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\GameData\Shared\Packages For EPs/SPs, the paths should look like this: D:\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 Ambitions\GameData\Shared\Packages and you should have one package named FullBuild_p## in every folder.

3. In the basegame folder, open the file named DeltaBuild0 in S3PE.

4. Go back to S3OC. You can sort the files either by name, or by expansion pack. If you’re working on an EP-by-EP (or SP) basis, the latter is preferable. Find an object you want to hide/recategorize, click on it in the list, let the tabs load, then right-click the file in the list and select Copy Resource Key (or hit Ctrl-C):

(I picked an object from the Ambitions EP but the procedure is the same.)

5. Switch to S3PE, with DeltaBuild0 open. Paste the data you just copied into the top Instance field at the bottom of the program window. Enable the Instance field (tick the box to the left). Delete everything before the last group with 0x in front of it. Tick the “Filter active” option to the left of the program window. And click the “Set” button.

Your window should look something like this now:

6. Right-click the OBJD resource and export it somewhere, without renaming it!! Create a new .package file/project in S3PE, and import the newly exported OBJD in it.

7. In this new project, select the OBJD resource you want to edit, then click the “Grid” button. These are the categories you’re interested in if you want to recategorize/hide things:

Expand the categories and see what you want to change. If you want to completely hide the object, make sure all the numbers are 0, while of course keeping the same number of digits, like this: 0x00000500 -> 0x00000000

If you want to change the price of the object, see the CommonBlock category.

8. After you’re done making changes, click the “Commit” button and save your project as a .package file.

----------------------------------------------------------

Why do it like this? Because it takes ages to make changes in S3OC, then clone the entire object (without selecting “Renumber/rename internally”, of course) and extract the modified OBJD from it. Like this, you’re basically using S3OC only for its ability to show your a preview of the objects.

#sims 3 #tutorial #sweetdevilreplies #Anonymous

[blazehedgehog]

Thoughts on Nintendo making the Super Mario 35 game and 3D All Stars limited physically and even digitally?

It’s legitimately surprising how blind Nintendo is certain things. And even if they aren’t blind, they’re... ignorant, in a sense? Frugal to a fault? They’re dumb. Amazingly dumb. Let’s go with that. That's a nice way to put it.

I tweeted that I’d recently finished replaying Super Mario Sunshine a year or two ago (it took me roughly four years!) and that I’d burned through the PC port of Super Mario 64 not that long ago over the course of a single weekend. And that, because of this, I found it hard to justify paying $60 for the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection.

I don’t want this to sound like “because I played them for free, I don’t want to buy them.” I already bought and paid for Super Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube, and I own at least two, maybe even three copies of Super Mario 64 (original cart, Wii VC, Wii U VC). That's because Super Mario 64 is also one of the most influential games of all time. I know I say that a lot, but I'll repeat it as many times as I need to. Any third person action game made in the last 25 years owes something to what Super Mario 64 figured out -- analog character movement, how to set up the camera, all of it. Even if Super Mario 64 didn’t invent everything about 3D character movement, it probably still figured out a better way to do it. All modern game design roads lead back to that game. I will absolutely buy another copy of Super Mario 64.

But you have to do it right.

If you aren’t matching or or exceeding the work that fans are doing for free, then you are asking me to pay money for a worse quality product.

I can play Super Mario 64 at wide screen, in 4K, at 60fps, with modern camera controls, thanks to the PC port. It sounds cleaner, and it looks better than the N64 game did. Even if you subtract the recreated textures and the high-def models and just play the game with the original assets, it’s still running smoother and plays tighter, but still feels like Super Mario 64.

A case could be made that these enhancements to Super Mario 64 are pretty big and would require lots of new work and testing (as if Nintendo couldn’t just account for that). But, then, what about Super Mario Sunshine? Now, the All-Stars version has been updated to run in widescreen, sure, but even more could be done without messing anything up.

Super Mario Sunshine as it shipped on the Gamecube ran at 30fps, but that’s not always how the game was shown. For a large portion of its development, Super Mario Sunshine actually ran at 60fps. At some point, Nintendo decided to cap it at 30fps, likely because it couldn't maintain a stable 60. Using the emulator Dolphin, and the right Gameshark/Gecko code modifier, it’s possible to restore Sunshine’s original 60fps framerate.

All the game logic under the hood was probably always running at 60fps, it’s just they capped the rendering at 30 for the final game. And yet, the All-Stars version seemingly retains the 30fps cap, even though the Switch could probably do 60fps in this game with both joycons tied behind its back.

For a company that constantly oversteps their boundaries when it comes to fighting the threat of piracy, they sure seem to be making an excellent case for why people should pirate their games, because they’re lowballing things like this and expecting consumers to gobble it up. Thank you Mister Nintendo, sir, for this generous offering of reheated table scraps.

No other extras, no other bonuses. You get these three games and a soundtrack player. Development history? Alternate versions, like Super Mario 64 DS? What about archival material? Concept art, or anything like that? A lot of people are over the moon about Nintendo history right now thanks to the Gigaleak. No? You’re not going to provide anything interesting or cool? Just a bare bones collection of three games presented basically as-is? Not even Super Mario Galaxy 2? Can't be too generous, after all. It's only been 35 years, and Mario's just one of the biggest, most important franchises in all of gaming. Gotta save Galaxy 2 for the, uh... next 3D Mario collection...?

The whole release date thing is just the final slap in the face. It’s Nintendo creating their own artificial scarcity. This is something I’ve picked up on regarding t-shirts -- I run a Redbubble store with shirts I’ve done, and the sales have never been stellar. In four or five years, I’ve made something like $18. Total.

Why? Because they’re always available. The few times I’ve actually encouraged sales a little bit is when I suggested some shirts might be getting retired, eventually. And when you think about it, that’s the entire crux of something like The Yetee. Either you buy this shirt right now, right here, today, or it goes away and may never come back. Limited edition stuff boosts sales because it forces people to make a decision.

It also boosts a festering aftermarket, where, because people know this is a limited edition thing, they can effectively “buy stock” that will effectively collect interest over time. Buy them at $60 now, mark them up for $80, or $90, or $120+ in a year or three. But then all that does is create a scenario where legitimate customers aren’t going to be able to buy the product, because the people who flip these in the aftermarket will have spent $1500 hoping to make a return of $2500-$3000.

You saw this with Amiibo. You saw it with the NES Classic and SNES Classic. It is TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY and every store front worth a penny allows “third party sellers.” Everything is Ebay now. Wal-mart, Newegg, Best Buy, Amazon, Target, whatever. You name a major retail brand, and they probably let some random goober scalp aftermarket products out of their garage. In many states, scalping tickets is banned, but online this is just “business.” I’m sure Jeff Bezos is elated you spent $230 on a Squid Sisters Amiibo double pack (original MSRP: $30). You don’t get to be the richest man in the world by forcing your best moneymakers to play fair.

Nintendo has taken many notes. The bare minimum of effort, for full price, and “oh, gosh, you better buy it now! It might not ever come back! The faster you give us your money, the better!”

Go jump in a lake. I get better and more features in an emulator and I can play these games right now, today, if I really wanted to. If you aren’t going to offer competitive features and business, then our conversation is over.

#questions #nintendo #switch #super mario 3d all-stars #super mario 64 #super mario sunshine #super mario galaxy #scalping #rant #Anonymous

[tsaomengde]

So, it's been a month, and I have finished Cyberpunk 2077. Time was I would have chewed the game up and spat it back out in less than a week, but now I have children and a house to run. I'm not here to talk about the conditions of its release, the human cost, the et cetera. I'm just here to give my thoughts on the game.  If you want a spoiler-free review, here it is: thanks to my mother-in-law for buying it for me for Christmas. If I'd paid money for it I might have been disappointed. As it was, I had a perfectly fine time. Spoilers follow. (Also spoilers for Witcher 3, which is more than five years old now.)

Let's get this out of the way: should the game have been more progressive? Well, yes, but here's another question: what the fuck is cyberpunk even supposed to be? After all, initially, punk itself was created to sell leather jackets and records, and its defining trait was being subversive. It wasn't about being progressive, just offensive, about bucking whatever Standards there were. It's been refined, and redirected, but there's a reason 'Nazi punk' is a thing.

I personally wasn't expecting this game to be a bastion of progressive thought just because it has the word 'punk' in it. They should have done better by people who wanted to play trans or nonbinary characters. They should have done better with a lot of things. But they should have done those things because that's just what we should expect as people who engage critically with media, not because the game has the word 'punk' in the label. Was I sitting there shaking my head at the fact that V can work with the police? No. You're a mercenary, you go where the money is. The game wasn't advertised as an Antifa 2077 simulator, it was advertised as an RPG where you play the role of a merc who will do pretty much anything for that cash.

Here's the other question: is it cyberpunk? I say no. Cyberpunk as a genre is about human beings trapped in exploitative systems which commodify everything, even our bodies, and the lengths we have to go to in those systems to remain human - or not. The game has a lot of stuff in it showing this commodification and exploitation of everything, including our humanity, but it doesn't really have much to say about it. There are no significant choices in the story about how many pieces of yourself you're willing to cut away for power. Fill up every slot with cyberware or play as natural as possible, makes no difference at all to the story or the endings you get.

So it’s not really cyberpunk. That’s fine, a game can not be a thing and still be good. What’s the story, then? The story is about V (who is supposedly you, but they definitely are a distinct entity unto themselves, this is not a blank-slate Bioware situation) and Johnny Silverhand, and who is going to end up occupying the brain they’re forced to share for a while because of an experimental personality-upload chip that gets lodged in there too good to remove. Johnny Silverhand is an asshole version of Keanu Reeves, and I happened to really like his performance. A lot of people didn’t. That’s down to YMMV. Having finished the story and gone online to read about the endings I didn’t get, I feel that it’s… fine. They give you a decent number of ways to address the issue. I was more invested in the side stories with people like Judy and Panam than I was in the Big Plot, though I definitely warmed a lot to Johnny and Rogue near the end.

I never got the Big Feels, though. Like, Witcher 3? I agonized over the amazing chemistry Geralt had with both Yen and Triss, and had serious debates with myself over who to romance, because I may be a slut, but I’m ethical, dammit. I got big sad when Geralt found Ciri, thought she was dead, and just collapsed in on himself. I got even bigger sad when Vesemir died, and felt very vindicated when I murdered the dude that killed him. All of this from a game whose predecessors I didn’t even play! Cyberpunk never hit the same highs for me.  The most invested I ever was in a mission chain, by the way, was the one where the plot goes full Ghost in the Shell with memory editing and "what is a personality really" and truly vast conspiracies, and then the chain ends and just kind of peters out and you're back to all the other stuff that isn't Ghost in the Shell.  So that was... not great.

What about the *game* part though? Is it awesome? Does it suck?  I mean, the game is also fine. The gunplay feels alright, alright enough that I definitely regretted my initial desire to be a katana ninja person and went pretty hard into guns by the end. I give it credit for the systems being robust enough to support that kind of mid-game playstyle pivot.  The melee is deeper than it’s been in other games, but uh… look, I’m pretty sure Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 had better-feeling melee combat, and that game came out over 23 years ago. Might have something to do with the fact that you had an option to switch to a GODDAMN THIRD-PERSON CAMERA. After seeing the story and playing the game and doing the stuff I am prepared to Pronounce on this, and my Pronouncement is that the first-person camera definitely is more immersive, particularly given the story they wanted to tell, and perhaps you should stick with it during cutscenes if that’s your jam, but Goddamn, give us the third-person mode for melee. Anyway, the game, yeah. The stealth is cookie-cutter basic. The hacking minigame is dumb, and the hacking itself is useful, but underwhelming.

What about the vehicles? What about them indeed? I got a motorcycle from one of the first side quests after the world opens up and never used anything else. Everything drives like shit, but at least the motorcycles let me weave through traffic and get those rare glimpses of the toon I spent an hour carefully creating. Of course, most of the time, she would look ridiculous, since you have to continually equip whatever latest thing gives you the most armor, and there’s no transmog, so it’s only at the very end of the game where you *maybe* stop looking like an extra who wandered off of the set of a quirky indie film about near-future hip-hop dancers.

What about the city? Yes, it’s an enormous open world and it’s crazy detailed and there’s so much to do and so many icons to visit, but look, they didn’t need to go this hard. They could have told this story without a GTA-style open world. They could have told this story with Deus Ex-sized hub areas. Perhaps then the game wouldn’t have taken eight Goddamn years to make and destroyed so many poor Polish game developers’ lives.

I’m a thousand words in and I feel like I could write several thousand more, but let’s wrap it up. Here it is: did the 64.6 hours I put into the game entertain me? Yes, but I was ready to be done well before the point of no return, and still I kept hitting up all the side character stuff because I was invested in them. Am I going to play it again? Not right away, no. I’ll wait and see what DLC they drop, what bugs they fix. I have other games to play, and other things to do. And most tellingly, for this past month, I have never been doing real-life adult stuff and just been thinking the entire time, “I could be playing Cyberpunk right now.” I would play it when I sat down and felt I had sufficient time for something more involving than a run in Hades or Slay the Spire. It did not get hooks in me the way the Greats have done.

Cyberpunk: not a whimper, but not a bang either.

#cyberpunk #cyberpunk 2077 #spoilers #cyberpunk spoilers #cyberpunk 2077 spoilers #review #thoughts #lot to unpack here

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND CADILLAC

Eventually the pimps and drug dealers notice that the doctors and lawyers have switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do each kind of work in the way of noticing it consciously. The reason I've been writing about existing forms is that I don't know. Most of the people who've had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't.1 That word balance is a significant one. I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately exciting to them.2 What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? We're good at making movies and software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money.3 When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, then a lot of people. One of my most vivid memories from our startup is going to be than the worst?4 In this model, the research department functions like a mine.5

I'm sometimes accused of meandering. With each step you gain confidence to stretch further next time.6 You had to for guests. Perl. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to be inferior people.7 Of what? And because of supply and demand, they pay especially well.8

If free copies of your content are available online, then you're competing with publishing's form of distribution, and that's why they do it so well.9 Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs.10 I make a note of what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are.11 It didn't seem to harm us. He redefined the problem as: make one that's beautiful.12 Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. It's exciting to chase things and exciting to try to guess answers.13 Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a valuable new resource you can use to figure out what he meant. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have if the founders had given the VCs what they wanted, when they wanted it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good.

A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. There were a lot of false positives. At least, that's how they see it. If it fails, that is. But it's certainly possible to do things that make you stupid, and if you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code: the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth the time. Hackers & Painters. Particularly to young companies that are growing fast, but haven't been doing it for long enough to have grown big yet. Do we want to get the resulting ideas past other people's. Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Note too that determination and talent are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the 1960s.14 It's one of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat.

But no one those days was paying a lot more than Yahoo. Conversations with corp dev is not doing a bad job of talking to them before they are. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same reason we're bad at.15 When you're too weak to lift something, you don't need either of those. It's something they plunge into, working fast and constantly changing their minds, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts became less about ancientness and more about texts. If they're only paying a twentieth as well. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined.16 We want kids to be innocent so they can get the most done. The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.

If you're really productive, why not modern texts? The place to look is where the line ends. I think founders will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users need. And I think this sort of thing it becomes national news. The less it costs to start a company. In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's fastest.

Notes

I know when this happened because it doesn't change the meaning of life.

Currently we do at least 150 million in 1970. Patrick Pantel and Dekang Lin.

Just use the name Homer, to a car dealer. A supports, say, but no doubt often are, but those are writeoffs from the most difficult part for startup founders tend to use some bad word multiple times. Ii. I'm not against editing.

Of the remaining outcomes don't have enough equity left to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

But if they do for a patent troll, either. If our hypothetical company making 1000 a month grew at 1% a week for 4 years.

It should not try to get elected with a screw top would have disapproved if executives got too much. Another tip: If doctors did the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to believing anything in particular made for other reasons, the switch in mid-game.

Good and bad technological progress, however. Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard they work. This is the accumulator generator benchmark are collected together on their companies took off? But that doesn't seem to have to talk about startups in Germany.

I may be exaggerated by the government to take board seats by switching to what you really want, like selflessness, might come from meditating in an urban legend. And if you know Apple originally had three founders? When you're starting a company if the students did well they do now.

After Greylock booted founder Philip Greenspun out of business, having spent much of the biggest winners, from hour to hour that the worm infected, because investing later would probably only improve filtering rates early on?

We Getting a Divorce? Perl.

Don't invest so much from day to day indeed, is a huge, overcomplicated agreements, and b when she's nervous, she doesn't like getting attention in the sense that there were about the same reason I stuck with such tricks will approach.

But it's useful to consider behaving the opposite way from the CIA. There are successful women who don't like to invest at any valuation the founders. But while this sort of things you waste your time working on is a dotted line on a scale that Google does. 0001.

But try this experiment is that you're not going to create a great deal of competition for the future.

VCs thus have a standard piece of casuistry for this essay will say that it refers to instant ramen would be more likely to come in and convince them. But this seems an odd idea.

You're going to drunken parties. I have no real substance. VCs should be working on Viaweb. But iTunes shows that people get older.

After a bruising fight he escaped with a slight disadvantage, but in practice money raised as convertible debt is a shock at first, but this sort of person who would never have left PARC. Again, hard work is in the Valley has over New York, people who did it lose?

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #memories #note #lies #NT #h2 #demand #something #li #government #attention #bruising #sort #VCs #problem #progress #name #company #benchmark #tricks #time #sup #confidence #experiment #outcomes #meters

[aharris00britney]

ASKS 19

It’s 6am and Brandon woke me up when he got up to go to work so now... i answer asks bc i cant sleep. 

@mileyzangel said: Can you please make a Harley Quinn hairstyle from both Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey?

I went and watched Birds of Prey the other night and it was really good. Brandon went to sleep I think tfgvhb. But I doubt I’ll try doing her hair from either of the films. @enriques4 is working on one for her Birds of Prey look if you are interested in that <3

Anonymous said: is tiny living worth it? im leaning towards the gameplay although i love cas. is the gameplay as bad as people say?

I honestly don’t think the new beds do anything. They’re... there. Lmao I think the CAS and buy items are very nice. If we get some cc murphy beds then that would make them a lot more usable tbh.  

Anonymous said: how do you and ayoshi keep making some fantastic collabs?? y'all are literally the first people i go to when I make a fresh install and I can't wait to see what you do next

Anonymous said: AxA CC KINGS!!!

Anonymous said: you guys didnt have to snap like that on AxA

Anonymous said: I LOVE EVERY SINGLE PACK U AND AYOSHI DO PLEASE KEEP MAKING MORE

Anonymous said: another iconic ah00b x ayoshi collab YAS LESSGOOOO

We put a bunch of cc ideas (hair and clothes) in a discord server we have together and then work on the stuff together on call usually so each item is the way we both want me. Like for example i’ll be meshing the Ivy top while he works on texturing the ribbed version.  We also only do collabs when they happen, we didn’t plan AxA 2019 or this new set, mainly just made cc starting in May and wrapped it up in July to release in August. Then this time we started making stuff late December and got most of it done by the time I got done with my break. Having a planned collab/deadline makes stuff less stressful and the stuff usually turns out better imo

Anonymous said: hi! ur sims are so prettyyyy what skin texture and eyes do u use?

Anonymous said: hi! wcif the eyes of the sim in the edit that Dogsill edited for you please? thank you!

Anonymous said: Hi! I really love the way your sims looks so, I was what skin and eyes you use?

I actually am changing my default eyes so I need to update my resource page soon ;n; but the skins they use are all listed for each sim on the resource page here

Anonymous said: you always name axa packs by the year but this one was named after a season those that mean.... 👀

We are wanting to do something in the fall, just not sure how our lives will be then ya know? There’s a chance that this will be the AxA 2020. Since we weren’t sure I didn’t want to label it that if 2 AxA’s release this year lmao

Anonymous said: what game is the pokemon thing you're playing!? pls help a guy out i'm in love with the art style

Pokemon Sword and Shield (I have shield) for Nintendo Switch. I’ll prob post more pics once I get some new shinies :P

@kristabunny said: lol is it bad that when I saw your Santana hair I read it as Satan Hair XD

tbhhhhh it was lowkey referencing that lmao. I made the hair in October for a speed meshing video and since it was around Halloween I was like “lemme give her an almost demonic name” also Santana from glee is a queen

Anonymous said: Tbh I absolutely adore your female cc but I LIVE for your male cc!!!

Thank you! lmao the only thing I can take full credit for is the AxA male hairs. I mesh the clothes for packs but ayoshi does the texturing for them.  

Anonymous said: Could you have a go at the updo Dua Lipa has on the cover of her Future Nostalgia? The high bun with a flick in it and the strands of hair down the sides. Thanks if so :)

I’m not the biggest fan of the hairstyle tbh ;n; but we will see. (Physical is a serve, just saying)

Anonymous said: So ive never played pokemon before until my friend gave me a copy of pokemon moon. I love cats so of course my starter was a litten, but i had no clue about evolutions or anything like that. I was heartbroken when my cute litten turned into some big man cat :(

omg noooo ;n; yeah Litten is a cutie... incineroar is... well I got used to him tbh and kind of like him now? I absolutely hate scorbunny’s evolution (and most of the SWSH starters final evolution) so I think that made incineroar slightly better in my eyes. My shiny litten will be staying a kitten however :)

@multifandom-slytherin said: Hello! I love your cc! Would it be possible for you to make the bangs from your Bree Hair a separate accessory that you can put with other hairs (for example the BG low ponytail)? Thank you so much!

Anonymous said: have u considered making or allowing someone to make an acc version of your handmade bangs?

I have thought of doing accessory bangs tbh, I just like... don’t like using accessory bangs myself. So I’m not sure if I’ll end up doing it. I might try it for myself and see how many hairs they work with, and if it is a decent amount I’ll release. 

Anonymous said: First off I want to say how amazing all of your hairs and collabs are! Second I was curious if you ever thought of going back to your old hairs and updating their thumbnails / display indexes so they matched your stuff now?

I really really wanted to have all my 2019 hairs updated by 2020. It was only January 2019-April 2019 that needed updated (thumbnails and display indexes). But I just lost motivation for doing it. I will focus on it next time I have a big break from school. Also planning on updating select stuff from 2018 and 2017. 

Anonymous said: please put Sophia Barker in the gallery. PLEASEEEEE it's the most beautiful sim I EVER seen! >:3 PLEASEEE!!!!!!!!!!

She should be on there? I think? Make sure you have CC enabled and if you can’t find me through the gallery her tray files are here

Anonymous said: Hi! After the recent patch I started having a small issue with Bree hair(without bangs), when I zoom out it looks like a completely different hair, something similar to that one basegame hair that's layered with tips pointed outward but longer. Thought I'd let you know, maybe others have had a similar issue or maybe I need to change a setting or something. Love your work so much!

Really surprised this is the first time someone told me about this lmao. The hair should be updated now on SFS/Patreon <3

Anonymous said: I tried to look around for this on your "Asks" portion before bothering you (so sorry), but do you have a link perhaps for all the lips you use on your models? Are they in game or a cc you create? Thanks so much! Love all of your work! I'm super new to cc stuff and I found yours like 2 days ago and have been going nuts with downloads lol 

like presets? None of my cc models use a lip preset. I do use this slider on some of them though. For lipsticks, that is listed for each model on my resource page <3

Anonymous said: i’ve been looking for a hair like lexi that i actually like forever and now i find it but it’s for paterson peeps and i’m like actually broke and i’m like :/

im sorry ;n; at least it wasn’t too long of a wait? :/ I hope you liked the hair

Anonymous said: I can't find your jisoo ponytails in your downloads?

they’re in my retired section... may they rest in peace. scroll to the bottom of my downloads and youll see ‘RETIRED.’ click that for the retired download page. 

@eclypt-0-sims said: Hi, I recently started making MM hair and I know you're probably an expert at this but; every time I go into CAS to test a hair, all of my accessories clip with the hair. Like the hair texture would cover some glasses if my sim was wearing glasses. I don't know how to fix it, someone told me to delete an eye weight in blender but I don't really understand weight painting that much, any suggestions? love your content btw

this is a late as hell reply i’m sorry. I think that you have texture where the glasses texture would be. Hair texture should only be in hair section or hat section (if you don’t want it hat compatible). Here is a UV map layout that I use for making hair textures. It shouldnt have anything to do with weights

Anonymous said: Do you use reshade when you take previews for your cc? and also is the tropical punch ombre overlay a palette or did you make it?

I do use reshade when I take cc previews. It adds a bit of saturation to my sims and gives them some shadows under their chin/clothes. Nothing major. Also, myself and @imvikai came up with the tropical punch palette together.

@little-eris​ said: You probably have answered this before but who drew your tumblr icon? I’ve seen the same art style with other simmers 👉🏼👈🏼 it’s super cute!

thank you! here is their twitter 

Anonymous said: The male sim in your Tiny Living review looks soo familiar; was there inspiration from anyone IRL? The person he reminds me of isn't even famous so I don't even know! He is very pretty though *-*

He was a gallery sim that I just revamped a bit so I’m honestly not super sure lmao. But he is very attractive yes I agree

that concludes this ask ceremony please collect your things and move to the exit to your left. fvghbjn if you sent something I didn’t answer and it was off anon I’ll get to you soon (person who asked what beards I used for AxA... I see you)

#asks #not me spending an hour doing this #im actually kinda tired now but do i sleep #or do i just stay up... i have class at 12 #it is 7am now

[emgkheadcannons]

Shoes

I was hit with the inspiration bat so this happened. Also work has picked up so yeah.

When looking up sneakers and stuff for this I found the best thing ever. So Moneyinc.com ranked some celebrities with killer shoe collections and Eminem was number 4 on the list, and according to Paul, Em has a sneaker fetish. All I could do was laugh and think that these two are made for each other. 

***************

Shoes are the one of the few gifts that Kelly loves receiving. Em loves to spoil his boy, but has to be careful to not make Kelly feel like a sugarbaby. (Em would be down for Kelly to be a sugarbaby but that’s not what Kelly wants, so Em respects that.)

So Em is a total sneakerhead, and Kells just really likes shoes. Like Kelly has a bunch of awesome sneakers, but he also has a bunch of other shoes too. Kelly keeps all the shoes he wears for movies; he keeps some of the clothes but he put it in his contract that he gets to keep the shoes.

Boots

Em has a few kinds of boots: rain boots, snow boots, timberlands, and a black pair of combat boots, but they aren’t his favorite.

Kelly loves boots. He has many pairs. Some are flat, army style, others are short cut, with a small thick heel. He also has many Rockstar style boots. One of his favorite pairs are the patent leather lace-up boots, with a 4 inch heel, and a slight platform that he got from filming ‘The Dirt’. Em also enjoys these boots a lot.

Slippers 

Em is a big fan of slippers. He lives in Detroit and it gets cold. He has a few pairs and he wears them around his house. His favorite ones are from his daughters. Alaina got him a pair that are like moccasins, with faux fur inside. Hailey gave him a pair of traditional slippers that are navy and have a good plastic sole. Finally Whitney gave him a pair of black fuzzy slippers. They are so soft and warm.

Kelly didn’t really care for slippers before Em. He didn’t have anything against them but he didn’t really wear them a lot (unless spa day but that's different).

Heels

So Kelly enjoys wearing heels. They make his legs and ass look great, plus they are a good workout for his calves. The extra height they give him makes him feel like a giant and he towers over people even more (he is 6’4”). He doesn’t wear heels out in public because people can be mean but also because his feet hurt after a while. While filming the dirt he wore a pair of high heeled boots. It was the first time he really wore a pair of heels. He kept them. He now has a small collection of designer heels. Some he bought and some Em bought for him. 

Em’s favorite is when Kelly wore his red velvet suit, with the shiny black Louboutin heels, just for him. That was a fun date night.

Skates

Kelly is awesome at roller blading. He has both inline skates and quad skates (think roller derby). Em can skate but not as well as his boyfriend. After dating for a few months Kelly surprises Em by getting him a pair of inline and a pair of quad skates, and renting out a roller rink, for a date night. For Christmas Em gets Kelly, all the girls, and himself custom ice skates, and rents out a rink so they can all go ice skating together. This becomes a common date night for them, renting a rink for a few hours and just having fun. Em loves it when Kelly shows off for him and does spins, jumps, and other moves.

 Sneakers

Em has a collection of sneakers, and he does collaborations, he even does limited edition shoes to raise money for charities. So the man has a lot of shoes and is picky about what he has. His favorite are Nike Air Max. 

Kelly has a lot of various sneakers, from Nike, Converse, Rebook, Balenciaga, and others. He’s not a sneakerhead but he does appreciate Em’s collection.

The first gift Em gives Kelly, as his boyfriend, is a pair of sneakers. They were a pair of his limited edition black Air Jordan 4. Kelly loved them. He switched shoes immediately, and modeled them for Em. Seeing Kelly in those shoes makes Em all hot and bothered, and he has to touch him.  

This starts a trend of Em getting Kelly shoes, and Kelly modeling them for him. It’s mostly sneakers, but sometimes he will buy different shoes. Em even gets some custom sneakers for Kelly, like the black and yellow Nike Air FOrce 1’s, or the white converse with sunflowers painted on. Kelly loves that his boyfriend’s shoes game is so good. He might dress better, but Em knows his sneakers, and he gets to make him feel great by wearing the shoes.

#emgk