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comfortfoodcontent · 1 month

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2024 X-Men #35 cover by Pepe Larraz

2019-2024 - RIP Krakoa Era X-Men

I love this cover. The art is amazing. It marks the end of the Krakoa era X-Men. It's been on my mind a lot lately and I had to get some thoughts out on it. If you know me, if you ever followed me or my comics site or whatever, you know I was a very loud, very big fan of the Krakoa era at the start, basically up until X of Swords and Hickman's decision to leave. It's finally ending.

2019-2024 - RIP Krakoa Era X-Men

But truthfully it may as well be 2019-2019 -RIP Krakoa Era X-Men. It pretty much failed from the start. I loved HoxPox when it dropped. It was, embarrassing to say now, life changing for me. I thought Hickman was a genius and had found a way to reinvigorate the line and render death as a cheap storytelling gimmick useless. A bunch of my faves were being used and ressurected. I was happier than a pig in shit. I joined Twitter and all the insane X-Fans on there. I started a website and a podcast dedicated to comics. Soon the Covid pandemic started. I was terminally online, my brain rot started and grew worse by the day. It was an insane wild ride that started high and died soon thereafter.

It's hard for me to separate my pretentious Comfort Food Comic media brand time with the pretentious Krakoan Era. Both started out so happily, so full of potential and optimism. To run a site or a podcast in these hellish times you must also play the social media game. Constantly be on there, constantly push your product. Being on Twitter during that time and being part of the X-Community, you start to see how much being on social media fucks you up. You constantly feel like you need to have an opinion on everything, and that it actually matters. You need to be a critic to every piece of media, every decision, every little thing someone says or posts. You lose your grasp on reality, the real world, how to function and interact like a normal human being not stuck hidden behind a screen with your dual public twitter profile and private locked one (something I'm glad to say I never stooped to). It brings you attention. It brings you friends. It pushes your product or brand. It gives you validation and the dopamine rush. It's an addicting, disgusting, fake as hell experience. I was fully caught up in it. It didn't help that I was quarantining and barely leaving my house for a few years. It got me through the pandemic but it also left me so much worse than when I started. Much like how the Krakoan Era treated the X-Men franchise.

Why am I talking about social media so much when I started with X-Men? Well, it felt like this era of publishing went hand in hand with what was being put into the comics. Every creator was constantly on Twitter interacting with fans, always seeing what they had to say. Even Hickman was on there. Dude just wanted to post photos from movies and talk about like what Gen X members he liked. He eventually left because insane X-Men fans wanted him to talk about George Floyd and compare real world race issues with some superhero comics and weigh in, OH GOD WHY ISNT HE WEIGHING IN PUBLICALLY??. It was really weird how fans dealt with that one. Vita Ayala, Tini Howard, Leah Williams - constantly interacting with fans, friends with many of them. A pretty cool thing really, but that shit started influencing their comics throwing in characters or scenes specifically to make some X-Men fan they know on Twitter squee real loud. Shatterstar is not your favorite AEW wrestler. We do not need a book of human X-Men fans who pretend to be mutants influenced by dorky X-Men fans online. We do not need longtime villain Apocalypse to become our "Blue Dad". Jordan White should be editing or at the very least reading any old X-Men comics instead of being on Twitter. We don't need to know what the X-Writers do on their Slack, or worse, what X-fans do on their own incestuous Slack. Gerry Duggan, a writer I loved and thought could do no wrong, joined this group and upped his Twitter usage and the brain rot commenced and his work was so influenced by it. I'll never forget when white people started using fuck around and find out on Twitter and then it was in like 3 of his books the next month. My point in this ramble is the books were being influenced by and written for the loudest X-Men fans on Twitter. The art was dead. The books were a product made in that echo chamber for that echo chamber. They got bad real fast because of our society's addiction to social media these days.

Now that the honeymoon phase is over and I've revisited a lot of these books I do still feel HoXPoX was a wonderful series, one of the best X-Men series, masterfully executed and a perfect jumping off point with so much to explore. I also see the usual Hickman faults. The my series starts some time later, not really addressing anything prior to it that all his books share, the insanely detailed long term plans that he nor the comics business machine will actually follow through on after a year or so, and the shadowy superior group of power that exists in all of his comics. The Moira retcon, while brilliant, quickly falls apart when they never develop her further, or deal with the fact Xavier and Magneto went on to have an entire publishing history knowing what amounts to their entire future until the Krakoa Age must be established. That never really worked and was ignored by the creators and fans alike, including me. So it never really worked from the jump.

Rather than keep the line condensed and maybe just let Hickman write his own story, they expand it out from there involving a bunch of different creators and new ongoings. Plenty of series to explore the ramifications of these retcons, the perceived ethnostate the mutants have established and their abandoning of the coexistent dream the X-Men always fought for, grappling with identity and what it means when death no longer matters, and the conflicts that would arise from having all these villains live with them now. Sadly we instead basically just got Utopia 2.0. Surface level shit where the mutants are on an island surviving that rarely ever went in on all the amazing story ideas we could have explored. But hey certain fans were happy because they could go "Hey Synch is here for a few panels!" or "this horrific out of character gladiator death ceremony is TOTALLY the same thing as my real life transitional phase". Nobody really wanted to question any of this in the comics or in real life. And hey sour grapes aside, we did get some cool stories and some fun character interactions and moments, mostly in the Hickman books. But even from the start, some of it is horrible, more of the same schlock - Fallen Angels a great example, or Hickman's more boring Giant Size issues or his Shi'ar issue, or half of every other title. What should have been being explored or dealt with in the text often went ignored and we got X-Men being superheroes or Otherworld nonsense, which at the time I ate up because I'm such a fan of the old Captain Britain material. Sadly that never really went anywhere either, just making nebulous dimensions that were out there somewhere, don't question it LOOK IT'S JIM JASPERS! ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED! Even things that should have been celebrated like Betsy and Rachel pushing through Gal Pals territory to being together felt largely flat and hollow and forced rather than natural or fun. And that was a common theme as it kept going. Everything felt forced, felt wrong, the writing felt amateurish and simple as it ignored more major issues or reasons to exist. Things just seemed to start happening for no real story reasons. No real further development or exploration. A ton of plots don't make sense as established history and characterization is thrown out the window. Nothing really matters. Rockslide is ruined forever just because. Arrako will never REALLY make sense, Loa and Mercury are psychopathic sex fiends, Pixie of all people is a callous death pervert, Banshee is a Ghost Rider, Warlock's doing something, Colossus joins the Quiet Council and just sits there, Children of the Atom is designated a "red" important book and does nothing of value or import, Moira gets pissy so she turns into a no shades of gray villain robot who skins her soul mate and wears his skin and joins Orchis, mutants are fucking so much and I guess just quickly going to term and they just abandon countless babies in the forest, Anole and a few others are brainless dolts who love the Shadow King, Onslaught is bouncing around, there's an old X-23, Synch is now the best and can recall any power ever magically but never talks to any member of his old team or deals with his death, Inferno as a whole essentially just didn't happen or matter, Sinister isn't Sinister at all he's a clone and there's 3 more of them, Casandra Nova is on a team, Doug knows secrets, Magneto buys a lighthouse, characters are randomly and indiscriminately put into The Pit, Shaw and Selene are maybe the only two villains ever that get examined in a way where maybe they shouldn't be buddy buddy with the X-Men - I need to stop now before I get more angry and depressed but I could go on and on and on. Point is things got bad. Like a ton of this was just bad writing and bad comics. I'm sorry. I get it. I was blinded too. I ignored things. I made my own head canons. I focused on the good stuff.

By the time Hickman actually announces he is leaving, things are already falling apart due to him and Marvel deciding to expand and stretch this shit out instead of just letting him do his shit and end it as a complete story or era. He does Inferno which as I said did nothing and didn't matter. It's good but it's a big ball of nothing. From there the books get worse and worse. Duggan's superhero X-Men book is fluff. Nearly every other series declines more and more. Hellions is a fun dark comedy, but sloppy and lacking that depth and exploration. Al Ewing's work tries hard to reach those Hickman highs and I found myself quite enjoying his work on SWORD and later on X-Men Red but mainly because it all ends up divorced from Krakoa as part of his larger Marvel Cosmic work, with great characterization. I really dig that work and it's common theme is really how off to the side not involved it is.

Later writers, including some real Literal Whos? and pretentious "novel authors" further dilute the line with their less talented work(I like Steve Orlando as a person but I desperately wish he'd try harder to write actual stories instead of being a human youtube video that summarizes obscure 90's comic characters for modern day zoomers). Kieron Gillen, bless him, tries to be the new Hickman and he does have some of the best Krakoa era material, but even he starts failing pretty badly. Sins of Sinister was a clusterfuck of boring nonsense for people who want to seem or sound smart, same goes for this current Dominion plot.

Looking at the art now I'm struck by how none of these characters are TRULY changed from this era, let alone had a lasting or defining story. It's crazy to me we went 5 whole years with this and really what has changed, ESPECIALLY with the current Orchis wrap-up story. X-Men fight some nasty humans who don't like them. We're back to that ALREADY. We aren't getting to the end of the Krakoan Era, we've been in it for quite some time. As I look at this art I see only 3 wholly new characters, which they'll be lucky if they are used after this. One of them is Pogg-Ur Pogg, a perfect example of this era. A big Aligator man, not much thought behind it, that fans LOVED. Sadly, he wasn't actually an alligator man. It was all a fakeout. That was some suit a little boring gremlin wore. A little boring gremlin. Nothing unique, nothing fun. Same old shit you've seen in thousands of comics. That's what the Krakoa Era was. Something that seemed SO DAMN COOL, SO DAMN THOUGHT OUT, but really it didn't have much thought behind it. It was a flashy suit of potential hiding the same old gremlin you've always seen. Even after the eternally online creators saw how popular he got, they didn't change any of this, they just thought we've got it. The suit/gremlin thing is good. It wasn't and they tried to bring it back for further stories but it was so lame at this point it was pathetic. Much like the repeated attempts to salvage and course correct after Hickman.

So here we are at the end. I can't believe I'm actually THANKFUL it is ending. That I actually want to regress and return to the X-Men as superheroes fighting their villains again. I've been rereading old X-books and I crave that big, bold excitement of what truly made the X-Men superhero team work. It's such a bummer and such a failure of execution with so many to blame. What DISGUSTS me so much is already seeing fans eulogize this era as perfection that was cut short by Marvel and not a fun experiment that was botched from the start. I'm with you, I was the biggest believer and supporter at the start. I joined Twitter, I examined every panel, made countless threads of discussion, debated and discussed every little thing with fellow fans. I wanted so much for this to be what it could be. Please, examine it honestly and critically. It's a failure. It's time to pull the plug.

It's ironic to me that I deleted my Twitter this year, the Krakoan age having the same amount of life my Twitter fandom life did. It went from such excitement and fun to soul sucking everyday nonsense. It seems fitting and emblematic of what this age was and turned into. This era, just like Twitter which influenced it so much, is/was a stupid, ugly, brain rotted mess dotted with sparing gold with the unrealized potential for so much more. I for one, welcome it.

Peace Out Krakoa Era, you won't be missed.

#krakoa #krakoa era #x-men #mutants #me #my writing #writing #comics #comic books #marvel #marvel comics #pepe larraz

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mariacallous · 6 months

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These are different situations in a lot of ways ofc but I've seen the argument made on twitter that the far left is doing the same kinda damage to the free palestine movement that they did to police reform with defund the police/abolish prison rhetoric. They're taking the most extreme stance with 'from the river to the sea' and defending Hamas and ripping down hostage posters and that could turn off moderate people in the same way 'abolish' turned people away from real discussions being had post George Floyd. I just wonder come a year from now when it's time for 2024, what the general public will think of all this rhetoric + Biden's take on the war. What do you think?

I think there’s some validity to that, tbh. I think that when it comes to I/P, people tend to be more vociferous and polarized as they try to “show support” or “advocate”, in a way that isn’t helpful to anyone involved. There is almost no other issue that triggers people’s berserk buttons quite like this topic, to say nothing of the conspiracy and aggressive thinking that comes along with it.

You also get some of the worst people involved being the loudest, which doesn’t help either.

You would think some of the core issues at stake would be universally agreed upon - civilians shouldn’t be targeted, Palestinians have been suffering for a while and deserve rights and freedoms and their own territory (just like Israelis have), and the situation is complicated and has not been handled well by basically everyone - and yet so many people apparently don’t see it that way.

There’s also this zero-sum mentality, where if you acknowledge the atrocity on 10/7 and what was involved, you’re automatically denigrating and ignoring the mistreatment of Palestinians, and vice versa.

The Palestinians have suffered in many ways, and one of those has been to have some of the worst fucking “advocates” in the west and elsewhere.

Rigid thinking, like rigid nationalist ethnostates, helps no one, but people like both of those things.

I’ve said before that people will rhetorically and otherwise use the pro-Palestinian cause to boost themselves and attack Israel and Jews, while doing nothing to actually help the Palestinian people. So much effort has been spent in vanity projects and ineffective campaigns that could and should have been used more successfully elsewhere.

And all of this plays into the hands of people on the right, both in the US and Israel, plays into the hands of “Zionists”, plus into the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran, and makes real progress much harder.

Fundamentally, the only viable choice is a two-state solution, with freedom of movement. Fundamentally, 10/7 should be a permanent disqualifying failure and shame for Likud and the other parties in Netanyahu’s government.

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beardedmrbean · 11 months

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A pair of senior partners at the California-based mega-law firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith split from the company last month to build their own “compassionate” firm, but internal emails show they used wildly offensive and demeaning language — repeatedly referring to women as “c–ts” and a judge as “sugar t-ts.”

Many of the shocking missives — exchanged between John Barber, 55, and Jeff Ranen, 45, and obtained by The Post from the pair’s former firm — were also racist or anti-LGBTQ.

Before the two labor lawyers suddenly defected in May and took more than 100 Lewis Brisbois employees with them, Barber spent more than 25 years with the firm and Ranen worked there for 20.

Their rationale for leaving was to “build something that’s reflective of our values and our beliefs,” Barber told Above The Law.

“We wanted to lead with empathy, collaboration and compassion, to do it our way and not have any baggage,” Ranen told the Los Angeles Business Journal about the formation of Barber Ranen.

But emails from their time at Lewis Brisbois – which were redacted to remove any specific client information before being viewed by the Post – raise serious questions about the virtue-signaling.

“Kill her by anal penetration,” Barber emailed Ranen in June 2012, reacting to an overtime request from another Lewis Brisbois attorney.On at least three occasions, Ranen described female attorneys as “c–ts.”

In a March 2022 missive, a Los Angeles judge was described as “sugar t-ts.” when Barber joked about how the judge liked to be addressed.

In a November 2012 note, Ranen noted to Barber that another partner has “huge t–s.” That female partner has since decamped to Ranen and Barber’s new firm.

In November 2013, Barber was told by a Lewis Brisbois partner that people were upset during a mediation because of a witness’ frequent use of the N-word.

“She doesn’t want the word n—-r used in her presence. She claims it was used with great liberality, unnecessarily so… and she found it very offensive,” the partner emailed him.

Barber responded snidely. “Got it. N—r. Don’t use.” He spelled the slur out in full.

In October 2012 Barber responded to an email about attending a baby shower with the subject line “N—r” — again spelled out in full.

On May 31, 2020 — just days after the death of George Floyd — Ranen emailed Barber, “F–king looters came within a mile and a half. I can’t even imagine what it was like living in Larchmont [Los Angeles] in 1992 when the savages decimated Koreatown.”

Barber responded: “Just to illustrate my enlightenment . . . As buildings burned within a mile or so that night, we had a party, got wasted, and yelled inappropriate things from the balcony.”

In June 2012, Ranen wrote to Barber, “Gypsy is my new word to describe about half of the minorities in California.”

The partners made frequent use of the word f—-t and other anti-LGBTQ slurs as well.

“Don’t be a f—t,” Ranen responded to a partner testily in April 2015. “What’s this f—t’s problem,” he emailed another colleague in November 2014, asking of a rival attorney.

Barber and Ranen went on a crude back and forth about an unnamed attorney from Mintz, another law-firm, in March 2008. In their exchange they mocked his past service in the Israeli Defense Forces.

“He’s a f-g. Israeli Defense Force hand-to-hand combat instructor? Yawn. I’ll kick his ass,” Barber wrote to Ranen.

Ranan replied, “his bio gave me a stiffy. Does that make me a homo?”

Later on Ranen made fun of Barber for using the expression “oh snap” — noting that he wasn’t sure if “that makes you more akin to a tween or a fudgepacker.”

Critics ripped the two men’s behavior and the firm’s hypocrisy.

“Though they may pretend to have founded their new firm in pursuit of ‘empathy and compassion,’ it is beyond any doubt that they are incapable of doing so,” civil rights activist Al Sharpton told The Post. “I am calling on The State Bar of California to conduct a full review of their character and licenses to practice law. Though these emails alone are beyond sufficient to question Barber and Ranen’s integrity, it is easy to imagine they are just the tip of the iceberg of their intolerance toward communities of color, women and the LGBT community.”

Lewis Brisbois has more than 1,600 attorneys working in offices around the world including one on Water Street in downtown Manhattan.

A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion mission statement on their website touts the firm’s commitment to diversity hires.

In a statement to The Post, the company said they were “shocked” by the behavior of the former partners and promised a probe:

“Following their departure from our firm, a complaint was lodged against John Barber and Jeff Ranen to a member of our management committee. In keeping with our firm’s policies and our responsibility to our personnel, an investigation was undertaken and the firm was shocked to find dozens of emails between John Barber and Jeff Ranen containing highly inappropriate and offensive content.

“The firm is continuing to conduct a broader review of the behavior and conduct of John Barber and Jeff Ranen. We are deeply troubled by their use of prejudiced language and racial and cultural slurs aimed at colleagues, clients, attorneys from other firms, and even Judges,” the company said.

Barber and Ranen did not return multiple messages seeking comment.

#nunyas news #extended gamer moments here

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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According to plenty of tweets in my feed these past few days, it sure seems like a lot of people can excuse stripping people of their reproductive rights—but draw a hard line at noise complaints.

Following Politico’s blockbuster scoop last week of the Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, people took to the streets. Pro-choice protests sprung up all across the country over the weekend, from DC to Baltimore to Oakland. But what has gotten folks most riled up is that the protesters took their outrage straight to the source: the steps of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s and Chief Justice John Roberts’ houses.

Footage from various news outlets show that protesters, armed with raincoats and homemade signs with snappy, pro-choice slogans, gathered outside of the judges’ home to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. While their anger and frustration were palpable, the protests were far from violent. Yet by the way some people have described the demonstrations outside Kavanaugh’s home, you would’ve sworn that the protesters ripped him and his family out of their beds and executed them in the middle of the street. (Spoiler alert: They didn’t.)

In a 13-second clip by Daily Signal news producer David Blair, you can see dozens of people standing outside of Kavanaugh’s house. They’re chanting, “We will not go back,” presumably to a time before abortions were safe and accessible.

According to Blair, this was “one of the scariest things I’ve ever witnessed.”

“This is an attempt at intimidation,” said Blair in an interview with Fox News, apparently clueless to the decades-long history of violent anti-abortion protests outside of clinics across America. “And I think it really says a lot, too, that the Biden administration is willing to absolutely let these Justices out to dry. They’re not going to say, ‘It’s not acceptable for you to go to somebody’s house and yell and scream.’”

But Blair underestimated the power of milquetoast white liberalism. At 9 a.m. this morning, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted the following in response to the demonstration:

Everyone from the far-right to the center-left seems to be way more concerned about the optics of the protests than the systemic injustices that people are protesting against. We saw something eerily similar with the racial-justice protests in response to the death of George Floyd in 2020. Remember Tucker Carlson describing the Black Lives Matter protesters as a “mob,” warning his viewers that the protesters will “come for them”? Or Eric Trump describing them as “animals” during one of his father’s campaign rallies? (And despite only 3.7 percent of protests containing violence or vandalism, several Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, stepped forward to condemn the violence at the demonstrations)

Asking for civility in the face of systemic violence is playing right into the oppressors’ hand. If we spend all of our time policing how people protest, then, conveniently, nothing will get done to attack the root of the issue. It’s nothing more than an attempt to derail the public conversation surrounding reproductive rights.

According to experts, if the courts overturn Roe, people’s lives will be at risk. Miscarriages could be criminalized. Abortion providers could be sued. But above all, people would be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies. This clearly is a sacrifice that the Supreme Court’s conservative Justices are willing to make.

And if a Supreme Court Justice losing a few hours of sleep seems worse to you than people dying from the complications of an unwanted pregnancy, it’s time to reevaluate your priorities. And to Kavanaugh, Roberts, and any other Justices in favor of taking away people’s rights, if you can’t take the heat, stay out of people’s uteruses.

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comeupkid415 · 1 year

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Math rip george floyd

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memento-morri-writes · 7 months

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Had the very strange experience today of being complimented by my professor and thinking to myself "you can thank tumblr for that".

(explanation/angry ramblings about the world under the cut. tw for racism and police violence)

So on Monday in class we watched a dashboard cam video of an altercation between a policeman and a black man that took place in my state. (My professor got called as an expert witness to the trial and got permission from the court to share the video.) After the video, the professor asked us what we thought about it, and what we thought either party did right/wrong/could have done better.

Most of the class was pretty wishy-washy, either not willing to get "political" in class, or hiding more extreme prejudices. But the absolutely insane thing was that most of them said the cop "handled it fine". My dude. The cop broke this man's window, attempted to rip him out of the car, and then later pulled a gun on him, leaving the man begging for his life. How the fuck is that "fine" behavior from someone who is supposed to make people feel safe???

Obviously being the opinionated, not-afraid-of-starting-fights little shit that I am, I had to call bullshit. I was the very last person the professor called on (by virtue of sitting in the far back corner) and I was really one of 2 or 3 people who actually said any words that meant anything.

I opened with the words "Have any of you actually had the police called on you? Anyone?" and went from there. I brought up that even as a literal child, and a privileged white one at that, I was terrified of the police. To the point that when a school employee told me (lying) that she had called them on me, I panicked, barricading myself in a room, and attempting to run as soon as someone opened the door. I was 12, and white. I had no reason to fear cops, having been raised on cop propaganda.

Now imagine how an adult black man must feel, living in the U.S., especially post-George Floyd. Every few weeks/months he's seeing on the news "black man shot by police, black man killed by police, black person beaten by police" and on and on and on. Of fucking COURSE his first reaction when he's pulled over (completely alone, no witnesses around) by a cop is to flee. Is that the "rational" thing to do? No. But people don't act rationally when they're terrified for their fucking lives.

Anyways, I brought that up, as well as pointed out the fact that the cop was the first one to get aggressive (swearing, raising his voice), as well as the fact that the cop had the nerve to later say "oh look, I have glass in my hand. This sucks." as if it wasn't his own fucking choice to break this poor man's window.

Some other classmates seemed mildly emboldened by my long rambling defense of the black man, and instead of saying wishy washy nothing spoke up a little more. Which was nice to see. But still... they didn't say much of substance.

Anyways, fast forwards to today, and when I walk into class the professor calls me over and says that my analysis of the video was "Something he'd expect out of a graduate student." While that was nice to hear, it was also disheartening, because my "analysis" was just pointing out things that happened in the video and linking them to real world events, as well as using common sense. So it's kind of sad to think that that level of critical thinking and just plain "don't be an idiot"-ness is rare.

I also didn't know how to feel about the fact that I have tumblr to thank for my education on that kind of thing, because god knows my 90% white, mildly conservative hometown didn't teach me shit about racism, or make me anti-cop.

I have the people who were spreading resources here on tumblr during the protests of 2021 to thank for that.

#morrigan.text #delete later #racism tw #police brutality tw #police violence tw #it's weird how many parts of me I can directly attribute to being on tumblr for the past 5 years.#including my general acceptance of people different from me #but also my queerness (or at least knowing what it is and being chill with it)#seeking out my autism diagnosis #being informed about current events #like. none of that would be true about me if not for being on tumblr.#which is very strange (and kind of sad) to think about.

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xtruss · 11 months

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One month after George Floyd was murdered while in police custody in Minnesota, Kris Graves photographed the remnants of the Confederacy in and around Richmond, Virginia. “One late night on statue-lined Monument Avenue, I came across projections by artist Dustin Klein on the monument of Robert E. Lee,” he writes. “We stood and watched a seemingly endless rotation of Black lives that had been ended at the hands of police.” Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of Floyd’s murder one year later, but Graves writes that “this continues to be an epidemic in the United States.” Photograph By Kris Graves, National Geographic

Wildlife ranger Joseph Wachira comforts Sudan, the last living male northern white rhino, as he laid dying at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya in March 2018. “He died surrounded by people who loved him,” wrote Ami Vitale, who was there to capture his last goodbyes. She added that she hoped that Sudan's legacy “will awaken us to protect this magnificent and fragile planet.” Photograph By Ami Vitale, National Geographic

While documenting the treacherous waters and fishing culture of the Aleutian Islands, photographer and salmon fisherman Corey Arnold captured this image. “Every night in Unalaska, I'd spot this red fox near the side of the road, charming drivers with its irresistible cuteness into throwing it snacks out the window,” he writes. “On this evening, I spent a few hours watching this fox at work, using my headlights to light the scene.” Photograph By Corey Arnold, National Geographic

“I don’t know about you, but fireflies take me back to childhood,” writes Kiliii Yuyan, who captured these synchronous fireflies flashing at early nighttime in the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “Here, in the space all around me, a thousand tiny green-yellow lights are miniature lanterns, blazing long enough to be seen but always escaping my cupped hands.” Photograph By Kiliii Yuyan, National Geographic

This is a rare example of performing polar bears, a controversial but not illegal practice in Kazan, Russia. Polar bears are a threatened species and a powerful symbol for conservation—yet these bears are fitted with metal muzzles and their trainer holds a metal rod. Photographer Kristen Luce and writer Natasha Daly traveled the world to learn about the suffering behind the scenes of wildlife tourism. “Our intention is not to shame tourists who have had these encounters,” Luce writes, “but to arm our readers with information that will help them identify potentially abusive situations for animals.” Photograph By Kristen Luce, National Geographic

Left: “A reminder to breathe,” writes photographer, filmmaker, and mountaineer Jimmy Chin of this striking image of the Middle Teton in Grand Teton National Park. Photograph By Jimmy Chin. Right: The Caldor Fire rips through a valley south of Lake Tahoe on August 29, 2021. Lynsey Addario documented the California wildfire season—the second worst on record—on assignment for National Geographic. Photograph By Lynsey Addario National Geographic

Andy Lewis crosses a slackline high above the valley floor in Moab, Utah. Photographer Renan Ozturk dedicated this photograph to his late friend Dean Potter, who first envisioned a free-solo image like this "moon walk," captured without digital manipulation within a single frame. After missing his first chance at the shot, Ozturk writes that he “stumbled through the night, arriving tired and bloody to the moonset/sunrise location on the opposite side of the towers.” Photograph By Renan Ozturk, National Geographic

#Most Liked Photographs

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thegreatbacon · 9 months

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The Coming Discourse Vacuum

Food for thought in a post-Twitter world

I originally published this piece 2022-11-18 on my blog, but then forgot to share lol. Thought it was relevant again with the Twitter/Reddit/Bluesky/Threads talk this past month.

There is no doubt that Twitter is collapsing. Millions of bytes have flown over the last few weeks describing the chaos both on the platform and in the private domain of its offices. Advertisers have pulled out, poorly thought out technical decisions have been made, hastily designed products have shipped, the majority of staff have either been fired or walked out the door, and the new owner and CEO is publicly melting down ON the platform for all the world to see. Some real grade A content if you will. The Adam McKay movie is writing itself. Yet as dumb as the whole saga is, it feels like there’s clearly something else at stake here, some sort of loss being felt. As much of a carnival as Twitter has always been, there is social value in it.

The widespread recording and reporting of police brutality in communities leading to the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd protests of 2020 likely couldn’t have occurred without it. Last year when a wildfire broke out in the north suburbs of Denver, I used the platform to get almost real-time info and pass it on to friends and family living close to the disaster.

It’s the place to go for breaking & front page news. To hear the latest japes and gossip. It’s one of the town squares of the internet. And now it’s on fire while a lone, pathetic, billionaire is trying to rip it apart and sell it for scrap after buying it on a whim.

So, what’s next?

Some people are starting to look for the future in newer, less established spaces. But what if before our society immediately moves on to the next big thing, we take a step back to dream of a green field. If we could do it all over again, what should it look like?

To start with let’s talk about the elephant in the room, Mastodon, which is one of the new things that people have been migrating towards. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a collection of open source tools and platforms that prize decentralized architecture first and foremost. This means allowing anyone to host their own instance of a server and then connecting it to other servers in a federated model to gain network effects.

So instead of just one single giant ship plying the shitposting seas, it’s a bunch of rafts lashed together. If you don’t like how things are going, you can untie your raft and set off on your own. Or that’s the idea anyway.

But in my experience I’ve found the whole system unintuitive and overwhelming despite the fact that I write software for a living. Where am I supposed to make an account? How do I make sure I’m in the same network as the funny people I was following on Twitter? Does anyone in this federation even live in my state?

The barrier to entry is too high and the core architecture of Fediverse software fragments the new social network right out of the gate, undermining the very reason Twitter was useful in the first place. The replacement has to be centralized, it has to be the same place everyone agrees to show up. That’s how town squares work.

Another consideration for this future digital town square should be democratic controls baked into it from the start. The goal here is to keep any one particular petulant owner from taking control of the whole thing. This is ostensibly the purpose of federation in Mastodon, but I’m talking about even lower level controls. Elected moderators to patrol the space and ways to debate and decide the rules that govern the space. Baked in polls for voting on anything from names to new channels to modifying community guidelines. Focus on democratically controlling a single instance from within its own framework before jumping straight to federation.

Lastly, just like how a good tax base helps keep public places clean and maintained, this theoretical future platform would need some mechanism for collecting monetary support from its users, instead of an ad driven model. Ad driven platforms will always be forced to sacrifice the user experience for driving advertiser metrics.Instead let's talk about things like up-front registration fees or monthly supporter tiers, cosmetic items or badges for purchase, and publicly published operational budgets so users know how much they need to open their wallets. We could even dream of an honest to god new state-run utility that can actually levy taxes to manage and operate the platform!

As I’m writing this piece, one of the top trends on Twitter is literally #RIPTwitter. Even if the website technically lives on past tonight, it’s clear that it has lost the trust and confidence of its community, the lifeblood of any social media platform. So as we stagger out of this burning square, we should all take a moment to unplug, touch some grass, talk to our friends and family around our kitchen tables, and take a deep breath. In that moment of quiet, let’s dream about something better, before we go back to looking for something to fill the vacuum.

#blogging #posts about posting #twitter implosion #reddit blackout #meta threads #mastodon #blue sky #web platforms

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brendonuriegotcancelled · 2 years

Text

Racism

TW: Mentions of Racial Slurs, Transphobic Slurs

Ignorant Racial slurs

Let’s talk about it.

The statement above is from 2014 and was directly ripped from a Laugh Factory stand up 12 years ago. The original comic was Chris D’elia. In fact, most of the horrible jokes Brendon made were ripped from stand up comedians. Which to me will forever be cringey, the man had questionable taste in comedy. I’ll leave it at that. I think that Brendon doesn’t think he’s funny enough on his own, and has to insert anecdotes from other people or put on a show. Without getting further into the psyche of that… I’m gonna move on. If anyone is interested in that theory, please feel free to send an ask.

Let’s just get it all on the table. Here is Brendon in 2016 singing along to a song and dropping the full n-bomb. This is a 6 year old video. I don’t believe it had any bigotry or hatred behind it. I think it was ignorant, tone deaf and not cool. I do not think it was intended to hurt anyones feelings at the time and he certainly didn’t do it again.

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Here is a clip of the same song and the exact same part in 2019 where he pauses during the word and does not say it.

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He lip-synced to a Dr. Dre vine in 2013 which is the only other time he used this word.

Here is a video from 2019 of him apologizing for using the slur t*anny in an interview when retelling a story: saying he wouldn’t just “drop an n-bomb” and that his ignorance is no excuse.

I know I can’t illustrate the difference in my own head in terms of “being bigoted and racist” to being ignorant. Was lip syncing a rap song tone deaf? yes. Can any harmful or offensive word just be qualified as Ignorant if there is no malicious intent behind it? How do we draw the line and where is it?

We want people to be better and we don’t give them the chance to do that. Brendon Urie never asked to be educated by his fans on racism.

Brendon Urie educated himself on racism:

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Brendon Urie acknowledged his privilege and complacency.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brendon Urie (@brendonurie)

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When the old vine and clip from periscope in 2016 started circulating during BLM, Brendon took a moment to address what happened to George Floyd and the people accusing him of hatred and bigotry.

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Brendon Urie vowed in 2020 to donate all twitch subs and donations to Black Lives Matter.

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In 2019 Brendon started to get some blowback for a comment he made on stream that was taken out of context. He was referencing this video. Michael Lopriore and his brother Danny are both Puerto Rican.

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Micheal and Danny were giving nicknames to people in chat upon request. Someone in CHAT then specifically asked Brendon what he would call the "ratchet duo" of Michael and Danny, Brendon responded with nicknames Danny and Michael were already using during their stream.

Here is what Michael and Danny had to say afterward:

This is the most “recent” thing he’s done and I am putting it all together so there can be no more broad use of the term like the man is going around being hateful.

You can apologize all you want to a community of people and give them pretty words to show remorse. Or you can just change your behavior and let that speak for you. You can educate yourself and let that speak for you.

This is Part 1 of two on the most common claims against Brendon in terms of problematic behavior. Part 2 will be the Transphobic slur he made and his apology for it.

This master list is almost done and I can’t believe it. I wanna pass out I have put so much work into it.

Guess what guys?

I’ll be done today 😍

#Youtube

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