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hairmetal666 · 11 months

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Steve and Eddie.

Eddie and Steve.

After Vecna, they're inseparable. They share a bed. Always. Twine their legs together and sleep close. No reason to pretend they don't need each other when they so obviously do.

Eddie loves him. He knows it's stupid. Doesn't know how to protect his heart when Steve is everything.

Spring fades into summer, and between nights spent with entangled limbs, Eddie starts to see more in Steve's hazel eyes; soft fondness and gentle care, a flash of heat. Their physical affection goes beyond casual touches--arms around waists, fingers on hips, faces nuzzling against necks, kisses pressed into hair.

It feels like they have all the time in the world, but Robin asks Steve to move to Indy and Steve never mentions it. Eddie pretends like the silence doesn't hurt. They've only ever been just friends, after all.

Then, one night, "I'm moving to Indy."

"Okay, yeah." Eddie tries to keep his voice even, the tears from spilling. it was always a mistake, falling for Steve Harrington.

"Come with me?" Steve's hands are clenched in the duvet.

"I'm moving to New York." He had no plans until this very moment.

Steve falls quiet. "That's nice, Eddie. That's--yeah, you should do that, if it's what you want."

He nods. Ignores the lump in his throat. "Maybe I can really be somebody."

Steve smiles. Eddie's not sure why it looks so sad. "You'll knock 'em dead, Ed."

---

They stay friends, of course they do. There's phone calls and visits, and it's not the same, but it's still good.

Eddie tries to get over him. He does. There are dates, men, possibility. But they're not Steve.

Steve meets a girl--nice, pretty, wealthy--the kind of girl made for a King. It sticks. Eddie likes her. And nobody needs to know that he cries himself to sleep, thinking of what might have been.

The invitation comes in the mail. He throws it in the garbage without a thought, before standing against his counter, knuckles going white where he's gripping into the laminate. Tries to remind himself to keep breathing around the shattering of his heart.

He's not going. Knows he can't take it.

Then, a phone call.

"I'm getting married," Steve says.

"Yeah, just got the invite. Congrats!" Bile in his throat threatens to choke him.

"Will you--you'll stand up there with me?"

Eddie smacks his head repeatedly against the wall. "Of course," is the only possible answer.

---

The wedding is fine. During the ceremony, he tries not to listen to the vows, keeps his eyes on Robin's back and never, ever on Steve. He drinks through the reception. Knows it's too much, knows he's losing control. Can't take watching Steve dance with his new bride, so he sneaks out a side door into an alley, lighting his last cigarette. The nicotine barely hits his lungs before a scuffle of feet interrupts his moment.

"Can I get in on that?" Steve asks.

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut, handing over the cigarette. "What're you doing out here?"

"Haven't really talked to you at all today."

"Well. You've been a little busy." He means it to be a joke but it falls very flat, his bitterness too close to the surface.

Steve exhales a cloud of smoke. "Yeah. Didn't realize weddings were so much work."

Eddie doesn't know what to say, so they fall into silence, passing the smoke back and forth until it burns down to the filter.

"You happy?" Eddie asks. Doesn't think he meant to, doesn't want the answer.

"Ed..."Steve swallows.

"So, yes," he chuckles. It's the most hollow thing he's ever heard.

"It's just--It's normal, you know?"

And it's like Steve punched him, to know they never could've been because Eddie--being with Eddie--would never be normal.

"Right, of course, Harrington. Normal."

"That's not what--I'm not saying--"

"What else could you possibly mean?"

"I want quiet. No monsters, no secret dimensions. Something regular. Easy."

"Six-fucking-nuggets, right? Still a pretty lady in the front seat next to you."

"What's wrong with that? Huh? What's wrong with kids and stability and a fucking life. Not bartending until 4am and playing the occasional gig and living with 18 goddamn people."

Eddie straightens at that, fingers twisting in his button-down. "Sorry my life doesn't meet your exacting standards, King. Sorry I can't be what you want."

He storms away, Steve shouting after him, but he leaves him there with his promising and bright and normal future unfurling before him.

---

They don't talk. One month. Six Months. A Year. Two.

For lack of better to do, for stability, he writes a book. Fantasy. About an Adventurer who helps a group of kids save the world. They're joined by a handsome, mysterious man who seems like an asshole, but helps them selflessly every time. He and the Adventurer are something, but before it's anything real, the stranger is revealed to be their Prince. They save the world, but the Prince has to leave the Adventurer behind.

The book is a hit. Spawns a series. Eddie's somebody.

---

Eddie comes home from the store, paper bag of groceries balanced against his chest.

Steve Harrington, not looking a day older than at his wedding, stands at his door, hands wringing.

"Steve?" He asks.

"Hey, Ed." The nickname twists Eddie's stomach, but he doesn't say anything.

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm getting divorced," Steve says.

Eddie almost drops his groceries, his hands shake so hard. He busies himself with the lock, ushering Steve inside.

"Is that all?" He asks.

Steve blinks at him, dazed expression on his still pretty face. "What?"

"You came all this way just to tell someone you haven't spoken to in almost eight years that you're getting divorced? What's it to me?" He stomps into the kitchen with his groceries.

"I wanted--I thought--"

Eddie snorts, makes it mean because he feels mean, wants to make Steve hurt the way he has for years. "You thought? We haven't spoken since your wedding day, man."

"She was ready for kids, and I realized that she's not--she's not who I picture having a family with."

The words pierce him like shattered glass, and he whirls into the living room, into Steve's space. "What the fuck are you doing?" he hisses.

"I wanted you to know, Ed. After all--"

"Stop calling me that. Stop acting like we're friends, for Christ's sake. And I don't give a damn about whatever realization you had once you realized normal wasn't for you."

"I'm trying to make this right!" Pink splotches highlight Steve's cheeks, his anger spiking to match Eddie's.

"There's nothing to fix, Harrington. We're over. It's fine."

"It's not fine," Steve is breathing hard. "I wanted you so badly, and you fucking ran away--"

"Bullshit! I waited for you. And you moved to Indy with Robin without a thought."

"I asked you to come! You were the one who said no."

"You asked a week before you left!"

"I was scared!"

"Of what, Steve? Not having that normal, easy, life you wanted so badly?"

"Of course not!"

"Then why?"

Steve chuckles, steps back. "I always thought you of all people would understand, and now--"

"Not when you come to my house unannounced to unload on me about your divorce because you expect us to pick up like none of it ever happened."

"That's not what I want!"

Eddie turns, pinching the bridge of his nose to cut off the stinging in his eyes. "I can't do this. I think you should leave, Steve."

"Fine." Steve won't look at him, storms to the door. "This was a mistake."

He slams it hard enough it makes the walls shake, picture frames rattle. Eddie can't stop the sob that rips out of him. Entitled, selfish, Steve Harrington, the only man Eddie will ever love. Steve Harrington who thinks love comes with strings attached. Steve Harrington who was afraid of asking Eddie to move away with them. And Eddie, always the coward, stifled by the weight of his own impossible love.

Eddie moves on autopilot, just knows he needs to find Steve, to see if there's a chance.

He skids down the stairs, almost falling a time or two, out into the night. His eyes scan the sidewalk, searching for familiar tall hair, but there's no sign of Steve, no sign--

A soft sob cuts through the air and Eddie's eyes fall to the steps in front of him, to the beautiful man sitting with his head on his knees.

"Steve," he says.

He stands, whirling, face a wreck. "Eddie?"

He doesn't know what to say at first, swallowing and swallowing around nothing. "I--I'm sorry I said no, when you asked me to move with you."

Steve's face does a funny, fracturing thing, even as he gives a little laugh. "I'm sorry I took so long to work up the nerve to ask."

Both of them take a step forward, then stumble together in a clumsy, tear-soaked hug.

"I'm sorry I got too drunk at your wedding," Eddie whispers against his friend's neck.

Steve giggles, but quiets quickly "I'm sorry about the 'normal' thing. I didn't mean it. I was--it doesn't matter. I'm sorry."

They hold each other for a long time on the steps of Eddie's building, rocking gently back and forth. When they finally let go, Eddie pushes Steve's hair off his forehead, asks, "wanna order a pizza and catch up?"

The answering smile is blinding as a sun, and Eddie is just as hopelessly in love as he was at 20.

They walk inside, fingers still entwined, lit up with hope.

"Hey," Steve says as they walk up the stairs together. "Are the Adventurer and the Prince going to find each other again? Because it's been four books now, and I'm still wait--"

Eddie twists his fingers into Steve's t-shirt, pushing him against the stained stairwell wall. "Fuck, Steve, I--"

He's interrupted by Steve closing the distance between their mouths, pulling them together in a searing kiss.

"They get forever, sweetheart" is Eddie's answer.

#steddie #steve x eddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #ficlet #angst #best friends to enemies to lovers #falling out #second chance at love #second chances #steve gets married and all eddie gets is this broken heart #reconciliation #happy ending #novelist eddie #the grand tradition of eddie writing hero characters who are thinly veiled versions of steve #hopelessly in love eddie munson #pining eddie munson #steve harrington is kind of a dick but he doesn't mean to be #they're just very bad at feelings

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sustancy · 2 years

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NEW instagram filter: (◡‿◡✿)

it is a filter inspired by the indie kid of the 2000s, if you love colors this filter is for you. for day and night! Link taste: https://www.instagram.com/ar/824187902319912/

#32 #instagram mindiqoo #filter #filter instagram #filter ig #instagram #gumroad #creators #ariana grande #psd ariana grande #psd

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indieyuugure · 7 months

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I gotta know would the indie tmnt listen to weezer since theyre 90s kids? I think mikey would. donnie might pretend he's not interested but he'll find himself singing along lol

I was actually thinking about that a bit since my cousins love Weezer. I think either Mikey or Leo would like it. Something I’ve found about people’s music taste is that it’s usually derived from an aspect of their personality that they don’t usually express. For me, I love Nine Inch Nails and hark rock/metal. My sister says it’s probably the angsty teenager that’s the root of it.

So I think in Mikey, there isn’t anything he doesn’t express since he has no filter. He probably likes exactly what you think he’d like, upbeat pop and rock. So he probably likes Backstreet Boys, other kinds of pop from the 80s and 90s, and probably Weezer too.

Donnie is more similar to Mikey in the way he has no filter and says what he’s thinking. I’m in @ezgurple’s boat of Donnie is an NIN fan/general alternative and industrial music. Probably would also love KMFDM since it’s a very similar style.

Leo and Raph would actually have similar tastes in music, but opposite to what you’d expect. Raph is pretty moody and while he does enjoy metal, especially when he’s angry, he really likes more chill rock, like Foo Fighters and other alternative rock when he’s drawing. Leo to put on a chill persona, and he does love rock, but he’s very high strung and so has a guilty pleasure of listening to hard rock and metal.

They all also love video game music, and are constantly humming it around the house. Sometimes it turns into a full on orchestra of drums and bass and lead melodies until Splinter yells at them to shut up because he’s sick of hearing the same song over and over and over again.

Good question! :]

#tmnt #q&a #indie’s turtles #indie tmnt #ninja turtles #teenage mutant ninja turtles #music

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piosplayhouse · 1 year

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Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games

(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)

(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)

Part I. The Backstory

My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.

However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.

The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.

(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)

Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.

However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.

(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)

This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.

(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)

¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.

Part II. The Game

The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.

To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.

Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)

What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.

You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))

Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:

(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)

I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.

In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.

(Image taken from an anonymous friend)

Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.

On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.

As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.

(My original post)³

What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.

² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.

³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.

Part III. The Ban, The Report

I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.

You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.

By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.

Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.

The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".

So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:

"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.

I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.

So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.

Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.

I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.

Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.

The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.

As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.

Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.

Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.

You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.

I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).

Part IV. The Backlash

I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!

After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.

However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).

I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).

I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.

Part V. Conclusions

I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.

However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.

Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.

Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.

It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.

#img descriptions in alt text!#lmk if there's any way I can make this more accessible! It's my first time writing something this long on tumblr :)#long post #really long posts #long posts #really long post #essay #hi3 #horse isle 3 #horse isle #fandom drama #hobby drama #discourse #homophobic scum horse chronicles

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lafemmemacabre · 6 months

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I've commented before the HUGE whiplash of having grown up in the 90s and 00s and now seeing younger people talking about subcultures that, despite having a fashion element, aren't fashion subcultures, only being about fashion.

The thing about how Back In My Day *knee joint noises and ibuprofen pills clacking inside my pillcase* no one would DARE say within anyone else's earshot that this or that non-fashion-based subculture was "just about fashion/looks/aesthetic" because, even if someone genuinely thought that, they'd be decimated to death even by normies. Like, even your conservative granny would berate you and tell you something along the lines of "Then why are you into something so shallow?"

Even when people were wrong about what was part of this or that subculture (which they often were), they were at least aware that the had some sort of substance somewhere; ideological, artistic, literary, spiritual, communal, political, or hell, at least at hobby level.

And to me the answer is simply that, while the mainstream has always tried to commodify alternative subcultures (and has many times succeeded at it), it wasn't really until the 2010s when this culture of embracing being all "head empty, no thoughts 🤪" and nothing being "that deep" as a form of the most useless and least threatening rebellion possible was solidified as a standard position to showcase one's cool detachment, which coincidentally only goes SO well with late stage capitalism and today's culture of instant gratification.

It's not "cool" to care about things having any substance anymore. It's actually very fucking cringe to care deeply about anything, as opposed to the 90s "be real" culture that came along the grunge and gangsta Rap explosions and continued to a lesser degree with 00s once Indie Rock becoming more and more mainstream.

Now, you're cool, detached and enlightened if you go "Who cares, dude? It's just a costume I put on for fun, why do you care?"

It's all about the instant brr of an outfit you can upload to get likes for or of a TikTok filter that will give you the look of a 90s goth queen in pixel form. And these are the new kids who get REALLY mad that someone actually loves the life that the glorified carcass they're parading around used to hold.

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stonedliverbird · 8 days

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I got tagged by @spiritualsidequest to post 5 songs in my current heavy rotation or that I rarely skip! Go ahead and give them a listen if you're interested.

Been more in a rap mood with the weather getting nice and rolling around with my windows down. My taste filters through a bunch of metal, rap, indie, and electronic. Always cool seeing what people listen to.

No obligation, but I wanted to tag @alienshifter @sleepycryptidgirlbackup @swaddle @sub4t0m1c @woodsmoke-and-whiskey @phoenix----rising

Gimme some music to listen to, I'm always looking for something new

#Spotify #mutuals #ask #personal #music #mac miller #parkway drive #belmont

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aerodaltonimperial · 2 months

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I did promise that I would try to explain how horrible (soul-crushing) the publishing world is, so at least people understood that I’m standing on the wreckage of all my self-confidence, so here’s the super abridged version. I suspect most people don’t know what it takes to be trad published—for our purposes here, trad published is going to be published by a major publisher with distribution. Normally this is the Big 5 but some of the smaller houses would still count here. We are not counting indie pubs here, because they have no distribution (meaning they are not in libraries or book stores), and I have already had experience with them and it was horrifically disappointing.

So you’ve written a book. That’s great. Now you have to try and find a literary agent, because you can’t submit to any of the Big 5 (normally) without an agent doing it for you, so you have to embark into the query trenches. Querying is where you spend a shit-ton of time researching lit agents (and weeding out the schmagents and the agencies with bad reps by trolling forums and somehow tapping into a whisper network; yeah, good luck with that if you aren’t in the biz already) and then you send them a little letter about your book and anywhere from 5 to 25 pages of the manuscript itself (depending on what they ask for, and every agent is different). The opening pages, so you’ve hopefully spent three weeks constantly tearing those pages apart and re-writing them, because you have approximately 3 seconds to be AMAZINGLY GOOD and catch their eye.

Agents all rep different age categories and genres. You have to filter through them to find the ones that rep what you write, and are open to queries (many are NEVER open, or open only to referrals from existing clients, or open only to expensive conference live-pitches, so again, good luck!) Some of them will throw up MSWLs (manuscript wish lists) and then you might find one that is asking for something very similar to what you wrote, and can toss it their way. Depending on what you write, you might have 30 agents to query (niche genres) or 100 agents to query (romance, women’s fiction, thrillers).

Agents are extremely busy. On average, the response time can be anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 years (no, I’m not kidding). Most of the lit agencies have a rule where you can’t submit to more than one agent at a time, so you are stuck waiting for the first rejection before you can query another agent there, and in at least a third of the situations, you will simply never get it. You’ll have to mark it as “closed, no response” after about 120 days and assume it’s a no. Some agencies STILL run by the “no from one is a no from all” which is BULLSHIT so you have to REALLY HOPE the one agent in the agency you picked to query will like your shit cause you can’t query anyone else.

And then you wait for the responses to roll in. Most will be form rejections. A few might be requests for more (partial or full manuscripts). And like I said, probably a third or higher will simply never get back to you. Ever. Generally, after about 6 months, you are probably done querying, with some outliers who will take a year to get back to you if they do at all.

If you get LUCKY and one of them requests your full manuscript, hooray! Now you get to wait even longer while they read it. If you are VERY VERY lucky, that agent might offer representation on it. They have to really love it. They will ask you for a call (these are all done via Zoom or the like, nowadays). Sometimes, you might get an R&R—or, a revise & resubmit, where the agent asks for changes. There is no guarantee that doing them will please them enough to get an offer on it. General consensus is that R&Rs only slightly raise your odds for getting an offer, and about 70% of them will still result in a rejection.

Fun thing about getting an offer of rep: industry standard is that you ask for 2 weeks to contact all the OTHER agents who still have your query and/or materials so you can let them know that you have an offer. And this is where my LEAST FAVORITE FUCKING PART of this industry comes in. It’s practically the tenet that publishing was built on—people only want shit that someone else already wants. Any outstanding queries, you “nudge” to let them know you have an offer and your timeline. Any outstanding submissions, you let them know they gotta read fast. You WILL get a shit ton of agents asking for your manuscript here, because SUDDENLY SOMEONE ELSE WANTS IT so it must be great. (On my only successful manuscript, my request rate for materials was 8% pre-offer. After my offer, it shot up to 60%. I will die furious about this.)

You may, if you are super duper lucky, even get multiple offers, and then you have to decide which agent you are going to choose.

So if you get this far, GOOD JOB. You have beaten 95% of the other writers out there. You are still doing all of this for free. And you still have more to go through! From here on out, now that you are with an agent, you get to go on “submission,” where your agent sends your book out to editors that they have (hopefully) matched up genres/likes with. And it’s just like querying, only your agent does it instead of you, and you sit at home and wait EVEN MORE TIME for overworked, underpaid editors to somehow fall in love with your book.

Maybe one of them does! Then you get to go to something called “second reads.” This is where the whole TEAM at the publishing house reads it and most of the time, they all have to agree. Then you have to go to ACQUISITIONS, which is a meeting at the publishing house where the editor has to pitch your book and ask the rich CEOs for money to offer on it. Your book can die at any one of these milestones: it can be rejected by editors, it can be rejected at second reads, and it can be refused at acquisitions. This process takes anywhere from 1 day (if you are super lucky and probably shit gold) to 2 years, and when all the editors are exhausted, your book is officially dead on sub.

If you DO HAPPEN TO GET THROUGH THIS and get an ACTUAL BOOK DEAL, you are the lucky 1%. And you might finally, FINALLY, get paid for the work you have done. (In installments, spread out over years, depending on how much of an advance you get.)

Or, like a whooooole bunch of us, you end up figuring out that your agent, for whatever reason, isn’t working for you. Maybe you want to write a genre next that they don’t rep. Maybe they leave the industry for whatever reason. Maybe you have a mismatch of communication/expectations/needs. Maybe they suck at being an agent and stop doing what they are supposed to do (like mine). And then you end up either leaving your agent or getting dropped by your agent, and you are back to square one all over again.

Remember that every time you have to query again, or go on submission again, you have to have a new book ready. The people who succeed at this industry have time, money, and luck; the more of those you have, the better you will do. A LARGE number of writers are bankrolled by a partner and/or parent and/or generational wealth who pays the bills for them, because otherwise, it’s pretty damn hard to find enough time to write as much as you need to.

And every single one of those rejections is going to eat away at you, inch by inch by inch, until you’ve amassed more than 150 of them representing all the times you just weren’t fucking good enough. Then you have to decide: do I keep doing this? It’s been years. It’s been double digit books. How much of my life and time am I going to waste on this fruitless quest? And I guess that’s the question you gotta answer lol.

#don't reblog this we do not need this bullshit connected to me

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 27 days

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Here's a fun article. DO'D shares ten links to things on the internet that he finds funny. I watched all the clips tonight, which made for an enjoyable evening of both watching things that ranged from baffling to mildly amusing to very funny, and of enjoying the fact that David O'Doherty picked them.

There was only one thing on the list that I'd seen before, and what an excellent pick. I've gone off panel shows a lot compared to the way I was a few years ago, I now remember spending mid-2020 watching every single episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats and Catsdown within about six weeks and wonder why that seemed like a good idea. But I stand by some of it. I still have a great fondness for early Jon Richardson (how generous I am with when I'd consider his strong "early" period to end depends on mood on a given day). I still think Sean Lock was breath-takingly funny. Catsdown was a funny show for the first bunch of seasons. 8 Out of 10 Cats was not, it was almost never good, but they did strike some excellent chemistry once they threw Sean and John together and I will never get tired of re-watching the best moment to ever appear on that show:

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I enjoyed David O'Doherty deciding Carrot In a Box was special enough to include on this list, even though the list is clearly meant to be for offbeat indie humour and not large Channel 4 panel show. Carrot in a Box transcends boundaries.

My two favourite things on the list that I hadn't seen before were Simon Bird and Claudia O'Doherty:

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Simon Bird surprised me because I saw student comedy and I figured it would be a sort of novelty thing where part of the humour comes from laughing at him for being so young and different to how he is now. But nope, it was just legitimately very funny. I was sorry I hadn't seen it before and glad DO'D directed me to it. Also, this was a year before The Inbetweeners started airing, I hadn't realized he was still in university so soon before it. Seems surprisingly young, though when I think about it, I guess being a year out of university is still a bit old to play a high school kid.

That Claudia O'Doherty + Natasia Demetriou sketch was really funny too, I've done some CO'D trips through YouTube but hadn't seen that one before. Obviously this rec reminds me that DO'D/CO'D being locked in a radio studio all night with Daniel Kitson back in 2006/07/08 would be somewhere on my list of offbeat, out-of-the-box choices for funniest things I've ever heard (after the fairly judgmental post I made last night about finding it annoying when comedians talk about their relationship, DO'D/CO'D is my proof that I don't always object to that, it helps if they're annoying about it in a way that's intentional and self-aware), and it's lovely that 17 years later he's still called her the funniest person he knows. The sketch made me laugh, Claudia and Natasia were both very funny in it. She's right, magic is stupid (I may be willfully misinterpreting the sketch through the filter of my own views).

Besides that, on the list there is a sketch that's probably funny if you ever watch cricket. A couple of videos where I feel like I'm missing some important context, probably related to Irish TV, that would explain why they're so funny. And Instagram account, and I think it's probably one of my unreasonable old person opinions that I have trouble with people referring to a social media account as a piece of comedy on par with a stand-up routine or sketch or something like that, but mascots during moments of silence definitely are funny. There's a video of Irish donkeys where I do not understand the point but I'm glad David O'Doherty's had a good time watching it.

There's this, which confuses me, and I definitely don't think it's the masterpiece that DO'D seems to think it is, but I did enjoy watching it:

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I'm not sure how much I enjoyed that one personally, I felt like I could really see why DO'D found it so funny. It seems like very DO'D-style humour, even though DO'D whole thing is being lowkey and this video is not particularly lowkey. If you took those lyrics - and that style of delivering them - out of the giant band and transposed them to a lowkey plastic keyboard, I could see this being the foundation of a DO'D song.

On an only very tangentially related note, I was listening to an episode of the John/Elis radio show today, and they were talking about when you accidentally send a text message to the wrong person, and Elis said David O'Doherty has a song like that. Which he does, but what surprised me is that the producer Vin was the one who immediately jumped in and supplied the title and summary of the song.

I'd been thinking for some time that Vin can hold his own with comedians surprisingly well for a guy who's not involved in comedy (to be honest he'll sometimes get to the joke or punchline in a situation faster than Elis does). A while ago I heard him express interest in Andy Zaltzman, and I assumed this must be because he's a cricket fan (I have, since making that post, heard him mention cricket several times, so I've confirmed that that's not just an assumption I invented based on his race), because he's come to this comedy radio show via radio and music, not via comedy. But now he's out there referencing David O'Doherty songs, and I'd like to apologize to Producer Vin for not expecting him to know about comedy. The song about sending a text to the wrong person isn't a particularly deep O'Doherty cut, he plays it a lot, but still. Impressive reference, if you happen to be the sort of person who's impressed by Chocolate Milk Gang references, which I am. Made me like Vin even more, I'm going to miss him when they move to the BBC. Which is too soon. I only have about 40 Radio X episodes left. It seems infinite when I started and now I'm running out. For some reason I feel like the BBC ones won't be as good. I don't want to run out of Radio X. It's okay, the audiobook will add 12 extra hours.

...I've veered pretty far off topic here, the main takeaway from this post is that you should watch the lethally meta Simon Bird student routine, and the Claudia O'Doherty/Natasia Demetriou sketch. You can watch the other things from the article if you want to, as I did, but I mainly recommend those. And obviously everyone should be re-watching Carrot in a Box at regular intervals anyway, for your health.

#Youtube

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