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the-rad1o-demon · 3 months

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[Image ID (sorta, basically just the text from it):

GET KOSA TRENDING.

STOP SCROLLING NOW!

AS OF FEBRUARY 21ST, 2024, WE GOT FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE DAY OF DECISION OF THE KOSA BILL, WHICH WILL CAUSE MASS CENSORSHIP ROUND THE INTERNET IF PASSED. OR DOOMSDAY. WE NEED EVERYONE TO KNOW ABOUT THIS AND CONTRIBUTE. I'M NOT GIVING UP ON YOU ALL.

WE'RE DOWN TO THE WIRE BUT WE CAN'T GIVE UP YET. IF WE GIVE UP, EVERYTHING IS OVER. IF WE DON'T, AT LEAST WE HAVE A CHANCE.

I'M THE ONE WHO SOUNDED THE ALARM, AND I'M NOT GOING TO CURL UP AND DIE YET.

Reblog this post in every LEGAL way you can under the Tumblr guidelines with the appropriate tags. TELL AND TAG EVERYONE YOU KNOW, then add the tags to see below... and more if you can think of any complying.

Visit badinternetbills.com if you want to find a way to defeat KOSA. It WILL NOT take much of your time. Reblog with any other information or sources, too-- but make sure to reblog if you can.

Reblog if you support lgbtq+ content.

Reblog if you support questioning queer youth and/or abused youth getting the information they need.

Reblog if you support Ao3 and/or other sites that wholeheartedly preserve talentedly made media.

Reblog if you're going to repost this on other sites than Tumblr and spread the word across Twitter, Tik Tok, Pinterest, or elsewhere, alongside the link to badinternetbills.com.

END image ID]

Hey, everyone. So yeah, this is happening. We're still fighting this battle. And we can't give up now. We can't. We can't stand idly by while one of the most important resources that helped us all wake up, or at least start to question things, is being threatened by the government.

We can't stand idly by when kids, teens, and adults just like us still trapped inside might lose access to the resource that could help them wake up. We can't stand idly by when they might lose access to their non JW friends and family. We CAN'T stand idly by when we can do something to stop this bill from passing.

I am sick and tired of this same old song, where conservative fuckers higher up think they can oppress everyone. I am FUCKING SICK of it.

Please, reblog both this post and the original post linked above what I've written, and do what you can to stop KOSA, please. We are running out of time.

I suggest that if it is within your power to do so, that you do more than simply reblog and assume someone else will do something. DON'T assume that. Please do more than just reblogging if you are able to, because that's not really enough at this point.

Call/email representatives in the House and tell them to oppose KOSA (you may want to list different reasons depending on who you're calling, some House representatives are anti-LGBTQ+, so it may be best to tell them to oppose because it violates people's privacy, safety, and anonymity online). Print posters and put them up where legal if you can.

Sharing all this information to other social media sites (Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, the bird app) to reach more people can really help too. The wider the reach, the better.

Thank you. Now let's fucking rip that bill apart like we rip apart Watchtower magazines and eat it for fucking breakfast. (In a "we're eating it and the politicians who are sponsoring it are looking on in horror" kind of way)

#kids online safety act #internet censorship #stop kosa #exjw #ex jw #ex jehovah's witness #ex jehovah's witnesses #not necessarily ex jw related tags but still relevant bc this bill also affects these communities:#queer #lgbtqia #lgbt #lgbtqplus #lgbtq community #ex catholic #ex mormon #ex christian #ex evangelical #ex cult

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media

The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:

https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf

I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"

Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.

II. Know red flags for bullshit

The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:

High-frequency posting

Emotionally charged framing

Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original

The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)

III. Don't trust screenshots

Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.

IV. "Know your platform"

It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.

V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing

People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.

VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy

TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.

VII. Think before you post

Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.

There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition

The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html

Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.

It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html

It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news

#pluralistic #media literacy #fake news #disinformation #misinformation #israel gaza #gaza #israel #palestine #conspiratorialism #hoaxes #infowar #on the media #breaking news #npr #flood the zone

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salt-and-shade · 10 months

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BARBENHEIMER - July 21, 2023

The most ambitious crossover event in history (artists cited under the cut!)

I hyperlinked the original posts to the artist handle wherever possible so go show the artists some love!! ROW 1: @JohnBeLucky on Reddit @anglespizza on Twitter (they made this for a class-iconic) @whovianrad on Twitter @shadowknightdk on Twitter @BossLogic on Twitter ROW 2: @rahalarts on Instagram @justralphy on Instagram @GrungiestBunny on Instagram, available as a poster here @envelopandkissme on Tumblr (I think? idk this one was hard to find) @shirtsthtgohard on Twitter, available for purchase here ROW 3: @omarg294 on Twitter (possibly not the original source) @raichu.copper on Instagram/@raichucopper on Twitter @galactic_psychedelia Instagram, available on Redbubble here @thesenatortheatre on Instagram (possibly not the original source) @nannymcghee on Tik Tok

ROW 4: Retro Travel Design on Redbubble @rahalarts on Instagram @stevereevesart on Instagram @jonattfieldart on Instagram @gringgieespons on Tik Tok

ROW 5: @BossLogic on Instagram/@BossLogic on Twitter @rahalarts on Instagram @nolanlounds Tik Tok @seanlongmore Instagram @Cornettogod on Twitter

ROW 6: @readfulthings on Instagram (aka Adam Perocchi) I cannot find this artist but you can buy the shirt here and here @moviemantis on Instagram (possibly not the original source, idk) Jason P on LinkedIn (ok career barbie!!) and finally, you can buy the shirt here

huge love to all the incredibly talented artists that put their work on the internet for free for all of us to look at, we love you!! (please sign/watermark your works though, the amount of art theft I found while looking these up made me sad for you)

anti-shoutouts: to google for nerfing their reverse image search with google lens (seriously-CHANGE IT BACK), to twitter for making it almost impossible to use the website after I deleted my account, and to basically no one on tik tok (or any other social media site for that matter) for crediting artists because that made tracking down the original posts so much harder than it needs to be :')

#barbie #barbenheimer #oppenheimer #barbie movie #barbie 2023 #margot robbie #cillian murphy #ryan gosling #fan art #movie art #movie poster #the art isn't mine but the collage is #the hype riding the marketing train has been fascinating #and now with the strikes hollywood is really going out with a bang! (pun intended)#embarrassing number of tags bc sorting these by aspect ratio to make a pretty grid took forever #ok this got more notes than I anticipated so I went back and cited the artists bc I'm not an asshole

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generic-anime-boy-bracket · 7 months

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Final Round

Shigeo Kageyama vs Tadano Hitohito

Reasons for being generic + Propaganda below

Mob/Shigeo Kageyama

Reasons:

Shigeo’s whole thing is being the most average boring middle schooler ever. He yearns desperately for a social life but he’s always been part of the crowd, so much so that his classmates and even his boss call him “Mob”. Also consider this post https://www.tumblr.com/codynaomiswire/190630281009/spot-the-main-character-amazing-mob-psycho-is?source=share

https://64.media.tumblr.com/15122b75c98b6a5978d892e284f5fe60/1c80e81d36417001-2f/s1280x1920/195aa0ce13b4bbea7fab38e3f930c250940fa9a2.jpg could someone who's never seen this anime pick him out as the main character

very plain face, and his hair is a simple black bowlcut. his design is intentionally as simple and generic as possible, mob appearing plain and unremarkable is a big part of his character.

The whole point of his character design is that he looks bland and blends into the background (hence his nickname "Mob"). There are characters with way more exciting designs, even including his brother who at least has Anime Hair™️, meanwhile Mob is just very plain with his bowlcut and monochrome design

a very obvious candidate. black hair, spends the majority of screentime in a school uniform, got his nickname (mob) literally bc of how generic and bland he is. a perfectly common face. no aspirations, no hobbies, no academic achievements, no sport talents. just a guy. regular dude. the only notable thing about him is his immensly powerful psychic abilities but he avoids using them in daily life, doesnt like to show them off and supresses them as well as his emotions

the point of mob's entire character is to be generic and plain. even his nickname "mob" was given to him by others to show that he is just part of the crowd and nothing special.

He's got a bowlcut, a very simply designed face, and usually is only seen in his school uniform.

He is designed to look like the most generic middle school boy with a plain unexpressive face and a bowl cut, and his nickname Mob comes from the fact that he doesn't stick out and everyone sees him as a background character. He spends most of his time going to school (he is bad at math) and reading manga and daydreaming/zoning out. He's socially awkward and gets nervous around girls. He started working out recently. He also has psychic powers but it's not a big deal it's just another trait someone can have like being charismatic or smelling bad

look at him. his literal entire point is that he is just some guy. his name (mob) was given to him because hes so bland and doesnt stand out that hes part of the mob / a background character in everyones life. it's also, in japanese, the equivalent to the english term "john doe."

Hair is a black bowl cut. Wears a school uniform, plain face. His whole thing is basically being completely average except for his insane psychic powers. He suppresses his emotions and powers because he just wants to live a normal life like everyone else.

bowl cut. standard school uniform. literally designed to look like a generic background character

classic bowlcut kid, literally designed to look generic and blend in

He's literally just a schoolboy with a black bowlcut and no distinguishing features. Look at he: https://mob-psycho-100.fandom.com/wiki/Shigeo_Kageyama?file=Mob+Fullbody.png Ofc, he's also an OP psychic, but he looks so entirely generic I think he fits perfectly

look at him. He checks every “how to look as generic as possible” box

Normal kid (appearance wise)

He is meant to look generic, he is this very powerful esper but he has black hair, a bowl haircut and mostly dresses in his school uniform. He looks like a background character even though he is the protagonist.

Propaganda:

i love him so much he's like a son to me

(Sorry to the person who submitted a Reddit img link it won't make me put the image there because i'm on phone since I probably won't get Access to my pc since I'll be outside ��)

i love mob so much he is my boi

…but also, if it helps, mob's character is "boy with bowlcut, almost always seen wearing standard japanese middle school uniform, who speaks in a monotone voice and has no strong opinions of his own (for reasons but its not important)"

He's literally earned the nickname Mob for being so bland and generic looking (Mob being a term Japanese programers use for background NPCs). He also was purposefully designed by the creator to be as un-protagonist looking and plain as possible.

he is literally just some guy and that is the point of the entire show is that hes not special hes just a guy. this is a good thing :)

he has my exact autism :)

Look doesn't he seem like a very polite young man? With no distinguishing features whatsoever? Yeah. He's THE generic anime boy. Immense psychic power notwithstanding

He <3

Tadano Hitohito

Reasons:

Just a good bean. Like a kidney bean

his name is LITERALLY a play on the japanese equivalent of the phrase "just some guy". he is DESIGNED to be a generic-ass dude. everything about him is comically average.

Propaganda:

No propaganda submitted for this character

#generic anime boy bracket #shigeo kageyama #mp100 #mob psycho 100 #tadano hitohito #komi can't communicate #komi san wa komyushou desu

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houseofbrat · 2 months

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As someone who works in PR I am ASTONISHED at how bad Kensington Palace is at all of this. It’s the most interesting part of the whole thing for me. Well that, and how much it seemingly vindicates H&M and Harry in particular in what he’s said about the firm and the media’s role in protecting the Heir at all costs.

Yeah I work in PR for a public company and anytime we want to put something out we have to run it up the chain - we need legal and Investor relations and executive approvals.

Even if KP and BP had their individual PR teams, which makes sense, there should still be one main central PR office that everyone answers to that manages the entire royal families PR, makes sure schedules and press opportunities and STRATEGY AND MESSAGING all aligns, before running up the chain for final approvals. There’d be a social team and a crisis team and government relations team and a branding team and a general “talent rep” kind of team, all working in tandem to serve the overall strategy for the royal family.

The fact that there are so many cooks in so many different kitchens is why the royal family has had so many PR disasters honestly for decades now. They’re truly doing it all wrong. So many Worst Practices here, not Best Practices.

It really doesn't seem like there is an overall PR team. Just the separate entities

Yeah and that’s the problem IMO. They are a business that should be run like a business. They should have the individual departments I suggested, and even more, working in tandem.

The fact that there are so many separate entities with different agendas and priorities is a huge part of their problem IMO.

But Charles has been transparent for the most part!! And photographed repeatedly. It’s so bizarre when compared to KP, and feels passive aggressive to me to be honest lolol.

They’re really so so so bad at this 😭😭😭😭 but the British public and the media lets them get away with it 🙃🙃🙃

For heaven’s sake. If she’s recovering nicely, why resort to recycling old photos?

Other sources are making a pretty good case for the fact that it’s a November photo, taken after Catherine and the children visited the baby bank.

Does nobody, and I mean nobody, know how to do PR in that place anymore? Now it's pin all of this on just-recovering-from-abdominal-surgery Kate? Why not on William since they were so proud about how he was the one that took the photo? Somehow they keep making everything ten times worse.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe for a second that Kate personally edited that photo together in such a way that it had to be killed as inauthentic. The pulling of the photo is likely more about the refusal to provide metadata or the raw image for proof rather than silly Photoshop choices. That isn’t an issue of “mummy going wild on the computer,” it’s a larger organizational issue about trust, transparency, and KP’s overall poor approach to news orgs and the press lately.

Why is Kate taking the fall? Why is William such a lout to let an ill Kate put this on her own shoulders rather than admit KP made an error or say KP is going to reevaluate their practices and make a change?

Are college interns running Palace p.r.? Because I cannot understand how they're botching this so badly. If Kate couldn't/wouldn't pose for a legit photo, then just don't release anything. The Royals are basically dumping tankers of gas on the inferno by playing all these games.

Sorry, am I going insane? After saying they wouldn’t respond to these conspiracy theories, they

a) responded by putting out a doctored image,

b) responded to the backlash of doctored image by claiming the woman recovering from a medical issue was playing around in Photoshop, and

c) responded to the backlash of editing claims by putting out an image where the person in the photo is supposed to be Kate but could LITERALLY BE ANYBODY.

NONE OF YOU ARE FINDING THIS WEIRD? NONE?!

"Kate's Back"

Well, it is indeed a picture of Kate's back

Apparently the main symptom of her mysterious medical condition is that any photo with her in it immediately becomes grainy, blurry, or with people's wrists trying to escape into a fifth dimension.

Good Lord, I haven't followed a disaster story this closely since Oceangate Titan and this one may be even worse. The narrative is out of control and the rules have gone out the window.

They already lost control of the narrative at this point. No matter what they do now, they will be scrutinized more than they've ever been before. And they seem grossly unprepared for it.

She’s not even facing camera, how is this supposed to help? This just feeds the conspiracy theorists! headdesk

It's becoming a PR nightmare that only Olivia Pope can rescue.

Maybe the better question is that people are concerned about Kate's welfare, and most WERE okay with waiting under the timeline KP initially offered that is she will likely return by or after Easter.

However KP has mismanaged the messaging, and with that concern grows over how weird some of the updates are. The article explains why this medical time out is turning into an absolute PR crisis. It isn't so much about Kates right to medical privacy (she definitely deserves that )

It now is about institutional reliability, the heir William's arguably erratic or unusual behavior or his courtiers' comments, the mess with the all kill photoshopped/Frankensteined photo (which has never happened before with a palace released photo), the very different approaches from BP vs KP, etc etc. It's become bigger than Kate sad to say.

And ultimately now people are worried for her, in a way they wouldn't have been, because things have become so irregular and bungled. So the urgency to make sure she is safe and okay has become louder and more insistent.

“CNN is now reviewing all handout photos previously provided by Kensington Palace.”

“In editorial photography, photojournalists and editors commonly adjust a photograph’s exposure or color balance in order to more accurately reflect the scene. Most news organizations, including CNN, regard it as unacceptable to move, change or manipulate the pixels of an image. To do so would alter the reality of the situation the image is intended to document.”

“In the past, the family’s amateur photographs have been well received when posted on social media. But on this occasion, this photo was also released to media organizations as a handout and the palace wasn’t transparent about the fact it had been adjusted.

That will have damaged the trust between the palace and media organizations – many of which, like CNN, will likely be assessing all royal handouts. The editing storm has undermined the existing relationship and when public interest over any possible cover up escalates, as it has done recently, many news outlets will now have take that speculation more seriously.”

#my gif #reddit #PR fail #fail!#kensington palace #palace officials #William The Prince of OWN GOALS #William The Weak #William The Terrible #prince william #William The Prince of Wales #scandal!#ESCANDALO!!!#kate middleton #Catherine The Princess of Wales #british royal family #fleet street #media

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ineffable-detective-agency · 23 days

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Good Omens' alien parking ticket - translated!

Curious about the “Alien Parking Ticket”? (Or only hearing about it for the first time?) You’ve come to the right place!

A little background first: there were 690 tickets originally released with the Ineffable and Celestial Editions of the Illustrated Good Omens as part of the “Folio of Ephemera” in 2019.

One more was a prize in a 2021 giveaway, where it was identified as an “alien parking ticket” - https://discworld.com/seven-day-instagram-giveaway/.

More were available with the campaign for the graphic novel, though they are now sold out, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dunmanifestin/good-omens/posts/4080374.

What does it actually look like? This is the front and back of a ticket from an Ineffable Edition, image credit to Reddit user lywinis.

The front looks a bit fuzzy because it’s done with lenticular printing (the image appears to move as you tilt it, like this:)

Interestingly, the photo on Kickstarter showed a very slightly different version of the front of the ticket, image credit to Discord user jennythepenny13. It’s still being called an alien parking ticket, and now we know it was issued to Newt by the aliens in the flying saucer.

So what does it say? Spoilers ahead!

Each symbol can be matched one-to-one to the Latin alphabet, or to a digit. After converting, it reads (with a few misspellings):

Most of the digits don’t have enough information to match them up – only 2 and 4 can be inferred from the source material.

The Kickstarter version changes “rotations of your planet” to “temporal units” for unknown reasons.

So it’s not really a parking ticket – it doesn’t even mention parking. But it is a violation ticket issued to humankind for excessive carbon dioxide emissions, high levels of atmospheric hydrocarbons, harnessing artificial wormholes without the proper permits, and insufficient planetary albedo for long-term climate stability. I guess we’ve got work to do!

#ineffable mystery #good omens clues #good omens analysis #good omens meta #good omens #good omens fandom #ineffable fandom #parking ticket #violation ticket #aliens #ineffable detective agency #good omens season 1

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gabrielied · 5 months

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Happy Holidays, everyone! 🕯 Another December means another Nutcracker AU piece. Hopefully it's obvious what the reference was for this picture, but if not, it's the "Anne Hathaway from the Twelfth Night Picture", minor tangent in the Read More below.

Anyway, stay warm and see you in the new year!

[Support The Search for Henry Jekyll on Patreon]

ComicFury | Tapas | Webtoons

So ok, most of you have probably seen the original picture this is based on, I wanted to find the original source of the image for people to link back to but I CAN'T find it. Most immediate sources lead to a reddit or twitter post that showed it with no info on the source and I didn't want that to be the link. One reddit version linked this article from the LA Times but this version features none of the original images from the Culture Monster Blog post it comes from, nor does the achieved version in the way back website. I also tried to find the source of the image and here's the initial data I found on it and the source info on the first available version of it.

Finally I found this article about a photographer and included in her work is a photo that has to be from the same photoshoot as the image I'm trying to source so I'm CERTAIN that's she's the photographer of it. So, to summarize this frustrating deep dive, I believe the photographer of the Twelfth Night Bisexual Kiss picture that became a meme is Brigitte Lacombe.

#the search for henry jekyll #jekyll and hyde #tsfhj #the nutcracker #watercolor #tradtitional art #victorian #henry jekyll #al utterson #molly poole #webcomic #comic

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saintmeghanmarkle · 2 months

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The Telegraph finally focuses on the Unsussexfuls & Misan Harriman's Photogate. The attacks on Catherine are hypocritical and disproportionate. When will media examine other past obviously botched photoshopped Sussex s with the same scrutiny? by u/wontyield

The Telegraph finally focuses on the Unsussexfuls & Misan Harriman's Photogate. 📸 🤥 📸The attacks on Catherine are hypocritical and disproportionate. When will media examine other past obviously botched photoshopped Sussex 📸s with the same scrutiny?

Original article link: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2024/03/13/meghan-pregnancy-photo-claim-doctored-willow-tree/

Archive link: https://archive.is/2024.03.13-095528/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2024/03/13/meghan-pregnancy-photo-claim-doctored-willow-tree/

The OSINT work of this sub has presented evidence of the botched edited Sussex photos for years. The media, both 🇬🇧 and 🇺🇸, have continued to ignore OBVIOUS deceit on part of the Sussexes and their minions, Liebrows Scobie and Misan Harriman. The media is complicit is Sussex 📸 scams. Major news outlets have continually propped up Sussexes lies by pushing their revisionist history via lies in articles and obviously edited images. 🕵️‍♀️

See link to Negative_Difference4's previous posts about the edited Sussex willow tree pregnancy announcement photo and other discrepancies in pinned comment.

Excerpts: One of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s own official portraits is said to have been edited with the insertion of a large willow tree.

The claim prompted accusations of hypocrisy after a source close to the Sussexes criticised the Princess of Wales, insisting that Meghan would “never” make a picture editing mistake and would have been “annihilated” for releasing a doctored family portrait.

However, an image released to accompany the announcement of Meghan’s pregnancy with her daughter Princess Lilibet on Valentine’s Day 2021 appears to have been heavily doctored, amid suggestions that a large willow tree was edited into the shot.

Mr Harriman took the picture with an iPad from his home in London and it was shared with no indication that it had been digitally altered.In 2022, he was asked during an appearance on BBC Radio 3 podcast Private Passions how he had created the photograph and admitted: “It’s amazing what you can do with technology.”

The presenter asked him: “They weren’t actually under a willow tree, they were lying outside in a meadow, weren’t they, Harry and Meghan, when you took the photograph of them?”

Mr Harriman said the image was his “most famous virtual shoot” as he described how he had used technology that allowed him to communicate with the Sussexes and tell them how to pose, before he remotely “pressed the shutter button” thousands of miles away.

‘Sussexes’ camp are hypocrites’

Angela Levin, Prince Harry’s biographer, told The Sun: “The Sussexes’ camp are huge hypocrites.”

A tree was doctored in their photograph to create a special backdrop so how dare their camp say anything about Catherine’s?”

THIS PART IS HILARIOUS!!!*🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Meghan spoke about her dislike of having certain features airbrushed out of photographs after posing for a People magazine cover in 2017.“

To this day, my pet peeve is when my skin tone is changed and my freckles are airbrushed out of a photoshoot,” she said.

😶😶😶😶😶😶😶😶😶😶😶😶

There is no suggestion the Sussexes edited the photograph themselves.

A spokesman for the couple has denied commenting about the Princess’s picture. post link: https://ift.tt/gXdz5qD author: wontyield submitted: March 13, 2024 at 12:20PM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.

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verifying-gimmick-posts · 7 months

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Among us sex gif

Presumably you're talking about the blog @amongussexgif.

The blog's owner certainly doesn't post the gif as often as the name would suggest, but xe still posts it in general, so, not really anything to verify. Probably doesn't even count as a gimmick blog, since it's seemingly used more as a main.

Just for the heck of it, I did try and source the aforementioned gif.

Searching for it on all the major image search engines brought up this Reddit post from 2 years ago as the earliest indexed result, however the phrasing of the title makes it obvious that the OP wasn't the original creator.

It's most likely the gif originates from some social media user, my gut says Twitter user, and is an edit or recreation of a remarkably similar "Ugandan Knuckles" gif - same style, quality, the two characters are even the same color in the same, uh, order. I'm not gonna try and source that meme, though. I have my limits.

#amongussexgif #no rating #suggestive #gif warning

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butchdarling · 2 months

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Hi, thanks for all your IDs! I'm new to Tumblr and want to write IDs. Are there etiquettes that I should take note of, like which posts to write IDs for and which not to? Any tags I should look out for? I came from Reddit and I'm aware that not all users want to have IDs on their posts, there's probably something similar here.

Hi, first of all you're very welcome for the descriptions! It's always nice to hear that my efforts are appreciated :)

Ideally, any post with images should also have a description for those images. Any post that doesn't already have an ID in the original post is one that's appropriate to add a description to. Even if someone else already wrote a description in a reblog, you're allowed to write your own if you want to. I personally haven't encountered anyone who has been upset when I've written a description? I think that's more an individual thing than something specific to a certain type of post.

There's not a consensus on what format works best for image descriptions, but alt text or plain text (not colored and normal size) directly below the image in the body of the post are generally considered the most accessible. Alt text tends to work better for screen readers, and plain text works better for some people who need descriptions but don't use screen readers. I personally use alt text for posts with a lot of images and plain text for posts with only a few. I've also seen people put a short description in alt text and a more detailed one in body text.

Other etiquette includes indicating when a description starts and ends. I use brackets and start and end with [ID / End ID] but some other formats I’ve seen include “Start ID / End ID” of “Image description / End image description” and being objective in your descriptions. If you're describing a picture of a dog as a "cute puppy," you're telling the reader what to think instead of letting them come to their own conclusion.

As for tags I know some people like to sort their posts as “described” for posts with IDs and “undescribed” or “no ID” for posts without. I find most of my descriptions either from people I follow or from looking in the notes of specific posts as opposed to searching tags so I'm not much help there, but here is a link to a post listing a whole bunch of accounts that make image descriptions.

There isn't really one way to write image descriptions because people have different accessibility needs, but even a simple description is better than no description. The basic format I usually go with is this:

[ID: A (type of image, painting, photo, etc) of (subject; if it's fan art I like to include the source) doing (action, this can really be as detailed or as simple as you want.) End ID]

In general, I go with more simple descriptions for comedic posts and more detailed ones for art. My number one tip is to follow people who write and reblog descriptions and to read them! I've picked up a lot of formats and phrases I use a lot in descriptions from people I follow.

If you're looking for more resources, I’m going to point you towards my mutual Kay @pathos-logical ‘s accessibility tag that has a bunch of good posts on how to write descriptions. You're also welcome to send me another ask or DM me if you'd like ^^

#I'm more than happy to talk more about IDs if anyone is interested I just don't want this post to get too long

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sentientgopro · 11 months

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Everything in the & 196 Video explained

A good place to start for learning 196 culture and understanding some of the stuff we mention is this video, made upon the end of 196, showcasing some of the biggest moments on the sub. Im gonna explain as many of these as possible. First, the history of 196. My source is a post I loosely remember from the person who made 195.

r/195 was a subreddit created by a few roomates living in apartment no. 195 to allow them to share memes easily and save stuff. They didn't set it to private and were suprised when they saw people starting to join. They decided to screw with them by creating the ONE GOLDEN RULE. You must post before you leave. They decided to do this as an experiment for 420 weeks (If I remember correctly.) Alot of fun was had and alot of 196s culture began here , such as Floppa and fanter. People were upset when the experiment ended, the sub had truly struck gold, so its permanent (or so we thought), sequel was created, 196. Its wortg considering, as what was basically an anarchy sub, why didnt it turn into a racist and himophobic shithole like the other ones? Its obviously dependent on the mods. The mods of most anarchy subs create them because they just want a place where they wont face consequences for saying terrible shit. 195 was different, and was moderated by more reasonable people. this is why 196 became the trans friendly space its known as today. Okay, onto the video.

Love of: The two 196 mascots, Floppa and Spronkus. These 2 will show up alot in this video. Spronkus was created in a meme comparing left and right shitposting, where the right is just a racist caricature and the left is "a popular recognisable cartoon character with a gun thay says trans rights and shoots fascits." It also has a gun thats labelled "this is a gun". Spronkus was, infact, not a recognisable cartoon character, but one created by the artist of the meme. It was named and became a 196 mascot, appearing in our r/place image.

The sun: alot of these images are just memes that did well on this sub and fit the lyrics. they explain themselves, theres no more culture to it, I wont mention them in the list from now on.

Came back again: The pillar wars. 196 had a lengthly battle over an image of different pillar types, where people would argue for their favourite pillar.

To make it clear that: When AI filters were just starting to pick up, someone ran their face through a masculinity filter many, many times, and this was the result.

Shame on a martyr: 197 is a place generally recognised as the place that people who liked 196 but got banned for being an asshole go. So its basically 196 but a little more right leaning.

Either perspective of &: First image of Bridget/ Biscuit/ Brisket/ Bucket. One meme where a guy mispelled bridget (Or was it someone who said one of their relatives kept mispronouncing it? Not really important either way) so it became a running joke of Spelling bridget incorrectly. I imagine this was elsewhere on the internet, not just 196.

Dry: Not sure if this is really a 196 culture thing, but its a common joke on 196 that there is nothing dryer than the pussy of Ben Shapiros wife.

& All the &s that we forgot: 196 was known for having microcelebrities, people that were easily recognisable in comments and people know their name. Most notable is Goblinhog, who became a moderator, but the rapid expansion of microcelebs came with monko74 who became one. Alot of people started signing their posts/ comments in a certain way to make them more recognisable.

Leave if you can't stand the thought of it: Not alot to it, 196 mods made the based decision to ban any and all people using the reddit NFT avatars.

New & Old: The new and old images for the sub. Everytime the image changed, it would replace the old one, they would all still be partially transparent. First was that rabbit, then a globe thing was added. The mods did a random choice of who would get to choose the new sub image for a month, and the winner chose a picture of that guy you can faintly see in the new image. It was changed back to the old image and the guy was added at the end of the month. Spronkus also temporarily became the sub icon, before it was added to the full image.

John & Yoko: A heavily edited version of a comic that was used as a frequent meme template on 196. The original joke is that 2 guys and a girl meet their future selves, and one of the guys is suprised to find his future self as a woman.

They took a lesson from their fathers: Explained by the 196 history at the start

Their lives stuck beside every &: The yoshi and toad kissing tattoo was a like goal thing if I remember correctly, "If I get this many likes Ill do this" and they did it. Either that or it was a goal for the sub itself.

Stop the peace: When 196 was at a perceived low point, and Sprokus was on the rise, people came to the conclusion that 196 just wasn't as Gay as it used to be, and it needed to be fixed.

We digress: There was a post (Dont think it was on 196) of a 4 panel comic thats supposed to be something about women moving on from heartbreak or something but the 4th panel was replaced with an image of a shitting toothpaste. Someone commented to ask for the version without the toothpaste and this comment and post was screenshotted and became popular on 196. When the no toothpaste version was posted, the same person asked for a version with the toothpaste. It was a common joke for a while for people to replace the fourth panels, or other panels, of other comics with the toothpaste. This is an amogus version of it. That should be everything, please reblog if Ive missed stuff.

#196 #reddit blackout #reddit migration #reddit refugees #196 campfire #196 migration #reddit #r196 #reddit boycott #rule

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mariacallous · 2 months

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As AI-powered image generators have become more accessible, so have websites that digitally remove the clothes of people in photos. One of these sites has an unsettling feature that provides a glimpse of how these apps are used: two feeds of what appear to be photos uploaded by users who want to “nudify” the subjects.

The feeds of images are a shocking display of intended victims. WIRED saw some images of girls who were clearly children. Other photos showed adults and had captions indicating that they were female friends or female strangers. The site’s homepage does not display any fake nude images that may have been produced to visitors who aren’t logged in.

People who want to create and save deepfake nude images are asked to log in to the site using a cryptocurrency wallet. Pricing isn’t currently listed, but in a 2022 video posted by an affiliated YouTube page, the website let users buy credits to create deepfake nude images, starting at 5 credits for $5. WIRED learned about the site from a post on a subreddit about NFT marketplace OpenSea, which linked to the YouTube page. After WIRED contacted YouTube, the platform said it terminated the channel; Reddit told WIRED that the user had been banned.

WIRED is not identifying the website, which is still online, to protect the women and girls who remain on its feeds. The site’s IP address, which went live in February 2022, belongs to internet security and infrastructure provider Cloudflare. When asked about its involvement, company spokesperson Jackie Dutton noted the difference between providing a site’s IP address, as Cloudflare does, and hosting its contents, which it does not.

WIRED notified the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which helps report cases of child exploitation to law enforcement, about the site’s existence.

AI developers like OpenAI and Stability AI say their image generators are for commercial and artistic uses and have guardrails to prevent harmful content. But open source AI image-making technology is now relatively powerful and creating pornography is one of the most popular use cases. As image generation has become more readily available, the problem of nonconsensual nude deepfake images, most often targeting women, has grown more widespread and severe. Earlier this month, WIRED reported that two Florida teenagers were arrested for allegedly creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of their middle school classmates without consent, in what appears to be the first case of its kind.

Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law who has studied the problem of nonconsensual explicit imagery, says that the deepnude website highlights a grim reality: There are far more incidents involving AI-generated nude images of women without consent and minors than the public currently knows about. The few public cases were only exposed because the images were shared within a community, and someone heard about it and raised the alarm.

“There's gonna be all kinds of sites like this that are impossible to chase down, and most victims have no idea that this has happened to them until someone happens to flag it for them,” Franks says.

Nonconsensual Images

The website reviewed by WIRED has feeds with apparently user-submitted photos on two separate pages. One is labeled "Home" and the other "Explore." Several of the photos clearly showed girls under the age of 18.

One image showed a young girl with a flower in her hair standing against a tree. Another a girl in what appears to be a middle or high school classroom. The photo, seemingly taken discreetly by a classmate, is captioned “PORN.”

Another image on the site showed a group of young teens who appear to be in middle school: a boy taking a selfie in what appears to be a school gymnasium with two girls, who smile and pose for the picture. The boy’s features were obscured by a Snapchat lens that enlarged his eyes so much that they covered his face.

Captions on the apparently uploaded images indicated they include images of friends, classmates, and romantic partners. “My gf” one caption says, showing a young woman taking a selfie in a mirror.

Many of the photos showed influencers who are popular on TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Other photos appeared to be Instagram screenshots of people sharing images from their everyday lives. One image showed a young woman smiling with a dessert topped with a celebratory candle.

Several images appeared to show people who were complete strangers to the person who took the photo. One image taken from behind depicted a woman or girl who is not posing for a photo, but simply standing near what appears to be a tourist attraction.

Some of the images in the feeds reviewed by WIRED were cropped to remove the faces of women and girls, showing only their chest or crotch.

Huge Audience

Over an eight-day period of monitoring the site, WIRED saw five new images of women appear on the Home feed, and three on the Explore page. Stats listed on the site showed that most of these images accumulated hundreds of “views.” It’s unclear if all images submitted to the site make it to the Home or Explore feed, or how views are tabulated. Every post on the Home feed has at least a few dozen views.

Photos of celebrities and people with large Instagram followings top the list of “Most Viewed” images listed on the site. The most-viewed people of all time on the site are actor Jenna Ortega with more than 66,000 views, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift with more than 27,000 views, and an influencer and DJ from Malaysia with more than 26,000 views.

Swift and Ortega have been targeted with deepfake nudes before. The circulation of fake nude images of Swift on X in January triggered a moment of renewed discussion about the impacts of deepfakes and the need for greater legal protections for victims. This month, NBC reported that, for seven months, Meta had hosted ads for a deepnude app. The app boasted about its ability to “undress” people, using a picture of Jenna Ortega from when she was 16 years old.

In the US, no federal law targets the distribution of fake, nonconsensual nude images. A handful of states have enacted their own laws. But AI-generated nude images of minors come under the same category as other child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, says Jennifer Newman, executive director of the NCMEC’s Exploited Children’s Division.

“If it is indistinguishable from an image of a live victim, of a real child, then that is child sexual abuse material to us,” Newman says. “And we will treat it as such as we're processing our reports, as we're getting these reports out to law enforcement.”

In 2023, Newman says, NCMEC received about 4,700 reports that “somehow connect to generative AI technology.”

“Pathetic Bros”

People who want to create and save deepfake nude images on the site are asked to log in using either a Coinbase, Metamask, or WalletConnect cryptocurrency wallet. Coinbase spokesperson McKenna Otterstedt said that the company is launching an internal investigation into the site’s integration with the company’s wallet. Metamask is owned by Consensys, and while the tech company was unaware of the site prior to WIRED's reporting, it has now launched an investigation: “We will need to determine how our Terms of Use are implicated and what steps would be appropriate to ensure the safety of our users and the broader web3 ecosystem."

WalletConnect did not respond to a request for comment.

In November 2022, the deepnude site’s YouTube channel posted a video claiming users could “buy credit” with Visa or Mastercard. Neither of the two payment processors returned WIRED’s requests for comment.

On OpenSea, a marketplace for NFTs, the site listed 30 NFTs in 2022 with unedited, not deepfaked, pictures of different Instagram and TikTok influencers, all women. After buying an NFT with the ether cryptocurrency—$280 worth at today’s exchange rate—owners would get access to the website, which according to a web archive, was in its early stages at the time. “Privacy is the ultimate priority” for its users, the NFT listings said.

The NFTs were categorized with tags referring to the women’s perceived features. The categories included Boob Size, Country (with most of the women listed as from Malaysia or Taiwan), and Traits, with tags including “cute,” “innocent,” and “motherly.”

None of the NFTs listed by the account ever sold. OpenSea deleted the listings and the account within 90 minutes of WIRED contacting the company. None of the women shown in the NFTs responded for comment.

It’s unclear who, or how many people, created or own the deepnude website. The now deleted OpenSea account had a profile image identical to the third Google Image result for “nerd.” The account bio said that the creator’s mantra is to “reveal the shitty thing in this world” and then share it with “all douche and pathetic bros.”

An X account linked from the OpenSea account used the same bio and also linked to a now inactive blog about “Whitehat, Blackhat Hacking” and “Scamming and Money Making.” The account’s owner appears to have been one of three contributors to the blog, where he went by the moniker 69 Fucker.

The website was promoted on Reddit by just one user, who had a profile picture of a man of East Asian descent who appeared to be under 50. However, an archive of the website from March 2022 claims that the site “was created by 9 horny skill-full people.” The majority of the profile images appeared to be stock photos, and the job titles were all facetious. Three of them were Horny Director, Scary Stalker, and Booty Director.

An email address associated with the website did not respond for comment.

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sixty-silver-wishes · 8 days

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Okay I Could do work but instead I'm going to write about the time shostakovich had the worst time in america

(So, despite the clickbaity title, this will be more of a serious post. I wrote about the topic a few years ago on Reddit , and I'll be citing a lot of the same sources as I cited there, because there are some good ones, along with some new information I've gathered over the years. This was going to be a video essay on my youtube channel, but I sort of kept putting it off.)

The Scientific and Cultural Congress for World Peace, held in New York in 1949, is a particularly fascinating event to study when it comes to researching Shostakovich because of just how divisive it was. True, the event itself, which only lasted a few days, doesn’t get as much spotlight as the Lady Macbeth scandal or the posthumous “Shostakovich Wars,” but you’ll find that when reading about the Peace Conference, as I’ll be referring to it here for the sake of brevity, many of the primary accounts of it never quite tell the full story. The Peace Conference was held during a volatile time, both in Soviet and American politics, as Cold War tensions were on the rise and an ideological debate between capitalism and communism gradually extended to become the focus of seemingly every factor of life- not just politics and economics, but also the sciences, culture, and the arts.

While artists on both sides were frequently cast in different roles in order to create or destroy the image of Soviet or American cultural and ideological superiority, the image either government sought to cast was sometimes contradictory with the sentiments of the artists themselves. For instance, while the CIA-founded Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF) sent African American jazz musician Louis Armstrong on various tours around the world to promote jazz as American culture and dispel perceptions of racism in America, Armstrong canceled a trip to the Soviet Union in order to protest the use of armed guards against the integration of Black students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Meanwhile, the Soviet government’s use of international diplomatic missions by artists as cultural warfare also reflected a desire to portray themselves as the dominant culture, despite the tensions and complications that existed for artists at home. When the Soviet Union sent Dmitri Shostakovich to New York in March 1949 for the Peace Conference, such cultural contradictions are why the conference occurred the way it did, and why Shostakovich’s image has received so much controversy, both in Russia and in the west.

If you’re familiar with Soviet history, you may be familiar with the term Zhdanovshchina, which refers to a period of time between 1946 and 1948 in which Andrei Zhdanov, the Central Committee Secretary of the Soviet Union, headed a number of denunciations against prominent figures in the arts and sciences. Among musicians, Shostakovich was one of the most heavily attacked, likely due to his cultural standing, with many of his pieces censored and referred to as “formalist,” along with his expulsion from his teaching positions at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories. During this time, Shostakovich often resorted to writing film and ideological music in order to make an income.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as fears of nuclear war began accumulating, peace movements between the two superpowers were regarded more and more as pro-Communist, an opinion backed by the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC). The Waldorf-Astoria Peace Conference, to be held from March 25-27th 1949, was organized by the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions, a progressive American organization, and was to feature speeches held by representatives of both American and Soviet science and culture. Harlow Shapely, one of the conference’s organizers, stated that he intended for the conference to be “non-partisan” and focused on American and Soviet cooperation.

On the 16th of February, 1949, Shostakovich was chosen to be one of the six Soviet delegates to speak at the conference. This was largely due to his fame in the west, where both his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies met a mostly positive reception. Shostakovich initially did not want to go to the conference, stating in a letter to the Agitprop leader Leonid Ilichev that he was suffering from poor health at the time and wasn’t feeling up to international travel and performances. He also said that if he were to go, he wanted his wife Nina to be able to accompany him, but he ended up being sent to New York without any members of his family- perhaps to quell concerns of defection (recall the amount of artists who defected around the time of the 1917 revolution, including notable names such as Rachmaninov and Heifetz).

Stalin famously called Shostakovich on the phone that same day to address the conference, and again, Shostakovich told him he couldn’t go, as he was feeling unwell. Sofia Khentova’s biography even states that Shostakovich actually did undergo medical examinations and was found to be sick at the time, but Stalin's personal secretary refused to relay this information. Shostakovich's close friend Yuri Levitin recalls that when Stalin called Shostakovich on the phone to ask him to go to the conference (despite the fact he had been chosen to go in advance), Shostakovich offered two reasons as to why he couldn't go- in addition to his health, Levitin claims that Shostakovich also cited the fact that his works were currently banned in the Soviet Union due to the Zhdanov decree, and that he could not represent the USSR to the west if his works were banned. While accounts of the phone call vary, the ban on Shostakovich's works was indeed lifted by the time he went to New York for the conference.

When Shostakovich arrived in New York, general anti-Communist sentiment from both Americans and Soviet expatriates, as well as media excitement, resulted in a series of protests in front of the Waldorf Astoria hotel where the conference was to be held, with some of the protesters directly referencing Shostakovich himself, as he was the most well-known Soviet delegate on the trip. In 1942, Shostakovich's 7th ("Leningrad") Symphony was performed in the United States under Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra to high acclaim, helping to promote the idea of allyship with the Soviet Union in the US during the war, and Americans were aware of the Zhdanov denunciations in 1948, as well as the previous denunciations that Shostakovich had suffered in 1936 as a result of the scandal surrounding his opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District." So by 1949, many people in American artistic circles had a sympathetic, if not completely understanding, view of Shostakovich during the birth of the Cold War. They viewed him as a victim of Communism and the Soviet state, who was forced to appease it in order to stay in favor, and as a result, could potentially voice his dissent with the system once in the west. Pickets visible in footage from the protests outside the Waldorf Astoria carried slogans such as "Shostakovich, jump thru [sic] the window," a likely reference to Oksana Kosyankina, a Soviet schoolteacher who had reportedly jumped out of a window in protest (although the details of this story would be found to be highly dubious). Meanwhile, another sign read "Shostakovich, we understand!," a statement that would prove to be deeply ironic. At the conference itself, Shostakovich did not jump through the window, nor did he attempt any form of dissent. Instead, an interpreter read through a prepared speech as he sat on stage in front of a crowd of about 800. The speech praised Soviet music, denounced American "warmongering," and claimed that Shostakovich had accepted the criticism of 1948, saying it "brought his music forward." Many in the audience could see that Shostakovich was visibly nervous- he was "painfully ill at ease," and Nicholas Nabokov (brother of the writer Vladimir Nabokov) remarked that he looked like a "trapped man." Arthur Miller recalled he appeared "so scared." As they noticed how nervous he looked, some of those in attendance sought to make a demonstration of him in order to illustrate Soviet oppression in contrast to the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by American artists, asking him intentionally provocative questions that they knew he would not be able to answer truthfully. From Nicholas Nabokov:

After his speech I felt I had to ask him publicly a few questions. I had to do it, not in order to embarrass a wretched human being who had just given me the most flagrant example of what it is to be a composer in the Soviet Union, but because of the several thousand people that sat in the hall, because of those that perhaps still could not or did not wish to understand the sinister game that was being played before their eyes. I asked him simple factual questions concerning modern music, questions that should be of interest to all musicians. I asked him whether he, personally, the composer Shostakovich, not the delegate of Stalin’s Government, subscribed to the wholesale condemnation of Western music as it had been expounded daily by the Soviet Press and as it appeared in the official pronouncements of the Soviet Government. I asked him whether he, personally, agreed with the condemnation of the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Hindemith. To these questions he acquiesced: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I completely subscribe to the views as expressed by … etc….’ When he finished answering my questions the dupes in the audience gave him a new and prolonged ovation.

During the discussion panel on March 26th, music critic Olin Downes delivered yet another provocative statement towards Shostakovich:

I found both of your works [the 7th and 8th Symphonies] too long, and I strongly suspected in them the presence of a subversive influence—that of the music of Gustav Mahler.

For Shostakovich, and anyone knowledgeable of Soviet politics and music at the time, it's not hard to see why Downes had explicitly mentioned Mahler. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was a highly influential composer when it came to 20th century western music, particularly with regards to the avant-garde movement pioneered by the Second Viennese School- Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. Shostakovich was also heavily influenced by Mahler, but such influences were frowned upon in the mid-30s to 50s Soviet Union. Mahler's style was decidedly more "western," and it's potentially for this reason that Shostakovich's 4th Symphony- perhaps his most "Mahlerian," was withdrawn from performance before its premiere in 1936, having followed the "Lady Macbeth" denunciations. To tie Shostakovich to Mahler would be to point out his direct western influences, while he was being made to issue statements that rejected them. During his speech, Shostakovich made statements criticizing Stravinsky and Prokofiev- two composers who had emigrated and adopted western-inspired neoclassical styles (although Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in 1936). Stravinsky had taken insult to Shostakovich's comments against him, and carried an animosity towards Shostakovich that appeared once again in their meeting in 1962, according to the composer Karen Khachaturian.

On the last day of the conference, March 27th, Shostakovich performed the second movement of his Fifth Symphony on piano at Madison Square Garden to an audience of about 18,000, and had received a massive ovation, as well as a declaration of friendship signed by American composers such as Bernstein, Copland, Koussevitzky, and Ormandy. He returned to the Soviet Union on April 3.

In addition to the 1948 denunciations, in which Shostakovich was pressured to make public statements against his own works, the likely humiliation he endured at the 1949 conference played a role in cementing his dual "public" and "private" personas. For the rest of his life, Shostakovich displayed mannerisms and characteristics at official events that were reportedly much different from those he displayed among friends and family. For the public, and for researchers after his death, it became difficult to determine which statements from him reflected his genuine sentiments, and which ones were made to appease a wider political or social system.

Both the Soviet Union and the west had treated Shostakovich as a means of legitimizing their respective ideologies against one another, a trend that continued long after his death in 1975 and the fall of the USSR in 1991. The publication of his purported memoirs, "Testimony," allegedly transcribed by Solomon Volkov, fueled this debate among academics and artists, becoming known as the "Shostakovich wars." The feud over the legitimacy of "Testimony," however, stood for something much larger than the credibility of an alleged historical document- as historians and musicologists debated whether or not it was comprised of Shostakovich's own words and sentiments towards the Soviet Union, its political systems, and its artistic spheres, they were largely seeking to prove the credibility of their stances for or against Soviet or western superiority. "Testimony" helped evolve the popular western view of Shostakovich as well, from a talented but helpless puppet at the hands of the regime, to a secret dissident bravely rebelling against the system from inside.

Modern Shostakovich scholars, however, will argue that neither of these views are quite true- as more correspondence and documents come to light, and more research is conducted, a more complete view of Shostakovich has been coming into focus over the past decade or so. Today, many academics tend to view Shostakovich and the debate over his ideology with far more nuance- not as a cowardly government mouthpiece or as an embittered undercover rebel, but as a multifaceted person who made difficult decisions, shaped by the varying time periods he lived in, whose actions were often determined by the shifting cultural atmospheres of those time periods, along with his own relationships with others and the evolution of his art. We can be certain Shostakovich did not approve of Stalin's restrictions on the arts- his posthumous work "Antiformalist Rayok," among other pieces of evidence from people he knew, makes that very clear- but many nuances of his beliefs are still very much debated. There has also been a shift away from judging Shostakovich's music based on its merit as evidence in the ideological dispute, and rather for its quality as artwork (something I'm sure he would appreciate!). As expansive as Shostakovich research has become, one thing has become abundantly clear- none of us can hope to truthfully make the statement, "Shostakovich, we understand."

Sources for further reading:

Articles:

Shostakovich and the Peace Conference (umich.edu)

Louis Armstrong Plays Historic Cold War Concerts in East Berlin & Budapest (1965) | Open Culture

Biographical and Primary Sources:

Laurel Fay, "Shostakovich, a Life"

Pauline Fairclough, "Critical Lives: Dmitry Shostakovich"

Elizabeth Wilson, "Shostakovich, a Life Remembered"

Mikhail Ardov, "Memories of Shostakovich"

HUAC Report on Peace Conference

Video Sources and Historic Footage:

Arthur Miller on the Conference

"New York Greets Mr. Bevin and Peace Conference Delegates"

"Shostakovich at the Waldorf"

"1949 Anti Communism Protest"

"Battle of the Pickets"

#shostakovich #dmitri shostakovich #long post #history #soviet history #classical music #music history #1940s history #new york #russian history #cold war #composers #classical composer #my god this feels good to get out of my drafts

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generic-anime-boy-bracket · 8 months

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Round 4 (Semi-Finals) Group A

Shigeo Kageyama vs Tracey Sketchit

Reasons for being generic + Propaganda below

Mob/Shigeo Kageyama

Reasons:

very plain face, and his hair is a simple black bowlcut. his design is intentionally as simple and generic as possible, mob appearing plain and unremarkable is a big part of his character.

the point of mob's entire character is to be generic and plain. even his nickname "mob" was given to him by others to show that he is just part of the crowd and nothing special.

He's got a bowlcut, a very simply designed face, and usually is only seen in his school uniform.

bowl cut. standard school uniform. literally designed to look like a generic background character

classic bowlcut kid, literally designed to look generic and blend in

look at him. He checks every “how to look as generic as possible” box

Normal kid (appearance wise)

Propaganda:

i love him so much he's like a son to me

(Sorry to the person who submitted a Reddit img link it won't make me put the image there because i'm on phone since I probably won't get Access to my pc since I'll be outside 😭)

i love mob so much he is my boi

he is literally just some guy and that is the point of the entire show is that hes not special hes just a guy. this is a good thing :)

he has my exact autism :)

Look doesn't he seem like a very polite young man? With no distinguishing features whatsoever? Yeah. He's THE generic anime boy. Immense psychic power notwithstanding

He <3

Tracey Sketchit

Reasons:

He has a very "just some guy" vibe, spending most of his time as a background character quietly observing after his 30ish episodes as a main character. Former head writer Takeshi Shudo himself once said on his blog that he thought Tracey didn't have a strong enough personality. Appearance-wise, Tracey has dark hair and brown eyes and doesn't stand out all that much.

He is literally *just* a guy. The best guy, but just a guy. A little dude, little fella. The guy ever.

Tracey is an incredibly sweet respectful king who got sidelined by the anime. It’s so sad because he loves drawing and research and pokemon, but he barely got any screentime 😔 I think he’s a wholesome fun character and he deserves more love!!

Propaganda:

Despite the fact that large swathes of the fandom either give him flak for being "boring" or completely forget about his existence, to the point that people also meme about his forgotten-ness, he has persisted. He went 17 years without a single line of dialogue due to his expensive seiyuu and then finally got to speak again in the final episode of Ash's story. He has 12 fans but we are dedicated and we are proud and we adore this sweet boy.

Tracey is king. Respects women, stays in his lane, draws pokemon. What’s not to love???

#generic anime boy bracket #shigeo kageyama #mp100 #mob psycho 100 #tracey sketchit #pokemon #pokemon anime

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