Some people are saying some things again, and I don’t really have a masterpost of why those things are off the mark, so here is one. I guess I’ll update this if anything else spicy crosses my radar, for ease of linking.
(That doesn’t mean to send me new things; I don’t need to be kept constantly up to date on the latest hot takes from Breitbart Jr.)
I know this is long, which means most people won’t bother to read it. But hey, that means it must be true, right? That’s how it works for callouts, so surely it works the same way here.
Foreword
KiwiFarms is a forum that grew out of a wiki dedicated to the sustained stalking and harassment of an autistic trans woman. Their biggest subforum is called “lolcows”, referring to the idea that certain people are valued only for the forum’s ability to squeeze mockery out of them.
This is the source of much of the scandalous “truth” about glip and myself.
They don’t lie, not exactly. Instead, they find a single tweet or sentence somewhere, then concoct a story that fills in the details. That way, they can present the original source as “proof”. A casual reader will notice that the source matches their story, and take the story as true. The source doesn’t prove the story, but that’s a subtle distinction.
Sometimes they’ll even claim that the source says something slightly different than it actually does, and still most people won’t notice. Maybe the order of sentences gets reversed. Maybe “this will happen” is spun into “I want this to happen”. Close enough.
Once they have one reason we’re horrible, they can take for granted that we’re horrible, which justifies interpreting the next snippet as proving that we’re horrible. The more horrible we appear to be, the easier it is to justify digging ever deeper.
They collect mountains of these stories, which makes it very difficult to push back. No matter how many individual tales we respond to, there will always be more. It’s actually a well-known poor debating tactic, but it works.
A huge post about how awful someone is looks like a documentary, even though it’s carefully constructed to only “report” on things to make the subject look bad. Things we’ve disproven or apologized for years ago still show up in callouts. Just a few days ago, I saw someone link a post that didn’t even exist any more; it had been replaced by an apology. Neither the person who linked it nor the person they linked it to seemed to notice this.
Juicy gossip spreads very quickly, both among people who love gossip and people who genuinely want to do the right thing. Retractions and corrections are boring; nobody spreads those. Besides, if you spread something awful about someone, and it turns out to be false, what does that say about you? Once you’ve spread gossip, if you want to save face, it’s in your best interest to insist the gossip is true — whether it really is or not.
Other people are discouraged from pushing back on our behalf, since that risks attracting the same scrutiny. Besides, if you try to say someone isn’t abusive, you may get called an abuse apologist. That makes no sense at all, but it doesn’t matter.
And there’s no downside to doing any of this. If something false spreads to thousands of people, who’s accountable for it? Nobody. You can outright make things up about people and nothing bad will happen to you — but if it’s just a misunderstanding, all the better.
Keep all that in mind as you read this.
glip did not refer to autistic people as emotionless robots
Let’s start out with a particularly great example of callouts in action. The log screenshot used as “proof” that glip said this about autistic people actually proves it false, because the conversation was:
pk: know what also
pk: the section on sociopaths was creepy
pk: they’re like emotionless robots
glip/eevee didn’t really self-diagnose as autistic
It’s weird to be accused both of thinking we’re autistic and of insulting autistic people.
But no, not really? We’ve both observed that lists of symptoms are conspicuously familiar. We don’t make any effort to call ourselves autistic, we don’t claim to know anything about autism, and our lives haven’t changed as a result of this observation.
I don’t really get why people care about self-diagnosis anyway. I “self-diagnosed” with ADD before going to a psych who then regular-diagnosed me with ADD and gave me magic brain pills for it.
eevee did not put glip’s boobs online
Another good example, though I don’t think this ever spread beyond the confines of the forum thread.
I have a public filedump, full of files. One file is called “bewbs.jpg”, and unsurprisingly is a photo of some boobs. Someone assumed the photo was of glip’s boobs, and so it became truth.
Surprise! It’s not. I don’t know who’s in the photo. It’s some image I found online, probably over a decade ago. I don’t have the slightest idea why I uploaded it. You can even check out the metadata and see that it was saved from Photoshop 4, which I’ve never used. Also, Photoshop 5 came out in 1998, when glip was 8, so… prooobably not them.
our cats poop a lot i guess
No, seriously, I’ve heard this complaint. Our cats do poop a lot, but I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to say about us, or what we’re supposed to do about it. Corks?
glip is not abusive
The “abusive” label is usually ascribed to a massive callout post by PengoSolvent, but he never said that. He did say “potentially abusive”, but left the conclusion up in the air. The difference seems significant.
Oh, and he later recanted, and he’s now on good terms with glip. Turns out it was all a series of misunderstandings.
Also, I’ve been dating glip for nearly a decade now and I’m pretty happy with them, but for some reason, nobody seems to think that counts for anything.
fieldoftheother’s level 100 post is bad
glip is not trying to get kids to see their porn
I’ve seen a couple people cite this line from the Discord, claiming it means glip wants 13-year-olds to read forflor:
my legacy will be 13 year olds secretly reading forbiddenflora and realizing they’re gay and/or trans
But this was said because people were talking about having themselves been young teenagers who secretly looked at porn and realized they were gay or trans. It was a tongue-in-cheek observation: teenagers will look at porn one way or another, and if they read forflor, its themes may very well jostle some realizations.
I’ve also been told that glip must want everyone who reads the main comic to also read the porn, because they put character development in the porn. But if that were the case, why would they have the sites separate in the first place? How would anyone even know there’s porn, just from reading the main site? The only place that even comes close to linking is in a heavily-disclaimered blurb at the bottom of a few character profiles, on the volunteer-edited wiki, which neither of us even knew about until someone told me in response to this very post. This makes no sense as a master scheme.
The truth is much more mundane: glip feels attached to their characters and likes to make comics with character development.
It is true that glip doesn’t care if teenagers seek out their porn. I don’t care either? We’re not your parents, and we have no way of stopping determined horny teens anyway. It’s tagged and separated so people who don’t want to see it don’t have to, but if you’re trying to seek out porn then that’s your own business. Just, uh, please don’t try to talk to us about it, that’s super weird.
glip drew a porn comic with an underage character, but…
This is true. They later took the comic down, and they’ve since talked about how it was a way of wrangling with their own experiences with CSA.
glip is not transphobic
I think people say glip is transphobic because their comic has a girl with a dick who doesn’t hate her dick?
Well, er, newsflash: not all trans girls hate their dicks? It seems like this complaint is implying glip should only depict stereotypical self-hating trans characters, and I don’t really understand how that’s any kind of improvement.
Ironically, I’ve seen this claimed multiple times by people who refer to glip with the wrong pronoun.
glip’s irc does not prey on children
Someone we knew as spaggledagger claimed that people hit strongly on her on our IRC, despite knowing that she was only 13 and had never had any kind of sexual interaction. She also claimed to have gone to the police and asked them some details.
I’ve been over this before, but the short version is:
She never mentioned she was 13 until the day she left the IRC for good (because of alleged ageism on our part — she’d invited a friend and the two of them were being incredibly disruptive). On the contrary, she made frequent reference to drinking and having had sex, so by all accounts she presented herself as an adult.
The thing she says the police told her is technobabble. It makes no sense at all.
We cannot find any shred of evidence of the conversations she says she had. However, we did find one thing she claimed was said to her — it was in public, and wasn’t directed at her at all.
She mentioned having lied to get an ex-boyfriend in trouble. We also got a message from the moderator of another small community who’d interacted with her before, warning us that she tried to get back at them for banning her by claiming elsewhere that she’d been abused.
She claimed to be paranoid because we mentioned living near her, but she told us where she lived, after someone else in the channel mentioned living in the same area. We’ve never lived anywhere near either of them.
So this was someone with (by her own admission!) a history of lying to screw over older people, who never told us her age, who supposedly got incomprehensible advice from police, and whose few concrete details were completely wrong.
This particular claim appears to be a total fabrication. To get back at us for not wanting her friend around, I guess?
eevee does not support legalizing child porn
I once read an article that argued for it, and I said “I’m not sure I disagree” — referring to the argument, which was that outlawing a photo of one particular kind of crime was inconsistent. I’m bothered by inconsistency, but obviously it wasn’t right to just legalize child porn, therefore the argument must be wrong. So I thought about it out loud.
That’s why I also asked someone why a photo of a particular type of crime should be illegal. It wasn’t rhetorical; I genuinely wanted to know what the other person thought about the inconsistency.
I wasn’t especially clear about this at the time, and it didn’t occur to me that my lazy phrasing could be taken as active support for abolishing the law. It was also pretty insensitive to treat a serious topic like debate club — especially one that almost certainly had impacted some of my audience. I know I upset a couple people, and I’m sorry for that.
The tweets have since been dug up and transformed via a game of telephone to “supports legalizing child porn”, “has talked extensively about legalizing child porn”, and straight up “is a pedophile”. Sorry, no. I just like nitpicking, and I made a very poor choice of thing to nitpick.
I’ve also tweeted about this before.
eevee is not trying to help kids to look at porn
In a FurAffinity journal from 2009, I played armchair lawyer over FA’s handling of minors and their access to porn. FA had (and, I assume, still has?) a policy that if an admin finds out a user is underage, their account will be prevented from seeing porn — “agelocked” — until they turn 18. This was usually said to be for legal reasons. I was saying there weren’t any legal reasons.
The claim is thus that I wanted teenagers to look at porn for some kind of nefarious reasons. I don’t know what those reasons could be? I didn’t even draw porn at the time, so it’s not like I was trying to lure anybody in or whatever. My actual motives were much more mundane:
I like nitpicking. See above.
I’d seen a few cases where people had done some very invasive snooping to find someone’s age. I thought that kind of near-stalking — especially targeted at someone already suspected to be underage — was pretty creepy, and I saw the policy as encouraging it.
glip had been drawing porn since they were 16, mostly in the form of commissions, and at one point had been agelocked. They were 19 when I made the post, so it was still relatively fresh in my mind, and I was annoyed that the policy had landed squarely on glip’s main source of income.
(That said, FA is a rickety thing, and I don’t think they’d ever tried to agelock a porn artist before. I believe the result was that glip could still post porn, but then not see their own work. I don’t know if that was ever fixed.)
eevee did not let her cat die rather than give him medicine
I heard this one second-hand so I don’t know exactly what’s being said, but regardless I am fucking livid about it. It boils down to a sentence from my old tumblr:
given that atenolol’s most common side effect is lethargy and styx already spends most of his time asleep i don’t think i’m going to do this
My cat, Styx, started rapidly losing weight around the beginning of April. I spent the next month and several thousand dollars being shuttled between vets, trying to find a cause. At one point I was sent to a cardiologist, who — shockingly — diagnosed him with a heart condition.
He was prescribed atenolol, a beta blocker and the usual treatment for the heart condition. I was hesitant to give it to him, since also on the table was FIP — a disease with no cure and a life expectancy measured in days. Beta blockers can cause lethargy, Styx was already sleeping most of the time, and I didn’t want to cost him his last few waking hours for no reason.
I decided to wait a few days for the vet’s formal diagnosis. What I got was the post linked above, saying the most likely cause was FIP; the heart condition wasn’t even on the list. So, yes, I decided against the vet’s recommendation, and did not give him the medication for the condition he probably didn’t have that wouldn’t have affected him until years later anyway. There was never any indication that the atenolol would’ve helped his FIP in any way; I interpreted the vet’s advice as being just in case he had the heart condition instead.
A week later, the vet finally started talking about looking into experimental treatments for FIP — a full ten days after the first mention of a disease that can kill cats in as much time.
Four days after that, we buried the cat I loved. He’d just been sitting in pools of his own diarrhea — the same thing that had ultimately led a vet to recommend we put down our elderly cat.
That month was by far the worst thing I’ve ever been through. I did everything I could think to do, burned through cash, spent every waking moment with him, and it wasn’t enough. I still can’t reread his eulogy; it’s the only thing that makes me cry.
Extremely cool that some jerks who are desperate for a reason to hate me are now trying to use my dead cat against me.
eevee/glip are not… usually… mean online
It’s not uncommon to see people calling us super mean based on a tweet thread that they’ve carefully cropped to remove the part where the other person was being an asshole. Maybe check for that first.
We get enough assholery that we have fairly low bars for who qualifies as an asshole, too, so there might be false positives. If that’s you, ah, sorry. We try our best!
But also, it’s common for someone to be a dick while feigning politeness, and we tend to have little patience for that, whereas other people have seemingly infinite patience for it. If you see us snapping for seemingly no reason, we probably got a very different read off of someone.
Final thoughts
I’m sure there’s more, but hopefully this is enough that you’re starting to suspect a pattern. Most of what we’re called out for is wildly misinterpreted or misreported just enough to be damning.
These are people who misgender us and use glip’s old name, then call us transphobic in the same breath. They follow our every public move with bated breath, while being largely anonymous or sockpuppets themselves. They show up as one of the top referrers every time I publish a game on itch. They’ve dug up a comment I made on a friend’s LiveJournal from 2004 and implied nefarious explanations. They archived the entire “styx” tag on my old Tumblr, meaning they read everything I went through and their only takeaway was some new “dirt”. They’ve taken the worst things that have ever happened to both glip and I, and used them as blunt weapons to say we’re awful. They put this crap in the Tumblr floraverse tag, inflicting it on people who just want to share fanart. They hide in our IRC and our Discord, waiting for new logs they can post and reinterpret. Only completely locked-down spaces are safe from their obsessive eyes, and they openly speculate about what happens behind closed doors as well.
Does this sound like a reasonable way to behave? If a single person acted this way towards someone else, anyone would be rightly horrified — this is straight up stalking. But people reblog their callouts and never question their tactics. I guess stalking is okay if we “deserve” it, and we deserve it because we’re awful, and you know we’re awful thanks to the stalking.
Here’s my question: if they know all their existing stuff is true, why do they keep looking? Ostensibly they believe that we’re both proven to be complete monsters, so what else are they hoping to find? Do you think I accidentally tweeted a confession to a murder? Does my old MySpace contain the plans for an orbital superlaser?
Or look at it this way: who have we hurt in the however many years this has been going on? Where are all the actual victims of our cruelty? Who has been protected by this muckraking, and from what?
They have no interest in what’s true, only in what’s titillating. It’s right there in the name of the forum: “lolcows”, not “investigative journalism”.
And, hey. If you want to hate us for actual reasons, please go ahead. I’m thoughtless and insensitive at times, and I’m bad at maintaining friendships. glip is short with anyone who appears to be acting in bad faith. We both fuck up sometimes. If any of that has put you off, fine. If you think we’re insufficiently horrified by the idea of a 17-year-old somewhere sneakily looking at a drawing of a boob, sure, hate us for that too.
But don’t make stuff up to fulfill your power fantasy of defending the world from a cartoon villain. Yeah, you — I’m sure a bunch of Kiwi folks are eating up every word of this post simply because I’ve written it. Hot tip: the first thing to enter your brain is not automatically the truth. How cruel are you being if you’re wrong?