Here’s a really good example of what not to tag someone’s artwork with!
So how would you tag it?
I don’t see what is wrong with this. They are the ones spreading your work around in the first place. Who really gives a fuck how people tag shit? I find it petty if one would bitch about that. You don’t get to dictate what people do just because you made the art. Either deal with it or don’t use the website because people will tag whatever they like. Oh you can just do the following…Wait for it. It is a doozy… Move on.
i love when people make exasperated posts on the internet, haughtily lecturing other people on how they shouldn’t make exasperated posts on the internet
omg
you guys
9/11 wouldn’t have happened if we’d just never invented planes
I don’t think they mean caring less makes you win, they just mean handling it in a mature way because all the see is a “tantrum.” There are other ways to go about this.
yes, and the implication is that the “mature way” doesn’t involve expressing annoyance or frustration in any visible way. i.e., it’s “mature” (and thus preferable) to smother evidence of emotion.
this is really just the same charade, one level removed. people call her immature, so other people feel the need to chime in “well they wouldn’t have called you immature if you’d just…”
As a fellow artist I totally understand that in which you are feeling. But it's sad to see both of you not acting like grown adults and resolving the issue in a civil manner rather than making it widely publicized among both of your fans.
You absolutely do not understand the situation if you think that is what is happening, nor have you read any of the posts I’ve been making or processed them enough to realize what either of us said.
1) I reported the art which he had no permission to use via the Youtube system. I used the given system of the website to remove the problem material. I do not see that as anything but an “adult” way to handle it.
2) I vented about my art being used unsourced, uncredited, no permission, naming no one after he approached me in an email asking me to revoke the claim. I said I needed time to think of a reply to his email. I did not name him, let me stress again. I was simply flustered over the situation.
3) He was also venting that another video got removed and he didn’t know if it was due to a false claim or not, but he accidentally made the mistake of naming me after he found out I made it and after I didn’t immediately reply to the email.
4) I spent a few hours trying to think of the best solution before I approached him about it — again, I didn’t bring him into the situation, his fans did and so did he, and he accidentally brought me into it by naming me.
5) I’m still getting really ill-informed asks that I want nothing to do with from people who haven’t read it over or else they wouldn’t be sending asks just like what you’ve sent.
6) We actually did resolve it in a civil manner last night, which you would know had you read the posts before sending this ask.
Please do not act like you understand the situation when a) you’re not me, you’re not him, and b) you haven’t even read over everything.
There is probably not a single thing more agitating than being told “Yeah you guys are being so immature” by someone demonstrating how little they paid attention to what happened.
can we talk about how someone sent “UGH STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS IN PUBLIC” directly to your primary blog using the mechanism that produces public posts by default
Please think for a moment about how this question comes across. Presented within the same breath is the idea that a lady with a high sex drive = childhood issues. That’s a little messed up.
Childhood issues can cause all sorts of things from high to low sex drive, but that definitely should not be the first idea that comes to your mind when someone has a high sex drive. It’s somewhat offensive, you know?
omtaydover said: The question didnt seem all that messed up. Could have been answered a been more passively.
Are you even kidding me? I answered this extremely passively compared to how agitated it made me that someone would ask a question like this. The question may not have been in an aggressive tone, but it was REALLY a messed up question to be asking. Do you even have any idea how many times I’ve heard through the years that if a woman has a sex drive, something must be wrong? That something is fucked up with *her*? No one ever asks things like this about men, or to do with men and a sex drive. I’ve never heard anyone do it, in any case.
Reread my reply and tell me if that’s aggressive at all. You’d be wrong if you said it was. Telling someone their behavior is problematic (and as an aside contributes to a sexist view that needs to be stomped out) should not be done super passively. It was already toned down a lot because this person asks a lot of questions and I didn’t think they meant offense, even if it was offensive.
I’m really, really put off by your reply saying it could have been answered more passively. No, it shouldn’t have. I could have been more assertive and it would have been absolutely fine still. I’m really tired of people associating women liking sex with ~some sort of problem~ and I think I stated it just fine while not specifically making the person who asked the question feel like they were being attacked.
All in all I’m ultra peeved that you think the message was too aggressive when it was already super cut back from what I REALLY wanted to say.
Please don’t even bother replying to my posts if this is what you’re bringing to the table. If someone says something offensive, I don’t care if their feelings get hurt when I tell them it’s offensive. I personally found the question offensive, even if I didn’t think the person meant to do that. That is why I was polite in my reply. I’m seething that you think even that reply isn’t good enough, as if I have to become a docile little lady to fucking tell someone “hey what you just said actually upset me personally because I actually have dealt with dozens of people thinking something is wrong with me because I like sex”.
Fuck off.
i like how, yet again, the original question turned out to be offensive, but it’s mel who needs to be nicer
there’s a post going around that i want to address—i’m the author of the text file in the post in question (and thus the one who took the file down cause i really did NEED to make this post!)
okay, i don’t want to be “that guy” and i will admit that this post is going to be very “white knight”y, but I really feel quite uncomfortable about everyone dogpiling poor old ren, and acting as if creating a lynch mob based on one side’s account was somehow the mature and sensible thing to do
hold up do you even know what lynching IS
it is murder by mob committed against someone who is not towing the party line
you are comparing this to people’s discussion about someone who, at the most charitable, severely violated someone else’s personal space
so the implication here is that even talking about what the transgressor is accused of having done is morally reprehensible
this is the first thing it occurs to you to say. no mention of whether what e did was actually bad. no, people are talking, and that just won’t do.
rather than questioning why private boundry disputes are being aired in public in the first place.
Surely this should be dealt with between nishi and reyn, as it is kind of important that intimate partners should feel comfortable with one another in their personal bubbles. That’s something that really has to be sorted out in such a relatiosnship, no?
in other words, someone who is sexually assaulted should shut up about it and talk it out with the assaulter?
how does this sound remotely reasonable to you
you are prioritizing someone’s reputation over someone’s body
It’s very easy to dehumanize someone when you’re behind a computer screen and a mob, but can people please stop acting like renard isn’t a person themselves, with dreams, hopes, aspirations, thoughts and feelings. As i understand he already feels bad enough about the situation, he doesn’t need your help to feel as such
stalin loved cowboy movies and was amazing at billiards
What I see is a bunch of people who don’t know him (admitedly, I have only briefly made his aquitance), making some pretty wild assumptions.
what on earth does “knowing” someone have to do with it
oh gosh that dude just ran over my cat but oh i don’t know him so who am i to judge him for his actions instead of for what his friends say about him
(furthermore, appologies about pronouns, but their doesn’t really fit into a lot of parts of speech in a natural fashion, i respect gender neutral folk! But english has a syntax that must be respected too. :>)
ok you are a huge fucking jackass fyi
i don’t know how you can lecture everyone about condemning someone they don’t know, and then turn around and in the same fucking breath admit you don’t give a crap about eir pronoun preferences because it makes writing your bad post a little harder
let us take a magical adventure of discovery to find out why
full disclosure: i am a bitter old grump
more useful disclosure: if this gets reblogged everywhere for some reason, and you don’t know my qualifications, they are: i am good at computers and no one else in this story is
Announcing Fur Affinity: Project Phoenix
Fur Affinity is happy to announce that the next version of furaffinity.net is in active development. Our goal is simple, to provide you with a better experience that can be sustained and improved upon for years to come.
some other times they have been happy to announce this, according to my handy timeline:
June 2006: announced Ferrox 2, the second (?) attempt to rewrite FA from scratch
Sep 2007: call for devs for Ferrox 3, the third attempt to rewrite FA from scratch
Jun 2009: previewed a new UI design created by Zaush, which had apparently been designed while Ferrox 3 was in progress, without a word to the Ferrox devs who had also been trying to make a design
Mar 2010: some clueless nimrod starts working on a fourth attempt to rewrite FA from scratch, apparently blessed by FA, though this was never mentioned publicly and the developer was never listed as on staff
Jan 2011: announced a designer would soon be hired to finish the new UI, now several years old and unchanged since it was first previewed
Jan 2014: previewed the new UI, which is actually just a different page of the same fucking design from five years ago, except now the idiot dudebro designer is also playing developer
not to mention the features that have been promised several times over the past seven years, often multiple times, in a cycle of “we’ll do” … “we’ll have a beta soon” … forgotten and never mentioned again
prints
fine-grained filtering by subject matter
gallery folders
web hosting
a URL shortener
supporter ribbons
but worst of all is that people are still dumb enough not just to fall for the snake-oil, but to get all smarmy at others for calling it out as snake-oil. dragoneer has promised myriad things over the past eight years and delivered fucking none of them. the only things FA ever gets are either microscopic improvements that should take a few hours to fix, or the resurrection of features it already had, after they’ve been disabled for so long that they seem new again.
so if you are running around sighing melodramatically about how it’s a free site and how dare anyone complain, fuck you, douchenugget. how about i sock you in your dumb fucking mouth for free. apparently being lied to and strung along for almost a decade is totally fine if it’s free (even when an entire community is basing its business model on the platform), so i don’t see why the same shouldn’t apply to my little fuzzy fist in your face
moving right along
To reach this goal, we will be rewriting Fur Affinity from the ground up.
i know i just said this but here’s the part where i’m super extra bitter
see i was on the dev team for Ferrox 3. i wrote the bulk of it. i was the lead dev for a while after the original guy quit. i learned Python from that project.
but nobody cared. that’s the impression that sticks with me the most. nobody really had any input, except for dragoneer’s extremely passive-aggressive resistance on occasion.
the thing was intended to be open source from the start, but it took over a year for that to actually happen. a year! do you know how long it takes to put code on the internet like fucking twenty seconds. i don’t even remember what took so long. i’d hardly believe it except i wrote it in this timeline and i assume i know what i’m talking about.
that whole zaush design would’ve been pretty useful, since i’m a pretty amateur designer and had far less of an eye for subtlety back then. (compare ferrox design with the final design for squiggle. thumbnails are broken there, but you get the idea.) but no one mentioned it to me. or anyone. because dragoneer is super paranoid.
also the rest of the staff gossipped about what a pain in the ass i was while i wasn’t around, largely for being an argumentative ass about ferrox design and features on the forums. which i totally was, and which i sort of try to be less often in my old age. but, you know, at least other people on the forums showed some interest
which brings me to the super extra bitter part
ferrox was open source, right. it even attracted a couple contributors that way, one of whom did an incredible amount of work on floof/squiggle later on, and whom i’m eternally grateful towards (and guilty towards, since wow that’s a lot of work to do for things that were never finished). the important part here is that the code is free for anyone to use and work on. someone even stuck it on github recently. hell, one of the other developers is still on FA staff to this day
so
why have there been at least two more attempts to start from scratch in the past four years?
ferrox had a whole lot of plumbing in place. it was rapidly approaching pretty darn usable. i put a whole lot of effort into writing a database migrator that even fixed data problems (e.g.: fucked up threading incomments) and which was like 90% done.
and they never finished it. or even tried. the remaining dev never worked on it again after a few months. (i don’t even know wtf he does for them.) none of the talks of hiring a developer have mentioned hiring someone to finish the code they already have. ferrox 3 was, and is, the closest they have ever gotten to a functioning replacement for FA, and they had so little interest in it that they have let it rot all this time.
which is why this announcement is such a joke.
oh, man, i hate the “hire a developer” schtick too. for two reasons.
the other is more philosophical, and i always wish i could find the link for this, but: it turns out that paying someone for a job e already wants to do can ruin the interest in it. if someone does something for free, it’s out of belief and conviction and joy and all those warm fuzzies. if you starting handing out material rewards, it becomes about the amount of the rewards, and the activity itself becomes less enjoyable. there was even a recent study where they watched little kids who did art stuff in their free time in school; they gave half of them a reward for doing art stuff, and that half ended up spending less time doing art stuff in their free time later. because it stopped being about passion and started being about what can i get out of it. for a niche community site like FA, that is the last thing you want.
jesus christ we’re only on the second paragraph still
Codenamed Project Phoenix, we’re able to take full advantage of new technologies that have emerged since Fur Affinity’s birth
lol
l o l
i got spoiled on this because i saw the forums thread before this announcement
are you ready for this
the “new technologies that have emerged since Fur Affinity’s birth”
they are talking about node.js
they are talking about javascript
javascript is the cutting-edge new technology that will revolutionize FA
i cannot get over how fucking absurd this is
the person who wrote this cannot possibly have any comprehension of what is actually going on
WHICH IS another problem they’ve got over there: the most competent tech is yak, and he is not very competent. he is holding things together with duct tape and fishing wire. and he constantly says he’s working on getting more people (no, seriously, it’s been like three years since i first saw him say this), but he’s waiting on dragoneer to approve people. and dragoneer says separately and elsewhere that he has no idea what’s going on and no one will tell him, because he is a hapless victim who only owns the fucking site and pays for everything.
shockingly, not a lot gets done
ensuring the site is easily maintained and extended upon for years to come.
i like the key word “easily” in here, implying that the site has been maintained and extended ever, at all
and again, this is javascript. javascript will make the site easy to maintain
javascript
javascript
We’re also working on a visual refresh, improving the overall look and feel, as well as the user experience.
i stress that this is the same visual refresh as was first unveiled almost five years ago
now, though, we have a mockup of the notes page, which looks kind of like someone wanted to copy Outlook but with even worse colors. i think he spent longer on those sweet web 2.0 monochrome icons
this actually looks worse than the 2009 design, which at least used, like… a color
i keep rereading this sentence and it just makes me angry somewhere in my caveman parts. it has a slick oily gloss of PR, using words that sound like things a Serious Business would say, without actually conveying anything. but it’s not just not conveying anything; the author doesn’t actually know what to convey. there is nothing to be said, because there is nothing going on.
consider that usually an unveiling of a new design—of anything—comes with some commentary by the designer. because people tend to be proud of good work they do, and they want to walk you through the things they have done, and what led them to those decisions, and why they think those decisions are good, and how they hope it’ll work better for you.
i mean, to pick an arbitrary example, look at this most recent github blog post that happens to have screenshots in it. it’s actually way shorter than most of their unveilings, but still infinitely more genuine than FA’s quote above. they sound like they are actually talking about the thing in the screenshot, like they care about it. hell, they sound like they’ve used it. (which they have. github dogfoods everything.) they say what it is, what it can do for you, where to find it, and that they’re happy to have done it.
now, not everyone blogs about every design change they make. but generally you either see a post made by someone who is genuinely attached to the work, or just a silent change. there’s not a lot of middle ground.
except with FA, where there’s a faint obligation to post something (because that’s what you do, and it’s way easier than actually getting the work done), but nothing to say about it. because no one is invested, really. no one who has any actual political power also has any creative or technical power. so all that comes out is a jumble of appropriate-sounding words, with no heart behind any of them.
how are they improving the user experience? what do they even think that means? no one knows, and no one cares, as long as it sounds good.
and it must sound good, because there are people saying the new ui looks amazing and they can’t wait for it
ho ho
yes they can
We’ll be holding our design to a higher standard to ensure that Fur Affinity provides ease of use while retaining high visual appeal.
“holding our design to a higher standard” would seem to suggest that the design is currently ugly as sin
and yet, “high visual appeal”
this is some sweet doubletalk
does “ensure [it] provides ease of use” mean it currently doesn’t, or that it should continue to do so?
this is even more hollow than before; it doesn’t mean anything at all!
Fur Affinity relies on its community, and it’s because of you that we’re all here today. We’d like to thank you for your patience and your faith.
you condescending prick. the best way to show gratitude for patience and faith (called collectively “goodwill”, a thing so valuable that real companies list it on their balance sheets and give it a dollar value) is to not keep yanking chains.
From today, we’re going to be posting regular updates regarding this project and the site in general.
i swear to god this is the sixth time this has been said, at least.
no one there—
ok, let’s be honest, this is pretty much all dragoneer
dragoneer does not seem to grasp that promising things does not magically make them come true
much better than to promise regular updates is to just start fucking doing something, so that it becomes a natural habit
e.g. look at me, i am already getting way more in the habit of tumbling jumbled thoughts, and in turn i’ve made a bit more headway in blogging For Real
tweet design revisions. keep a dev journal. open source the fucking codebase or something so people can actually see what is happening instead of having to chug on this PR swill
or maybe that’s it. i really do think dragoneer is paranoid (generally) about FA and his control over it, and this is another symptom: he does not want anyone to know what’s going on unless it goes through him first
2014 is a new year for us, and we want to increase transparency and trust for all aspects of the administration.
no one cares what you want
just do it
lol who am i kidding half the comments are from people who are genuinely excited to be promised all these things. are y'all new here or just really forgetful i really don’t know
i think “transparency” has come up before, but like most PR, dragoneer doesn’t seem to understand what it means. it means people can see inside, and he has never made the slightest iota of effort to make that happen. where did all those furocity admins go, i wonder? was that ever even discussed publicly? so many things are kept hush-hush as “site business”, like anyone gives a damn about the business secrets of Fur Affinity™
About Fur Affinity: Fur Affinity was created in 2005 as an outlet for creative expression within the furry community. Today it continues to be the largest active community site for the furry fandom.
are you serious, are you actually trying to write a press release
About the Team:
oh my jesus lord you are
We’ve established a team experienced in product management, UI, and the development of large-scale web applications.
i’ll believe that when i—
Dragoneer: Owner and head admin of Fur Affinity, Dragoneer has been with FA since 2005. He manages the organization as a whole as part of his day-to-day responsibilities. For Project Phoenix, he provides top-level guidance and direction to ensure the project meets the organization’s needs and vision for the future of FA.
top-level guidance and direction
where the fuck was any of that the last four fucking rewrites
what the fuck experience does dragoneer have in product management? he BOUGHT the current incarnation of FA, and under his leadership, four software projects have gotten confused and lost and ultimately failed
here, right here, is your opportunity to be transparent. and that you didn’t even think of it while writing means you have no idea what transparency is.
what are the “organization’s needs and vision for the future”?
seriously, what are they? what does this Phoenix project actually intend to do? anything concrete. anything at all.
you don’t have a fucking clue. and if you did, you wouldn’t say. and if you did say, it wouldn’t happen anyway!
Adam Wan: Also known in the fandom as Zaush. Development lead for the new Fur Affinity. Adam has over 11 years of experience in various technical fields such as web development, game engine development, UX, and applications for integrated systems. Lately his work has been related to user experience, complex intranet tools, and integrated applications.
for the less technical in the audience, “intranet” means “only works with IE6”
for the even less technical in the audience, every time i say “for the less technical in the audience”, i am about to make a really dumb technical joke
this guy is Sir Rapist
or maybe he’s not a rapist but honestly i do not give a fuck
if you are accused of rape and your response is to tweet “don’t stick your dick in crazy!” in the most dudebro fashion imagineable, even if you did absolutely nothing wrong, you are still an abomination of a human being for being incapable of taking this seriously for even a picosecond
but most appalling at all is that people are showing up to defend him, to say that hey sometimes people do lie about rape and assault
and that is true: sometimes they do
however let us consider the example you are setting here
you are telling any charismatic popular person in a position of power that, hey, it’s fine to lean across the line. maybe even cross it a bit. maybe even cross it entirely. because even if we find out, we’ll be here to cast doubt on the unknown nobody you chose to target.
i.e. you are making it easy to shrug off accusations of rape, which makes it easier to get away with rape. (this wasn’t even an accusation; it was uncovered only because FA’s entire private message database leaked.) so, you know, fuck you with the horse you rode in on.
ctrlaltdel123: Developer working under Adam Wan to help with the new Fur Affinity. He has experience designing, implementing, and testing real-time software systems and web applications.
who the fuck is this? the only internet presence he even has is the same four pictures of an oversaturated blue mewtwo posted several places
Nanuk: Product and marketing lead for the new Fur Affinity. Nanuk has experience managing and marketing products for large scale web properties. He works to help organize planning and development of the new Fur Affinity, while maintaining transparency with the community.
i don’t know who this is either but he seems to have been doing a lot of damage control on the announcement thread, so i guess he might actually do the thing his role is for
one of his earliest comments is this gem, responding to an early question about whether the project will be open source:
While a proprietary nature of code is one aspect when deciding whether or not to make a project open source or not, it often boils down to the flexibility that can be afforded for a closed-source codebase as opposed to an open source codebase. The code can be specifically tailored for FA in every aspect, as opposed to a generic image board software, of which countless numbers of open-source alternatives exist online.
this is fucking insane. it doesn’t make any sense at all, made all the worst by being written to sound like it’s supposed to. in fact it appears so coherent that i almost suspect it’s an outright lie.
you don’t have to make your app be super generic to be open source.
you know firefox’s extension website? addons.mozilla.org? well here it is. who the fuck is ever going to need to run that except mozilla? fucking nobody. but they release the source anyway, because that’s what they do. they release the source to everything.
it goes without saying, of course, (and here i’m about to say it again) that this cannot possibly be true since FA has already had a rewrite attempt that was open source.
marketing lead indeed
anyway
i don’t know how to end long-winded intense posts
it always feels like i should have some cool conclusion, and i’m bad at those, because i totally just said everything i wanted to say??
basically fuck most of the people involve in this clusterfuck
i wanted to build a cool art site, truly. i even still do
but i do not want to play furry politics and i do not want to play marketer
so i’m going to try improving on regexes instead because at least i know programmers will appreciate programming tools
sorry you guys have to deal with all this nonsense. as an aside to the thing on smarm, ive noticed that smarmy people seem to have this belief that behavior can be unhooked from identity. such as, "well, i know x did all this bad stuff, but hes actually a good guy on the inside, you just have to get to know him!" what a convenient life that must be. you get to act however you like but hey, its OK - its not who you "really are"! where who you "really are" = you around certain people, some times.
yeah uh i don’t know what the hell “good guy” is supposed to mean
people by and large tend to act nicely towards the people they care about most of the time? wow here is your nobel prize in sociology
i am kind of in favor of describing people in terms of what they do rather than what role we imagine they play
also let us stop to consider the subtext of “but he’s a good guy really”, which i think can only go one of two ways really
he’s a good guy, so for him to have acted this way, there must have been extenuating circumstances. in other words, you were asking for it
he’s a good guy to me, and i don’t really care about you in the slightest, so fuck you i got mine
take your pick
valid:
stop bringing up what X did, he apologized for it
valid:
stop bringing up what X did, he did his best to make it better
not valid:
stop bringing up what X did, it makes him feel bad for doing it
Anonymous asked:
oh i think i have missed something important what did mike do i know that he quit the pmd group or something?? i feel so stupid not knowing
oh yes something did happen, and it wasn’t mike quitting - it was him pretending to quit so we’d give him more attention and say he was important, but it turns out he was bluffing (of course) - he lied about me, very openly, and then tried to take it all back so he could go back to abusing and taking advantage of people in the group
okay yeah no please shut the fuck up. both of you are entirely biased on this and it pisses me off. BOTH PARTIES ARE WRONG, NOW GET ON WITH YOUR GODDAMN LIFE. i agree that it was shitty for pk to bring up things from the past, but apparently this mike guy was shitty too. how bout everybody just grow up and leave this alone.
its fucking disgusting that both of you are trying to prove the other is in the wrong, which neither of you can do because youre biased. i dont know shit about pk except drama follows her. i dont know anything about this mike guy either. but i can honestly say from experience that bringing up past damage is not helpful at all.
its rude and fucking bullyingwhen you have such a massive following like pk. i can only imagine how much hate mail this mike guy has received from pks fans. i agree that pk and mike should either have a talk about this and get the laundry all out in the open, or shut up and move on. seriously. youre all supposed to be adults- fuckin act like it.
“Hey uh this guy ruined several lives so I posted about it on my blog”
“Sounds like you’re both jerks so it’s pretty much even, stop talking about it so I don’t have to hear about it”
Anonymous asked:
oh i think i have missed something important what did mike do i know that he quit the pmd group or something?? i feel so stupid not knowing
oh yes something did happen, and it wasn’t mike quitting - it was him pretending to quit so we’d give him more attention and say he was important, but it turns out he was bluffing (of course) - he lied about me, very openly, and then tried to take it all back so he could go back to abusing and taking advantage of people in the group
I never said what he did was RIGHT, but how this is being handled is WRONG. If you just tell him, to his face, instead of in secret IRC channels behind his back or whatever, or public tumblr posts, he’ll probably stop. He might put up a fight but I’m sure he’ll stop. He doesn’t have the same sense of right and wrong as a lot of people. I learned that from actually talking with him patiently and not just getting pissed off. If PK’s method of handling things is to get mad, then take out the anger some other way. Let people experience Mike themselves instead of dealing with the confusion of word-of-mouth. Its not fair to him. He’s a human being just as much as PK, just because he’s done some wrong doesn’t mean he deserves this. This just shows how spiteful and unforgiving you all are.
I’m not replying to this any more though, I just wanted to get out there how frustrating it is to see this constantly brought up. Maybe Mike and PK need to find some closure privately or something or just, I dunno, ignore eachother because this is just ridiculous.
You didn’t say it was wrong, either. You carefully phrased it as “you didn’t handle things the best way either” and “you have every right to be angry with him”. But Mel, well, you have no problem labeling her reaction as disgusting bullying for which she’s lost your respect.
(What on Earth would it take for Mike to lose your respect, I wonder?)
If even you can’t bear to state plainly that Mike did something—anything—wrong, then what hope do I have that Mike himself (who has an off sense of right/wrong) thinks he did anything wrong, and thus has learned anything from it?
Not fair to him? What’s fair to Mel and everyone else? To just suck it up and forget about it, while Mike’s friends actively work to mitigate any backlash he might suffer because oh no it would make him feel bad? I remind you that, to the best of my knowledge, he never made the slightest attempt at reparations or even an apology to a single person.
He still clearly considers her the bad guy in this story. Again, how does that show he’s learned anything at all, if that’s how he regards the person who exposed his “mistakes”?
He’s even still, to this day, with this recent Pommy adventure, weaving tales that aren’t quite complete lies to fit his story of how Mel is a bad guy. So what you’re really asking for is this: Mel should never say anything bad about Mike because he might cry, but Mike can continue twisting the truth to spite Mel until the end of time.
“Spiteful and unforgiving” my ass.
This is, thus, not public shaming. This is a warning.
Because Mike is manipulative and delusional. He refuses to admit his shortcomings or seek help for them. He continues to paint anyone who doesn’t pat him on the back as a villain, and ropes his friends into doing the same. He is a corrosive person to be around, and his genuine demeanor makes him all the more dangerous. And people should probably know about that, so they can stay away before they get suckered in.
Anonymous asked:
oh i think i have missed something important what did mike do i know that he quit the pmd group or something?? i feel so stupid not knowing
oh yes something did happen, and it wasn’t mike quitting - it was him pretending to quit so we’d give him more attention and say he was important, but it turns out he was bluffing (of course) - he lied about me, very openly, and then tried to take it all back so he could go back to abusing and taking advantage of people in the group
oh by the way, I read back over the thing to remind me of why I should still have burning rage and to really relive the moment, and realized I fucking toned down the extent of our shitty conversation
I seriously can’t believe you’re continuously bringing this up? This happened like what, a year ago? Mike drove me crazy back then too but it’s seriously disgusting seeing you still bringing this up like you want Mike’s entire life to be miserable or something. He realized his mistakes. He’s cried so many times over this, feeling so awful for hurting you and losing something that was really important to him. But I guess its not good enough for you? You still just keep being angry and bringing it up, and I can’t believe people don’t notice how horribly toxic and counterproductive it is.
I’ve actually MET Mike, a few times. He’s actually a NICE GUY and a close friend of mine. His friends and family mean everything to him. He comes off as a little odd, but he has an actual social disorder and is stuck at home all the time, alone. All you have to do is be patient and give him time and understanding. I understand you tried, but seeing the logs, you didn’t handle things the best way either.
You have every right to be angry with him, I completely understand that. but this public shaming is straight up bullying at this point. He doesn’t even mention you anymore, at least not around me. He just seems like he wants to move on. He’s learned from the experience. Yet you keep holding onto it. You’re even bringing up private things he trusted you with and bringing it out in public! Wtf!
Mike did some things wrong, but how you’re handling this is terrible too. I’ve lost pretty much all respect for you with how you’re handling this. Please just leave Mike alone and let him move on from this, you should definitely move on too. There is literally no point to keep bringing this up anymore.
Has he realized his mistakes, or has he realized that they bit him in the ass?
Did he go to therapy? Did he stop collecting female artists to encourage them to draw his fantasies? Did he apologize or attempt to make amends for a single thing he has done, to a single person he has hurt? Has he actually shown the slightest shred of a sign that he’s learned anything at all?
Of course not. He’s still telling people (including mutual friends) that Mel is “NG”. This past week. Because in Mike’s world, Mel really is the villain—for calling him out on everything he did wrong. She hurt him, which makes her bad. It doesn’t matter that Mike hurt her and a lot of people around her first, because Mike felt bad, and somehow that’s enough.
Mike drove some people away from Mel’s multi-year project and used other people as a source of fanart. (I’m astounded how many people came out of the woodwork with horror stories once he was fired.) Hell, Mike drove several extremely talented but also timid female artists off the Internet entirely because they didn’t want to deal with him. He told twisted stories to get people on his side, to make everyone agree with him on who was in the wrong: anyone but him.
Meanwhile we’ve had mutual friends turn on us in disgust, even right after Mike’s dismissal, because “he’s had enough”. Oh. Poor Mike. His reaction to pain is to cry, so he gets sympathy. Mel’s reaction to pain is to be angry at whatever’s causing her pain, so who gives a shit, right? How disgusting that she would dare try to hold someone accountable for his manipulative actions over the course of years. That’s just not very nice.
I bet he wants to move on, to forget what he was caught doing, so he can get back to doing it with other people with a clean conscience. Funny how the people causing the harm always want to move on before the people they harmed. Gosh, just forget about what I did you already; I sure have!
Of course he’s a “nice guy”. (Just like every other guy to ever do anything cruel.) Mel was friends with him for years, and he had a trusted position in her project, before all this dirt came out. She thought he was a nice guy, too. She defended him, like you’re doing right now.
What makes you think he’ll be any different this time around?
I’d probably be disappointed/mad too (assuming I don’t care about reference counting) but yelling at them is kinda dickish. So instead I’d be passive-aggressive for a bit instead of trying to change the topic or talking to the others. Or fling peas.
how is being passive-aggressive an improvement! now you’re being a dick and wasting your own time by being passive-aggressive
i know being inconsiderate isn’t something often done on purpose, but it’s kind of weird to suggest that the people who don’t respond considerately are the ones being rude
actually you know maybe this is where mel comes off as abrasive
snapping at someone is inconsiderate, sure, in the sense that it pointedly ignores the person’s feelings. call it “actively” inconsiderate
but forgetting that others at the table have limited time and want to spend it in more fulfilling ways than hearing about taric’s new skin is also inconsiderate, in that it forgets to take someone else into account. call it “passive”.
i suspect a lot of people will merrily let themselves be trampled on forever by passive inconsideration, whether out of politeness, low self-confidence/esteem, giving the benefit of the doubt, or just not wanting to make a fuss. there are all kinds of excuses you can invent for why someone might have forgotten about you. active inconsideration is harder to write off and generally earns some pushback. (as seen here.)
but mel won’t tolerate either. if you claim to be her friend but forget about her in a significant way, you might as well have just slapped her in the face and saved yourself some time.
Anonymous asked:
Thank you for the article on smarm, it was very good. Now that I think about it... a great deal of social justice is very smarmy, isn't it. Not "what you say", but "how you say it"...
actually it’s mostly the reaction to social justice that’s smarmy in my experience, which is where the notion of “tone policing” comes from
there is an awkward and blurry line here of course
sometimes people do get shot down for “tone policing” or “concern trolling” when the speaker really is being pretty abrasive
but then who defines “too” abrasive? it’s not like being angry about imbalances is unjustified; snark is a response in kind
besides, it would seem that people who are polite about hot topics are rather more often just ignored. which is, perhaps, one of the driving forces of smarm: if you were nicer, it would be easier for me to not listen to you at all. by being snarky, you got me all riled up, and now i have to feel things. curse you, feminazis!!
i do wince when it degenerates to “cis people are scum” because i know how that will be received. majority groups are surprisingly tender about being vilified for their group identification (hmm)
but how can you blame someone for feeling that way? imagine if the most horrible parts of your life were inflicted by group A upon you merely for being a member of group B
and this is where the equivocation becomes laughable: if a woman hates or fears men as a group because she’s been assaulted a dozen times by a dozen different men, how is that remotely comparable to a man who is a jerk to women because they’re women
maybe stop being a fucking dickhead to outsiders and it won’t make your tribe keep looking like a bunch of xenophobic assholes
this meandered a little but it is basically the train of thought i went through when wondering whether social justice really did need to be “nicer”
the answer is: i don’t know and it doesn’t matter because people will do what they feel they need to do regardless
also it’s kind of funny how mel-vs-lulz is a microcosm of all this. reactions condemned by the people who caused the reaction first, utter obliviousness to one’s own antagonistic behavior, etc.
shinytirtouga-blog asked:
glitchedpuppet answered:
pixel-necromancer asked:
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Anonymous asked:
andava:
i love when people make exasperated posts on the internet, haughtily lecturing other people on how they shouldn’t make exasperated posts on the internet