Suedeltica

Regardless of where one falls on the “it’s gross to gloat over any person’s death” ↔️”lol let’s put more billionaires at the bottom of the ocean” spectrum, it’s pretty damn disturbing to imagine human beings aboard that contraption, thousands of feet below the surface. What a misbegotten, miserable, wasteful endeavor.

There’s been kind of a “last week of school before summer vacation” vibe, which I suspect is related in part to the overall weirdness of this moment as reddit partially collapses and the Fediverse figures out how to absorb the influx of new users and, I dunno, I figure everyone is just feeling kind of impish and punchy.

Anyway I’m a humorless old person and unfond of scatological humor in general, so I emphatically share your sentiment. I suspect it’ll die down shortly, though. In the meantime I hope the literal shitposters are at least enjoying themselves. Everybody’s gotta blow off steam from time to time.

I will return anything sent to me in an Amazon package.

Ooh, that’s a good one. I might need to adopt this policy.

Behind the Bastards: a Terrible Story About the Internet. Two parts, with guest Margaret Killjoy.

5/10/22 Part One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000560258046

5/12/22 Part Two: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000560735697

Like I said, this isn’t actually about furries, but a lot of the “how” in this saga can, I think, be applied to the rise of anti-furridom in the early-mid aughts. Maybe some of the “why,” too.

(And seriously, proceed with caution. It’s an upsetting story rife with mentions of child abuse, ableism, sexual assault, elder abuse, racism, transphobia, suicide, stalking/harassment—I’m sure I’m leaving things out; be advised it’s rough. That said, it’s well done imho and worth a listen if you want a better understanding of how the internet got the way it is.)

I think there was a wide and deep vein of “look at these fucking weirdos” that shaped a lot of early aughts internet gathering places. I’m thinking of Something Awful in particular but the phenomenon was certainly a lot more widespread than SA.

While “look at these fucking weirdos” was by no means confined to dunking on furries, I feel like for whatever reason furries kind of became the highest profile subculture to be brought to wider, mainstream attention—and derision—during this era. I vividly remember poking around on SA when I was in college circa 2003-04 and there was a lot of anti-furry sentiment (much of it grounded in the assumption that for all furries everywhere furridom was exclusively a sex thing.) Eventually that anti-furry sentiment was felt across the internet. LiveJournal, for example, was home to a lot of furries but also to a lot of furry-hating trolls.

The internet in the first decade of the new millennium was a deeply weird place. For a good (though extremely distressing!) overview of how and why places like SA became what they did, the Behind the Bastards series on Chris Chan is solid. It’s not furry-related, but a similar “let’s gather around and gawk at and eventually harass and provoke this fucking weirdo” thing played out in Chris Chan’s “discovery” by Something Awful. I’ll put a link below with a caveat that basically every type of content warning you can imagine applies to these episodes , though imho Robert Evans and Margaret Killjoy handle the Chris Chan story with as much sensitivity and compassion as one could hope.

Oh yeah, that one haunts me. Such an unusual, eerie case. I hope her family gets real answers someday. What a nightmare.

Who could have possibly foreseen

Why Canada? The artice says Netflix also used Canada to test its password sharing changes as well so it seems Canadians are a testing ground for Netflix for some reason

Well, Canadians have many biological similarities to humans, so they’re good candidates for a variety of experiments

Darling! I endorse this.

There’s a lot about OceanGate that confuses and alarms me but the thing on my mind this afternoon is why there isn’t any way for the people inside to get out without an external crew. That just seems insane—all those ways to theoretically ensure the Titan makes it to the surface in case of emergency but then you just bob there, oxygen running out, too bad? (And the submersible is white?! Not neon orange?? I hate everything about this.)

He went on to gain notoriety online, with Twitter banning him for saying women should "bear some responsibility" for being sexually assaulted. He has since been reinstated.

Super cool, good job Twitter.

Fuck this guy. Hope he’s convicted.

Yeah this sounds like a bespoke Hell created just for me in case I am very, very evil in this lifetime. Inconceivable that people would pay actual money to experience this. :(