A person yells out into the void, on a social media service, ‘if you do X, then fuck you, you’re scum.’

I reply, ‘don’t call me scum.’

The person replies and starts a fight.

People often say, ‘don’t feed the troll.’ But this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because, in this situation, only the troll is allowed to speak. It’s similar to how liberals try to get away from Neo Nazis by avoiding every single bit of terminology that the Nazis use. The Nazis glom on to something, and the liberals abandon it.

Let me give you an example from popular culture, to help you understand this more easily. I’m going to make this more-palatable for you.

The Nazis take shit like the Borg.

Now this is the point where the people reading assume that I’m suggesting pacifism against Nazis. No: what I’m pointing out in this video occurs 1 minute and 7 seconds in:

… I’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back.

Here’s what I’ve seen happen over the past 3 decades, online.

Good people used to populate the Internet. There were assholes, but they were cloistered. And then the more people got to use the Internet, the more they took it for granted, the more general toxicity and negativity invaded the space.

Now the good people are cloistered, but the assholes run free.

I’m not suggested we should have gatekept the Internet better. After all, there also is no ‘we’. I could not have done anything, nor could you have.

What I’m saying, is, the more that the real world began to use the Internet, and the less that the Internet was this curiosity, relegated for use only by ‘nerds’ and social outcasts and misfits, the more everything bad about the real world began to permeate onto the Internet. Now there’s no going back.

Social outcasts used to keep the Internet nice for themselves. Now that they’re beset on all sides by normies, they’ve reacted in such a way where they’ve become spiteful, rageful, vindictive, and territorial, in ways that don’t make any sense. And they have no real way to gatekeep their environments that don’t also hurt they themselves.

‘Don’t feed the troll’ created an environment in which the people causing all the problems were allowed to speak, while the people who caused relatively fewer or no problems, they fell back. They surrendered their territor(ies) online, went to different websites, and became less concentrated. Meanwhile, the Bad People™ got full use of the facilities.

The insane are running the asylum. They have been since 2003. It’s just that, with how widespread Internet use is, it really hasn’t become a problem until quite recently. I’d like to say it started in 2014, to puff myself up and say, ‘I ruined this.’ But I didn’t. And it would’ve happened a different way, anyways.

Not even Chanology was the start.

This is not some blameless phenomenon. People perpetrated this. I had a hand in it, but I did not ruin it by myself. Furthermore, in trying to grow and evolve as a person, when what I did to protect my own ego, something that was once pretty much nonexistent, fragile and easily hurt, caused the largest tantrum spiral I’ve ever seen on the Internet? I offer no apologies.

Somebody told me I was worthless, and that I should kill myself.

And I told them to go fuck themselves.

And everything just unraveled from there.

It is, of course, going to continue. Human beings have no real desire to become better. When they say, ‘do better’, they don’t really mean it. They just want to be mean to one another.

And that’s your problem.

You want to be mean to each other. A lot.

Here’s a secret: when the Tantrum Spiral started in 2014 (and none of you are going to know what I’m referring to, unless you actually know me), I did not tell that person to go fuck themselves.

I said, ‘I don’t deserve to be spoken to, in this way.’ And they took it like I had slapped them in the face and said ‘go fuck yourself’. That’s why I always tell the story like that.

That’s the thing about human beings: you can tell them, ‘good morning’, and they’ll take it as an insult, demanding you tell them, what’s good about it?.

When people say that to me, by the way, I always tell them,

you’re alive. That’s what’s good about it.

Discussing Turtles with Crazy People

My uncle, Ryresai, once told me a story about how he was doing research about turtles, and other turtle-y things. And he was discussing this with someone, who seemed very interested in turtles. He was, in fact, a published author on some sort of turtle-y research.

My uncle is very intelligent. And he’s very passionate.

It was about an hour and 45 minutes in that Ryresai realized that the person he was talking to was insane. Some things started not making sense. And after that, the whole thing started to unravel.

Ryresai suddenly realized that nothing he had said to the man had had any real effect. He was discussing turtles with a crazy person.

The man he was talking to might once have been ‘sane’. Or he might have been something like a savant, where he was good at one thing, but he lacked relevant and useful experience and knowledge of protocol when it came to other things. Or he might have gone insane after he wrote the book.

But even then, there were signs. There were tangents in the book that started to not make sense. But it would almost-always get back on track. A minor derailment; nothing more.

But that’s the thing. Even, if not especially, the smartest of people, they tend towards insanity. I, in particular, chose not to pursue mathematics, because I did not want to develop schizophrenia. (When you’re nine years old and you’re basically the kid that J. shoots in the simulation in Men in Black, you tend to not want to pursue any more advanced informations.)

That is to say, I played the Marathon series on PowerPC Macintosh, and then, I got into Quantum Mechanics/Physics, pretty deeply.

You don’t wanna do that when your balls haven’t even dropped.

But, anyways. Jokes aside, there is one thing I want to tell you about all of this, that I want to impress upon you.

When you try real hard online? And you’re wondering why everyone is so angry at you? And you don’t understand?

And you’re trying to tell people things, and get them to understand you, but they’re just not understanding you?

Be careful.

You may be discussing turtles with crazy people.

An Explanation

A lot of people don’t tend to get the sublteties of my writing. They don’t understand my nuance. I’m not saying people aren’t smart if they don’t get it. I’m just saying, I want to make something perfectly clear.

The Internet is this way because you can’t get anything done when the people you’re talking to don’t fucking understand what you’re saying. That’s ‘discussing turtles with crazy people’.

Essentially, everyone trying to do something good online, they’re not being heard, nor understood; and when they want to gather with like-minded people, those like-minded people tend to either be insane themselves, or in such a bad fucking mood that they’ve cloistered themselves in a way that makes interacting with them damned near impossible.

It’s easy to be a mindless dipshit who smears their shit all over the wall and tells even the most-learned of elders that said elder’s mother sucks him good and hard thru his jorts. It’s much more difficult to actually produce anything resembling a civilization, when the vast majority of people who could, are being smeared with other people’s shit.

This is untenable.

Don’t expect anything useful from the Internet.

For civilization to exist, the people who act as the enablers of said infrastructure must also exist. And no one online is going to do the work for free, forever, without getting burnt out so badly that it doesn’t even matter.

I could write more, but I honestly have better shit to do.

The post The Problem with the Internet appeared first on icze4r communication.

Sexualized Harassment

This was very interesting. For the first two bans I received, I came back to two comments that seemed to have been edited. People were responding to shit I didn’t say, which was interesting. And then I realized that I was being targeted by a Reddit admin, or some sort of moderator who was moderating one of the top subreddits, based on the behavior exhibited.

In particular, I was targeted after I left a single comment: “Good”, on a thread in which a super-aggressive dog breed got banned in the U.K. And that’s when it started. And it was, yet again, as you could probably guess: yep, it was World News.

For the second comment, I have no idea what the fuck happened, as they don’t even show you what comment they ban you for. But this one, I’m telling this story. Because even though I don’t give a shit about Reddit, you don’t get to accuse me of sexualized harassment. You don’t. Fuck you.

Last night, Subreddit Drama (again: this is probably where the fuck the ban originated from, some admin or someone high up in that group of subreddits) had decided that a woman was not even a human being. And I took issue with this.

Usually when I get banned from places, I think, ooh, maybe I did somethin’ wrong. Like, even when I got banned from a Sailor Moon community when I was a kid, after I pointed out that the 30-year-old (almost 40, really) was grooming kids, and that’s no good, when I got banned from there? Until now, even then, I would sometimes wonder if I had done something wrong in another way, ‘earning’ me that ‘ban’.

When I was threatened with a permaban on World of Warcraft, for reporting a pedophile actively grooming a child (the GMs threatened me; even banning me for a second, to ‘show me what it’s like’), I thought, have I erred in some way?.

No.

This time, I have realized that it is you who is full of shit.

When I got banned the first time on Reddit for saying “good” to the news article that talked about a dog breed being banned in the U.K., the ban was for “racism” or some shit. Which was fun, because, it’s a dog. They’re a dog. They tried to make it out as being some sort of anti-black comment. It’s not. I’m a black people. Get fucked.

The second time, it was similar bullshit: they accused me of threatening someone. I did not.

Now, you’ve accused me of sexualized harassment.

I won’t accept that.

Leaving a nice paper trail

I’m leaving this here because I’m marking the wall. I’m gonna tell everybody what happened, and that’s not a threat, nor a promise. I’m leaving this here because you’re full of shit and I’m not going along with whatever shit you’ve just pinned on me.

The comment I think I got banned for (because it happened directly after), was telling a bunch of people in Subreddit Drama that they weren’t treating a woman like a human being.

The situation is thus: there’s a lady who has a Patreon. She has a web comic, and everyone has decided to harass her. They suggest things like leaking her nudes off of her Patreon, and everyone there was saying of her, such bullshit like, ‘well, she needs to get a thicker skin’.

The fuck, you stupid dickheads? No she doesn’t. Leaking nudes is a crime.

I got banned from Reddit, permanently, for telling people that leaking nudes is bad.

I got banned from Reddit, permanently, for telling people to stop harassing a woman.

Nope. I won’t accept that ban as legitimate. Get fucked.

I won’t use the website anymore (quite frankly, the thing did nothing but piss me off); and when the time comes and someone asks me for an AMA, I’m going to have the distinct fucking pleasure of telling them why that won’t be happening.

But of all my bans, I think I might actually wear this one with pride.

I wasn’t sexual predator enough for Reddit.

The post Reddit appeared first on icze4r communication.

There’s something kind of comical about the Internet. If you weren’t here for certain eras, you just weren’t there. It’s impossible tro explain it to you, what we were on about. But I think I can try.

Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie was a Tumblr Ask blog. It’s something that I think could’ve only existed on Tumblr: you have an inbox, where people can send questions, and you can respond to them. Publicly. Automagically. It was all set-up, in Tumblr’s software.

There was some sort of thing in the fandom where it was alleged, or at least joked about, that Pinkie Pie was a murderer. Cupcakes were involved. Scootaloo is a minor, in the show’s continuity. They’re friends.

I’m not interested in ponies. I also cannot draw. (At the time, I was still affected by how my father traumatized me; as such, I did not want to draw.) So, asking me what this was all about, it seems like an unlikely crossroads.

I fucking loved this Askblog.

Keep in mind, Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie took place— or, rather, was created— over something like a 2 week period, in August of 2011. August 6th to August 18th, if the Ask dates are actually reliable. Sadly, they are not, as, I remember this going on for months. But whatever; I remember Arcadium lasting until 1999. I’m sure my photographic memory is just faulty.

Why’s that date important?

Franken Fran ran from 2006 to 2012.

This period of history was particularly amazing for human content creation. Or, should I say, art. Gore was heavily in style. 4chan pretty much had every kid’s ear when it came to art direction. So, what was in, was in. Mix My Little Pony with Franken Fran; you got dis.

Interestingly enough, Hannibal would not come out for another two years. The tone’s pretty much the same, even if the situation isn’t.

Now, looking back on this something like 11 years later, it’s easy to see it and go, oh, wow, so edgy. But it wasn’t. At the time, the humor involved was pretty much on the fringe of what we considered normal; but it was bleeding-edge. It hit a note, struck a chord, severed a vein. People liked it. They still do.

UPDATE as of June 10th, 2024: As with everything, when I search for this on Google, now, it’s going out of style. Or, it’s simply not being indexed anymore. And the old ways are falling out of use.

In the interest that you all do not forget the face(s) of your father(s), I am, once again, re-uploading this entire article, and updating it, a bit.

Back to what I was talking about: The limited palette; the characteristic square brush, that no one could really emulate; and the combination of the artist’s being, with the relatively-new PaintTool Sai, produced something no one had really seen before. And it was good.

For whatever reason, the juxtaposition of cute pony cartoons for children and horrible serial killer just clicked. And, as you can see, above, there’s some shit in it that just wouldn’t fly, these days.

Interestingly enough, all the murder, fictional as it might have been, wasn’t really what riled people up. Or, at least, as far as I heard, that wasn’t it.

It was that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo in a comic.

Be it true or not, the story I heard was that the artist, or somebody who people thought was the artist, ended up getting plagued about this, in real life. Phone calls; that sort of thing. It was my first experience witnessing what happens to artists, online: they eventually kinda get driven away, if they get popular enough. And, for a time, that seemed to be what was happening, there, too.

Oh, why was it bad that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo?

The idea people had was that Scootaloo was a child, while Pinkie Pie was probably, or definitely, an adult.

To be fair, the mention of rape, as far as I can remember, also received significant backlash. But they seemed to weather it, just fine.

Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie is an interesting part of Internet history. I feel like it was right at the cusp of the Internet becoming very, very reactionary towards ‘unacceptable’ adult subjects. How we went from Deliverance being somehow acceptable to be released theatrically, to I think it’s problematic when a villain does bad things, I don’t know. I really fuckin’ don’t.

Interestingly enough, the acceptability of unacceptable adult subjects, depicted fictitiously, is something that’s still argued about, today, on Twitter. (Tumblr’s audience has largely moved onto Twitter.) En generale I see it as a natural progression of the Human psyche: puzzling out what it wants to deal with, and what it won’t accept.

What do I think about its subjects?

They’re fuckin’ cartoon horses, kid.

I don’t give a shit. I didn’t draw ’em.

And if I did, I’d be absolutely cheesed that my style infected the new show.

An Addendum

Since this entry was deleted off of Margaret Gel’s Apocalyptic Log (due to what I felt was a conflict with my ‘professional’ identity— I’d prefer to leave that blog as something else now), I felt some sort of great and terrifying need to rejuvenate it. People liked this, right? Or at least those two weird kids who were stalking me, thinking that I was Crooked Trees, liked it.

There are a couple of things I need to say. Once again, I am not Crooked Trees. Human beings online have always had this desire to believe that any vehement insistence of mine that I am not someone, is, in point of fact, just the opposite: if I say that I’m not somebody, then I must be.

I’ve gone through being stolen from, before. It’s not nice. It’s not nice to let this happen to somebody else, either. And I’m fully aware of how this fucking happened— it’s the same order of things wherein someone once thought I was JonTron, of all people.

There was a time in my past where I needed to lie, tactically, specifically, to protect my ailing father. I didn’t want what I did online to follow me home and affect him. But he’s been dead for seven years, now, and I no longer have a great and abiding need to conceal my identity. I am, in point of fact, now a published author, with copyrighted work. Hiding doesn’t help me anymore.

If I were Crooked Trees, I wouldn’t hide it. It would enable me to do much more than I currently can. Por ejemplo, it might get me animation work. I might be able to make a movie. I don’t know! I might be able to do something wif it.

But I’m not them.

Years later, after this whole dog and pony show was quite fucking over, I saw an 18 and a 19 year old duo, this pair of kids, who were wildly in love with each other. Whether or not they were LARPing, who’s to say? I’ll never know, maybe. But they seemed to be in love.

And they had taken the part of Scootaloo and Pinkie Pie, from this comic, and were playing it out, quite overtly sexually. And they contacted me, and they asked me—

icze4r, are you the Great and Wonderful Crooked Trees?

No, little babies.

I’m nobody.

An Interesting Final Note

The blog itself was located at http://askpinkaminadianepie.tumblr.com/

The comic itself was called “Ask Pinkamena Diane Pie”.

At least, I think. I mean, this shit was 13 years ago. Without access to my own archives, that’s as much as I can glean.

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