Apple Cider

Tell your lady that she has a lot of people pulling for her, at least. I'm so fucking exhausted right now of people being shit to my friends who are bisexual and coming out about it.

The paranoia and strange lingo of PUA shit permeating throughout all of MRA-Misogynydom is so weird - every weak man is a beta, every man with an opinionated woman is a cuck. They are like terrifying aberrations of human beings who are being slowly eaten away by the idea that no one loves them.

I take Lyfts because they show up when I want them, they get me where I'm going and they LET YOU TIP OVER THE COST OF THE SERVICE. Which afaik, Uber does NOT let you do so I always tip my Lyft driver a ton. I hate dealing with taxis who also don't take cards since I usually don't carry cash.

Yep. they thought his wife and son were fake because he was raising a very large amount of money to pay for her jaw surgery but also because years earlier he made up a girlfriend.

Subtweeting is the Twitter equivalent of vaguebooking (Facebook). It's a way to say something without actually saying who it is about. It's useful in some situations when you have no institutional ability to call someone out directly or can't talk about it with names, but there's also subtweeting that's vicious and abstract to such a degree that it could be about ANYONE. It runs a whole spectrum. Because Twitter is public but no one reads every single tweet from everyone out there, it's a way to talk to people "in the know" without dropping names or specific things. But it's also a great way to rile up a ton of people to your cause without actually detailing WHO you're getting mad at. I've seen a list of the same people in the "anti-gamergate" crowd very generally refer to my friends and I without being specific but just make up shit wholesale. But it could also be a lot of people! It's complicated. But it's also a way to get around people who obsessively namesearch and stuff by using corruptions of their names (TotalBisquick/TurtleBasket/Gamergonk etc) or generally just vent frustrations about things or people you can't come right out and address directly. Basically, it can cut multiple ways and sometimes it justifiably gets derided but it's also a way to gossip too, which has it's usefulness. I tend to stick a lot more stuff behind a private account or a private slack channel these days though.

Offense to me or in general? As far as I am concerned - a month or two ago, he basically took what I was talking about male allies in the aGG "group" generally doing it for nerd points and fighting guys vs. elevanting discourse and highlighting harassment/showing off women's work in spite of being harassed. He came into my mentions and proceeded to snipe at me when I was already mad (since I'd been getting shit all day) and said that I'm devaluing harassment victims and women's work, etc. I blocked him but not before he screencapped all my tweets, stuck them up on his account and started shittalking me to this 13k followers, some of whom he admits are hate-followers. Keep in mind I've never spoken this guy other than telling him not to RT something I said because I was getting gators in my mentions. He blocks me, I block him but he then continues to read my twitter or my friends twitters or generally keep up on what we're all doing because he subtweets us occasionally, the worst being the other day where he had a fucking meltdown about being called an ally. The guy seriously is unstable at best and has a lot of other shit he's done (made up a fake asian gf years ago, got famous for kicking himself in the balls, is generally just a youtuber with a huge insecurity problem who also is now an authority on feminism and social justice because he picks fights with gators.) But it means that it's landed me back on the GG radar because they see Coffin as "coming to the right side" by shitting on me or my friends or feminists in general.

Thanks. I really don't know what Peter Coffin's deal is but he's been getting scarily obsessed and subtweety lately. But he went private so maybe he'll fucking leave us alone. The fact that a guy can be even superficially critical of "social justice" and that makes GG people go after ME instead is not surprising in the least.

My tweets, rather. As in they are getting around. (I've been up since 330 AM, it made sense at the time.)

I'm starting to rack up considerable frequent flyer miles from having my Twitter posted up on KiA because this one dude in particular seems to be obsessed with me because I am friends with other people he's obsessed with.

Ex Machina:

Am I the only one who thought the American Sniper thing was a lampshade for Paul? Probably way too intentional but I still thought that immediately when I saw it.

Something they touched on re: Frank on the podcast and how he doesn't know what he's doing - it seems pretty clear that Frank's survivalistic instincts make him a big fish in a small pond when it comes to low-level criminal rings, but that he's utterly lost when it comes to the high powered world of crime that only rich white dudes could conjure. He's clearly out of his element when he's not going to just kick the shit out of some lackey.

All I could think about this week was Sean guessing that Paul is definitely a closeted gay man, with the small touches alluding to the blowjob story, the compatriot from the war alluding to a potential Brokeback Mountain between the two as well as him sitting on a bench near where some park hookup is occurring. These kinds of character developments as well as Ani's comfort now in her own narrative are what are keeping me on the hook for the show because I'm more iffy on Ray or Frank being interesting in the long run.

There's even imgur galleries saying this is all a mistranslation - which immediately then just says it's a magical tonic used "without her knowledge" because that would "lower its efficacy" if she knew. And that she's "really bisexual" but that her attraction to women "weakens" her. IT'S STILL HORRIBLE. https://imgur.com/gallery/Z46S9 Basically every single thing I've seen, no matter what camp, no matter how flimsy the reasoning, all looks terrible.

I think the other side of the ideological purity coin is that we allow certain people to speak for others or be the expert on a subject across way too vast of a demographic - I don't want Erika Moen or something like Dan Savage getting to be the representative for my experience personally, because I don't like their politics in some way or I don't like how they present their identities or feelings on others as somehow also representative of mine. I think keeping receipts is useful if you are seeing that someone is given way more credit than they should when they are not changing but I also think we raise people up and give them way too much power to "speak for" people. Granted, a lot of them didn't ask for it, so it's a problem I've seen a lot in social justice communities as well. It's a byproduct of politics in general, and how normative our culture is - marginalized identities only get so much room to be visible so one person gets seen as the voice or the representative.

Sorry, it's just really unnerving to be referred to in the third person for an argument you're not involved in.

why did you use my friend and my podcast as an example here

I'm going to take an unpopular stance on this - because while in general there's not an equal and organized opposite force to them in general, there are a small group of people who spend their days chronicling, documenting and generally keeping tabs on what GG does. Gamerghazi is part of this, and a dedicated core of people on twitter are like this. Their general tweets are screencapping what GG is doing and while it is useful in some ways, particularly for those who are being harassed by them, a lot of it is men who have made a cottage industry in hassling GG people, or rather "dunking on nerds" and getting into long drawn out pointless fights with GG people for reasons I can't fathom. To look good? To do something easy rather than combat systemic issues? Who knows. All I know is that I pointed out how exhausting it is to see men spend their entire day getting into public fights with GG where it seems like their notoriety and popularity (and yes, some men have gotten VERY popular on just this alone) are based on fighting another group of men with marginally different politics than them, and I actually got harassed by aGG men about it because how dare I. My twitter got screencapped and RTed to show how I "hate women's work and dealing with harassment" despite specifically talking about men's role in this and that I am also a harassment victim, many years before GG came out even. That's not terrifying at all, having "allies" who feel that it's their duty to "protect you" turning on you, men who have never spoken to you at all other than to get mad at you that day alone and then talk about you like they know you and how much you're a shithead.

I'd go to town on some fucking play-doh. Rich coming from the guy who has an RV that looks like the van from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

holy shit fuck shit FUCK

Oh trust me, I like that scene about Ani - but I know that typically when I enjoy a female character on some level, it's not necessarily because that's intentionally what the writer wanted. Just my experience with these types of characters. I mean, I think the reason no one is agreeing with my read on things (which is fine, it's an opinion not a fact) is just because these kinds of characters are the ones I end up enjoying but are supposed to be other kinds of people to a different kind of audience. I've been the person who people see as man-hating, cold, or otherwise damaged in some way. I just know how a lot of male writers tend to write women in this way, I am just hoping my prognostications largely turn out to be unfounded.

I think there's definitely a balance that can be struck between jumping on something just to jump on it and actually not pulling punches just because she's a woman author, yeah.

Has significant emotional alienation from her dad, is painted by her sister as a prude, likes rough sex but isn't into emotional intimacy and then that big conversation with Shitty Cop (I still cannot remember anyone's names) in the car about being overpowered by men and that's why she carries knives. And then Shitty Cop made that quip about feminism. It just reads closely to how a lot of writers chose to present a woman who's been hurt/broken in some way and how it comes off as aggressively anti-man. That's all.

Birthday plans are dinner with pals this Friday, bus strike pending. I spent a quiet night home watching a movie and reading my boyfriend's latest novel draft.

There's been a lot of decent feminist takedowns of her work from the standpoint that she's endorsing really unsafe and abusive BDSM practises in her books, not to mention just straight up abusive relationships. The larger issue is that this is one of the few books in the history of publishing to get this big that even comes remotely close to being that openly sexual and be directed at women. However, this is a larger issue with publishing and "chick lit." But I also don't think all criticism of her work is entirely misogynistic in nature - Stephanie Meyers came under fire in a similar way. Because women authors are very rarely breakout hits, and the ones that do are seemingly badly written and handle a lot of topics in a really problematic manner (J.K Rowling nonwithstanding but she is not considered a "solely woman oriented lit writer") What is even more interesting to me is less that EL James wrote a shitty smut book with horrible abusive tendencies, but that her and Cassie Claire have made a huge career of taking lightly changed fanfic and elevating it into genre lit and a huge career, with possible plagarism issues. (His Mortal Instruments is based on a Ginny/Draco fanfic, iirc. Both of them have huge swaths of burned bridges in the fandom communities they used to be a part of as well.) But all of that stands against the fact that they get twice the criticism as other shitty male authors who also are successful. People get really upset when you criticize any male author ever.