Ah, famous trolls like...Stephanie Sterling, and Liam Robertson. For fuck’s sake.

I’m both looking forward to seeing Steph’s take on all of this and kinda wishing they would steer clear of it just for their mental health.

Mods have to be pretty heavy handed with some subjects because of ye olde “you let one Nazi hang out in your bar” problem, IE, when you allow a certain level of hatred for a group of people, no matter how minor, you eventually wear out and push out that group of people, and more and more of the friends of the hateful…

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (I had to look it up).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

It’s not as bad as the death threats and stuff but it is really exhausting all on its own.

Nearly all local news channels in the US are owned by the same hyper-conservative news corporation. The largest and most popular news mega-corporation in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia are all owned by the same man (Koch) (the same corporation that owns Fox News). The BBC, which is state media in the UK, has made…

God, I wish HP fandoms were a bubble and not a loud, annoying group that has been loudly spouting about buying this game to “own the transes” all day every day for weeks in every single gaming space that didn’t have a singular focus on a different franchise. That’d be great, actually.

She’s also being used as a cudgel to silence criticism of the game...like a token character is intended to be used.

Unfortunately the “GamerGate” morons that spawned a whole host of alt-right nutjob groups and whatnot have effectively made it quite a lot more difficult to discuss the problems in the games journalism industry by intentionally poisoning that well.

Yup, that’s an absolutely massive issue that we still haven’t really dealt with. Game publishers withholding review copies or straight up blacklisting reviewers that leave anything less than glowing reviews is a huge problem. Paid reviews, dictated reviews, etc..

Tech companies like Apple doing it, too.

It just doesn’t…

It’s really depressing that so many people have literally killed themselves for that.

It’s so bad that there’s worry from the conservatives that “red” counties have had high enough death rates that it’ll affect their elections.

Ah yes, starry-eyed reviews by people who grew up as fans of the books and movies as children and have a vested interest both personally and potentially financially in giving the game a positive review totally wouldn’t overlook gameplay and narrative issues.

Granted one of the reasons we avoid several places in town, including my neighbors, is that they’ve pointed guns at us and made several threats on our lives just for existing.

That’s fun.

It’s so fascinating that a phrase invented at least 120 years ago to illustrate just how absurd the concept of toxic individuality and self reliance for the lower classes inherent in capitalism is an impossible goal has become so flanderized that the capitalists actually use that phrase unironically.

As a young trans girl who liked girls I really latched onto Princess Ozma, who was hidden away by a spell as a boy for most of her childhood (that whole arc has some problems, too, that boy is basically a whole other person that gets unwillingly blinked out of existence to bring Ozma back), and then later Dorothy…

Every time I see a damned Chick-fil-A bag.

Also, there are several places like that here in town, and we make a big point of avoiding them like the plague. The whole town is still run by the same handful of families that ran the KKK here for a hundred years (and they still have the mayor’s office, the entire police…

Is that what that smell is? They keep saying it’s the smell of success but it stinks pretty badly down here.

K.A. Applegate seems like a lovely person (and is super supportive of her trans daughter, to boot).

Terry Pratchett was an absolutely fabulous human that will be dearly missed (GNU Terry Pratchett).

Neil Gaiman is a great example of a human who has spent his whole life learning from and improving on what mistakes he has…

But who will think of the poor investor class?!

The sheer number of books that are amazing, too.

Like, can K.A. Applegate and her work get even a fraction of this love that HP weirdly gets, please?

People telling me I would understand if I loved Hairy Plopper as a child have no idea how much Orson Scott Card, Ayn Rand, Terry Goodkind, etc., I was exposed to as a child.

Oo, how about Oz? Cause L. Frank Baum was a raging monster of a human being. Or H.P. Lovecraft.

At least some of those bigots have the decency to…