Sunday Sampler: Shutting Down Shutdowns Edition (No, Not THAT Shutdown)

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Recently, a video from a creator that I normally like came out talking about how supposedly “cringe” culture is an absence of empathy. It was… disappointing. Not because I disagree with the central premise but because it was reductive. It also skirted around what I think the real issue is (namely, that TikTok is actively making everything about being alive worse & no one seems interested in acknowledging that), while indulging in some things that always rub me the wrong way, from slinging around psych terms like corporate buzzwords to even dropping an “it’s not that deep” moment about “that person in class who overanalyzes everything even when it’s clear that the red curtains are just red”.

The comments, however, only made my disappointment worse.

The video was attempting to argue that anyone who finds the ultra-performative forced enthusiasm that’s de rigeur on TikTok & similar short-video platforms is doing so from a place of cruelty (hence the whole “death of empathy” thing). While there is some truth in this, especially when it’s clearly a bunch of people harassing a teenager who’s just doing what everyone around them is doing, the host also lumped in topics that aren’t really related, from bad video thumbnails to lolcow commentary culture to basically anything that isn’t positivity & encouragement towards the supposed targets. This led the commentators to start in on several well-beaten drums, from “lolcow is a right wing dogwhistle” to “they’re only picking on neurodivergent and/or queer people for being different” to “anyone who criticizes these enthusiastic kids is just a bully”.

Yeah, no. Tante Mela has been online longer than some of you have existed, and lemme tell you, it’s not that clean cut, no matter how much you wanna will it to be.

Let’s start with the assumptions about WHO gets “targeted” for discussion as a lolcow. You get into the weeds of the scene, and you’ll realize “it’s just a bunch of horrible bigots targeting poor innocent queer/ND kids for being quirky” isn’t true. In cases where it COULD be true, it’s usually because there’s a very superficial reading of the situation happening. Usually, regardless of any disability or identity in play, the people involved are objectively awful people. They’ve scammed people even more vulnerable than they (supposedly) are, or they’ve faked their disabilities to either get away with actual crimes or self-promote. They’ve been callous & cruel to people at their lowest, then expect sympathy when they do something really REALLY shitty. When there’s someone who IS almost universally hated, the “lolcow culture is right-wing only” crowd will usually hate them for the most trivial reasons versus why others do, such as hating someone for bad fandom takes rather than being an admitted remorseless child molester. Hell, some of them tie into what I was saying last week about not knowing when to keep their horny fuel to themselves, going so far as to fake killing themselves to get pity instead of just dialing back the constant fetish posting. (BTW, I am avoiding names with my examples, but I do have them available if asked.)

Honestly, I think this video put it best: sometimes what looks like 'bullying' is simply a form of social correction that the subjects just don't want to accept. Even if it’s “maybe dial down the forced overenthusiasm cuz it’s obnoxious & off-putting”, something your parent might have told you as a kid to keep you from becoming an object of curiosity/mockery, they’ll read it as an insult to their very core. And when you respond & keep fighting it, even if you’re “fighting” it by trying to deflect & join in with it against someone else, THAT’S when the cycle starts. People blow off “don’t feel the trolls”, but it WORKS. There are people who were laughingstocks for years who just… didn’t respond & kept on doing what they do, so long as it wasn’t awful, and they stopped being targets for mockery.

(Also, I’m saving it for Ace Week, but acting like the ONLY people who do identity-based dogpiles and harassment campaigns are imageboard dudes is the most disingenuous “it’s okay when WE do it” bullshit after 2018-2019 I’ve seen, and I will have some choice words for that.)

Taking this back to the video and its whole “have some ~empathy~ for the people you’re picking on” basis, I think we need to talk about what it is that you actually want. Cuz “empathy” has become a term like “narcissist” or “gaslighting” - a perfectly cromulent psychological term describing a very particular thing that has been embraced & overused by the internet to the point that it’s lost all meaning or usefulness. Empathy is understanding how someone else feels; that’s a perfectly good thing, but it’s not what people who use the word as a bludgeon want. They want SYMPATHY. They want people to feel bad for them and let them keep doing whatever it is that they’re doing, whether it’s being overly goofy & dancing about something they just bought or getting off on pretending they’re an infant in questionable Discords. And it’s entirely cuz sympathy is easier to abuse when you keep masking it as “empathy”. 

Funny how the same people who love to misuse psych terms will also bust out, like this video did, the whole “you’re reading too much into it, sometimes the curtains are just red” anti-intellectualism arguments, too. You don’t want to actually understand the words you use as cudgels against criticism, and you’re not even trying to hide it.

Finally, we need to talk about TikTok. Trying to paint the resurgence of “cringe culture” as reactionary without addressing the role the micro-video platform & its competitors have had in that is like addressing a flood without acknowledging the week of heavy rain that preceded it. EVERYTHING is exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness on that platform, and as a result, people who use that platform as their primary social window wind up with a very warped worldview. Every pastime boils down to a contest of who can purchase the most, every book promoted is either based on how “spicy” it is or how pretty its limited-edition printing is, every social issue is boiled down to pithy bits of glib text to be pointed at while overly produced pop music plays, and every private beef becomes a chance for public spectacle. It’s brought back rampant hostility to anyone even slightly overweight, Bi/Pan/Ace Discourse in all its horrid glory, and an alarming tendency to call every single person you find slightly off-putting a “groomer” based on “vibes” from 90-second clips. Basically, it’s made everything about an already dreadful world worse and just seems to be accelerating societal decline. But no one wants to acknowledge it. Either they see TikTok as some great leveler, giving “everyone” a voice & a chance to earn money (usually via shilling for drop-shipped garbage or bad mobile games), and anyone pointing out the platform’s far more numerous & dangerous flaws is a Bad Person; or they get so addicted to it that they’ll passively consume whatever it throws at them in any spare moment, as I have seen with coworkers & older relatives. Ignoring that all of this stems from this particular spout, as the video did, put it on an already shaky platform.

I don’t know how to wrap this up except that the whole thing feels symptomatic of the current internet’s refusal to engage with anything with a sense of nuance. And if you can’t accept nuance, you won’t be able to function in public for too long. The curtains are never “just” red, no matter how much you want to insist that they are.

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This week’s video recommendation is about Eurovision and how they really really REALLY need to remove Israel, or at least acknowledge their abuses of the “soft power” system that the show uses, before the contest implodes out of deliberate ignorance.

I normally don’t follow Eurovision. The most I know about it are that one band that won that dressed like zombies & sang heavy metal with opera arias in the chorus, along with that one episode of Father Ted that’s become a too-complicated-to-explain family in-joke. But I am a sucker for a good shitshow, especially if it’s completely avoidable. And this one is nothing but avoidable moments, from the “it’s okay when they do it” exceptions constantly being made for Israel, to the ignorance of their behind-the-scenes efforts to paint all criticism in bad faith or harassing reporters, to just not giving that one line in the opening number a second revision to find another rhyme for “neutral”.

Part of me, the deeply buried idealist, wants to believe that there’s value in “soft diplomacy” efforts like this or the Olympics. But as long as I’ve lived, they’ve just been another pissing ground, and any common ground quickly gets carved up by the powers that be. It feels like every effort to create some sort of way to connect across cultural barriers by embracing commonalities, things like music or athletics that every part of the world enjoys in some manner, will inevitably become tainted from its ideals and become yet another battleground. When you keep seeing it happen, it’s really only natural to be jaded. I’ll be shocked if the Eurovision board actually changes anything, even with other prominent countries declaring an “it’s us or them” ultimatum. They seem to embrace the ignorance of it all. After all, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have declared as much in their musical number.

Lastly, before we move along, I’m not sure if I want to know what that woman in the horrible 90s-arcade-carpet blazer was on for the clips seen in the video. But I guess being on horse hallucinogens or whatever is the only way to get anyone into that outfit.

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Lighting-squared round! A more authentic expression of nervous tics than you’ll see on TikTok.

• Finally finished playing through the 2nd part of Scene 0 in Magia Exedra, and… hoo boy, thanks for reminding me how incredibly smackable Sayaka could be. Also, Mabayu is way too relatable for me on a personal level. And knowing that she probably doesn’t have a happy ending cuz of course not, it’s gonna sting even more.

• Also, props to Magia Exedra for finally doing a fully original new story with all-new characters! Sumire & Fuka both look VERY cool!

• Yep, the animation scene is already being insanely obnoxious about the newest indie darling. I knew it was gonna appeal to the very worst kind of animation fans cuz of who’s behind it, but they’ve done a speedrun of “terrible fandom nonsense” with only a single pilot available.

• Replace "Return of the Anasazi" & "Spectre of the Pine Barrens" with "Thoughtscape" & "The Robot Spies", and that's pretty much my list as well. “Pine Barrens” isn’t bad, per se, but I’m personally very finicky about my Jersey Devil stories. At least the ending makes it clear that Big JD is actually out there and isn’t just a Scooby hoax.

• When Knit Picks said that their mystery boxes shipped with their “Traverse Cabled Accessories” booklet, I was expecting a pamphlet with 3 or 4 patterns. I was not expecting a whole-ass pattern book with 13 patterns, one with each mystery box.

• Tale Foundry, y’all gotta stop equating “romantic love” with “truest definition of humanity”. 

• Horse-girl game update: Hmm… need a Long race specialist for my team, so I’ll make this character my next career… oh. Oh no. OH NO. At least they made her boobs less cartoonishly huge compared to her concept art, but the rest of her story? Yeesh… (I do like her roomie, though. Short, angry, ineffective Napoleonic little gremlin? Man, I hope she’s playable soon.)

• Judging by the people who are still posting snide attempts to defend the knitting video, it appears that the audience for SciShow consists equally of dudes from 4chan who only post in English to defend sexism & Tumblr aesthetic blog girlies who grew up into something skirting tradwives. Also lazy, lazy teachers who apparently want their students to be as proudly smugly stupid as a Green brother. At this point, anyone defending Hank needs to be visited by a version of Coily who can force them to appreciate the existence of textiles.

Do what you gotta do, Coily, even if it means involuntary nudity. It's the only way they'll learn.

• Still thinking about Scene 0. Sayaka is definitely someone who’d unironically share that “why Gravity Falls is more mature than Breaking Bad” infographic because of the “teaches good morals” entry.

• So in the States, Discord is used for constant drama & highly questionable roleplay, while in other countries, it’s used to overthrow a deeply corrupt tyranny & hold actual elections. Okay.

• I think there are better selling points for Nebula than blurring out a dead body with an “uncensored on Nebula” label over it. But given how half the people they consider draws for that platform are folks that I find kinda smackable, I’m obviously not the market.

• Not surprised it’s taken this freaking long for DC to do an actual cross-promotion with AEW, since WBD is notoriously bad with cross-promoting its stuff effectively. Hopefully it goes better than their last attempt, even if the terrible art used for that did perfectly capture Britt Baker’s ugliness.

• I still wanna see more AEW folks on Food Network shows (especially if they’re ones I actually like and not, say, the greasy cowboy). It’s a shame they let the House of Black crumble, cuz putting them on something like Supermarket Stakeout would have been priceless. Malachi Black: “Hello. How much did you pay for your grocer-” Random suburbanite: “TAKE IT, OH GOD, JUST TAKE IT! DON’T HURT ME!”

• One day, I’ll have to sort out my thoughts on AEW, really. I don’t really bother with them anymore for a LOT of reasons, but I also don’t want them to fail cuz there’s lots of individuals worth supporting there & monopolies suck. But it also gets into some personal stuff & how AEW/its fanbase kinda caused my first true PTSD flashback, so it’s not gonna be easy. Although, if my former moots were any indicator, that somehow didn’t matter as much as the powerful acting chops & oh-so-sincere wholesome posting (*coughsarcasmcough*) of the greasy cowboy, so I doubt anyone will care even if I do.

• My most Old Person music opinion is that a lot of songs have really good disco-esque melodies that I would enjoy if every single singer didn’t sound like they had a horrible sinus infection. They’re all so… nasal. 

• Watching this video on performative men who play at being "feminist" within fiber arts circles and thinking about examples from within my own orbits… including one who I know from experience vanity searches to make sure that every teen/YA comic reader knows that his white male ass is God’s gift to ending sexism & racism and that anyone who’s even slightly put off by his arrogance or his extremely narrow concept of “female empowerment” (as seen in his absolute mangling of a magical girl series to fit into it) is a Bad Person. (He’s also an “own voices” ace writer - demi to be precise - that tends to center every single other fucking identity BUT asexuality in his work, and when he finally did, it was the same tired old Ace 101 shit that every single YA story does. Wow, way to portray the richness of the a-spec life experience there, bro.) But yeah, I seem to be one of the very few people online who can see through these guys and how they’re ultimately trying to make everything about them in some way. An actual male feminist shouldn’t feel the need to perpetually advertise it, only to… be it.

• Every visit I have to take to 30th Street Station is more depressing than the last. There’s always more mazes of wood & scaffolding, more of its beauty stripped away indefinitely, more of the station itself boarded off with only a newsstand & a Dunkin to distract you. I’ve been in dead malls less dismal. Not even the ceiling is being spared

Careful, now, you can still see some color and a sliver of natural light. Can’t be having THAT! Get more scaffolding!

Hmmm… I think I found a possible influence on why the renovation requires shutting down 75% of the station’s rest areas…

• I have no idea why my last post got a sudden surge of Chinese readers. If they were looking for the freaky stuff I was addressing, uh… sorry to disappoint. 

• Heard a car driving by on the street whose music had a “lalalala lalalala” piece, and for some reason, my brain interpreted it as the Meow Mix jingle.

• Nemalki uses his Thoughtnami blog to work out some interesting network revamps or “what-ifs”, the latest of which is Project MTV, a revamp & revitalization of the network that defined what was "cool" for us younger Gen X/older Millennial types. 

• I will forever appreciate & respect a creator who is humble & self-effacing about themselves & their work, as they're letting it speak for itself, than someone who is convinced that they're God's Chosen Creator & cultivated that image of themselves & their creations at every public opportunity. For a good example of why, look up a certain former Vertigo writer & what he used that illusion to cover.

• Saw concept art for an unmade H-B adaptation of Dial H for Hero (the Chris King & Vicki Grant version) with gorgeous Alex Toth art, and I was struck by two things, besides its beauty: One, while it’s sad that this wasn’t made in some ways, a show about two kid heroes would have been SAVAGED by the Adult Swim dudebros come the 2000s. Two, it’s probably a good thing that they didn’t adapt it, cuz at the same time in the comics, we had Chris becoming super OP & Vicki becoming an eeeeeevil monster because… she was gang-raped by a cult. Yeah… DC has always had this problem.

• Speaking of Vicki Grant, I’m kinda glad that modern readers don’t shrug off the sheer volumes of “weird issues with women” shit in Wolfman’s NTT. It was off-putting as fuck when I first read it 20 years ago, and while it’s taken way too long, having other people finally call out shit like Vicki’s weird victim-blaming story (or Terra’s in a similar way) or the mere existence of Terry Long is very welcomed. Claremont had some occasional weird shit, but it rarely reached this level of casual grossness.

• Annnnd now my stupid rat brain is thinking “magical girl Dial H”. I hate you sometimes, niche interest.

• I wish there was a way to just block specific topics from showing up on YT, even from channels you follow. Cuz there’s a long list of stuff that I just don’t care about, even actively dislike, and when YT keeps shoving it in your face cuz the people who like them REALLY like them & make the algorithm assume that applies to everyone, it’s extremely annoying. I don’t care about Dana’s tantrum show, I don’t care about the circus show thing, I don’t care about the UT sequel & its horrible child fans, I don’t care about That Show, I don’t care about a whole list of internet-beloved animated shows, I don’t care about anything with Batman. Just let me block them BY NAME, not by “extremely broad category that might contain them”.

• Oh, Andrade re-signed with AEW? Hmm. I give him a year.

• “It’s not that deep… unless it’s something that I like, in which case, it’s deeper than your feeble hater brain could EVER fathom, despite everything in the actual material!”

• Horse-girl update: Dammit, I’m not gonna get El Condor Pasa’s cool event costume (which actually looks like really cool wrestling gear & suits her better than her default gear) before the event ends, am I?

• I can’t be the only person who finds it hard to support a cause when the other people supporting it are just the most off-putting, obnoxious, “dear God, do you have NOTHING else in your life” assholes. Even if it’s a good cause, if that’s the vocal crowd pushing for it, I get to the point where I stop supporting it cuz I know the only thing worse than their proselytizing is that they inevitably become examples of “sore winners” when they get their way. And if you're reading this and think it could only possibly refer to your political enemies… oh, honey, you’re probably exactly who I’m talking about with this.

• I missed the Wraith Arc in the manga mostly for money reasons, but man, I loved its Magia Exedra adaptation. It’s made me hope (probably in vain) even harder for Walpurgisnacht Rising to knock some sense back into Homura. Again.

• Looking at the same people who stumped for Gretchen & her Holocaust denialism (among other vile shit she said that they described as “good politics”) reacting in disgust at similar attitudes in a famously hateful webcomic is another example of the “it's okay when WE do it” attitude I despise so much.

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Well, that’s another week done & dusted. This week’s cat picture is of Parker and his ingenious technique to stop me from going into the office.

Buddy, I can’t smuggle you onto the NJ Transit train in that. Besides, you’d hate it more than you hate car rides.

See you next week! Or not. I’m not your boss.