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paullicino · 3 years

Text

On the Internet

Taken from, and thus generously funded by, my Patreon. The above image via ExtraFabulousComics.

Do you have a flashlight nearby? A lamp, or other light source? Keep it to hand, it might become relevant for something, something I’d like to demonstrate later. The demonstration is simple and entirely voluntary, the flashlight is not essential. It works just as well as a thought experiment in your head.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write about the internet on the internet. Because that’s what we all do these days, isn’t it?

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. It was a kind of hidden, secret space of unknown dimensions when we found it as young adults. A weird sort of Narnia. A modem meant you could open this door to an entirely different place full of entirely different people obeying entirely different rules. You had to find ways of telling one another about what you’d found this week, either the next time you were together in person, via an email or, God forbid, by printing out a webpage. Twenty-five years ago, the internet was a collection of imperfect search engines (crawlers) taking you to out-of-the-way websites that were as likely to have been made by someone just like you as they were to belong to some major company or organisation. Its mess was egalitarian. It was a decentralised place full of curious corners and sudden surprises. It wasn’t somewhere we logged on to with an expectation of finding the familiar. It was a place of discovery.

It wasn’t simply that the tech wasn’t as good as it is nowadays. That much is obvious. It was the fumbling newness of the place. It was a primordial soup, we were all blobs and we blobbed around together, testing out the water.

It was a tremendously international space. It was easy to stumble across websites in other languages, to find places that weren’t for you, that were never created with you in mind, and at the very edges of these places their owners and their users might just blend together. Spill over, even. Everyone was from everywhere and they were all mingling, uncontrolled. It was liberating. It was mind-expanding.

The internet was exciting, it was new, it was unfamiliar. It was a place to learn. It was a place without an agenda.

It was also a place to be different. Niche interests found their audiences and young people could be united by what they enjoyed, not marginalised. There was no need to fit in when the place didn’t even fit together properly. For those of us bullied, bored, or worse in tiny homogenous hometowns, isolated or upset by the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school can create, it offered little judgement about what you should want or who you should be. It was a place to be genuine.

I still remember the end of the 1990s, too. It was a decade of growth and change not just for a young generation, but for the wider world we were learning about. There was a peace deal in Northern Ireland, there was optimism in the media and there was a coming millennium that was supposed to be defined by technology and communication, the internet at its forefront. I was not a young man who could identify with very much of this optimism, but I was at least a young man looking forward to change, who could be accepted as who I was on the internet and who could be excited about what it represented. I’d never tried to be anyone else, even though being different rarely works out when you’re young, but now I knew for sure that I didn’t need to.

As my friends and I grew, so did the internet, and it became a place where we could share more about ourselves, where we could play together and where we found a bunch of ways of keeping in touch whenever we were apart. It became a tool to help me work, that kickstarted my career as a writer, as well as an ever-widening window on the world. It wasn’t yet too corporate, its websites and its tools not yet too monolithic.

I remember some of that early sharing. I remember talking to total strangers, a world away, about some part of my life or theirs. I remember talking to one internet friend of many years, who I never met, about British and American spelling. And about spelling in general. I remember they told me they weren’t sure how to spell a particular word and I said they could look it up in but a moment, since they were online there and then. “I can’t be bothered,” they replied, and that frustrated me so much.

The 90s passed and on September 11th 2001 whatever vision there was for the coming century was erased. The course of world events shifted immediately and dramatically. Never before had mass murder been so visible and so immediate. I remember talking not about how different the world was going to be, but that we had no idea how big a difference this would even make. In a very short space of time, it felt as if the world became not only so much more cruel and so much more cynical, but also so much more divided. I remember the weeks and months after those terror attacks as being my first experience of seeing people sharply divided in their politics, divided enough to be extremely angry, extremely offended, by the many suggestions of what should be done next. It set the scene.

As the decade continued, technology and communication certainly did change us. More of us were using the internet not only to talk, but for more and more of our everyday tasks. We were also sharing ourselves, too, in ways more personal and profound, and there was so much to know. I read a blog post by a Black woman from the American South describing the ways she had to bring up her son to interact with the wider world, how angry he was about it, how unfair it all was. I read updates from those caught in the civil war in Myanmar, talking about what they claimed the news didn’t show. I read about the realities of the rapid growth in Dubai, the working conditions and pollution. I read diary entries by people surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, weeks without power and wondering when help would come. I read about the world in a way I’d never been able to before.

More than ever, the internet was a library of lives.

The first trip overseas I took by myself was all planned, booked and executed with the help of the internet. I flew to Chicago, in the United States, and I stayed in the most average hotel in the most average neighbourhood and it was wonderful. I heard real cicadas for the first time and walked through concrete valleys between towering skyscrapers that my tiny mind couldn’t process. In the evenings, I watched a plethora of American news, which was only ever about America, and that frustrated me so much.

The first interview I ever conducted with someone who wasn’t making a video game was with the writer Mil Millington. The interviews I really wanted to do were about people, their experiences, what they liked and why they do the things they do. Mil Millington was the perfect subject because we had both written about games, we both understood the reach of the internet and we were both interested in what the future of this medium would be. He had recently scored a book deal and written his first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, based on his semi-autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek blog of the same name, listing comic domestic disagreements. I asked him what it was like to share all of his personal life online and he told me that, actually, he didn’t:

“I'm, honestly, almost obsessively private. It's just the way I write that, for some reason, if I say, 'Margret won't let me watch a film in peace,' causes people to think, 'My God! Mil's laying his whole life bare!'”

And then I realised that he had, of course, chosen to share all the things that he had. And carefully. It didn’t mean that those things were less honest, less real or less interesting, but he had been doing what all of us writers do: picking his words and his moments. We should all get to share on our own terms.

I liked his honesty. He wasn’t trying to prop up any persona.

---

A little after this time, I was asked on a date by a conservative American woman who I met in my first year at university in London. We saw each other a few times and stayed in touch when she returned to California. A couple of years later, the American Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin spoke about “death panels” run by Britain’s National Health Service. Online, I expressed my annoyance and anger both at Palin just making things up, as well as at the volume of people who seemed to simply accept her words. My former date said that Palin was allowed to “express her opinion” and I didn’t know how to begin to explain, to an adult in her mid 20s, the difference between fact and opinion, or that she could check such things in a moment, since she was online. That frustrated me so much.

This discussion played out over a relatively new website called Facebook, which had become an invaluable way to connect with my fellow students. I had feared being alone at university, lost in a big city, but the opposite had happened. As soon as we all finished our first year of studies and were hurried out of our student residences, we scattered across the capital and the closeness I had taken for granted was suddenly lost. But Facebook became a directory of friendship, another library of lives. In its early days, I made jokes about people oversharing, or using the site to attract attention, but this wasn’t any different to how some of us might behave anywhere else. It wasn’t such a big deal. That’s just humans.

And anyway, I like to share. My whole life, I’ve enjoyed sharing things I think are important because I feel like it helps me make genuine connections, express myself and feel useful. I saw the internet becoming another way of doing this, another way to be genuine. The younger me had played in bands and held dreams of reaching other people through music, in awe of those moments when an audience sings an artist’s lyrics back to them. I still wanted that, that connection, or some version of it.

On the ever-growing internet, we could all share ourselves more. It could become a new medium for acceptance and understanding. What a glorious future it promised.

---

In time, I adopted all of the social media platforms that I use because I enjoy human connection and I think one of the fundamental traits of people is that they can be so interesting. They do stuff, they make things, they go places, they inspire and they pull humour out of the most difficult of situations like a conjurer tugging an elephant from a beanie. I’d like to be able to do those things. Some days I can barely make a pancake.

Social media allowed me to make and share even more, and now I was sharing things with two people at dinner, ten people at a party or a hundred people online. The number mattered less than the creation’s ability to connect, because it all helped me figure people out and it helped me figure myself out. It helped me figure everything out so that, perhaps one day, I might also learn the trick that lets you tug an elephant out of a beanie. I would be able to say to people “Ah yes, you start with the trunk,” or “Surprisingly, you pull from the tail.” Then they could pass that on. Social media seemed particularly good for this, a way for us to all enrich one another.

In 2008, a series of devastating terrorist attacks erupted across Mumbai. Many of the events were documented in real-time by both journalists and locals using Twitter, which made the site seem to me to be an invaluable new perspective on current events. By the start of the next decade, the Arab Spring saw a broad uprising across North Africa, with thousands of people united in protest by the unifying power of social media. It felt like these tools could change our world forever.

Some other things happened as that decade wound down.

A woman on Twitter made a poor joke about AIDS and Africa before boarding a flight, only to find that, by the time she had landed, her words had been shared around the world many millions of times. A woman in England was caught on camera putting a cat in a bin, the footage of which went viral and received such an overwhelmingly furious reaction that one national newspaper asked, only half-joking, if she was the most evil woman in Britain. These events were shared, discussed and dissected with a comparable passion and level of investment as the terrorist attacks and the Arab Spring. On the internet, a cat in a bin was becoming as important as terrorists in a hotel.

I flexed some cynical opinions. We all had opinions by then (though still not the same as facts), because it was increasingly difficult not to get swept up in things like these as and when they happened. They were everywhere, echoed and repeated, with a kind of mentality of momentum. Countless people changed their profile pictures to something green in support of protesters in Iran, or added a flag to support victims of terror in France. They signed internet petitions demanding Something Be Done, though it wasn’t always clear where these petitions would be delivered or how they would compel someone to act. None of these protesters or victims were in any way saved, protected or enabled by a person on the other side of the planet clicking their mouse like this, but if a million other people did it, those metrics created a validity of their own.

I think I remember the late 2000s as the time that I really began to feel different about these things. But by then, I was too bought in. It had already gone from a habit to a dependency.

Year by year, the internet had become less egalitarian. Monolithic sites and spaces were increasingly the center of the experience, whether hubs like MSN and Yahoo, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or popular news outlets. We found ourselves in the same places, over and over, and we relied on these for our new discoveries. While social media in particular pitched itself as something that put us all on the same level, behind the scenes levers were already being pulled to shape and to manipulate what was shown and shared.

(That’s okay, people told me. Turn on this feature, or adjust these options, and you get to pull your own levers. That’ll undo everything. You still get to share on your own terms.)

These sites had swelled to envelop us, going from making themselves exciting to making themselves essential. We no longer went online, we were online, always, and we left more and more of ourselves there even when we were away from our screens. Social media allowed you to collect everything together, becoming a place where you could simultaneously read updates from your friends, your parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, your favourite newspaper and your favourite sports team. All in a moment and all competing for your attention. Sites like Google and YouTube started to track and understand the preferences of their users, delivering to them more of what they wanted, working hard to grab and to keep their attention. You liked that dog, that topic, that politician? Here’s another.

Here’s another, again.

I was pulling levers all the time, frantically now, like someone operating locks and gates to try and dam an ever more overwhelming flow. My social media sites had changed from something that I used to something I had to manage. Not only were we all carefully curating who we broadcast to and when, lest we offend an employer or shock a relative, we also found ourselves trying to coordinate and customise them, because if we didn’t they would do this for us. They began to choose what to show us, based on what they believed we cared about, they began to offer us things, based on who they believed we were. They even began to mess with time, giving us information and updates out of chronological order. All of these were changes we often had to undo or at least be mindful of, if we even knew about them. If we wanted to. And if we knew how.

If we didn’t, our reality might shift.

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. My first favourite website was Snopes, which was then a collection of myths and urban legends, most of them debunked. In the late 90s, bullshit chainletter emails would bounce around the internet with stories about how some Russian scientists had drilled their way to hell, or how a new computer virus had come out, or how Coca Cola dissolved human teeth. Sometimes, the strangest of stories really were true, or at least partially so, but most of them were trash. Thanks to Snopes, you could check such things in a moment. I loved that about the internet.

On September 11th 2001, almost twenty years ago now, it was difficult to disagree about what we saw happening right in front of our eyes. Nevertheless, there were a few people afterward who insisted that a plane had not hit the Pentagon, that the towers had been deliberately demolished, that some more mysterious sequence of events had transpired. They lurked in the darkest corners of the internet, much as they had always existed on any other margins in any other mediums. The rest of us could get on with our lives.

I grew up playing games and then, later, I became someone who analysed, critiqued and even designed them. One of the most powerful and important things I learned through games is that so much in life is based around systems and the longer a system is around for, the better we become at manipulating it. When a game has been around for a long time, we find many different ways to play it and sometimes we have to adjust the rules of the game to account for this. The rules for chess that we have today have seen many adjustments and revisions. The same is true for football. It is also true for our laws and for our systems of government. We have to modify these things in part because times change, but also in part because they are being abused and exploited, subverted in ways their designers never imagined.

Or simply used as optimally as possible.

It’s 2021 and the internet monoliths that we have begun to take for granted, that have surged like the rising oceans to engulf our lives and to carry us along their currents, are constantly being used in ways their designers never imagined. Two years ago, we thought the biggest problem we had with social media and internet monoliths was their subversion to manipulate elections, with great armies of bots and fake profiles being created and directed faster than the people who owned social media sites being able to prevent this. This presence could bring amplification and validity to anyone or to anything. “Learn the algorithm,” was the key to success online. Use a site or social media platform in a particular way and it will elevate you further. Elevate your work. Or your truth. Or just you.

Now, more than a year and a half into a pandemic that defines our generation, the areas of the internet with which we’ve become most familiar and most comfortable, those which we began to pour our lives and identity into, are not only places where elections were subverted, they’re places where the difference between life and death are considered a matter of opinion, where science and fact can be openly ridiculed, where conspiracies about September 11th are tiny in comparison. For some time now they’ve already been well-worn battlefields, public arenas within which opinion and force of will often carry more weight than evidence and reason, but now the consequences of doubling down on a belief are undeniably the difference between living and dying.

More important, for some people, is the difference between right and wrong. Not so much being right, but being seen being right, can give you validity, clout, value. I think we’ve reached the point where dying while being seen as right can matter more than living and admitting a mistake.

The flow of the internet, all those locks and gates opened by algorithms or AI or other people’s decisions that may simply have been motivated by a desire to give us what we like, have made it more difficult than ever to find things that go against the current, or to grasp something we can be sure is objective or straightforward.

One part of me believes that we can no longer look things up in a moment any more, because we have to second-guess every other thing we find. As a journalist and researcher, I never feel secure with what I find on the internet now and I dig, I verify and I compare, still coming away unsure, often worried I will publish something glaringly incorrect. A different part of me, a more dramatic part, sometimes wonders which things are even real.

I suppose anything is real if you can get away with it. If nobody ever notices.

---

There’s another aspect to all this, the aspect that makes me the most uncomfortable. The aspect I least enjoy discussing, but which I have to if I can fully explain myself.

Living alongside the internet, I’ve watched as some of us pull all those levers simply to control the flow as best we can, to keep ourselves afloat, but others have viewed this experience differently. They’ve seen it as a challenge, as another system they can manipulate. It’s an opportunity for them to choose how they present themselves. The more levers they pull, the greater their ability to do so. The more time they invest, the greater the result.

If you take your flashlight, lamp or light source and point it toward an object, you can easily affect the size and the shape of the shadows it will cast. Under your control, those shadows can lengthen or deepen, they can sweep and distort. A light up close can cast a gigantic shadow across a far wall, perhaps a sharp one or perhaps one fuzzy and undefined. Try it. See what you can make. The more you do it, the more tricks you can learn.

All of us try to present our best selves and all of us have our different selves, too. Forty years before I ever went online, the sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a book about how we behave differently in different contexts. It’s natural for us to speak to our family in a different way to how we speak to our best friend, or to our colleagues, or to a crowd we might be addressing in a speech. It’s not necessarily disingenuous, it’s merely a part of the human experience. But impression management, as Goffman called it, is also a matter of degrees. Some people are more invested than others. If given the tools to perform more effective impression management, more levers they can pull, they will engage even further.

I have flexed a few cynical opinions in my life (at least as many as three, the stats suggest) but, at the same time, I think I have to admit that I have also been very naïve about people. I tend to take many of them on face value and assume they are genuine. Many of us are, perhaps even most of us. But I’ve come to know both that this isn’t always the case and that, given the opportunity, some people will use every tool at their disposal to shape a false version of themselves. We’ve found ourselves in an era where this is more possible than ever. It’s no longer simply within the purview of politicians and PR firms, it’s within reach of every one of us and all we need to do is put in the time and energy. The reward can be ever greater popularity, ever more validation

And I’m so tired of seeing this.

Over the past half decade or so, I have seen the internet and its many systems gamed more than ever. Gamed for political gain, gamed for personal gain and gamed to create images, personalities and that god-awful golem of hollow and lifeless artifice that is brand. Now a person can be a product, a new kind of commodity in this ever more opaque ecosystem.

The nausea and unhappiness I feel from all this is more than the simple declaration that I’m not a brand, I’m a person. It’s the discovery that other people, sometimes people I’ve known, really are a brand now. Their time, their energy, their life is now invested in shaping and maintaining that image, that brand, perhaps even at the expense of other pursuits. And with the right manipulations, the right tugging of the correct levers, they can perpetuate that, build that and further gain the affirmations and validations they need to prove to themselves that what they have created is as solid and as true and as real as anything else. And how would we know any different?

The ocean is not so far from my home. It’s not unusual to walk the beach or the seawall and see people engaged in impromptu photoshoots, dressed in their very best, expertly presented and shot with long lenses. A friend told me that most of these shoots are for the purpose of enriching dating profiles, that there’s an increasing feeling of expectation, a sense that everyone must present their very best selves, simply because everyone else now does so. To be on a dating site is to feel engaged in an ever-escalating competition for time and attention, to need to package oneself as the best possible product.

I don’t at all object to the idea of dating sites, but I could never get comfortable with them and I used to feel like I was browsing a human meat market, that it was all too easy for me to make judgements about people I didn’t know and then cast them aside. I felt, again, like people had become products and this was a system and a process I did not want to be part of. You can game it, people tried to tell me. There are ways to make it work better for you, it just takes a little time. I didn’t want to know.

The more time you spend trying to engage with things that aren’t genuine, the less you have for what is real.

When I use the internet these days it’s with an increasing sense of discomfort and disquiet. I find myself already on the lookout for the artificial. I second-guess people as much as I do information. I’m all too aware of the constructed persona and the deliberate framing, of that angling of a light to cast a particular shadow. In a few cases, this isn’t an abstract concern and social media in particular can be a place where I watch people I know are starkly different to the image they project be celebrated for the false façade they maintain, a façade that can be further reinforced by popularity and prominence. I see harmful and unhealthy people championed even in spite of their actions, because they have managed to engineer support and validation, or using the popularity and affirmation they have gained to push opinion over fact. The disingenuous and the distorted tie together like a greasy braid, each one reinforcing the other, and it’s no wonder falsehoods can spread so far, whether false representations or false information. I would say that sometimes I almost feel like I’m back at school, amongst the same gossip and garbage, but this is far worse than any of the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school ever created, and now it comes with measurable metrics in the form of likes, follows, retweets or subscriptions.

I’m sure, at this point, this is a common experience and common concern for most of us, and we are each finding our own ways to handle it.

Or not. For me, the experience is deeply unpleasant.

While drafting this I idly wondered if we could somehow develop a new version of Snopes for human beings. A demystifier of people, something that reveals each person’s private Picture of Dorian Gray, which grows ever more warped as they reinforce their persona ever more. But I’m sure even that would be gamed and subverted before too long.

I'm so, so tired of trying to work out who is real.

---

The internet monoliths I move between in my daily life all have one thing in common. Google, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Patreon and so many others are all based in the same place: the United States. They are towering. They overwhelm the rest of the internet. The levers that many of these pull, controlling currents and flow, are being operated in the United States. The politics, existential crises and cultural interests of that country are disproportionately represented and, while I care very much about the United States, I also want to hear about the rest of the world. I want to hear about where I live, and yet even that feels like it comes second. Yes, I am pulling all the levers that are supposed to make this happen. No, it isn’t entirely successful. I am using a paddle against a tsunami.

Once the bias is there, the snowball effect perpetuates. So often, whether I choose to or not, I am in that motel room watching a plethora of American news again, or its modern equivalent. It frustrates me so much. Most of us Westerners essentially live in America some of the time now, if we spend any period online. That’s where our presence and our attention are pointed.

Before publishing this essay, I changed every mention of “torch” to “flashlight” because I felt I had to cater to an internet that sees the first word only as a burning chunk of wood, not as a British battery-powered light source.

The internet doesn’t feel like the world any more. It hasn’t for a long time.

---

I can’t abandon the internet of today. I need it for work. I need it to promote the things I create. I need it to keep in touch with people. I’m not different or special, only someone too bought in as well, my use also going from a habit to a dependency. But it has almost entirely stopped being a place of delight and discovery. It has lost any sense of being egalitarian. So much less is new, so much less is unfamiliar. So much more has an agenda.

Algorithms, metrics and social media have quantified and gamified everything, encouraging competitiveness and narcissism. Public spaces have become arenas and arenas encourage performance. In an attention economy, the outrageous and the overblown mean a cat in a bin can have the same profile and presence as terrorists in a hotel. In spaces that now mix our friends, our parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, our favourite newspapers and our favourite sports teams, people we know and love are elevated or relegated according to how interesting an algorithm has decided they are, pushing them to the fore or pulling them from your view. “People on Twitter are the first to know,” says the social network that prides itself on immediacy more than integrity or fact-checking. Misinformation abounds. As the line between person and brand has smudged between all recognition, corporations insert themselves into and between everything else we try to examine. Surrounded by banner ads, the conflicts of polarised culture generate enormous revenue for monolithic American tech companies. As we fight, push our narratives, construct our personas or compete in the race to prove we are the most woke, we all make @Jack richer, or provide Zuck with more of our personal data.

I also find myself reminded of what Octavia Butler called “simple peck-order bullying,” the hierarchical behaviour where people want to, and now can, elevate themselves above others, according to identities they've built for themselves, to push their ideas, push their image, push their sense of superiority or push their opinions so hard that they can reshape them into facts. Anything is possible with enough pulling of enough levers. And now more people have more of those levers. And some of them love to pull and then push, pull and then push.

I don’t like what the internet has turned into, nor what it has turned people into.

So what now?

---

This was an essay inspired by an essay, inspired by an essay, which is always how it goes. Creativity is theft and anyone who says otherwise is only trying to distract you as they secretly shake you down. The eternal question that writers (or anyone creative) is supposed to dread is “Where do you get your ideas?” Because we aren’t supposed to know. But we do know. We get them from everyone else. We thieve them.

Ideas are pickpocketed from the people we pass in twisting evening alleyways, during the briefest moments of darkness and distraction. They’re caught with nets as they flutter with all the freedom of sweet springtime naivete. They’re spied upon from tremendous distances through the jealous lenses of sparkling telescopes. Nothing is truly ours and anyone wringing their words into a desperate defence of some unique capacity for originality ex nihilo is either deceptive or deluded.

(Avoid them. You’re likely their next target.)

This essay was heavily inspired by Lucy Bellwood reflecting on Nicole Brinkley. Both have written nuanced examinations of social media (focusing on Twitter) that I think you should make the time to read, but I’ll try and sum up the main thing I have taken from their writing in one line:

Social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it.

This is in so small part my interpretation, coloured by a particular belief I hold, that being that social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it. You can probably see why I approve.

There’s more to it than that. Brinkley talks about Twitter essentially breaking the way the Young Adult literature scene works, which to me is one facet of a dangerously seductive diamond that repeats many different stories of damage done by how we’ve used and gamed the internet. Her wonderful conclusion is that “These days it’s okay to not be sure what Twitter is for. We can stop going there until we figure it out.” And I so desperately wish I could stop going on the internet until I could figure out what it is for now, too. I wish it wasn’t essential. But it is, broken as it may be, breaking things as it may be.

While I don’t think leaving it is an option for me, I am using so much of it less. I have to. Social media, a place where I am shown arguments and controversy over the lives of people I care about, has become somewhere for me to hurriedly hurl out a quick update or two before I flee, escaping before I come across something, or even someone, that will make me sad. Any search box is a cause for scepticism, prompting me to analyse the results it gives and try a dozen different ways to find the same thing, just in case. Even Snopes is now a running commentary on the (American) news cycle. The best I can do whenever I think something fundamental to our society is unhealthy is to participate in that thing as little as possible. I know this limits my reach, limits my relevance and limits my success, but I also know that this makes me less unhappy and allows me to continue to feel genuine. Like I am still myself. Like I am still real. It may be apparent that my mental health has taken a few hits over the last couple of years. It doesn’t need to take any more.

I am not only unsure what Twitter is for, I am unsure what the whole internet is for.

---

There is no conclusion to this essay. It is supposed to be six thousand words of open-ended reflection. The past year or so has sometimes been a huge struggle for me and it really is true that some days I can barely make a pancake. Work has been difficult, writing has been difficult and maintaining regular Patreon updates has been difficult, with this piece being a huge challenge to finish. I think I’ve tried to make the best of things, as well as present an honest but still positive face to the world. I have piles of tasks to get through and I tackle what I can, with what feels like so much competing for my attention. At the same time, I can’t opt out of the systems I live and work inside of, much as I can’t stop paying rent or putting food in my mouth, because individuals can't kick a habit society has become dependent upon. I think the best thing I can do right now is be truthful about all that, try to remain as genuine as I can and continue to step away from what makes me uncomfortable, giving myself some distance from the things that make me unhappy.

That doesn’t mean I’m disappearing (I’m still checking in on social media, streaming on Twitch and so on), nor does it mean this change or this philosophy is forever, nor does it mean that things can’t improve. But it does mean I’m changing a few things about myself, my habits and my preferences. And it does mean I have a working, temporary, if unsatisfactory answer to the question “So what now?”

It is: “We’ll see.”

---

A big thanks to my Patreon community for the links I’m adding here, post-publication.

The first is How sex censorship killed the internet we love, on Endgadget, about controlling the internet in all sorts of ways and about what might be considered explicit (apparently a condom might be explicit).

Then there’s The internet Is Rotting, from the Atlantic, about bits of the internet that are disappearing and the loss of information that comes with it, as well as information that is overwritten and altered. We are keeping less than you might think.

Finally, The web began dying in 2014, here’s how, by André Staltz, talks about the growing prominence of big corporations (all American), what their priorities are, and what online things (services) they may bring to you.

#Patreon #America #Erving Goffman #September 11th #persona #social media #the internet #writing

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danetobelieve · 4 years

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Tech-tonic Shift || Dave and Winston

When: week beginning 12/07 or so Who: @seizethecarpe & @danetobelieve Where: the station and etc. Summary: Dave brings Winston some technology that they found at the beach. Warnings: content warnings for death discussion, some slight description of gore and the like

Winston was actually starting to be able to do their job again. They’d taken the week off after Bea’s resurrection, mainly because all the tech around them had immediately gone haywire. After a week it hadn’t really been that workable but Winston had barely been in the job a week and taking an extended period of time off was hardly ideal. Things had improved vastly since then. A knock at the door however dragged them from their thoughts and Winston looked up from the array of monitors they’d been given as part of their new role. Honestly, one of the reasons that Winston enjoyed their work so much was the cool stuff they got to work with. Obviously this wasn’t all top of the line, but then again it was a ‘sleepy’ backwater town in Maine. Looking up, Winston spotted officer Redwood. “Hey Winston, there’s a guy here to see you, found some tech on the beach or something … seems more your area then ours?” Winston honestly wasn’t sure that it was, but when it came to anything with anymore then a six inch screen they were usually the one who ended up doing it. Apparently things hadn’t changed with the new job. Which was fine. “Sure, I’m happy to take a look at it.” Winston held the door open and spotted someone almost exactly there height. “Hi, my names Winston Dane, I’m a forensic technician here, you had something you’d brought in?”

Sometimes the end of the hunt wasn’t a successful kill, but the hope of closure. Dave knew a thing or two about that. Some days he woke up with nothing but the desire to feel the fury’s neck tear under his teeth, and sometimes he was too worn to want anything but the chance to say goodbye. Figured it was the same for everyone else, so when he’d heard rumbles of a beach that was the site of a number of disappearances he’d had to explore it. When he saw some seals hauled up and untouched, it looked all kinds of friendly to him, even with the broken down warning signs. But when he’d had a real walk, he’d begun finding them. Bits of sunglasses here, phones there. After an hour's walk on the beach, he’d found some things worth salvaging. Things that had been spit back out after. Some of it was beyond rescue, some of it wasn’t, but hell, maybe there was someone who would want them back. And hell, Dave had no idea what people could do with tech these days. So he’d brought the whole batch over to the WCPD. When he was finally directed to the person who could help, he offered them a wide hand to shake. “Dave Herring. I was having a walk on one of them beaches that no one sunbathes on, and found all of these ipods and kindles and I don’t know what kinda gizmos. I was told you might be able to help me get them to the right persons.”

Honestly, when Winston had started their day today (with coffee as usual) they hadn’t expected this. But it was certainly an interesting problem. Winston paused for a moment as they considered what this guy was saying. “Okay Dave, cool to meet you…” Winston glanced at the man opposite them before pulling up a chair and taking another one for themselves. “I don’t know if you’ve got all of that stuff with you, but the best way to do it would probably to see if we can work out who they belong to and then I can try and get in contact with them and let them know that you found them and returned them. I’m sure they’ll be really grateful, it’s really nice of you to bring these up.” Winston found that it was less nerve wracking talking to people in a professional capacity then it was when they were in a social environment. “Which beach did you find these at?” Winston asked, curious as to why there was such a great variety of items just being abandoned on a beach.

“As a matter’o fact, I do,” Dave replied, swinging a rough looking tackle bag from his back, that he hadn’t updated since at least the eighties. Why replace what you could stitch and fix back together? ‘Specially when things these days weren’t made to last. Piece by piece, he picked out the salvaged tech, sand grains sticking to each piece. No matter how battered each individual thing was, he set it down on this young Dane’s desk with careful reverence. Some of these things likely had photos of the people that had lost them, and maybe answers too. “Uh, the one just south of Vicker’s beach.”

“Oh, wow, cool.” Winston was pretty sure that the bag that Dave had used to bring the proverbial goodies into Winston was older then they were. However, they weren’t going to complain. At least he had thought to have the good sense to bring them in at all, which was more then most people. Apparently that fact was more true on the one just south of Vicker’s beach. Winston was pretty sure that there was a veritable plethora of iPods (there was an old nano, an iPod classic, two iPod shuffles and four iPod touches), several phones, a couple of kindles and a few other versions of e-readers, an iPad and what looked like the very battered remains of a Alienware laptop. Winston pulled on a set of gloves and glanced at the tech. “You weren’t kidding, this is really a lot of stuff. Weird that people would just leave this all behind, I guess the first thing to do is clean them all up as best I can, then get them charged and see if I can access them.” Winston looked up at Dave. “This is gonna take me a while Dave, can you come back in like a few days or something and I can let you know what sort of progress I’ve made?”

“Sure thing,” Dave said, slinging the worn canvas bag back onto his back, looking at the random assortments he’d left on the technician’s desk. Hoped this Dane person would be able to find their homes, even if their owners were long gone. Plucking his sunglasses from his shirt pocked, Dave nodded his head, and headed out. No point in lingering to waste anyone here’s time.

-------

Several days’d passed, and Dave’d eventually made the trip back to the station to see where the electronic detective had gotten with all them gizmos. He’d done another pass of the beach in the mean time, running his fingers through the sand, but nothing new had surfaced. But sand beaches could swallow and unearth their secrets at any time and maybe he’d found all the big things on his first round. Maybe he wasn’t the only one patrolling the beach for little treasure treats. All the same, he was quickly directed back to Dane’s office, and knocked politely, summer hat clasped in his hands.

Winston had been working on the lost items as much as possible. Finding all the various charging cables had been challenging in itself. Of the gizmos that had been brought into Winston, a good proportion of them would need repairs to hardware before they could be recharged. A few had broken screens which made accessing them difficult. The rest worked to varying degrees. Spotting Dave knocking at the door to their office, Winston pulled it open and ushered him in. “Hey, welcome back Dave, you want a drink or anything …” they weren’t sure if Police Station Coffee would be to Dave’s taste but it was polite to offer, “You didn’t find anymore tech did you?” Winston asked, a little concerned about the amount of it that was apparently turning up.

“Nah, I’m alright, thanks all the same,” Dave replied, waving away any such coffee request as he stepped inside. He set his bag down, and pulled out a quarter of some old kindle, and what had once been the motherboard of some kind of smart phone. “Ain’t too sure you’ll get any use out of these. It’s just that one shore, though. You’ll find trash anywhere, but just whole things abandoned on this one.”

“Sure, it’s cool, the coffee here sucks,” Winston raised an eyebrow at the scraps that Dave had brought in. “I’ll take a look at them if it’s all the same to you, I don’t really know what I might be able to do with it. You never know what you might be able to pull off of something, even if there’s no way to access any of the data that was once there forensics can get a lot. I’m always … surprised by it.” Winston paused for a second. “Anyway, I’ve managed to get into one of the phones, it’s one of the newer models actually and the lady who owned it had a pretty good case on it. It was just scratched up really.” Winston pulled a evidence bag towards them and turned it over so Dave could see the phone inside. “It’s belongs to a lady called Elaine Thompson, she lived here in town, is a retired lawyer apparently. When I matched the phone to her I realised that there is a missing persons report attached to it. Elaine went missing in February of this year.”

“Ha, noted,” Dave replied with a laugh. “Not much of a coffee guy myself, but I’ll keep that in mind.” The caffeine gave him headaches as often as not these days, heavy pounding ones not worth the kickstart to the morning he promised. Besides, sleep was the one thing in his life he had complete control of. He slid the little pieces onto Winston’s desk. “Yeah, you;d know better’n me.” When Dane said they’d found something, he perked right up, clasping his hand behind his back and leaning over the phone. “Shit. That aint good. This here uh beach I found this all on, it had a couple broken signs, saying it wasn’t all that safe to stay there too long. Wonder if maybe all this has somethin’ to do with that.”

Winston was not convinced that there was such a thing as someone who wasn’t a coffee guy. They themselves lived off of the stuff. Sometimes to an unhealthy level. However, that was hardly important compared to the other problem at hand. Dave seemed concerned by the news, however it was nothing compared to the concern that Winston themselves felt at the fact that they had been found in an area with broken signs warning about a hazard. “Okay, that sounds like bad news,” Winston wondered whether this was a coincidence. Maybe Elaine had simply wandered onto the beach and something terrible had happened. They were almost praying that this wasn’t supernaturally related. “I’ve got a map of White Crest’s coastline, can you show me where on the map this area is?” Winston pulled up the map on an iPad and handed Dave a stylus, “You can just draw onto the screen, if you use your fingers to like drag the map to where you want, then you can you know … draw with the pen thing.” Why would they call it a pen thing? “Anyway, if there were signs here we should definitely get someone to check it out properly.”

“Yeah, sure thing,” Dave agreed, sitting in the seat opposite Winston’s desk. He’d expected them to pick up a physical map, but instead he was handed an iPad and a stylus. Hell, Dave had only made the switch to a touchscreen phone three years ago, and was constantly typing the wrong buttons, clicking on things that he oughtn’t and getting lost through ads that looked like links on the website and dragged him some place else. The moment he took the iPad, he accidentally clicked the homescreen button. “Uh,” he said, gesturing for Winston to refind all of it. Once they had, Dave was more cautious, poking the screen in short bursts until he got to the area south of Vicker’s, using the pen, he cautiously drew a bubble around the beach in question.

“Awesome,” Winston dropped slowly into the seat next to Dave’s, watching them carefully pick up the iPad. There were some set backs but that was to be expected and Winston had seen much worse. Some of the older members of staff in the station didn’t know the difference between a fax machine and a printer, many of them were convinced that faxes were the optimum method of transferring information too. “Don’t worry, happens to the best of us.” Winston watched Dave mark out the area before taking several screenshots and sending them off to the relevant people within the station. “Some officers are going to meet us down there, but you’ve actually … you know been out to this beach and gotten there relatively unscatched, do you think you could show us the areas you found everything and we can set up some method of monitoring it so we can work out why this is happening…?”

“Hmmm,” Was all Dave had to say to that. He was happy just fine with his laptop from 2010 and a phone with a case thick enough it could be mistaken for a brick. This was not his expertise. At Dane’s suggestion, he nodded, although he had a bad feeling about it right deep in his gut. “Ain’t too hard to get to, it just seems dangerous to stay on.” With plenty of signs of danger on all ends. It wasn’t even one of the beaches with the more dangerous waves nor riptides. “Anyhow, I’m here to help, however that might be. Just letting you know I’m new to town. Don’t know much of anything about the beaches yet.”

“Well, welcome to White Crest, I’m sorry that this was one of your first experiences of the town, it’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.” Winston being one of the key culprits for that particular crime. “If you’re free now we might as well go check it out now, officer Redwood has volunteered to drive us down to the beach,” which was good because Winston didn’t think that they should be having anyone in their terrible piece of shit car within any sort of work capacity, “so if you’re happy to join us then we can get going straight away. Hopefully this won’t take too much of your time.”

“Sure am,” Dave replied, dropping his hands to his thighs and pushing against his knees to stand up again. “No time like the present.” Not long after, there was officer Redwood, whose hand Dave shook too, and they were lead to the car. Dave gave directions to the beach, and they were soon on their way. As Officer Redwood pulled up, Dave scanned the waters. Shrinking tides, and with the sunny sky, the water wasn’t that violent either. In all things, it seemed a perfect beach day, but the beach was near empty of people. Everyone either avoided it or somethin’ worse was causing the gap. “See here. Sign’s barely even legible, completely rotted through.” He pointed it out, nudging it with his boot

The sea wind swept through Winston’s hair and slowly dried out their lips. Winston squinted into the sun through their glasses and couldn’t help but wish that they had brought their sunglasses with them. Looking down at what was a truly rotten sign, Winston couldn’t help but wonder what was up with this place. “That’s really weird,” Winston crouched down and pulled the remains of a large red sign that had once given a warning of some kind from the wet sand. “Did you see other signs like this … ?” Winston had to admit that it was weird to them, they weren’t sure what it was, but there was something off about this that didn’t quite add up, Winston took a step towards the beach.

“Yeah, one down on the south end. Doesn’t seem to matter that you can’t seem them though, for a sand beach it sure is empty,” Dave said, looking out along the beach. He’d been wrong. There was one man, lying on a striped blue beach towel, flicking on his phone. David frowned, looking around the rest of the beach. Instinctively, he raised his hand in front of Winston, because while he knew he’d walked it fine, people didn’t avoid such a pretty place for nothing. “Careful now. Sure those signs are there for a reason.”

Spotting the man lying on the beach towel Winston was about to say something to them and was making their way over when Dave’s hand rose in front of them. “Broken signs and an empty beach,” Winston wasn’t sure whether or not this was really true, but they were almost certain that there was something going on here that was supernatural, it didn’t make sense for this to be something … mundane, and yet there was definitely something weird going on here, “that doesn’t seem weird at all.” Swallowing, Winston looked at the man on the beach, was he beginning to sink a little or were they seeing things? “Is he getting lower…?”

“I don’t have the faintest-” Dave turned back to the beach with a frown. Winston was right, the man was sinking, slowly at first. He didn’t seem to realise, but as Dave began to move, the man began to yell. Dave dropped his things and sprinted across the beach. Ignoring the police altogether, he grabbed the man’s arm, and tried to yank him back out. He came far too easily, so much so that Dave fell back from how hard he yanked. Only, the only thing he’d rescued was an arm dripping blood. “What the fuck.” He began to dig through the sand where the man had been, frantically throwing sand behind him as he dug his hands deeper and deeper, but as most when he reached the water logged sand, it smelled like iron, but he couldn’t quite see how blood soaked and red it truly was.

What happened next would’ve been perfectly placed within a horror movie, Winston saw the man sinking, they tried to move with Dave as he went to help the sunbather but they weren’t nearly as quick or spry as their older companion. Darting after Dave, Winston was gasping for breath and had half a mind to reach for their inhaler and then they saw the hand that was in Dave’s possession. “Okay, fuck, off the sand now.” Winston wasn’t giving an option here, they could look for the man all that they wanted but from the arm that had been left behind and the red splodge of blood soaking into the water and dirt around them, Winston doubted there was anything left to look for. “I think he’s gone Dave,” they swallowed as the Officers that they had come here with looked at one another as if they should be doing something but weren’t sure what, “we need to get back to the station and cordon this place off but first we need to get out of the sand.”

After a long pause, Dave nodded, pressing his bloodied hands against his knees to push himself standing upright. He was breathing heavily, his lungs protesting the exertion. “Think you’re right, Dane. Alright, let’s go.” Pressing a hand to his side, he followed them off the sands, still holding the arm in his hand, it dripping blood onto the sand as they returned back to the embankment. “Don’t understand a thing. I walked that beach for hours last week. Ain’t seen nothing like this.”

Pursing their lips at the scene that they had just witnessed, Winston couldn’t help but worry about all of the people who could’ve been hurt like this. They weren’t sure what they had just seen. Honestly, it didn't really make any sense to them. They had seen things that could do this, but they were always physical things. Not entire pieces of land. Apparently previous signs hadn’t been successful but they had to do something. “I don’t get it either, but I’m going to look into it, I don’t think it was entirely natural and whatever it is that can do something like that is beyond me.” Winston paused for a second longer and frowned. What was different about Dave if he had been able to comb the beach without getting harmed. “We’re missing something and as soon as we find out what we can actually do something about it.”

#wickedswriting #para #p: dave #chatzy para #chatzy #tech-tonic shift

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autobot-ratchet · 5 years

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I’ve been wanting to do a character analysis thing on Drift for a long time and now that the comic is over I finally have time to sit down and think about his arc as a whole and how the fandom treats him and I have got some Thoughts and Opinions™

Alright so Drift. let's talk about Drift at his core, who he is and what he's like, which can admittedly be difficult to pinpoint because he spends like 90% of his time throughout the IDW continuity Working On It and figuring out for himself the answer to this question, but whoa hey it was a TRICK QUESTION the answer is ~*~inside him all along~*~*~

No seriously, it actually is. even though Drift goes through a whole lot of changes, including flipping his entire outward personality around like 180°, he doesn't change so much that there's absolutely nothing connecting him to his former self (though he'd probably love for you to think so lmao)

from what I’ve seen, fandom seems to assume that the most important aspects of Drift's character are that he started out as a street rat and that Deadlock was a Big Meanie Murderman and almost all of the fics I’ve read hugely reflect that, a lot of the fandom writes Drift based on their own personal assumptions (mainly assumptions of what they think a homeless drug addict would do and what they think a "Big Bad Decepticon" would do) rather than what Drift as a character would do. When writers don’t consider who Drift was as a person or why he was an addict/Decepticon and acted the way he did, it results in a lot of gross, insulting, boring, and out of character writing

This goes for current Drift too, with regards to his spirituality. Often he's characterized as a "stereotypical hippie", and fandom often doesn’t consider his motivation for being drawn towards it in the first place. Again, assumptions are made about what he is rather than what his actions are and it makes me yearn for death's sweet embrace so let's talk about the most important and consistent things to remember about Drift's character, like overall

There are at least a couple of things we know about him that are true, even through all the personality changes and emotional floundering:

1. When it comes to fight or flight, Drift is a solid fighter, he doesn't just take abuse lying down, he is more than capable of protecting himself.

2. He genuinely believes in justice, both as Drift and Deadlock. He can't stand when people with power abuse people without it.

Let's focus on street rat Drift and Deadlock for now since that's where a lot of people either didn't read or vastly misinterpreted, and also mtmte/lost light Drift is worthy of a section all to himself given how different he is

Point 1: times when Drift defended himself

That time when Gasket got killed and he wrecked the fuck out of the cops that did it in a fit of blind rage (COPS. Meaning he’s not afraid of authority)

That time when one of his Deception comrades told him he'd tattle on him to Turmoil and he shot him in the face (like. in front of everybody, not even trying to be subtle)

That time when Turmoil tried to execute him and he broke free and bailed (again. not afraid to disobey his superiors and get in trouble, cannot stress this enough)

That time when he did it to his own dang self!!! When the heart of darkness was controlling him

so yeah Drift is not one to sit back and let people walk all over him, if someone tries to force him to do something he truly is not okay with doing, he makes them stop and I swear by all that is holy if I see one more fic where he's a poor little ex-prostitute rape victim who just needs to be healed with The Good Dick I'm going to snap you in half like a kit kat bar

lengthways, bitch

point 2: times when Drift elaborated on or demonstrated his true motives (and how that motive is justice and not just rage, the rage is fuel for the justice, y’all)

literally the whole reason Drift became a decepticon was because *King of Town voice* GOVERNMENT AIN'T RIGHT like he was angry about the blatant inequality that led to starvation and death for no reason other than greed on the part of the higher-ups

Deadlock was not super cruel and did not take pleasure in killing autobots like "heehee look how weak they are I love tormenting things weaker than me" he quickly killed as many autobots as he could because he genuinely believed that wiping them all out would win the war and that winning the war would make sure that Cybertron could become a place where no one has to go through what he did in the streets of Rodion

he was never a sadist who enjoyed causing pain and torturing autobots to make himself feel powerful or take out his aggression on them, his goal was to quickly eliminate as many of them as possible and he did a very good job of it and that is why he was an infamous decepticon, because of his absurdly high kill count

now let's get into mtmte Drift and how all this still applies to him even though he's way different now

point 1: still defending himself even though he’s nicer now

yes he liked Rodimus and let Roddy get away with a lot of things he probably would not have put up with as Deadlock but Roddy never crossed that line into "genuinely uncool" and Drift would get real with him even before the exile, like I know Ratchet said Drift "tells him everything he wants to hear" but like. not really lmAO

and of course the whole discourse with the exile, Drift took the blame because he genuinely believed in the quest and his vision and that Rodimus had to be there to see it through, you could honestly argue that it had more to do with his vision than his friendship with Roddy, like yeah they're tight but Drift had his moments where he wasn't totally down with his antics (as shown above) and he really bet everything he had on this quest

Rodimus never abused him or anything like that. Took advantage of him, sure, but like I said, he never crossed that line into “genuinely uncool” and even if he ever tried to, Drift does have his limits and does know how to say no, it’s not an unbalanced relationship, Drift just prioritized the quest above all else and him doing so happened to work in Roddy’s favor (not that Roddy wanted it to since he came clean about everything later but that’s a whole other discussion for another time)

same with Ratchet and his jabs at this religion, Drift’s got his limits and Ratchet has seen them lmao

Drift is also still badass at fighting, let's not forget that

he also still gets angry like he used to, he's not an emotional pushover either

I'd also like to mention that even after his realization of self worth in Empire of Stone where he accepts that he's good for more than just being a weapon to be used by an ideal, he's still holding his own, but less lethally

Usin them hilts instead of the blades, good job honey

point 2: he still cares about justice and doing what’s right even though his mind’s been changed on how to make it happen

during his exile he went around saving mostly organics from decepticon attacks and tyranny, granted yes part of it was probably out of guilt since he no doubt participated in some destruction of organics when Megatron had him convinced it was to help Cybertron but all that's really changed is that now he realizes organics actually aren't detrimental to cybertronian freedom and they deserve to live in peace just as much as he does.

He didn't suddenly go from "whatever, organics aren't even sentient it’s fine to kill them" to "oh shit maybe they are sentient my bad", he went from "Megatron told me organics are trying to impede our freedom much like the autobots are, I have to wipe them out too if we want to win this war and live in peace" to "whoopsie doo it turns out Megatron lied to me and we're treating these organics just like the senate treated us, I have to stop this"

also the Lost Light’s quest! The whole point of the quest was to find the knights of cybertron so they could make the planet suck less, he’s still trying his best to take action to make things better on a large scale like he bought the ship and kickstarted the quest, he’s just lucky Roddy wanted to come with and charmed 200+ people into joining and being their crew for him lmAO he probably would’ve gone by himself anyway if Roddy had refused to help, he really believed in the vision he got that told him to find the knights more than anything

so yeah these two points have way more to do with Drift's character and looking over his whole arc with them in mind makes him much easier to understand, he’s a lot more than just “a helpless victim street rat who turned into a sadist to rival the DJD and then randomly became a hippie” he’s actually a pretty consistent character despite the outward personality shifts and hopefully this helps anyone having trouble characterizing him

#text post #character analysis #happy clappy hippy #I love this boy and he gets done wrong by the fandom a lot lmAO #rape mention

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ilovethings-somuch · 6 years

Text

Good Press

Chris Evans x Reader

Fake Dating AU

A/N: Here it is! Happy Election day! Get out and VOTE!

This is technically part of my 1.5k Followers Celebration and its been haunting me from my drafts for over a month, but I finally finished! This is a fake dating AU and it was requested by @princenyaz

I’ve been in a rut for a while now so I’m going to share the website that has repeatedly helped me get out of ruts like this one. It’s called Fighters Block (I linked it there) and it basically gives you a fun way to reach a word count and be motivated to just keep writing something.

“I’m sorry, you want us to what?” I asked my publicist, who also happened to be Chris Evans’ publicist, as I chose to ignore the look Chris was giving me.

“I think it would be a good idea for you two. You have a lot in common and it would give both of you a lot of positive press.”

“Why do I need positive press?” I looked at Chris for backup but he refused to meet my eye. “Are you going to back me up on this?”

“I actually, don’t think it’s such a bad idea,” he shrugged.

“Really? Other than the fact that we’d be faking a relationship? You don’t see anything wrong with that?”

“It’s not ideal, of course, but if we make a contract and know each other’s boundaries it’s basically like a business transaction.”

“I can’t believe you’re agreeing to this,” I shook my head as I glowered at both of them.

“I’m just saying it might not be that bad. The final decision is up to you,” Chris tried to assure me.

“Chris is right,” our publicist spoke up. “Take some time to think about it over the weekend, and we’ll have another meeting to discuss it on Monday.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to go on a date with Chris Evans, because honey I will gladly take your place,” my best friend, Ellie, offered when I told her about my meeting.

“That’s not the point,” I started.

“It is the point! If your publicist thinks it’s going to help kickstart your career, and that it’s going to be good on Chris’ end too, then why not? He’s a nice guy! Plus, he’s not bad to look at.”

“But it’s fake.”

“It is, but at least you know it’s not real going in. Think of it as method acting, you’re just acting as his girlfriend,” Ellie suggested.

“That’s not how it works.”

“But it can be! Don’t write it off so fast. I think it would be fun.”

“Of course you think it would be, you’re also the one who thinks skydiving is fun,” I deadpanned.

“Don’t change the subject. Look, if you’re really worried about either of you getting the wrong idea or something, just make a really good contract so that you know you’re both on the same page.”

“That’s what Chris said,” I mumbled.

“See, I knew I liked him!” she laughed before being serious again. “You asked for my opinion and I think it would be good for you. Not only because it will get your name out there, but because it will get you out there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, you haven’t so much as talked to a guy since Ryan. You need to put yourself out there again.”

I took the rest of the weekend to think about it. I weighed the pros and cons, but really I couldn’t come up with a good list of cons. I was sure there had to be a concise list of reason why this was a bad idea, but when it came down to it I could barely name three.

“I can’t believe I agreed to this,” I sighed as I looked over my outfit one last time.

“Honestly, me neither,” Ellie laughed from where she was perched on my bed. I gave her a sulking look and she hopped off the bed to hug me. “It’s going to be fine! Chris is such a nice guy, and you made a very thorough contract, nothing could go wrong.”

“Thank you,” I hugged her back for a moment before straightening up and releasing one final deep breath.

“Now get out of here, you’re going to be late!”

I waved her off but took her advice and grabbed my bag and keys before heading out the door. Chris suggested a new restaurant downtown and even if I wasn’t excited about the date itself, I was very excited about the food. As I got out of the car I noticed another car door closing a few cars over. I looked over at the same time Chris saw me so I caught his smile and wave.

“Good timing,” he called as he waiting for me before we walked up to the door together. “You look great,” he complimented me easily and I was taken aback for a moment before remembering that that was a typical statement on a date.

“Thank you,” I recovered, “you look nice too.”

“Oh thanks, the henley really classes things up,” he joked.

We were sitting in the restaurant by then and I was trying to think of something else to say. “It shows off your tattoo at least.” There was too long of a pause before I got the words out and he seemed confused before remembering our conversation about his shirt.

“It does, do you like tattoos?”

“I like them on you.”

After the initial awkwardness, we were able to talk pretty consistently throughout the meal. I embarrassed myself a minimal number of times and before I knew it the waiter was dropping off the check. My instinct was to grab it or at least insist that we split it, but Chris was faster and quickly informed me that since he picked the restaurant it’s only fair that he pays. I was still going to argue but he shut me up by telling me that I could pick the restaurant and pay next time. That’s when I was reminded that this wasn’t just a one-time thing. We were planning on keeping up this relationship for at least a few months.

Chris offered me his arm as we stood from our table. I gave him an unsure look for a moment but he subtly nodded to the not-so-casual paparazzi that was waiting outside the restaurant and I quickly understood. It was weird how comfortable it felt being close to him, touching him, but it almost felt like I’d known him for a while. Chris escorted me to my car, the paparazzi stayed at a semi-respectable distance, but Chris still gave me a kiss on the cheek for good measure.

“I’ll call you,” he called to me as he walked backward towards his car.

“I’ll be waiting,” I teased, assuming that this was also for the benefit of the press. I later discovered that was not the case when my phone lit up with a call from Chris as I was getting into bed.

“Hello?”

“I think it’s funny that people still answer the phone like that,” he laughs into the phone. “As if you don’t have caller ID and know who’s calling.”

“It’s a force of habit,” I defend myself lightly. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

“I told you I was going to call you later.”

“Yeah, but I thought that was just because of the press being around.”

“That might have been part of it, but is it so bad that I like talking to you?”

I press my lips together to suppress the smile that’s trying to show, “It’s not a bad thing.”

“Good. You know, I wouldn’t have agreed to this whole setup if I found you totally intolerable.”

“Of course not, I’m glad I made that one step up from intolerable.”

“Maybe, but you’re on thin fuckin’ ice,” Chris’ accent came out as he teased.

“Oh no, baby I’m sorry, I don’t know what I would do if my fake-boyfriend broke up with me,” I whined sarcastically. Chris blurted out a boisterous laugh and I couldn’t help but feel a little pride at being the cause of that sound.

“You should do more comedies,” Chris suggested once he calmed his laughter.

“Yeah? Maybe I’ll ask my manager.”

“You mean our manager.”

“I mean my manager, but I can tell her about you if you’d like. Maybe I could get you a meeting, she’s really great. I bet she could get you some auditions, but of course, you need to be ready to start out with some low budget films. You can’t have everything, Chris.”

“Wow, the sass is really strong with you, isn’t it?” Chris said in disbelief.

“I’m sorry,” I quickly backtracked. “Sometimes I can’t shut it off.”

“No, don’t apologize, really, I think you’re funny.”

“Thank you,” I trailed off awkwardly.

“Anytime,” Chris offered. “Well, um, I should get some sleep, I just didn’t wanna back out on my promise to call you. We should set up another date soon.”

“Yeah, I’ll look at my schedule tomorrow and text you or something.”

“Perfect. Well, Goodnight, (y/n).”

“Goodnight, Chris”

We ended up going on quite a few public dates the following weeks. It wasn’t until later that I realized we also started spending time together privately. I was convinced we were just becoming closer friends, and even if I wanted it to be more than that, I knew Chris didn't feel the same way. We were both just doing this to advance our careers and get good publicity, I couldn't bring myself to even consider that there could be anything more. Even when his causal touches started showing up in private, or that time he surprised me with flowers and soup when I told him I couldn't make our date due to a sudden case of the flu. That was the first night he slept over, granted, he slept on the couch and it only happened because he was convinced I was going to get worse over the night. All these moments seemed so insignificant at the time, but now I'm able to realize how important they were in the creation of our relationship.

The fake dating started seeming like less of a chore, it started feeling real. I knew I was in trouble, but I kept telling myself that even once we had to "break-up" we would still be friends and I could deal with that. Or at least I thought I could deal with that.

"You guys have been doing great," our publicist informed us. She asked us to come in for a meeting to update how we were doing with the fake relationship and because she had news for us, though she wouldn't tell us what the news was.

"It hasn't been easy," I sigh sarcastically and lean away from Chris. He laughs wholeheartedly and reaches for my hand. I don't pull away and instead, enjoy the feeling of his hand in mine.

"As much as I love seeing how well this has worked for both of your public images, I think it's time to quit while we're ahead. There was a big scandal in Hollywood last week where a couple was caught to be faking it. They were seen with other people and instead of taking a hit from a cheating scandal they thought it would be easier to admit it was fake. Now, I know you two are smarter than that, but I don't want anything like that to happen to you two and have this all be for nothing."

"So, we need to break up?" I asked, trying to mask the sadness in my voice.

"You do."

"Oh, okay," Chris replied quietly, gently dropping my hand in the process. He turned to our publicist and took a business tone, "How do we do this? Do we need to stage some public breakup or do we release a statement?"

"I think it's best if we just do a statement, as long as you two are okay with that? There's no reason we need to act like you left it on bad terms. Especially since you seem to have become friends at this point, I wouldn't want to jeopardize that."

"I appreciate that," I said and Chris met my eye with a smile.

"That means we'll have to stay away from each other for a while though, right?" Chris asked, looking back to our publicist.

"I think that would be best. I would suggest laying low for a while and then after a few weeks, don't be afraid to be seen with other people. We want to make this break up seem easy and happy. You guys could even go out together as long as it were in a group setting so it didn't seem like you were getting back together."

Chris and I left the office together. I was feeling defeated but still tried to put on a brave face since I wasn’t sure how Chris felt about the whole situation. For all I knew, he was excited for it to be over. An intrusive part of my brain wanted me to believe that is the case, even though my heart was telling me it wasn’t. Chris took my hand in his again as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

I looked up at him, confusion written on my features, and he smiled, "I figure it might be our last chance before the statement goes out tomorrow."

"You say that as if you're going to miss this," I replied in a mildly sarcastic tone. A tone that made Chris stop in his tracks, pulling me back right along with him.

"Why do you say it like that? Of course, I'm going to miss this and I'm sorry if this has been so awful for you that you're not going to miss it at all, but spending my time with you has been one of the highlights of my life lately."

"I'm sorry, I, I didn't mean it like that," I tried to rush through my words, trying to fix what I'd done, but at that point, Chris had dropped my hand and continued walking without me. A thought ran through my head about not needing to stage an argument since I could ruin any situation all on my own as I jogged to catch up with him. I took his hand in mine again as I pulled him to the stop.

"Chris, listen to me please," I looked up as a camera flash caught my eye.

"We can't do this here," he told me.

"I know, just, come over and let me explain." He agreed reluctantly and we continued on our way. I let go of his hand once he agreed and he didn’t make a move to pick it back up, even with the paparazzi on our tail. The trip to my apartment wasn’t far from the office and we walked the rest of the way in silence. As soon as we got inside Chris faced me, his arms crossed and eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer.

"Do you want to sit down?" I asked, trying to release some of the tension that had built between us.

"I think I'm good right here, at least until I hear what you have to say."

"Right. Okay, so, I guess, I like you. I like you more than I should and I'm not ready for this to be over."

"You have a weird way of showing it," he scoffs.

"I know, I know,” I sighed again, willing myself to say the words that had been on my mind for weeks. “I didn't want to open up and let you know how I really felt because I didn't know if you felt the same way. I didn't want to tell you and then end up losing you as a friend too. I can handle not being your girlfriend, but I can’t lose you from my life. I know you don’t like me as any more than a good friend and that’s okay, but this is why I’ve been acting weird, I was trying to keep that last bit of distance between us.”

“What makes you think I don’t like you as any more than a friend?” Chris asked with an amused look on his face.

“Well, how could you? You’re you and I’m just,” I shrugged and gestured vaguely to myself.

“Don’t do that, you’re perfect.”

“From from it,” I said immediately before the realization of what this could mean set in.

I caught Chris roll his eyes as he finally uncrossed his arms and stepped closer to me. He didn’t stop until we were almost touching, his eyes bore into mine and he cupped my chin to keep me from looking away.

“You. Are. Perfect,” he said slowly, enunciating each word with careful precision. The urge to roll my eyes was strong but the emotion he had in his eyes stopped me. “I have a confession,” he paused and took half a step back, releasing my chin. “I only agreed to this fake dating scheme because I had a bit of a crush on you. I wanted to get to know you without the pressure of a real relationship and I’d say it worked. I know you, and I like everything about you.”

“You do?”

“I do,” he said with a soft laugh. I couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment as the news sunk in and Chris took the opportunity to close the gap between us. His lips touched mine, softly at first, seeking reassurance. I gave in almost instantly, parting my mouth has his tongue glided along my bottom lip. I had a fleeting thought about getting drunk on the taste of his mouth, but before I could finish it he was pulling away. I chased his lips inadvertently and he smiled into another quick peck before fully pulling back.

“We should probably call our publicist and tell her not to run that statement,” Chris said in a somewhat triumphant tone.

“I think that’s a good idea,” I agreed, still feeling dizzy from the kiss.

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umazes · 7 years

Text

In the interest of having a civil discussion, I wanted to clear up the concerns I have about The Arcana. I think many of the people who have been raising concerns probably feel the same way and I don't want to be misunderstood as trying to attack the devs or kill the game, because this is emphatically not about that.

My concerns with how this is proceeding can be broken into 3 points

1. The pricing of the game.

I've said it before, but I don't mind paying for things. I've spent hundreds on merch and games. I've paid at least $50 to play mystic messenger, for optional content, and I haven't regretted it.

What bothers me about the pricing of this game is how absurdly different it is compared to other games, and how I have no idea why it's this expensive.

Most mobile dating sims (voltage and solmare, notably) tend to ask no more than $5 for a route. And that's not what I'm asking for, but it's a comparison worth noting, because I think of it every time I'm asked to pay the equivalent of $3 for a single choice in this game. Beyond that, it's costing $10 to buy a book, which ends up working out (as others have calculated) to somewhere in the vicinity of $500 if you want to play the full game.

I've never been asked for that much money for any game, ever, unless they also offer me an art book and something like a 3 foot tall statue. Even other dating sims priced in the hundreds offer posters or voicing or badges. Asking $500 per customer for just the game itself is ridiculous.

Here's where the "It's optional" argument comes in. It's optional, in the same sense that I can eat raw potatoes and cooking them with seasoning is optional. I can play the free game, but it's just not as good or coherent without the coin choices, and lacks all of the scenes that make the game what I want it to be.

The problem associated with just not buying premium content if you don't like the pricing is that from a statistical point of view, unless we explain WHY we don't want to pay so much for it, it can be misinterpreted. What if the executives think we don't want the content because it's bad? They can interpret it as mobile visual novels just not being profitable. "Don't like, don't buy" with no additional complaints can ensure the content just stops being available rather than altered to be affordable.

I want to pay for this game! God, I want to. If I could even buy a route for $50. If there was a discount the more coins you buy.

(There isn't. You save something like 81 cents if you buy the highest bulk tier as opposed to the same amount in small increments.)

I just can't afford to pay half a months rent to play one game that I have no guarantee of receiving the full content for, and I imagine that's true for many of us. And if it has to be this price, I'd just like to know why. It's been extremely unclear to me why it's priced so high.

2. The treatment of kickstarter backers.

I'll be brief here, because I'm not a backer myself.

It's very upsetting to me first and foremost that all backers were promised a free version of the game that is no longer available and can receive, at most, a $10 compensation or just suck it up.

"But they're refunding most of the kickstarter money and killing their game!" is an argument I have heard. And, well, yes. But the backers who bought tiers specifically for the promise of a full pc version have all lost out, unless the pledged $10 or less and did not buy anything in the mobile game.

I understand that a free mobile version was never a reward, and that makes sense. But for the people who pledged maybe $50 for the pc game, they've lost $40 and in addition will have to pay the $10 per book in order to still receive the content they were promised. It's absurd. At the very least, higher tier backers should be offered coin compensation. And the gall of allowing people to select neither refund nor waiting for the PC version indefinitely, of offering for people to just give their money away after this, is shocking.

The draw of kickstarters that I fund is that I pay for a product that isn't complete in order to receive it for a reduced price when it is complete, because that compensates what was essentially an uncertain loss to me at the time of pledging. This is a loss with no equivalent gain in sight and no overt plans for them to do anything much about it.

3. The response and treatment of feedback.

This one really gets me. Let me start off by saying that I am very, very much aware that they have no dedicated PR staff.

I had a recent interaction with the arcana Twitter after they found another user's untagged complaint. As has been standard to this point, they kindly advised us that paid content is optional, to which I have the response I gave above. Upon being asked again why they think the price is justified, this response was offered.

Ha ha! Funny joke! Apparently whoever was manning this Twitter account thought so. Except it wasn't a funny joke at all. Making a very callous and inappropriate joke of a real concern that has already negatively impacted users, after barging into an untagged complaint on a personal account, is about one of the worst responses I can think of. And nobody even asked for one at all, at the time.

But upon receiving that response, boy did I want a response. I've been seeing that response from them everywhere. "Send us an email". So I passed this along to some friends who do similar work and who have feedback concerns as well.

Firstly, I was told by pretty much everyone who had sent them an email that no response had been received. I brought this up in the Twitter thread, to which I received the answer that the team is small and can't respond to every email.

Well, okay, that's reasonable. Except that you DO have time to respond to every tweet, apparently.

Then send them! Throwing my feedback into some kind of void with no indication of how, if, and when they are being received is not an encouraging way to deal with customers.

Apparently, tweets are harder to pass along. Except that when I pointed out tweets can be linked and indexed in a variety of ways (it is a thought sharing platform, after all), I received the response that tweets are screenshotted and passed along as well.

Then why are we supposed to email??????

I was complaining about this confused response privately when another friend who works in customer service pointed out to me that companies tend to prefer social media over email communication anyway, because email can be treated as a legal document. This entire inability to respond to my questions promptly and honestly is making me really irritated in trying to resolve what amounts to a singular complaint that I would like to freely offer money to this game, and want to know why it's so hard.

And to be clear, I don't expect it to be resolved in a day. I don't expect the devs to work day and night to change their game. But if you are using official accounts to interact with your audience, I expect a prompt and professional reponse. I handle CSR duties daily in my job too. A simple "We will get back to you in a few days" or "This problem can't currently be resolved but we'll provide an update on how the discussion is going in a week" would suffice. Do a public update instead of responding to every email if it's too much. Walk away and respond to my tweet in twenty minutes after coming up with a better response.

If you're interacting with customers in a professional capacity, then be professional. I expect to be treated with respect and I expect to know where my feedback is going and what's being done with it, because as 85 stands the interactions I've had have been extremely underwhelming.

I'm not contacting these devs on their personal accounts and I don't want to be accused of bullying. I just don't think it's unreasonable that if I'm having a bad time trying to support this good game that I enjoy playing, I should know why.

#the arcana #i just wanted to get this off my chest

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