#i DO love the website though. the entire web design fucks hard

[diseaseriddencube]

i keep going back to read sparklecare thinking i'll like it but i just...don't

maybe i'm silly but it feels very flat? I still have no real grasp on the characters or attachment to them, I have vague ideas of a few of their main traits but not much else. I'm aware the entire comic is basically vent art, it does just read like a child's fanfic though..not to be insulting to fanfiction, but it does have a certain style or writing or joking to it. I don't dislike it either, but the writing and characters just don't vibe with me, i don't have the words to adequately explain why though

#sparklecare #i love the idea of it all #this hyper saturated hospital themed comic #it was instantly something that interested me #i'm always a sucker for blood and gore under sparkles and neon #perhaps it's just the art style #the thick lines just aren't doing it justice sometimes #panels end up looking so cluttered it's hard to tell what's even happening really #i DO love the website though. the entire web design fucks hard #the design changing with the chapters is absolutely incredible #(though they REALLY need a 'skip to page' button. the volumes have over a hundred pages to individually skip) #i like how much effort they put into trigger warning for things #though...with this art style..it almost feels unnecessarily silly sometimes #like TW vomit and it's a single brush stroke drop of green on the floor #blood is just the most cartoony red blobs i feel like it wouldn't even scare a toddler #even i have trouble looking at needle scenes but i can easily lower the content warning because of the art style #it gives me the vibe of those tumblr bios with dnis and a giant list of mental illnesses from people who don't understand what a squick is #half the faq page feels like 'you can't do this because it makes me uncomfy uwu' #....this entire post is criticism but i'll keep coming back to read it anyways 😍😍

[cmdonovann]

it's time.

welcome to…

QUANTUM BREAK APPRECIATION MONTH 2024

okay, fuck it, i went too hard last year trying to post every damn day in april. this year, i am taking a break and inviting you all to join me in making too many insane posts for quantum break month.

yes, that means i will be giving out prizes to those brave soldiers who join me in posting about a nearly-dead eight-year-old fandom for an entire month. i cannot promise that they are GOOD prizes, but i WILL reward you for joining me in quantum break hell.

HERE IS MY CALENDAR:

you will notice i am starting on the second week of the month. this is because i have been renovating an office and am exhausted. i will not be taking questions at this time.

anyway, the 5th of april is the 8th anniversary of quantum break's release! if you post about quantum break on this day and send me a link to the post, i will draw you a tiny doodle on a post-it note of one of the quantum break characters.

the week of april 7th - april 13th i have designated as ships week. this week, post about your favorite quantum break ships! for every shippy post you make (and send me a link to), i will put your name into a hat one time and then pick a random person (on the 30th) to recieve a ship certificate from robinboob, a parody website that sells "certficates" saying you "own" a certain ship. (to clarify, this is parodying nfts, but the money actually funds fandom-centric web development projects.)

(i already own certificates for jackpaul and paulcest. see below. but i'm sure you can come up with some fun new ships that i can buy for you ;3)

the week of april 14th - april 20th is blorbo week. who is your quantum break fave? which of these characters do you want to squeeze like a stress toy? post about your fave this week, and for each post you send me, i will put your name into a hat once and randomly pick someone (on the 30th) to receive free art, done by me, of your blorbo.

(i have already drawn so many quantum break fanarts, and yet, there are still characters i have only drawn once or twice. if your fave is underappreciated, this is the week for you.)

the week of april 21st - april 27th is plot week. gimme your meta, your theories, ramble about the plot points you love to hate or hate to love. for every plotty post you make and send to me, i'll enter your name in my little hat of names once and then pick a random person (on the 30th) to win either a copy of the secret history of time travel or quantum break: zero state, your choice.

that's about it! general diclaimers: you can tag your posts with "quantum break appreciation month 2024" obviously (that's what i'll be doing) but the only way to guarantee i see them and count them is to send me a link. my askbox will be open all month for this reason. you're also free to join the quantum break discord server i run and send your posts there, if that's easier! i won't announce winners for anything until the 30th. if i can't get in contact with you to tell you you've won (ie via tumblr message, askbox, discord, etc) i will pick someone else.

also, full disclosure, yes, i am giving out prizes specifically because i am too tired to make a ton of posts myself. but that doesn't mean i won't try! (i'm not going to enter MYSELF into the hat for a prize though, that would be silly.)

anyway. happy quantum break month! go wild my friends!!

#quantum break appreciation month 2024 #quantum break

[csmeaner]

(Aphex) Mod shit can we straight up get a design shitting edition for InsaineMembrane's designs?? APHX-714, APHX-666, APHX-667, APHX-838, APHX-1263, APHX-843, APHX-1341, APHX-1032, APHX-1737, DPHX-1431. in order of how they have them on the website. Love u sorry for torturing u </3333. Tried not to grab any dupes that have been on the blog before but if I got some that have been featured before please roast me to death. Also hope I'm using pronouns they're comfy with but let me know if I'm not

at first i was going to tell you to go fuck yourself because i dont want to but then the bus got delayed so here i am. this one has the faintest hints of a good design actually and that's probably because it's not a clusterfuck of shoddy textures and glaring colors. still not that impressive but considering who makes these it's almost passable. the spikes always look terrible and jut out from weird places, and it took me a second to realize the black clouds on the eyes are wisps but i have less to shit on this other than it's just a touch ugly instead of glaringly ugly

of course they have the 666 one and it's as needlessly edgy as it could be. not even that edgy either compared to the usual clusterfuck. the legs remind me of big bird and its hand behind it looking like it's trying to pull out a wedgie really decreases the edge factor. on the nose also looks like a nose clip for people who go swimming. most of it's just repeating patterns for the sake of filling space

i might just have very low standards but this design is completely fine. the right version gets to the weird overcomplicated nonsense but the one on the left has nothing wrong with it. right looks like it got a disease

I kind of appreciate the various poses these are drawn in but this one's closer to what i expected. a shitton of spikes and zigzagging segments that is more confusing than anything, on a pose that is clearly either eyeballed or traced somewhat because anything that has to be drawn from scratch has incredibly low skill. they've gotten better at color placements though. idk i feel i just have to reward actual progress. this does not stop it from looking a lot like a chicken or the fuckugly hands though

im glad you discovered the darken layer in procreate now can you learn some better things too. same spikes though im unsure if these are standards for the species or whatever. idek what the effect is trying to pull off or why the right wing looks broken. in fact both wings appear broken because they just out of the wrist when usually wing membranes are connected to the hand themselves. the eyes almost look like trypophobia and the amaazing stamp brush used for the circles

click on the link because this one couldn't be assed to be properly colored in at bits or even have the lineart connect. idk what the reference was but why is it doing a weird look over the shoulder. points i guess for trying to copy what a flail looks like even if it's incredibly obvious. the horns don't make a lick of sense and nothing is even which is almost a breath of fresh air compared to the over used symmetry ones. almost, it still looks bad.

idk which part of it lets it have two bodies with entirely different designs but sure let this person make more bad designs. these would actually look fine if anyone else was designing them, though right one is very hard to see because it's mostly black god forbid this be drawn with any shadows or you'd lose the bitch

this looks like a crook because of the mouth and limb situation. the lines aren't smooth at all do they do this with a mouse

another common sign a person's a beginner is their overuse of a single interesting stamp brush. it works for the wings but does not work as well for the wrists or ankles. the tail is very hard to see past the two octopus tentacles in face they are covering it entirely. the webbing on the forearms make little sense

another attempt at a plague rat. the limbs are already jacked up but they couldn't even make them look attached or like they'd even bend properly. also apparently the mask is a trait too. the subtle tint of gross piss yellow adds a nice touch for infected sewer rat just fix the anatomy and this almost could be decent

#aphex #design shitting

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #358

“i know the pieces fit, ‘cuz i watched them fall away”

Would you ever own a Great Dane as a pet? Oh Lord, my mom wants one so bad. She looooves big dogs. I wouldn't, though. I don't want another dog, period. What was or is your favorite quality about your recent ex? Her resilience, strength, creativity, loyalty, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. lol. Have you ever witnessed a human being giving birth in real life? No, and I NEVER fucking will. What about an animal? Yeah, cats. What kind of things do you enjoy reading about on sites like Wikipedia? I sometimes do that for straightening out game plots after watching a let's play if I have remaining questions. Wikipedia tends to do well with compressing it. Which country’s cuisine that you haven’t tried, would you be interested in sampling? (e.g. Moroccan, Thai etc.) I wouldn't know because I'm not educated enough on foreign cuisines. What’s the last movie you watched on your own? The Shining, I think, forever ago. Fried, poached, boiled or scrambled eggs? Scrambled. Have you ever got into a club, whilst being underage? I've never tried. Are you happy with your relationship with God, or do you want more from it? I don't have one. Do you struggle with boredom? Very, very severely. I have absolutely awful anhedonia; I'm pretty much constantly bored. Literally. I just... find things to pass the time, even if I'm not really enjoying myself. What famous person do you wish you could be friends with? I'm going to assume here you don't mean a significant other, because uh... y'all been known lmaooo. I would really love to be friends with Gab Smolders (I know that's not her real name, just using her YT name), because we have very similar interests. As well, Suzie Hanson is a fucking SWEETHEART. I miss her channel. :( At some point I want to purchase some stuff from her store to support the darling. Man, thinking of this question, there's really a lot. What would you do if you were famous? Hate it, haha. Do you wish you hair were shorter or longer? It's at a fine length right now. What photo editing website or software do you use? Lightroom and Photoshop. What hair color looks best on you and what’s your natural color? I think my hair looked best black. It's naturally brown. What is your favorite show to watch? Meerkat Manor. It is so, so comforting to me. Are your maternal/parental instincts strong? Not with kids, oddly enough. I've only ever really encountered strong protective instincts with significant others like when they're sick or something like that. In school, do you/did you work better by yourself or in a group? I absolutely worked better alone. I hated group work. Do you know anyone who has a collection of old records? My mom did, once upon a time. I feel like I know someone who does now... but idk. Do you go on any forums often? Just RP ones. Would you ever agree to an open relationship with someone? Nnnnope. Do people always say you’re too thin? Uh, I have the opposite problem. Could you design a whole web page yourself? Not from scratch, no. I've only done so on free sites that give you the bare bones and easy editing. Have you ever cooked an entire dinner for your family? Definitely not. Do you prefer piano music or violin music? Ohhhh, both are beautiful, but I have to say violin. Who do you tend to get in fights with the most? My mom, I guess, not that we fight a lot. Are you attracted to spooky and macabre things naturally? YEP. Have you ever bobbed for apples? Were you successful? No. It's disgusting if you're going after others, and besides, I HATE water up my nose and have never quite figured out how to block it out without plugging it. Hypothetically speaking, if you had a child [too young to make their own decisions], what would you dress him/her up as for Halloween? It would depend on what their interests were. Do you intend to take your children trick-or-treating, if ever you have any? I'm not having kids, but if I did, I definitely would if they wanted to go. What is the coolest jack-o-lantern you have ever seen? Now THAT'S hard, I really don't know. What was your favorite candy to get from trick-or-treating? What about your least favorite? Reese's was my favorite, and I never liked Tootsie Rolls. Did you ever receive anything that wasn’t candy? Maybe? I feel like I have... Have you ever carved a really extensive pumpkin, or were they always simple carvings? Yes; I once carved a pumpkin with a raven design with "and quoth the raven, 'nevermore'" written into the back. The raven wasn't just a flat cut-out, but rather carved in layers so the light came through differently at certain depths. Are you more interested in cute, funny, “sexy”, or scary costumes? For myself, absolutely the scary ones. In general though, I'm not gonna BS ya, I love me some sexy costumes, haha, but also still scary and particularly gory ones. Have you ever intimidated or made another person feel legitimately threatened? If not, do you think that you could ever be seen as scary? I seriously hate admitting this, but Mom has confessed that my yelling has scared her before when scolding our former dog that I fucking hated. In what ways do you or would you need to be validated by a partner? (For example, liking your posts/talking about you on social media, or perhaps by doting on your with gifts.) I absolutely need words of affirmation. I just need to hear a lot that you do still like/love me. Also, if you're unwilling to actually act like we're a couple in front of ANYONE, like you're ashamed of me or something, byyyyeeee. Do you tend to succeed by weaning yourself off of something or by quitting cold turkey? It depends, I guess. Is there a specific type of pet breed/size/etc. that you don’t want? Why not? Any that have underlying medical issues, like pugs, spider ball pythons, Persian cats, etc. etc... It's just a moral thing; I don't want to support the deliberate continuation of poor genes in animals for human monetary gain. It's just wrong to me. Away from breeds, I also don't really want free-roaming animals after my cat passes, because I don't want to endanger the reptiles and invertebrates I want as pets in the future. Have you ever lived in a notoriously dangerous area? If not, would it bother you to do so? I grew up in one, yes. I never want to again. Has a friend’s significant other ever interfered with or damaged your friendship? What about a significant other of yours damaging a friendship? No. What, if anything, is something that you put pressure on yourself about? What do you imagine would happen if you did not live up to this expectation? Getting a job nowadays. I do NOT want to imagine what my life will be like if I never find employment. If you have been in a serious relationship, have you and your partner ever discussed lifetime plans that clashed? Did you reconcile them or did you break up? If you have not been in a relationship, what are some issues that would be deal-breakers? This hasn't happened, no. If you were offered to smoke some weed right now would you accept? Honestly, I want to try weed to see if it would help my anxiety, BUT I'm unwilling to ever smoke something, so no. Have you ever changed clothes in a vehicle? Yeah. Do you listen to country music? No. Have you ever had a boyfriend your parents didn’t like? No. Were you ever a trouble maker? Not really, no. Do you shave your legs? Hell, that's debatable by this point. I haven't since this past October, but I *would* if for whatever reason someone might see my legs. I am not overexaggerating when I say I naturally have men's legs as far as hair goes, oof. Do you have any person in your family with an addiction to beer? That's what my dad always drank when he was an alcoholic. He doesn't touch alcohol now. Have you ever gotten sloppy drunk at a party? No. Have you ever slept naked? Accidentally. Could you ever be friends with the person who hurt you most in life? I really don't think I could be. Do you actually like going to school? I never did. Have you ever really been in a “complicated relationship”? How did that work out? In your opinion, what makes a relationship “complicated”? No. I don't care enough to go into what a complicated relationship means, I think it's pretty obvious. Who was the first person you’ve ever fallen in love with? Is this a person you’re still in contact with? How do you know you’re in love with someone? Jason, and no. And you just... know. It's a wordless feeling . Have you ever successfully broken a bad habit? How about conquered a fear of something? Uhhhh I don't know, really. Well, I used to be AWFUL at picking my eyebrows, particularly when anxious, but I have gotten better at that. I still kinda do it, though. Onto the next question, I don't believe I've "conquered" a fear, but rather they just faded with time on their own. Have you ever read a whole series of books? Yeah. Are you going to walk at your graduation or just pick your diploma up? I walked. Do you own a pair of brass knuckles? No. Have you ever tried to break a Guinness World Record? No. Can you sing your ABC’s backwards? I can't. Do you like Skittles? I love Skittles. Do you know how to read music? I used to. Who would you say has made the biggest impact on your life? Really, Jason. He ultimately led to me getting proper treatment for my depression, which changed my life. I'm in no way giving him credit for it, but you get what I mean. You can only listen to THREE CDs for the rest of your life. What are they? Black Rain and Ozzmosis by Ozzy Osbourne, and uhhh... perhaps The Black Album by Metallica. Do you own any shirts that have a year on it? Yeah, but it's way too small for me now. It's from Back To The Future, when we actually reached the date in the movie. Have you ever done another person’s make-up? Ha, I gave Jason a makeover once. Honestly, do you double dip? Not if I'm sharing the dip with other people. Who were you last on an elevator with? My mom. Do you know anyone that has a black belt in karate? Not to my knowledge. How often do you wear hats? Never. Who is the youngest gay person you know? *shrug* Have you ever watched an animal being eaten by another animal? I've seen cats eat mice and stuff as a kid. What is the strangest, most “out there” thing you believe? Some people I'm sure would consider the fact I believe the government was involved in 9/11 as "out there," but when you look into it, it's far from "out there." Do you get along with people who are especially religious? Why/why not? It depends on how they act about it, not what they keep in their head. Now if they have just purely hateful beliefs that demonize another's existence, then no, we can't get along. Have you ever drawn or painted a self-portrait? Painted, yes, for an art class. Do you have any interesting pillow cases? No. Are you more afraid of spiders or bees? Bees, generally. Especially if we're talking things like wasps, who are just demon spawns. Would you rather donate time, blood, or money? That's a really hard question, but I guess time? Like I'm thinking volunteer work and stuff, or listening to and comforting someone. Can grills be sexy on a guy? They're sexy on absolutely no one. Last strong smell you can remember smelling? Ugh, gasoline. This one car in front of my mom and me smelled awful. Last healthy thing you ate? Apples. Do you know anybody who was abused? Emotionally, yes. Do your parents volunteer anywhere? No. Do you have a steering wheel cover? Mom's car doesn't. What do you think of when you see sharp knives? This is really morbid, but I will immediately envision what it would be like to be stabbed. I'm very afraid of knives. The highway and back roads take you to the same place; choose your route. The back roads, of course. And let me bring my camera.

#survey #surveys #questions #lyrics: ''schism'' by tool

[yutaluvs-blog]

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[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Trolls thought I was a man. That saved me.

This post is part of Me, online, Mashable's ongoing series digging into online identities.

I was locked in my friends’ bathroom on the phone with my thesis adviser and staring at Reddit. It was snowing pretty hard and though there was a window with some theoretical light streaming in, I felt like I was under a blanket, the flashlight of my attention pointed at a screen that I refreshed and refreshed and refreshed. I was discussing the critical thesis component required for my graduate degree, an MFA in creative writing. It was titled Masculinity and the Making of the Modern Nerd. It was a mess.

“Does that make sense?” my adviser asked, or something like that. I don’t know, exactly, what she’d said, other than the paper didn’t work, because I was preoccupied. We need a Kotaku In Action Action, a user typed. And they were typing it about me. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

“Yes, I think. Sorry, something weird and bad is happening right now?”

She paused. “Are you okay?”

“I think so? I think I’m fine.”

SEE ALSO: The email problem no one is talking about: mistaken identity

I’d been the Geekery Editor at Autostraddle, a popular website primarily by and for queer women and non-binary folks, for some years. I’d both written about Gamergate and assigned others to write about it. My entire first novel? It was (and still is) about the phenomenon of weaponized nerds, radicalized young men (primarily white and western) terrorizing women over games. At Autostraddle, I’d written an essay in 2016 praising one of the central targets of Gamergate for doing as much good as can possibly be done in the wake of a harassment campaign against her, and then moving on with her gosh darn life like a woman on a mission. 

I’d thought my biggest crime with this piece was writing it just a bit too saccharine; I was lavish with my compliments. The gamers on Kotaku in Action apparently thought it was more egregious than that — perhaps the worst offense in the entire world: that I might not be a "real nerd" at all.

I struggle to explain Kotaku in Action every time I have to, because it truly defies explanation and has the many heads of a hydra collective. It’s the Reddit forum that perpetuated GamerGate, a place to coordinate targeted rape- and death-threats against women in the games industry — when a user says “Kotaku In Action Action,” it is likely to these types of activities they are referring. 

It is synonymous with the alt-right (and strategically so). It’s full of (mostly) dudes with no sense of culture or community outside their homogenous gaming forums; these rootless young men long to be a part of something bigger, something greater and so, Kotaku in Action it is. A place on the internet that’s part of the Manosphere and also includes Pick Up Artists, Incels, and Men’s Rights Activists. A place so toxic that its creator recently tried to shut it down, calling it a “viral cancer,” and Reddit, in its infinite wisdom, decided to save it. A place that I’ve spent years researching in service of my fiction; I often say it is the butthole of the internet, and I’ve spent the last four years giving the world wide web a proctology exam.

When I was first alerted to the thread, I was scared. I’m no stranger to a good hate pile-on—I do work on the internet, after all, and writing for the queer community often means antagonizing some harsh critics, both without and within. The GamerGaters, though? I’d spent two years flying under the radar of these fine, upstanding gentlemen internet terrorists. I wrote for queer women, for non-binary folks. I thought that must be the reason why: They were uninterested in what I had to say because I was never saying it to a mainstream audience, to the normal set of gamers, and so I never got hit. I thought I must not be a threat; that wasn't quite it. I was wearing armor. Armor I had no idea I'd ever put on.

I was filled with too much nervous energy after seeing the thread to stay in my apartment, so I went to the Strand and stress-bought a Virginia Woolf Saint Candle, a Moleskine notebook I didn’t need, and a book on drawing happy people. When it was time for me to get back to my own space, I found I didn’t want to. My head was filled with all the stories, the doxxing, the SWATting, the things that can happen if you walk through the digital world as boldly female. It’s dangerous to go alone; I didn’t want to be alone. I told my Dungeons and Dragons group what was going on — I figured they’d be the most likely to understand, being a group of gamers. And that’s how I wound up locked in my dungeon master’s bathroom, talking to my adviser as I watched the comments build up on Reddit.

The guy spends way too long jerking himself off in the first paragraph about how much of a nerd he is.

When I was growing up, in the 80s, geek and nerd was a derogatory slur. I don't get the desire to identify with labels the popular people tried to shame us with... Anyhow, the term "geekery" makes my skin crawl. I guarantee you this guy knows fuck all about the history and intricacies of the various so-called "geek" interests.

I'm guessing he was alone for Valentine's Day.

They were mean — but they weren't threatening. There was only the one. The rest — just grousing. I'd seen much worse happen to other folks. To more feminine folks. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

I came out as trans last fall, but I’ve looked like this for a long time: close-cropped hair, chest flattened by a binder, every stitch of clothing I own from the men’s department. My fellow queer writers had seen me coming for years. But at the time this was happening in 2016? I was still white-knuckled from clinging to the sisterhood. Even though I’d get “excuse me, sir?” while walking about in public, right up until the point I opened my mouth to speak. Even though, more than once, folks had been very concerned when they happened upon me in the women’s room. Even though literally all my (repressed) internal barometers pointed to “not a woman.” 

I love my family, my queers; we are a people used to existing in the strange gray area. We are a people used to taking slurs from the mouths of hate-filled adversaries and tattooing them on the soft muscles of our hearts, making celebration and community out of words meant to hurt us. I figured I was just a failure at femininity; that the definition of woman was broad and that my masculinity fit within it. Those are all true things, they’re just not true for me. Still, it was shocking to see, this assumption that I was a man — a popular man, at that! 

It's annoying to me when popular hacks call themselves nerds. Especially because having been a nerd back when the word meant social outcast. It was them who came in and caused all beatings and insults.

Back in my friend’s bathroom, my adviser asked, incredulously, “They think you’re a guy?” 

“I think so,” I replied and I read her some of the comments.

“How?”

I explained it to her; it had happened before, this confusion. When I identified as a woman, I published under the name “Ali,” which, for half of this world, isn’t a woman’s name at all. My photo was next to my byline and people didn’t really read what the website was about if they found it from an outside source. I wrote largely about technology; my longest-running column was titled Queer Your Tech. A lot of folks (wrongly) consider that some “boy-stuff.”

She didn’t believe me until months later, when I was taking over her website from her former designer (I maintain the websites of a few authors I know). As he was passing me all the information I needed, he conducted the entire transaction calling me “he” in all the emails. HE THINKS YOU’RE A DUDE my adviser texted me, privately. In digital space, where I never have to open my physical mouth, where I am simply a collection of characters on a screen, no one ever looks at me with their eyebrow raised; no one ever corrects themselves. I am whatever I am assumed first to be. And I’m doing and saying the “boy-stuff.”

“Yup,” I responded. “I told you.”

Eventually, I did come out of the bathroom. I waited. These were tamer than the reports of what happened to the women who crossed the GamerGaters. I was expecting the worst — surely, if it hadn't happened yet, the worst would be coming and it was only a matter of time. I waited through the night for something to happen. 

And nothing ever did.

“Do they even know you spent the entirety of seventh grade eating lunch in the guidance counselor’s office because you were too unpopular to eat in the cafeteria?” my friend Laura said from my couch the next day. “You — you’ve never been cool. Except to me, you were cool to me.” Laura and I have known each other since the fourth grade. She stuck with me through my obsession with the musical Cats and my childhood assertion that I was an alien from Saturn. And now, she was volunteering to be my questing buddy. To keep her eye on the thread, to make sure I was safe, so I wouldn’t have to keep refreshing it.

“It’s taking everything I’ve got not to jump on and say something to these people.”

“Don’t do that. That’ll make it worse.”

What I meant was: Don’t do that, they’ll figure out I’m one of the things they hate. Because I’d developed a hypothesis, one that keeps proving itself even now, years later. I said things they disliked, disagreed with. They called me an SJW (social justice warrior), but I looked masculine enough that the Kotaku in Action Action never materialized. 

Looking like a dude was armor; it played on the subconscious prioritization of all things manly. I’ve watched queer femme authors get harassed so intensely that they have to leave the internet, and many of them aren’t even trying to poke the GamerGaters. The cause isn’t in the content, or the severity of the imagined offense. It’s in the gender presentation of the author. Those that the heteronormative world deems masculine people can talk; those they deem feminine people better watch their backs.

And the things about the way I present online one might perceive as feminine (allying myself with women, the over-prooving of my right to speak on a subject) were but small scratches in an armor built of clipper cuts and and computer-speak. “Boy stuff.” The reason I was never considered a threat wasn’t because of who I was speaking to; it was because of who I was — ultimately, not like those “other girls.” Weaponized nerds use their masculinity as a sword; now I know I can wield masculinity as armor to go questing in the darkest caves, in the buttholes of the internet. My masculinity allowed their eyes to slide right over me. Allowed isn’t even the right word; encouraged, perhaps. 

Two years later and not much has changed. It’s still happening; I am one variant, one echo of it. It wasn’t the masculine half of #PlaneBae that got chased off the internet, for instance. This isn’t a phenomenon isolated to me, or to queers, or to 2016, or to GamerGate. This is just the way it is, out there, on the internet. I could’ve identified as trans at the time this happened, instead of as a woman, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It’s the nature of being squeezed into two dimensional space while being squashed by the patriarchy. I am whatever people assume me first to be. I am safer online because of it.

A.E. Osworth is the Managing Editor of Scholar and Feminist Online at Barnard College and Part-Time Faculty with The New School’s Creative Writing Department, where they teach digital storytelling. You can find their writing at Autostraddle, where they contribute regularly, and Argot Magazine, where they are a columnist. You can also catch up with them on Twitter or Instagram.

WATCH: Meet the 10-year-old drag kid shaping the future of drag youth

#_uuid:f49e74e5-30d7-33d7-b3be-6d15dedc9005 #_author:Brittany Levine Beckman #_category:yct:001000002 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

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5 Sucky Things That Suck On Purpose

This may come as a surprise, but I like it when things don’t suck. In fact, I would say that I devote 80 percent of my efforts toward avoiding suckage. Sadly, though, I can’t control the actions of others, and I won’t ever be able to until The Device is perfected. But until then, some people make shitty things, and the rest of us have to deal with it. And while we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that everyone makes mistakes as we eat a pizza which inexplicably arrived topped with double olives and pineapple, there’s no solace in the knowledge that some people do shitty things entirely on purpose. On that note, here are five terrible things which people made fully knowing that they’d be terrible.

5

The Google Glass Battery

If you were sober or literate in 2013 and 2014, you may have had to endure the deluge of tech profiles and extremely not-boring thinkpieces on Google Glass. If you could not in fact read or legally drive in 2013 and 2014, Google Glass was basically Google’s answer to the question “What’s a super expensive piece of shit I can intrusively wear on my face which will obscure my vision and make anyone around me fearful that I’m videotaping them like some kind of creeper?” You know, a question that we’ve all asked.

While most of us immediately dismissed Glass as being about as appealing as a herpes scab parfait, there were naturally a few fans who couldn’t wait to be the dollar store version of Geordi LaForge. But even amongst those die-hard tech fluffers, there was a clear issue: Glass had a battery that sucked like a leech in the coldest recesses of the vacuum of space.

The battery life of Google Glass clocked in at around 45 minutes, meaning that you had just enough time to stream yourself watching one episode of Young Sheldon and then crying about it afterwards before it shut off. Google tried to explain this away as an intentional design feature that was actually beneficial and not an example of a battery assembled by a one-eyed guy in an flea market who smells like cats.

According to Google, your cellphone is just a dangerous espionage device constantly listening to you from your pants pocket and maybe sending all that sweet, sweet pants gossip back to Samsung or the Kingsmen or whoever the fuck cares what you’re doing. So in an effort to heroically protect you from filthy spies, Google intentionally made a shitty battery so that the New World Order agents will only be able to watch half of your masturbation session before they’re left hanging. Suck it, dickholes! You’ll never know how this one ends!*

*Hastily, with a climactic yawp.

4

Low-Quality Viral Commercials

In 2011, the internet was blessed with one of the worst commercials for a taxidermy business that anyone had ever seen. I say this not as a connoisseur of taxidermy ads, but as a logical human being. Also, do taxidermy places really need commercials? What more needs to be said, other than “Hey! Do you like wolves, but hate the bitey, movey kinds?”

This commercial for Ojai Valley Taxidermy featured the one-two punch of Chuck Testa’s taxidermy skill and acting, and made us all fall in love with the stuffed corpse of a coyote and the overall awfulness of the entire experience. It was poorly made, clearly cheap, and its only redeeming quality was that all of the badness made it charming as hell. Chuck Testa became an internet hero. And it was all bullshit.

Testa is just one of many viral commercial stars made famous for being in videos often shared as “the worst commercial I’ve ever seen.” One commercial for a mall from 2014 featured employees singing a jingle that sounded like a cross between 3 a.m. barf-in-your-own-shoe-drunk karaoke and a cat stuck in a well. It sucked large, and people went nuts about it.

For a local business trying to drum up some attention, you have two options: Legitimately make a forgettable, boring, low-budget commercial which blandly explains whatever you’re trying to sell, or roll the dice on potentially going viral by making an abomination. Create such an abysmal crime against advertising that the sun refuses to shine when the video is playing and birds immediately stop singing and synchronize-shit on your car. Make it so bad that everyone immediately shares it with everyone they know. And then your craptastic commercial becomes an internet sensation.

They say people are ten times as likely to share a bad experience with a business than a good one. People like to complain more than they like to praise, probably because if something goes right, it fits in with your expectations and is therefore unremarkable. It’s only when things go wrong that you get worked up and make a stink over it. So when you see a commercial that damn near offends you with its utter fuckshittery, you’ll share that monstrosity with everyone. And that’s exactly what they want.

3

Web Brutalism

When I first got the internet in my house as a kid, we got a state-of-the-art, badass, lightning-fast 56k modem. I could download an MP3 in like ten minutes, and sometimes an entire dirty picture would load up before something went buggy and the poor woman was cut off at the knees. And seven out of every ten websites looked like a low-res My Little Pony pony ralphed cotton candy and Four Loko across a small-town church bulletin board.

As time passed, we all grew up and became better people with better websites. Dancing baby GIFs gave way to interstitial ads and Flash videos. Designs that looked like they were made by a guy with vinegar in his eyes working in the dark faded away, and sleek, professionally designed mega porn sites took their place. It was a great time to be alive. Or so we thought, because I guess people got sick of things that don’t look like shit and Web Brutalism was born.

If the terribly cheesy name didn’t give it away, Web Brutalism is a kind of artsy shitsy internet aesthetic. You purposefully make your website look like the south end of a northbound horse. Ugly, disorganized graphics, shockingly off-putting colors, a veritable dumpster of design techniques shat out onto a screen — if your site doesn’t look a fourth-grader’s glue and cardboard collage, you’ve failed.

A classically bad website was designed on Angelfire by your aunt who collects figurines of Jesus playing sports when she wanted to do something to commemorate her love of beat poetry. Some links were unclickable, images didn’t quite line up right, and it had charm in the same way your macaroni artwork had charm to your mom, who never told you that it looked like shit because she loved you. By the way, your macaroni art looked like shit. It’s cool, though, mine looked like the shit that shit takes after eating shit sandwiches. And somehow, someone decided a forced version of that was a good idea.

Web Brutalism seeks to make a website harder to navigate and uglier to look at than a fine, upstanding site, like the one you’re currently enjoying. Why? The answer is best summed up in this quote I heard from a guy in a bar once: “Fuckin’ because.”

2

Bioware’s Female Designs

Back in the day when I had an NES, there were basically two female characters you could name across the spectrum of video game characters: Princesses Peach and Zelda, and I don’t even think Zelda was actually in her game. But I did beat Super Mario Bros. 2, and Peach helped a brother out on that one, so yeah, you could say I’m like a video game feminist or some such. Which is why Bioware’s curious history with female characters is such a headscratcher.

Bioware makes some pretty impressive-looking games, like Mass Effect, and the character designs are amazing. There is a definite problem with some of them, though, insofar as that amazingness is in how straight up nuts-on-a-donkey ugly they are.

When Mass Effect: Andromeda was released, fans were quick to notice that the male version of the player character, Ryder, looks super badass and cool and almost exactly like the male model who lent his likeness to the game designers. The female version of Ryder looks like the model if you rolled her in a sack of sadness and didn’t let her sleep for four days while feeding her a straight diet of CHUD.

Twitter

So why, if you have the ability to render characters in a way that makes them look like not vaguely emotive ballsacks, would you make your character look like a vaguely emotive ballsack? This one requires a bit of creative tinkering in the ol’ thinky bag, but it does make sense. Female characters in gaming, as you may be aware, have a bit of a lackluster history in terms of realistic representation. After Princess Peach, the next big name in lady characters was Lara Croft, who was at first presented as polygonal boobs on blocks, and then later as well-vectored boobs on well-vectored short pants. And thus began a tradition of most video game women being little more than boobs and confusion. So maybe Bioware makes their female characters less appealing on purpose so as to not be considered sexist or douchey.

Bioware has never come out and said they’ve made purposefully ugly characters. They have acknowledged abhorrent animation issues and terrible facial expressions which they set to work on fixing, but fans were all pretty convinced that there had to be more behind the distractingly objectionable visages of the female characters. As noted gamer nerd and feminist Lisa Kerzner argues in her video, it looks an awful lot like Bioware put considerable effort into downplaying the character’s face to make her more of an ugmo hero type (but just in the face), while trying to pawn it off as a technical limitation. Despite the fact that numerous other games can feature women who don’t look like victims of barnyard mad science, including a lot of Bioware’s previous games.

Unfortunately, dealing with matters of sex, sexism, and gender in video games is like opening a bag of cat shit lined with explosive squibs right in your damn face. If you recall anything to do with Gamergate, you know this is ground no one wants to tread on, so you almost can’t blame Bioware for not saying jack shit about it, as you don’t want to feed any trolls. But at the same time, when it’s obvious that they can make a nearly identical male character, there’s clearly a reason they’re not putting that same kind of effort into their females.

1

Scam Email Grammar

Usually when I send emails, I spell the multi-syllable words incorrectly and use grammar that’s about as fucked as a friction-burnt Fleshlight. But that’s my own bugaboo to deal with, and has little-to-no bearing on the world of scam email.

The odds of you having never received a Nigerian scam email are slimmer than Slender Man’s weird dick, which I’ll tell you about sometime if you buy me a few beers. But for the sake of the kids in the audience who are reading this on the wall I inscribe all my articles on and have never received email before, a Nigerian scam email is a poorly worded piece of fuckery that shows up in your inbox claiming to be from some African prince who has millions of dollars tied up in banks overseas, and if you could just help pay some transfer fees, you can keep a buttload of it!

Typically, these emails use terrible grammar and atrocious spelling, not because the person sending you the email is a blithering idiot, but because they need you to be so gullible that you believe a Wakandan prince personally sent you a one-way ticket to being a millionaire, and he typed the message with a greasy turkey leg in his hand while riding a homemade roller coaster.

Most of us can identify a scam email right away. Another subsection of people will be suspicious but interested. And an even smaller division will write back to test the waters. The scammers want nothing to do with any of those people. They want the person who immediately responds with their bank account number in the signature line, because they only want to deal with people who may have mistaken a ham bone for Tony Danza more than once in their lives. So don’t be too proud if you recognize right away that someone sent you a weak as shit attempt at ripping you off; they just didn’t want you to waste their time.

Ian’s Twitter is awesome on purpose. Go look.

Does Troll 2 suck on purpose? Find out for yourself, and go down the rabbit hole of recommendations like Samurai Cop and more!

Read more: http://ift.tt/2gTq5jG

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2AazPyt via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

[jamiekturner]

Designers. Work better with developers.

Designers are a precious and proud people. I’ve met a few who would rather have pixel-perfect builds than let their colleagues work normal hours — that’s not a collaborative process, it’s a dictatorship.

The expectation that developers ruin the hard work of us designers is poisonous.

Developers are doing a tougher job than people give them credit for. Instead of complaining, designers should figure how to work with them to make this difficult job easier, and how to work with them to create the most efficient process for everyone.

If this ruffles your feathers, then you might be the one who’s treating a developer unfairly.

Mutual respect

I can’t work on a team where people don’t have respect for the work and skills others have. All of our jobs overlap. UX Designers, Visual Designers, Developers, and Project Managers each have skills the others do not, but they also overlap.

This isn’t just an empty ‘Hey, I respect you’ and a thumbs-up, it’s allowing people to take ownership of their own work, and giving them control over your work too. Even though they’re a developer, they may be okay designing something from a quick sketch based on your visual language without any design input!

Mutual respect gets rid of the us and them mindset. It helps develop better relationships with your colleagues by fostering a happier environment.

Don’t be so damn precious!

Design is about communicating something in the most effective and appropriate way possible. Fuck this nonsense about it fixing the worlds problems. It doesn’t.

When working with developers, this means reaching pixel-perfection on that new Halfords site is a low priority. The highest priority is making sure the message you wanted to convey is conveyed in a way that doesn’t look broken. That’s it. Getting miffed about kerning is just going to make you angry, and the developer frustrated.

My development critique is a two-step process:

Does the build communicate what I wanted it to communicate in the most appropriate manner?

Are there any fundamental visual or interaction design problems?

If the answer to #1 is ‘yes’ and the answer to #2 is ‘no’ then it’s okay for that to go live. That’s not to say I’m flimsy about the details… Rather, I think it’s more important time to sweat the big picture stuff instead of worrying about the border radius of that text input in the footer of a website.

The highest priority is making sure the message you wanted to convey is conveyed in a way that doesn’t look broken. That’s it.

Adapt to their processes

Development is a rigorous process. It requires lots of planning, tools, and applications to help it flow smoothly. I’m not saying us designers have it easy, but I’ve never seen a visual designer have to work until midnight on a Friday because the recently deployed application doesn’t work on some obscure mobile OS.

By saying ‘yep, I’ll create a GitHub issue in that branch’, you are making a developers job easier with very little effort. This is the environment they are used to, and it’s easier to figure out how to create a Jira ticket with an attachment than it is for a developer to find the exact folder where my most up-to-date designs are.

I’ve never seen a visual designer have to work until midnight on a Friday because the recently deployed application doesn’t work on some obscure mobile OS.

Respect their time

I’ve worked with designers who assumed their time was the most precious on an entire team, but it wasn’t true. I’ve been busy, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as busy as a developer, so I trust that the thing that they’re doing is going to get done.

To help this in the past myself and developers have sat down together and gone through the list of tasks — bugs included — and prioritised all of it. It provides an opportunity to understand what takes time in development, figure out whether a feature is worth the effort, and for us to negotiate the importance of tasks.

Developers can be their own time managers, they don’t need a looming designer asking them when that typographic hierarchy is going to be fixed.

Get them involved

What’s worse than being dropped into a project at a crucial stage? This is when many developers in an agency environment are called in. Designers should be proponents of collaboration, getting developers included at an early stage.

This isn’t just inviting them to planning meetings, it’s involving them in workshops, sketching, design critique, and anything else you are doing.

A developer’s insights are valuable from the start, and the feeling of involvement from being present will make them respect and love the project even more.

This entire post is selfish

We’re not an altruistic species and I’m not going to pretend to be either. I don’t do the above for selfless reasons, I do it because it makes life better for me. By making developers more design-aware, by making our processes more efficient, and by having a happier team, it makes my life easier.

If I adapt to their processes, they adapt to my processes. If I respect their time, they respect my time, and if I get them involved, they’ll get me involved too. It works both ways. We all win.

Thank you for reading my post! If you enjoyed it and want to stay in touch, let’s speak to each other in one of these places: Twitter, Instagram, my portfolio.

The post Designers. Work better with developers. appeared first on Design your way.

from Web Development & Designing http://www.designyourway.net/blog/design/designers-work-better-developers/

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5 Sucky Things That Suck On Purpose

This may come as a surprise, but I like it when things don’t suck. In fact, I would say that I devote 80 percent of my efforts toward avoiding suckage. Sadly, though, I can’t control the actions of others, and I won’t ever be able to until The Device is perfected. But until then, some people make shitty things, and the rest of us have to deal with it. And while we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that everyone makes mistakes as we eat a pizza which inexplicably arrived topped with double olives and pineapple, there’s no solace in the knowledge that some people do shitty things entirely on purpose. On that note, here are five terrible things which people made fully knowing that they’d be terrible.

5

The Google Glass Battery

If you were sober or literate in 2013 and 2014, you may have had to endure the deluge of tech profiles and extremely not-boring thinkpieces on Google Glass. If you could not in fact read or legally drive in 2013 and 2014, Google Glass was basically Google’s answer to the question “What’s a super expensive piece of shit I can intrusively wear on my face which will obscure my vision and make anyone around me fearful that I’m videotaping them like some kind of creeper?” You know, a question that we’ve all asked.

While most of us immediately dismissed Glass as being about as appealing as a herpes scab parfait, there were naturally a few fans who couldn’t wait to be the dollar store version of Geordi LaForge. But even amongst those die-hard tech fluffers, there was a clear issue: Glass had a battery that sucked like a leech in the coldest recesses of the vacuum of space.

The battery life of Google Glass clocked in at around 45 minutes, meaning that you had just enough time to stream yourself watching one episode of Young Sheldon and then crying about it afterwards before it shut off. Google tried to explain this away as an intentional design feature that was actually beneficial and not an example of a battery assembled by a one-eyed guy in an flea market who smells like cats.

According to Google, your cellphone is just a dangerous espionage device constantly listening to you from your pants pocket and maybe sending all that sweet, sweet pants gossip back to Samsung or the Kingsmen or whoever the fuck cares what you’re doing. So in an effort to heroically protect you from filthy spies, Google intentionally made a shitty battery so that the New World Order agents will only be able to watch half of your masturbation session before they’re left hanging. Suck it, dickholes! You’ll never know how this one ends!*

*Hastily, with a climactic yawp.

4

Low-Quality Viral Commercials

In 2011, the internet was blessed with one of the worst commercials for a taxidermy business that anyone had ever seen. I say this not as a connoisseur of taxidermy ads, but as a logical human being. Also, do taxidermy places really need commercials? What more needs to be said, other than “Hey! Do you like wolves, but hate the bitey, movey kinds?”

This commercial for Ojai Valley Taxidermy featured the one-two punch of Chuck Testa’s taxidermy skill and acting, and made us all fall in love with the stuffed corpse of a coyote and the overall awfulness of the entire experience. It was poorly made, clearly cheap, and its only redeeming quality was that all of the badness made it charming as hell. Chuck Testa became an internet hero. And it was all bullshit.

Testa is just one of many viral commercial stars made famous for being in videos often shared as “the worst commercial I’ve ever seen.” One commercial for a mall from 2014 featured employees singing a jingle that sounded like a cross between 3 a.m. barf-in-your-own-shoe-drunk karaoke and a cat stuck in a well. It sucked large, and people went nuts about it.

For a local business trying to drum up some attention, you have two options: Legitimately make a forgettable, boring, low-budget commercial which blandly explains whatever you’re trying to sell, or roll the dice on potentially going viral by making an abomination. Create such an abysmal crime against advertising that the sun refuses to shine when the video is playing and birds immediately stop singing and synchronize-shit on your car. Make it so bad that everyone immediately shares it with everyone they know. And then your craptastic commercial becomes an internet sensation.

They say people are ten times as likely to share a bad experience with a business than a good one. People like to complain more than they like to praise, probably because if something goes right, it fits in with your expectations and is therefore unremarkable. It’s only when things go wrong that you get worked up and make a stink over it. So when you see a commercial that damn near offends you with its utter fuckshittery, you’ll share that monstrosity with everyone. And that’s exactly what they want.

3

Web Brutalism

When I first got the internet in my house as a kid, we got a state-of-the-art, badass, lightning-fast 56k modem. I could download an MP3 in like ten minutes, and sometimes an entire dirty picture would load up before something went buggy and the poor woman was cut off at the knees. And seven out of every ten websites looked like a low-res My Little Pony pony ralphed cotton candy and Four Loko across a small-town church bulletin board.

As time passed, we all grew up and became better people with better websites. Dancing baby GIFs gave way to interstitial ads and Flash videos. Designs that looked like they were made by a guy with vinegar in his eyes working in the dark faded away, and sleek, professionally designed mega porn sites took their place. It was a great time to be alive. Or so we thought, because I guess people got sick of things that don’t look like shit and Web Brutalism was born.

If the terribly cheesy name didn’t give it away, Web Brutalism is a kind of artsy shitsy internet aesthetic. You purposefully make your website look like the south end of a northbound horse. Ugly, disorganized graphics, shockingly off-putting colors, a veritable dumpster of design techniques shat out onto a screen — if your site doesn’t look a fourth-grader’s glue and cardboard collage, you’ve failed.

A classically bad website was designed on Angelfire by your aunt who collects figurines of Jesus playing sports when she wanted to do something to commemorate her love of beat poetry. Some links were unclickable, images didn’t quite line up right, and it had charm in the same way your macaroni artwork had charm to your mom, who never told you that it looked like shit because she loved you. By the way, your macaroni art looked like shit. It’s cool, though, mine looked like the shit that shit takes after eating shit sandwiches. And somehow, someone decided a forced version of that was a good idea.

Web Brutalism seeks to make a website harder to navigate and uglier to look at than a fine, upstanding site, like the one you’re currently enjoying. Why? The answer is best summed up in this quote I heard from a guy in a bar once: “Fuckin’ because.”

2

Bioware’s Female Designs

Back in the day when I had an NES, there were basically two female characters you could name across the spectrum of video game characters: Princesses Peach and Zelda, and I don’t even think Zelda was actually in her game. But I did beat Super Mario Bros. 2, and Peach helped a brother out on that one, so yeah, you could say I’m like a video game feminist or some such. Which is why Bioware’s curious history with female characters is such a headscratcher.

Bioware makes some pretty impressive-looking games, like Mass Effect, and the character designs are amazing. There is a definite problem with some of them, though, insofar as that amazingness is in how straight up nuts-on-a-donkey ugly they are.

When Mass Effect: Andromeda was released, fans were quick to notice that the male version of the player character, Ryder, looks super badass and cool and almost exactly like the male model who lent his likeness to the game designers. The female version of Ryder looks like the model if you rolled her in a sack of sadness and didn’t let her sleep for four days while feeding her a straight diet of CHUD.

Twitter

So why, if you have the ability to render characters in a way that makes them look like not vaguely emotive ballsacks, would you make your character look like a vaguely emotive ballsack? This one requires a bit of creative tinkering in the ol’ thinky bag, but it does make sense. Female characters in gaming, as you may be aware, have a bit of a lackluster history in terms of realistic representation. After Princess Peach, the next big name in lady characters was Lara Croft, who was at first presented as polygonal boobs on blocks, and then later as well-vectored boobs on well-vectored short pants. And thus began a tradition of most video game women being little more than boobs and confusion. So maybe Bioware makes their female characters less appealing on purpose so as to not be considered sexist or douchey.

Bioware has never come out and said they’ve made purposefully ugly characters. They have acknowledged abhorrent animation issues and terrible facial expressions which they set to work on fixing, but fans were all pretty convinced that there had to be more behind the distractingly objectionable visages of the female characters. As noted gamer nerd and feminist Lisa Kerzner argues in her video, it looks an awful lot like Bioware put considerable effort into downplaying the character’s face to make her more of an ugmo hero type (but just in the face), while trying to pawn it off as a technical limitation. Despite the fact that numerous other games can feature women who don’t look like victims of barnyard mad science, including a lot of Bioware’s previous games.

Unfortunately, dealing with matters of sex, sexism, and gender in video games is like opening a bag of cat shit lined with explosive squibs right in your damn face. If you recall anything to do with Gamergate, you know this is ground no one wants to tread on, so you almost can’t blame Bioware for not saying jack shit about it, as you don’t want to feed any trolls. But at the same time, when it’s obvious that they can make a nearly identical male character, there’s clearly a reason they’re not putting that same kind of effort into their females.

1

Scam Email Grammar

Usually when I send emails, I spell the multi-syllable words incorrectly and use grammar that’s about as fucked as a friction-burnt Fleshlight. But that’s my own bugaboo to deal with, and has little-to-no bearing on the world of scam email.

The odds of you having never received a Nigerian scam email are slimmer than Slender Man’s weird dick, which I’ll tell you about sometime if you buy me a few beers. But for the sake of the kids in the audience who are reading this on the wall I inscribe all my articles on and have never received email before, a Nigerian scam email is a poorly worded piece of fuckery that shows up in your inbox claiming to be from some African prince who has millions of dollars tied up in banks overseas, and if you could just help pay some transfer fees, you can keep a buttload of it!

Typically, these emails use terrible grammar and atrocious spelling, not because the person sending you the email is a blithering idiot, but because they need you to be so gullible that you believe a Wakandan prince personally sent you a one-way ticket to being a millionaire, and he typed the message with a greasy turkey leg in his hand while riding a homemade roller coaster.

Most of us can identify a scam email right away. Another subsection of people will be suspicious but interested. And an even smaller division will write back to test the waters. The scammers want nothing to do with any of those people. They want the person who immediately responds with their bank account number in the signature line, because they only want to deal with people who may have mistaken a ham bone for Tony Danza more than once in their lives. So don’t be too proud if you recognize right away that someone sent you a weak as shit attempt at ripping you off; they just didn’t want you to waste their time.

Ian’s Twitter is awesome on purpose. Go look.

Does Troll 2 suck on purpose? Find out for yourself, and go down the rabbit hole of recommendations like Samurai Cop and more!

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