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otherkinnews · 1 year

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Twitter promotes hatred against transgender people, furries, therians

Summary: Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has been pushing the platform into fascist politics by either manually or algorithmically suppressing LGBTQ content, welcoming back neo-nazis who’d been banned, and boosting hate speech. This Pride month, he used the platform to promote a stream of an anti-transgender movie, What Is A Woman? (2022). The movie attempts to ridicule transgender people by comparing them to other groups, so it contains misinformation about furries: the litter box urban legend again. It also had an interview about therianthropy with Naia Okami, who rejected therianthropy again a few months afterward. The free stream gathered more than 62 million views that day, so it will be how many people first heard of furries or therians. Twitter keeps getting worse for marginalized groups, and now for furries and therians too. If you and your friends haven’t already migrated away from the nazis-and-transphobes site, we have advice on how to move to safer alternatives: Mastodon, Tumblr, Discord, Dreamwidth, and forums. We also have advice on media literacy skills, how to recognize nazis and transphobes on social media, how to guard against this happening in the future, how to support transgender rights, and some options for what to do with your Twitter when you leave. At the end of this article, we have a timeline of events that happened in this story.

Musk promoted an anti-transgender movie

Since last October, billionaire Elon Musk has owned Twitter, a social media site with 450 million users. He started June by pinning his quote retweet of an anti-transgender movie. He remarked, "Every parent should watch this." The movie is What Is A Woman?, by Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh. The Daily Wire invited everyone to stream the 95 minute movie for free. It is a propaganda piece that uses misinformation to oppose the existence of transgender people. Until then, the movie had been behind a paywall. Media Bias Fact Check describes the Daily Wire as a right-wing news and opinion site that has medium credibility. The civil rights nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch has called Walsh and his boss “peddlers of fear and disinformation about LGBTQ people” (Wilson, Nov 22, 2022). Musk has been known for his transphobia since before he bought Twitter (Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 13 2022). NBC reported that the Daily Wire’s CEO and other anti-transgender influencers such as Robby Starbuck had demanded for Musk to make the site stop suppressing the movie for its hate speech. Musk complied. Walsh, who had released the movie in June last year, said “What a great way to ring in Pride Month.” (Tolentino and Ingram, NBC, June 2, 2023).

What is that movie, and why is it so harmful?

The movie’s title refers to how they spend the movie interviewing various people about what a woman is, with the goal to discredit the validity of transgender people. Matt Walsh and Justin Folk had a bad enough reputation that no transgender people or allies would willingly appear in their movie, so they tricked people into showing up. They founded a front group called the Gender Unity Project LLC, and used a registered agent to mask their connection to it. Their producer used a fake name when reaching out to people to interview. They advertised the movie and LLC to potential interviewees as being “about transgender and LGBTQIA+ communities, and the challenges they face in today’s culture” and that it would “[explore] the real lives of people in the LGBTQIA+ communities, and to shed some light on the topics of gender identity, and gender fluidity, in a way that will capture the attention of all Americans and be educational.” Transgender rights activist Eli Erlick discovered they were not who they seemed, and exposed them immediately.

The movie intentionally misrepresented and disparaged a variety of professionals and transgender individuals who Walsh misled into interviewing with him. He used deceptive editing and ambush interview tactics to make it look like the interviewees were either in complete agreement with his hateful perspective, or were contradicting themselves and didn’t make sense. He used the movie to push false claims about transgender people, including trying to connect transgender identity to sexual predation and implying that transgender individuals will regret transitioning or that transitioning is dangerous.

Far-right director Robby Starbuck plans to release a similar movie this summer, titled “It Takes a Village.” This will also be a hateful propaganda movie opposing the existence of transgender people. Starbuck, like Walsh, lied about the movie goals to potential interviewees. Erlick caught and exposed this trick even earlier than the last one. Starbuck’s team members misrepresented the project as “highlighting gender affirming care and the issues facing trans youth.” Erlick believes that Starbuck may have planned to arrest her should she have agreed to fly to Tennessee for the offered interview.

How did this movie misrepresent furries and therians?

A common illogical argument that bigots use to criticize LGBTQ people sounds something like this: “If we let women marry one another, then wouldn’t it be just as absurd if we let people marry animals? If someone can identify as a woman, wouldn’t it be just as absurd if someone identifies as an animal?” Walsh used that tactic in his picture book Johnny the Walrus. Walsh’s movie has segments about furries and therians, in an effort to say that saying you are a woman is as absurd as saying you are an animal.

In one segment in the movie, Walsh interviews Sara Stockton, a family therapist. She incorrectly tells him that furries have demanded litter boxes in schools. Reuters Fact Check has an article that debunks that part of the movie. It’s well-known to be an urban legend that has never happened in any school. Conservatives have circulated it for the past few years to satirize transgender students asking to use the restroom of their choice. An alterhuman community historian did a presentation about how the legend has developed (House of Chimeras, 2022). The legend is why a few of this year’s hundreds of anti-transgender bills in the US say they also oppose people who identify as animals. Those are Montana Senate Bill 544, North Dakota House Bill 1522, Oklahoma Senate Bill 943, and Indiana Statehouse Bill 380.

In the next segment, Walsh interviewed Naia Okami. Okami has frequently sought and accepted media publicity for the past decade, even with producers her peers advised her to avoid (Okami, Oct 18, 2022). Around the same time as when she interviewed with Walsh, she accepted interviews with two other far-right media known for their hostility toward openly transgender people such as herself: The Sun (Jan 23 2022) and Fox News (Feb 7 2022). In these three interviews, she described herself as a wolf otherkin and therian. When Walsh tried to get her to describe herself as transspecies, she “vehemently rejected” that, so Walsh didn’t use those parts of the interview in the movie (Okami, June 5, 2022). (Okami has never called herself transspecies, and had spoken against the word for years.) Instead, against her wishes, he referred to her as a “trans wolf,” a label that she never used and which makes her “want to vomit” (Okami, June 8, 2022). A few months after the movie came out, she announced that she no longer calls herself a therian. She said, “I will always be a wolf girl; but I am not nor do I want to be … a member of the alterhuman, therianthropy, or otherkin communities” (Okami, Oct 18, 2022).

Like many of the other interviewees, Okami has explained how she was interviewed under false pretenses by a producer who used an alias. She shared records of her correspondences with the producer. She was not aware that Walsh would be the one interviewing her. He asked “intentionally provocative and leading questions.” She was looking into taking legal action, because the movie used the appearances of herself and others without informed consent (Okami, May 21, 2022).

By the end of the day, Musk’s promotion of the free movie on Twitter had caused it to have more than 62 million views (Tolentino and Ingram, NBC, June 2, 2023). This may be how most people in the world first hear of anything like otherkin, therians, furries, or transspecies identity. This may contribute to more widespread attitudes that are misinformed about and hostile toward these groups.

Musk’s Twitter welcomes fascists while suppressing LGBT speech

Musk has a history of supporting antisemitic and fascist ideology and espousing anti-LGBT rhetoric. One of Musk’s first actions when he bought Twitter was to share an anti-gay conspiracy theory published by a right-wing news source about the October 2022 attack on Paul Delosi. Twitter under Musk rolled back content policy protections for the site’s transgender users. He has also been known to quote Nazis, has reinstated the Twitters accounts of multiple neo-Nazis who were previously banned for hate speech, and has transferred his Twitter CEO title to a former Trump appointee. On Transgender Day of Visibility, users noticed that Twitter’s algorithm flags tweets for sensitive content if they contain the words LGBT, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, trans, queer, gender identity, pronouns, or TERF. Meanwhile, it doesn’t flag the words gender critical (which is what many transphobes prefer to call themselves), Nazi, fascist, or fascism. The algorithm’s source code shows that it’s designed to suppress and hide tweets that contain external links, misspelled words (as happens when users to try to get around suppressed words), and all mention of Ukraine. If you wanted to stand your ground and use Twitter to speak up for good causes, that’s exactly what it makes sure nobody will hear.

Musk vows to criminalize transgender healthcare

Musk pushes his anti-transgender attitudes in more places than just in this platform he owns. He vowed that he will be “actively lobbying to criminalize” gender affirming care in individuals under the age of 18. He supports long-term imprisonment without parole for anyone who supports or assists in such care, including therapists (Thakker, New Republic, June 2, 2023). He can wield unmatched influence over politics because he is the world’s wealthiest person at more than $100 billion dollars (Toh, CNN, May 31, 2023).

What you can do

Leave Twitter and bring your friends. Musk, and the platform he has through Twitter, is a threat to our civil rights and our lives. Twitter is not a safe place to be, because it is increasingly being turned into a fascist platform. As long as you’re there, you’re handing money to fascists, even if you’re not paying a subscription (Solarbird, April 23, 2023). You can’t fight the normalization of fascism by continuing to contribute to a fascist space (Solarbird, Dec 7, 2022). If you work for free to be a content provider for Twitter, then you are supporting fascism. Remember a German proverb: “If one nazi sits at a table, and ten other people sit there talking with him, that’s a table with eleven nazis.” It will become harder to avoid sitting and talking with Nazis on Twitter, because Musk says he will get rid of the option to block users (Ngo, Washington Times, June 8, 2023). Many users have been migrating away from Twitter. We strongly advise that you do so as well, and help your friends migrate, too. You must, to protect your friends, and to quit supporting the normalization of fascism.

Follow relevant news, and sharpen your media literacy skills. Whenever a friend shares a news article with you, see what Media Bias Fact Check says about that news source, and see what Reuters Fact Check and Snopes have to say about its content. Avoid boosting or interacting with transphobes and nazis on social media by learning how to recognize their characteristic jargon and the “dog whistles” that they use to signal themselves to one another. See the Anti-Defamation League’s encyclopedia of hate group symbols. Here’s a list of dog whistles racists and nazis use, ones transphobes use, and more that transphobes use. We recommend following Solarbird’s Fascism Watch blog post series, where she has been keeping track of news about the rise of transphobia and fascism, with an eye on its rise on Twitter. If someone contacts you for interviews or media projects, your job is to research them and their previous work before you agree to anything. Document everything. If they turn out to be exploitative, spread the warning fast. Take some notes from how Erlick does it.

Donate to good causes and support marginalized peoples. Some reputable organizations that support LGBTQ people and their rights are The Trevor Project, GLAAD, Mermaids, Human Rights Campaign, and National Center for Transgender Equality, or other civil rights organizations, such as The American Civil Liberties Union. Be cautious about sound-alikes that impersonate good organizations, and use Charity Navigator to check their backgrounds. Boost and donate to your friends’ personal fundraisers for their health, legal expenses, and moving expenses. Donate to the social media platforms that you prefer, so they can afford to keep going. Support and mutual aid means more than just sending money to the right places. Listen to your friends who are LGBTQ or members of other marginalized groups. Educate yourself.

Mastodon is a better Twitter

What is Mastodon? From the perspective of a user, Mastodon looks and behaves very similarly to Twitter. If you’ve used TweetDeck or other front-ends for Twitter, then Mastodon’s layout will look familiar. Users can create short posts, use hashtags, boost other people’s posts, and follow one another… even if those other people are on different Mastodon servers. Each Mastodon server is independently run, and has its own rules and moderators. These servers communicate with one another via the Fediverse, an interconnected network of servers. This is similar to how you can use a Gmail account to send an email to someone on a Yahoo account: they’re on different servers, with their own rules and owners, but they can communicate with one another. This decentralization protects against the owners or users of a particular server being able to ruin the whole thing for everyone.

How do you sign up on Mastodon? Click on a server in the below list of ones that we recommend, and then click “create account.” If it says an invitation is required to create an account, ask a friend for one from that server, or try another server. Don’t get overwhelmed trying to choose the perfect server before you begin. After all, you can use it to talk to people on any other servers, if its moderators haven’t chosen to block those particular servers. If you join a server, and then you don’t like its rules or moderators after all, or if the culture there goes bad, then you can move to another server, automatically bringing your follow list with you. You can carry on your Mastodon experience without a pause and without getting stuck with moderators you distrust. We recommend these servers to our readers because they’re LGBTQ friendly, welcome various sorts of alterhumans, are opposed to hate speech, and are open to new users, though some require an invitation. They’re owned and maintained by ordinary hobbyists and volunteers who care, not corporations or evil billionaires. Later, consider chipping in a little money to support your favorite server, if they offer that option.

https://awoo.space - This server “isn’t aimed at any specific audience, though there are a lot of queer furries here for some reason.”

https://bark.lgbt - This server *is* aimed at queer furries.

https://beach.city - Lightly themed around the cartoon Steven Universe.

https://chitter.xyz - For furries.

https://dragonscave.space - This dragon-themed server is especially for users who are visually impaired.

https://equestria.social - For fans of My Little Pony. The moderators speak French as well as English. (By the way, you can find servers in whatever languages you want, which is great for immersion language learning.)

https://meow.social - For furries.

https://plural.cafe - For plural systems.

https://plush.city

https://tech.lgbt

https://weirder.earth - Moderator team includes people who are POC, LGBTQ, and plural. Good track record at standing up to racism.

How do you make friends and find interesting blogs to follow on there? No algorithm plays matchmaker for you. We use hashtags, which is the only part of a post that shows up in a search. Usually people put hashtags that describe themselves and their interests in their #introduction post to help find others who share those interests.

How do you stay safe on there? Anyone with technical proficiency can create a Mastodon server and use it for good or bad. However, the Fediverse’s very design makes it easy for you to avoid the bad. Some Fediverse servers say they prohibit hate speech, but have been disappointing at enforcing that. Their moderators are overwhelmed, and unfamiliar with the needs of BIPOC, so racism goes unchecked. Those are widely-recognized problems with the servers mastodon.social and mastodon.online, so we don’t recommend joining those ones. Some Fediverse servers choose to allow hate speech, such as BlueSky. If you join a server that blocks problematic servers such as these, then those entire servers won’t be able to communicate with your server at all, period. Think of the story of the nazi bar: if a bartender lets in just one customer who wears nazi insignia but is polite, then that customer will come back with his nazi friends, everyone else will leave, and it will have become a nazi bar. A bartender who doesn’t want to accidentally find himself running a nazi bar has to prevent that from happening by kicking out even that one polite nazi. The Fediverse uses the nazi bar phenomenon against the nazis. Bigots and those who welcome them get isolated into their own space, and out of yours. By blocking entire servers because they have nazis there, your own server becomes something like Twitter without the nazis (Solarbird, Nov 6, 2022).

Mastodon has another safety feature: built-in content warnings. There is a widespread requirement to CW for content that is sexual, disturbing, or a spoiler. Followers will only see what’s beyond the CW if they click to open it. That’s good consent culture, and it makes Mastodon less stressful to scroll through than Twitter. In your settings, you can also filter out posts that use words that you don’t want to see at all.

Tumblr is great if you liked retweeting

What is Tumblr? Tumblr is a social media site that hosts 572 million blogs. It’s less similar to Twitter, but it does have a feature like retweeting, called reblogging. Even better, you can add tags to what you reblog, so you can categorize and later find things you’ve reblogged. That makes Tumblr an ideal platform for circulating fandom content, art, and memes.

How do you sign up on Tumblr? You can sign up on Twitter with just an email address, without sharing other personal information. Tumblr allows for users to have one primary blog, and as many side blogs as they want. You can customize the appearance of your blog using HTML and CSS. On desktop, install the browser extension xKit Rewritten and play with its settings to improve your experience of Tumblr.

How do you stay safe on Tumblr? You can curate your experience with blocking and filtering. Use tags to give content warnings, which others can use to filter your posts, and view them only if they consent to see that content. For that to work, don’t censor words. You can hide posts that use certain words, which helps you filter out posts from users who hate LGBTQ. Here’s a guide for how to do that. And another guide with screenshots for how to do that in the settings, and another guide. On desktop, install the third-party browser extension, Shinigami Eyes, which often helps warn you that a Tumblr account is known to express anti-transgender views.

How do you make friends and find interesting blogs on Tumblr? Tumblr tags are great for that. Use this web address, and replace the word “food” with some other key word for any topic that interests you: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/food?sort=recent It will show you the most recent posts that people have tagged with that word. The accounts you follow will often reblog from other users, and you can use those as leads to find other interesting blogs.

Discord has many ways to communicate

What is Discord? Discord is a combination of many forms of communication in one. It supports group chat rooms, private messaging, voice calls, video calls, and streams for both one-on-one direct messages and for groups. It isn’t similar to Twitter at all, but it’s fantastic for talking with friends and meeting new people. All Discord servers are all required to follow Discord’s Community Guidelines, which bans hate speech, harassment, and violent extremism. Many plural systems enjoy using a bot on Discord, PluralKit, which lets you create something like separate accounts for each of your system members, without having to sign in and out.

What servers might you join? Discord allows for the creation of servers based around specific interests and groups of people. Servers can be tight-knit private groups, or huge public groups, or anything in-between. Most servers have a specific theme or focus that they adhere to. There are some excellent servers about being alterhuman. Ask your friends for recommendations and invitations to these and other servers.

Dreamwidth.org is the best social blog site

What is Dreamwidth? Dreamwidth is a social blogging platform based off of code from Livejournal. If you used Livejournal long ago, Dreamwidth will feel like home. If you’ve only used Twitter or Tumblr, you can adapt to the differences soon enough, because it has an especially well made FAQ. (Here is a collection of more info about how to use Dreamwidth, written for people who are more accustomed to Tumblr.) Dreamwidth focuses on creating your own original content and interacting with other folks’ original content in personal blogs and in “communities,” which are group forum blogs. Dreamwidth’s design is ideal for long pieces of writing, serialized works, and conversation threads. Because of this, many blogs that are especially active on Dreamwidth today are those that focus on fan fiction, role play, personal diaries, and essays, but you can put nearly any kind of subject matter there.

How do you join Dreamwidth? On the front page of Dreamwidth.org, click “create free account.” (Paying a subscription to help support the site will give you a few perks, but a free account is just as functional as a paid one.) Make up a username. Tell your email address and birthdate, which you can keep private in your profile settings. You can customize the appearance of your blog. We strongly recommend you use Solarbird’s theme that makes your blog mobile-friendly.

How do you find friends and interesting blogs on Dreamwidth? You can discover more blogs that focus on things you like by adding a list of interests to your profile, searching for others who put those interests in their profiles too. You can look at the Latest Things (the newest posts and tags by all users). You can also use Dreamwidth to follow the news! Dreamwidth has a built-in RSS feed reader, so you can use it to subscribe to content from other sites. Many sites offer RSS feeds: major news sources, comics, subreddits, Tumblr blogs, AO3 tags, and more. YsabetWordsmith regularly features interesting active communities in her FollowFriday tag. For the alterhuman readers of our blog, we recommend joining these communities:

Dreamwidth_therians: A members-only group for therians and otherkin.

Fictionkind: A members-only group for fictionfolk to discuss their experiences based on prompts.

Otherkin: A public group for otherkin.

Otherkin_haven: A members-only group for otherkin.

OtherkinNews (that’s us!): A volunteer-run blog for sharing news for otherkin, therianthropes, fictionfolk, plural systems, and all sorts of alterhumans.

PluralArchives: Citations of plural and pluralish phenomena collected in one place.

PluralStories: A searchable catalog of plural and pluralish stories.

TheriThere: A comic about therianthropes and otherkin.

Forums make great community spaces

If you simply want a place to talk with friends about shared interests, consider web-based forums. Each forum has its own rules, moderation teams, and features. Search for forums that are built around your fandoms or other interests. We recommend these for alterhumans:

Alt+H Forums: A quiet forum hosted by Alt+h, a nonhuman advocacy group. It is about alterhuman experiences as a whole.

Draconity: A forum focused on dragons specifically. It had a site-wide update in 2022.

Draconic: This forum for dragon otherkin has been running continuously since 1998.

Nonhuman National Park: A forum focused on inclusion and intersectionality of nonhuman, alterhuman, and plural identities.

What do you do with your Twitter after you leave?

Some people choose to delete their Twitter account completely. This erases all their tweets and connections to other users. Any conversation threads with this user will have pieces missing. That can interfere with other users’ archival efforts. Erasing your tracks that thoroughly can also make it difficult for your friends and followers to discover where you disappeared to and why.

If you don’t want to delete the account altogether, then sign into it once every 30 days, to prevent it from getting automatically deleted for inactivity. You don’t need to post anything: just sign in (Twitter, inactive account policy). Some people use a third-party tool to automatically delete all or most tweets. Removing content from the site is a good way to withdraw support from it. However, some users report that their deleted tweets come back later.

Should you leave your account public, or set it to “protected”? That status makes it so all your tweets, followers, and followed users can only be seen by users who you manually accept as your followers. Pros: this mostly prevents unwanted interactions or follows from random users, while leaving behind a signpost to let your friends know where you disappeared to and why. Cons: privating can interfere with others’ efforts to archive conversation threads just like if the account had been deleted. Archival tools can only pick up your tweets if they’re public. -- Appendix: A timeline of events related to this article

2022 January. The Gender Unity Project, LLC, invites transgender people and allies to interview in a movie. Meanwhile, Okami has interviews in The Sun, and UK breakfast TV show This Morning.

2022 February 7. Okami’s interview on Fox News. On the same day, Erlick publicly exposes that the Gender Unity Project is deceiving transgender people into interviewing with Walsh.

2022 March. Walsh publishes Johnny the Walrus, a picture book about a child being pressured to become a walrus, in parody of transgender children.

2022 May. Okami blogs a public statement about her involvement in What Is A Woman? with documentation of how they deceived her into showing up to it.

2022 June. Walsh releases What Is A Woman? Okami writes a detailed criticism of that movie.

2022 October. Okami announces that she no longer calls herself therian or otherkin. Musk buys Twitter and immediately posts an anti-gay conspiracy theory. He lays off thousands of employees, many crucial to the maintenance of the site software. He invites many users back to Twitter who had previously been banned for being nazis and white supremacists (Washington Post, Nov 11, 2022). Anticipating that Twitter will soon crash and/or become effectively a far-right site only, thousands of users leave or prepare to leave Twitter, filling their profiles and pinned tweets with links to where to find them on other social media sites.

2022 December. To discourage this, Twitter introduces an algorithm that prevents users from putting links to other social media sites in their profiles, and threatens to ban users for doing so.

2023 March and April. Users notice that Twitter’s algorithm suppresses tweets that contain external links, misspelled words, or mention of Ukraine. It suppresses LGBT related words, but not fascism related words. Twitter’s policy stops protecting transgender users against harassment. Even news agencies are quitting Twitter, such as NPR and PBS.

2023 May. To discourage this, Twitter starts banning accounts that have been inactive for a short amount of time.

2023 June. Musk quote-retweets and pins the Daily Wire’s free stream of What Is A Woman? The same day, he vows to lobby for the imprisonment of therapists who support transgender youth.

About the writers: Alterhuman community historians and archivists House of Chimeras, Page Shepard, N. Noel Sol, and Orion Scribner collaborated on this article. Thanks to Solarbird for her Fascism Watch blog series, which helped us find news sources for much of what has been happening with Twitter.

This article is also on the Otherkin News Dreamwidth.

#long post #very long post

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kastelpls · 10 months

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i hate social media

hello tumblr, i make interactive fiction titles and yuri visual novels and i used to write about japanese subculture media.

Completed Titles (from latest to oldest):

Ah Lim’s Chicken Rice, #01-08A - Everyone loves your chicken rice. Slice-of-life horror.

Chinese Family Dinner Moment - You haven't even had the chance to tell your parents you've gone vegan...

I MUST EAT CHILI OIL - I miss her mapo tofu.

June 1998, Sydney - Your family is moving in, whether you like it or not.

Their Time in This World - A fantasy/adventure game where you restore time to people in need

Hanna, We’re Going to School - ghosts | slice of life | trauma

Ongoing Works:

I Became Gay From Translating My Roommate’s Short Story - A mediocre translator burned out by capitalism. A writer who has only been published once in her entire life. They meet as roommates and develop a relationship that is perhaps much more than love.

Other Works of Interest:

Mimidoshima - a blog covering a lot of random things inside Japanese media and elsewhere. people seem to like it.

Minidoshima - a substack newsletter successor doing something similar. has more articles on critical distance including their best articles roundups, so surely it must mean something.

Amelie Doree’s YouTube - i’ve collaborated with her on a bunch of videos on the history of japanese visual novels and more. you can especially blame me for the Barcode Fighter video.

Other Social Media:

cohost - tfw my tumblr for fancy people account also appears on critical distance for some reason...

mastodon - i just post esoteric game dev and interactive fiction thoughts there. follow at your own peril.

IFDB - i post reviews there once in a while.

#interactive fiction #my writing #pinned post

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grimgiblog · 2 months

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Why you should make a Misskey/Shonk.Social/Mastodon account.

Hi lol. As a trans artist who has been incredibly frustrated with tumblr censoring lgbt content and general transphobia. Eat shit Matt.🔨🚗💥 I wanted to offer a small guide about activitypub servers. Considering Tumblr and Threads wish to integrate with activitypub services.

It truly doesn't matter what instance or server you pick. There are a lot of them that within each individual one hosts thousands of smaller communities. You can also make your own servers and instances!

Other good servers.

Point of the matter is, you can follow anyone from any instance and have them on our dashboard. You can follow someone from mastodon and still use misskey.io Or (eventually) follow someone from tumblr on shonk.social.

Or even make your own instance. The best part is say one of these sites has another CEO meltdown, or they have harmful policies, you can migrate to another instance without losing followers or our posts.

From our experiences Misskey.io is similar to twitter AO3 and deviantart with no censorship regarding artwork (so long as you mark it as explicit). Which is good and bad. That means they allow drawn nsfw lgbt content and sex work. However being a japanese instance they allow drawn loli shota and noncon. Therefore I highly recommend using an instance blocklist and blocking any terms or words in relation. There are hatespeech instances and conspiracy instances of course. And it is always good to be aware of when a server becomes toxic. Luckily with instances and account migration we can pack up and leave. The reason I'm on Misskey currently is because its the biggest server and there are more utilities than shonk such as animated banners, decorations, and community outreach.

Mastodon works but the UI is incredibly bland and uncustomizable. It also feels mostly dead.

Shonk.Social is a fork of Misskey that is a safe lgbt space. It is a very small server currently but the people who code it are incredibly passionate. Their boosts and global timelines are really good ways to keep up to date on other servers.

You've also got custom emojis, lists, channels, antennae.

There's also cookie clicker LOL

But all the same I highly recommend it. If tumblr decides to feature activitypub integration we could eventually follow people from tumblr on any instances without all of the Transphobic ceos and app breaking ads.

#misskey #misskey.io #activitypub #shonk.social #lgbt #hammer car explosion #fediverse #mastodon #tumblr alternative #trans rights

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kellan2255 · 11 months

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Yet Another Summary of What r/196 is and the Current Reddit Drama

Some people in an apartment/dorm created a subreddit (a community on Reddit. Think a tag with its own moderators) for sharing memes called r/195, named after the room number. The only rule was that you had to post before leaving, which turned it into a shitposting subreddit and created the tradition of naming posts “rule”. After 420 weeks, r/195 was abruptly shut down and its users moved to r/196 (196 eventually had its own spin-offs like 197, 198, 19684, 196andahalf, etc).

For a subreddit with theoretically one rule, 196 was actually very moderated. Many rules got added over time like restricting certain controversial types of post to certain days, the ever changing rules about porn, and most importantly strong enforcement against bigotry. That made it one of the few mainstream shitposting subreddits with a largely left-leaning and/or LGBTQ audience.

Recently Reddit announced API changes that effectively end 3rd party apps. That forces users to use their horrible official app, which makes moderation harder, reduces accessibility for disabled people, and a bunch of other things people have written whole essays about. Users only have two ways to put any real pressure on the administrators running the site: negative media coverage (this has required multiple mass shootings by site users to be effective) and, more recently, blackouts.

All content on Reddit is made by users and posted to communities run by users. The main page is simply a collection of popular posts from these communities. A blackout is when the moderators of many large communities coordinate to make them private or block all new posts until a demand is met. This has been tried twice before and succeeded both times: one time to shut down the Covid misinformation subreddit r/nonewnormal, and one time to fire an admin who defended her pedophile father and banned any mention of her name. Also worth noting there’s a *lot* of history with Reddit admins and pedophilia that deserves its own write up.

People are less hopeful this time due to less participation in the blackout and the CEO quadrupling down on the API change. Again, there’s much more to that drama including lying about conversations, recorded phone calls, accidentally revealing he was using copy-pasted responses, and admitting the company wasn’t profitable to try and win an argument. Since it’s clear there will be no change and many communities will be gone forever, there’s an exodus of many of them, including 196, to other platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Discord, and Tumblr.

#r196 #196 #r/196 #/r/196 #reddit #blackout #reddit blackout #long post

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unpretty · 7 months

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hi! are you still on mastodon? if so, where? and if not, is there anywhere else people can follow you besides your personal site? just in case someone really liked and appreciated the stuff you post and if tumblr was hypothetically entering hospice care 🥲

these days i'm at [email protected]! i've also got my long-neglected backup blog at blog.kittyunpretty.com, which used to federate but i think that wordpress plugin broke and i haven't installed the new one that works. kittyunpretty.com also has rss feeds for various updates, though not braindumpy like mastodon, that's all writing and not blogging. and in a real tumblr emergency i'd probably have unpretty.space point somewhere else (the ability to do this was the primary reason i got a custom domain lol)

i guess i'm also roboglam on last.fm if that's something you want to follow? and if you want to follow the articles i broadcast in inoreader, my username is kittyunpretty and there's an rss feed here

i'm not on any other social media because i'm old and cranky and i've given up on anything that won't let me pick up and move to self-hosting if i want to. tumblr has been grandfathered in but i'm not fucking with any of that other shit.

#original

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sunbentshadows · 11 months

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Honestly the age of fake-free technology services is ending. Sites and apps have sold all your data, tracked your every move for a literal decade and a half, and they still don't make enough money to stay afloat. Think about that: Almost every site (tumblr and a few others as notable exceptions here) has spent the past decade scraping every part of your identity to sell it to the highest bidder. Emails. Purchases. Search history. Clicks, website visits, who you have seen, what wi-fi networks you walked by, that you stayed out late last Thursday and what bookstore you stopped by. All to slice you into convenient advertising segments.

And it's still not enough. Your data, those supposedly-secret pieces of your supposedly-private life - that time you bought flowers for your mom, the time you looked up that health thing, hell, even the fucking phone number you used for multi-factor authentication - went up to sale for pennies.

Sent to dubious ad-companies to scrape whatever profit they could.

And it didn't even matter.

There is no online space that doesn't require money. Actual money, not fake ad views-money. Independent forums and Mastodon/Fediverse instances and reddit lookalikes are all put up by people's own money and volunteer time. AO3 and Wikipedia use volunteers and donation drives.

Because it isn't free. It never has been.

If you want something to exist, to continue to exist online, the only way to ensure it will stay is to give it money. Actual money. Exposure and ads just do not work, and have never worked. They sold every bit of your information to try to make it work, spent billions of dollars to bleed the internet dry, and it still hasn't.

Yes, this is a post about tumblr woes. This is also a post about Web 2.0 dying. And also a plea to literally anyone who can afford it:

Pay for sites you use. If you do not, they will not exist. You are on a sinking ship.

#tumblr #writing #long post #tumblr update #what are the kids tagging this controversy #staffcon #like; if you do not give money to things you utilize and like that you know are dying. You are complicit in their downfall. That's it.

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foone · 2 years

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One of my few problems with adopting Tumblr as my social media outlet of choice is the way reblogging your own threads to comment on them means you get this slow explosion of longer and longer posts, and all previous versions still exist on your timeline.

This got long, so musings about the differences in how long-text posts work on different social medias and the trouble with writing them on ADHD continued under the cut.

So if you scroll down my Tumblr account after a bunch of writing, you see:

FOONE: A, B, C, D, E

FOONE: A, B, C, D

FOONE: A, B, C

FOONE: A, B

FOONE: A

And this is annoyingly repetitive especially as posts get long. Which is a definite risk, I can type SO FUCKING MUCH.

And you might say "this is easily fixed: posts don't have to be short (this isn't Twitter) so just put all the content in one post", which, no. I have ADHD. Coming back in the room to go "AND ANOTHER THING!" is my modus operandi, you know? I can't think of all the things I want to say and just say them in one place and go "OK DONE" and click a button and let the internet go read it now. I don't know what I am going to say until after I have said it, and especially not what I am going to say next.

And I worry that the way Tumblr compounds your threads in this additive explosion means that the threshold for "this is too much of this punk" is much lower than other social networks, and that's a real worry for someone who writes as much as I do. I am happy to write endlessly for my own entertainment but I don't want to be annoying, and having to repeatedly scroll past multiple copies of my endless threads is going to get old fast.

Also on the subject of "one long post vs many short ones in a thread", splitting a post and continuing in a reply post/reblog has a functional use: it's like a paragraph break, but moreso. So it's good for indicating a break in the thought, to shift focus, or to take a tangent. (and as someone with severe adhd, my brain is 90% tangents)

Anyway I'm thinking I might do something weird like build a private mastodon instance and then set it up to sync threads to Tumblr.

Like, collect a full thread of small posts, turn them into paragraphs, and post that to Tumblr as one big post. It will work better, I think.

Fundamentally the problem I am facing right now is that Twitter is the best site for how my brain works. Individual tweets in a thread are a close approximation for how I think, so writing a long series of tweets is easiest for me. In that format, I can write. I can be creative. I can express myself.

And don't get me wrong: I love Tumblr. This is easily one of my favorite places on the web. But the "big open white page with plenty of room to write" model is not a good fit for my brain. I look at that and I can't get started. If I can get started, I can't finish, because I get bogged down in going back and editing and rewording.

Short small snippets in a row, like IRC or Twitter, prevent those problems. I don't have to think about the whole thing I'm writing, because I don't have room to write that. I just focus on the current line, and once that's done, I move on to the next. Did I misspell something? Could that have been phrased better? Well, too bad. That line is done now, you can only move forward.

Yeah this may not result in a work of literary genius but it at least results in something. I am not a great writer, I'm never going to be a new york times best seller... But I'm not aiming that high. Writing like this, as a series of short snippets and not going back to fix and re-edit them? It's the only way I can write at all. (and if you have ADHD that gets in the way of your writing, I recommend trying it).

I'd rather write in this specific and limited style than not write at all. There's too many ideas in my head, I need to get them out.

Anyway the reason I'm thinking about this now is that this is why I've traditionally been a heavy Twitter user (though let the record show that I have been on Tumblr for longer!). It works for that style of writing, so I could flourish there.

But it's dying. Oh God, is it dying. And I'm having to think about what to do next. Where to "go".

And as an aside, it's always weird how we always phrase these things like migrations. Like people are backing up their bags from site A and getting on a train to site B.

Maybe it's just my ADHD talking, but that's never been how I've used the web. I am in many, many places simultaneously, and have been for a long time.

I'm active, to different degrees, on Tumblr and Twitter and reddit and discord and mastodon and cohost and Facebook and LinkedIn and IRC and email chains and BBSes. The only thing that change if I "move" is how much I focus on one over an another. If I have a shitpost in my head, where do I decide to post it? If I want to talk about something more serious, where do I go?

Obviously with Twitter dying I'm focusing more on other places. I joked to someone on Twitter that I'm currently sharding what used to be my Twitter posts to Tumblr and mastodon: Tumblr gets the shitpostier and transier stuff, mastodon gets the techier stuff. But that may change as I find the right balance going forward.

Or, regarding my "persona Jubilee" post, I might just stop. I have been this Foone for a while, it might be time to stop and rethink.

Anyway, the final wrinkle in this overlong post: I wrote this much on Tumblr, despite all my talking about not being able to do it. I think I'm basically doing this by channeling my "Twitter thread mood" and not going back up and editing. Who knows if that means I've actually managed to overcome my previous inability to just write free-form long content, or if this is just a limited trick that I can't keep up. Time will tell.

#Long post

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desert-palm · 1 year

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Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in response to a Twitter user’s complaint about Mastodon’s complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 — suggested the user “come to Tumblr” as the site would soon “add activitypub for interconnect.”

“Don’t stress,” he said, before clarifying that Tumblr first has to deal with the waves of new users coming in right now from Twitter but that support for “interop and activitypub” were due to come “ASAP.”

In short, this announcement means Tumblr would move from being only a niche blogging platform to becoming a part of a larger, decentralized social network of sorts — and one whose user base has grown in size in recent days as people flee Elon Musk’s Twitter in search of new communities.

#activitypub #tech memes #tech news #technology #open source #decentralization #twitter #news #techcrunch #computers #software engineering

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joyce-stick · 1 year

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Suzume Isn't Gay, But We Liked It Anyway

Despite not being as gay as Shinkai might have tried to make it during its development, Suzume is still quite a good film which we enjoyed immensely on account of its characters, compelling narrative, visual beauty, thought-provoking themes, and the improvements observed over Shinkai's previous two films. So this an essay about Suzume, about why it's good, what its themes are, and our glowing recommendation.

youtube

Transcript under the cut.

Previous video essay/transcript: Audrey's Best Girls Winter 2023

If you're on desktop, you may find this more comfy to read directly on our Tumblr site.

If you enjoy this essay, please consider following us here or on any other platforms, and/or donating to support future works via our Patreon or Ko-fi.

Patreon • Ko-fi • YouTube • Twitter • Cohost • Tumblr • Mastodon

Citations!

Baron, Reuben. “Director Makoto Shinkai on the Anime Artistry of Suzume - Exclusive Interview.” Looper, Static Media, 12 Apr. 2023, https://www.looper.com/1254434/director-makoto-shinkai-anime-artistry-suzume-exclusive-interview/.

Brzeski, Patrick. “Makoto Shinkai on How Anime Blockbuster 'Suzume' Reflects the Current State of Japan: ‘the Most Honest Expression I Could Put on Screen.’” The Hollywood Reporter, Penske Media Corporation, 7 Mar. 2023, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/makoto-shinkai-interview-suzume-anime-berlin-2023-1235329404/.

Pulliam-Moore, Charles. “Makoto Shinkai Wants Suzume to Build a Bridge of Memory between Generations.” The Verge, Vox Media, 15 Apr. 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/15/23678724/makoto-shinkai-suzume-interview.

Jackson, Destiny. “Director Makoto Shinkai on the Tender Resonance and Maturity of Making 'Suzume': ‘I Think about How to Dig Deeper so I Can Emotionally Move People in My Vicinity.’” Deadline, Penske Media Corporation, 15 Apr. 2023, https://deadline.com/2023/04/suzume-makoto-shinkai-japanese-anime-weathering-with-you-your-name-1235325691/.

https://twitter.com/ao8l22/status/1513116464210919425

https://twitter.com/moogy0/status/1592346490315640836

I had a few good reasons to assume I would hate Suzume.

We've seen three of Shinkai’s films. Yes, those three. We liked Your Name quite a bit when we saw it in theaters, but its flaws became apparent on a rewatch a few years later. We did not like Weathering With You, which made its flaws apparent to us rather immediately. Never watched it since watching it the first time, but, I don't know, maybe we'll go back to it.Still, thinking about that film had us pissed off for a little while, although we're less pissed off now, for reasons we might get to later. So, when we went to watch Suzume, I was reasonably expecting to hate it, or, even worse, enjoy it, while seeing some intractable flaw in it that ticked me off immensely about it.

And… I found none! I mean, maybe I'll think of one later, but my current opinion of Suzume, as I write this hours after having seen it, (and speak it, 'bout a couple days after having written this) is that it was a pretty good film with a lot of breathtaking visuals, funny moments, some emotional bits, and no real huge flaws to speak of. In fact, not only does this film lack the biggest flaws of its predecessors, it's also got a few things about it that I appreciate more.

First thing I liked immediately: Girl. I mean, her name, is the title. It's no secret that we of the joystick system appreciate beautiful anime girls, and this particular such beautiful anime girl is good, both as the protagonist of the film who does all the proactive things to save the guy, which is different from the last two movies where the guy did all the stuff. I'm not gonna pretend like Shinkai is suddenly some kind of feminist icon now for correctly giving a female character some goddamn agency, but: it's a nice touch for us personally, given that… we like girls. It helps that Suzume is emotional and interesting and funny and has a pretty good arc through the movie and her voice actress does a good job- no, we did not watch the dub. I'll probably talk a bit more about her later, but I think she's good.

I think it's important to mention with regards to this girl, that she was, apparently, supposed to be gay. This information came to light in the English speaking anime community after a Japanese entertainment journalist tweeted a tweet sayin’ as much, and then professional translator Moogy went and tweeted about it in turn, citing this journalist as a source. I can’t find that this chain goes back any further than that, although I tried to out of personal interest, because, if I had, then I would’ve been able to write that into the Wikipedia page- which, I DID CHECK, and it briefly mentions that -

Okay, so, since writing that, another, Wikipedia-admissible, source, in the English language, emerged, in which Shinkai is interviewed, and confirms this to be true. So as such, I added that information to the article, with that source. Look. There it is! And it’s still there, probably, unless someone removed it while I was making the video.

In this interview, the interviewer asks Shinkai directly about this, and he says, “I’m surprised you know it! I’ve only told Japanese interviewers about it!” Clearly Shinkai is unaware of the power of Moogy. So, he goes onto say, that, yes, it was his initial idea for a companion, and that the theoretical character who Souta replaced would’ve been Suzume’s onee-san crush; that’s how I’m taking this whole ‘sisterhood romance’ thing. He thought he’d done enough with the boy meets girl thing, and he wanted to try doing something else.

His producer rejected it, because, in Shinkai’s translated words, “You may be tired of these romantic stories, but your audience loves it,” which, I believe, is a polite way of saying “I don’t think a gay film will sell.” The chair thing was chosen to “not make it too much of a romance”.

Shinkai further says— and this part kinda gets me— that he doesn’t think the story would’ve changed if it had been gay, or if Suzume had been a boy or non-binary or whatever. Quote:

“It's not necessarily the context of male/female; it's about a human overcoming something. In my future films as well, I want to focus on that human story as opposed to too much commentary on gender or sex.”

So, my reading of this response, and, take this with a grain of salt because it’s only my personal interpretation, is that while Shinkai was interested in making a gay film as a change of pace, he did not consider it important enough to insist on. There were other things he wanted to make the movie about, and he didn’t want to die on the gay hill.

And, y’know, that’s a shame, but I think it’s fair enough. I would have liked to see the alternate timeline where no one stopped him from making the film gay, but if it wasn’t already clear, I like the film that we got, and I don’t fault Shinkai for having other priorities as a director, like, for instance, getting his film funded and keeping his job. And honestly, I can halfway see the merit in not making it a gay film, because then it’d be a lot harder to, y’know, address the themes, without addressing whatever gay discourse there’d be that overshadows the themes.

I don’t say this to be like, “ooh, the film would’ve just been gay and that would’ve been bad,” it would’ve been good for the film to be gay, I just mean that a lot of the time people are more concerned about there being representation rather than the quality of the story in which the representation exists and it becomes the gay thing, rather than, the thing that happens to be gay, and that’s not always great. I mean, I guess we are getting a little bit of that just off of the knowledge that the film could have been gay, but at least I don’t have to think about talking about it too much past this point, because it’s, y’know, not actually in the film.

Shinkai said other stuff, too, I guess, about the animation and how the characters have different color palettes for daytime and evening and night scenes, which explains the very convincingly presented amusement park scene, that happens at night! So that was interesting.

Anyway, that’s the addendum I have about that, I’m gonna go back to the rest of this:

I have no idea if this would've been good for the film or not, but we have a different video being written about gay pandering, so, let’s move on then I guess!

The second thing that we liked was the film's opening minutes. And to explain why this is, I need to give a bit of context, I think. So, in short, after the 2011 nuclear meltdown and earthquake that irreversibly forever changed Japan and the life of all the people living there (and also delayed Madoka Magica's finale), Shinkai apparently decided that he wanted to make a bunch of films about it. About three so far, to be exact. Which, y'know, is not a bad motivation for making films. It's certainly a better motivation than I had to write this video

So, as such, his last three films are a novel fusion of wacky comedy, coming of age romantic melodrama, and disaster film. Your Name and Weathering With You had really slow buildups to the disaster part of the disaster film, to the point that mentioning it is almost a spoiler, but I'm going to assume it isn't because everyone has now seen those films. So they have a whole first half where it's just kind of weird supernatural romantic comedy slice of life hijinks but then it abruptly tone shifts in the second half.

This is actually, I think, the source of both of these films' major issues. It's kinda cool to watch them the first time and then see the story's tone shift when the mid movie plot twist happens, introducing the big disaster scenario aspect of the story along with it, but the drawback to that approach is that you have, in essence, a movie whose plot twist is that it becomes a different movie. This both contributes to the odd tonal whiplash and also means that the supernatural disaster part of the film is weaker and not as well fleshed out as it could be.

Suzume, on the other hand, smartly introduces the main conflict of the story in the first act of the movie. This choice is good. The serious existential threat to Japan stuff that the film is about is the immediate focus of the film. This allows for a more balanced tone, as then the movie can comfortably use its comedic parts to add levity to its treatment of that harrowing topic, rather than the existential stuff comin' in like a sledgehammer to break a previously comfortable tone- which, I should say, IS a thing you can do, and IS a valid choice to tell a story, I just don’t think it was necessarily a choice that Shinkai handled well before. The pacing is much improved, as the supernatural aspects of the film are more evenly developed and the story has more time to explain itself. Mostly. There's like one scene I don't get. I’ll get to it?

Anyway, the end result of this choice is that Suzume feels like a much more focused and complete film, rather than two halves of different films. Aaaaaand, I appreciate this! A lot. I can see this choice maybe maybe maybe making the movie less interesting to some people, because it's paced more like a normal movie than Shinkai's other previous two romantic comedy disaster movies, but, hey, I think it's nice that Shinkai seems to be growing as an artist and a writer and a filmmaker, who made a normal movie that didn’t leave us confused, and disoriented, and confused, about what it’s about

Other things I like… I like the visuals. The animations and backgrounds and visual effects and the CG are all pretty fire. Suzume is generally a really beautiful film! We all knew this, but, really, it's really good. I like the chair thing. I like the way that the chair is animated. Apparently the animation of the chair was inspired by Luxo Jr., y’know, the Pixar short that became the origin of the Pixar lamp, and… yeah, I can see it. It definitely does have that old Pixar vibe of “inanimate object moving like a very real human inanimate object” that that has. I just like the way the legs move, and the way it emotes so convincingly with these subtle but credible motions.

There’s one scene involving a roller coaster that- that scene is incredible, that’s definitely one of the most visually novel sequences in all of Shinkai’s films that we’ve seen. I like the character design of the guy, Souta, also? When he’s not a chair, I mean. I dunno. The last two guy characters in the last Shinkai films looked like generic anime boys, but this guy looks like the kind of guy who I can believe a woman would find attractive. I like the look of his hair, I like how grizzled he is, I like his long gray coat, I like that you can look at this tired hunk of a man and immediately see that he’s been places and that he’s carrying some shit with him. Bonus points for that he looks like one of the Monogatari exorcists.

As for Suzume! Well, her design is maybe a bit generic, but… she’s a girl. It’s not like our standards are too high for girls. She’s supposed to be an ordinary girl, and, y’know, in this movie contrasting with this dude and then this chair, that works out well. And also, I appreciate that she rotates her outfits throughout the movie. My headmates and I love to see a woman change her clothes, not necessarily directly. I’m just saying, that denim jacket thing she had going on in Kobe, and when she lost her shoes in Tokyo and then borrowed Souta’s boots? Specifically borrowing the boots, because, the only pair of shoes that we own looks like this:

It’s a small thing, but like, Shinkai couldn’t make Suzume gay. Widespread trans representation in anime is a bit far off. I might well be eating off the floor conjuring table scraps pointing at a woman in a man’s shoes and saying “oi, isn’t it gender?” But like, 1, it’s a woman wearing a man’s shoes, and 2, yes, it is gender. And we like the gender. You cannot stop us! We did get to see the movie a second time with a friend, (thank you for seeing the movie with us, and reviewing our script!) and she insisted that the boots are femme coded, and, we disagree, unfortunately. I’m sorry, we cannot see these boots as anything but gender.

However! It is Shinkai’s fault that Onimai exists. That scene in Onimai is definitely influenced by that scene in Your Name. We know this because Nekotofu said so in interviews. Onimai is very good and based and funny, and this is a fact upon which I, and all of my headmates, equally quite agree. It’s nice to agree on something with all of yourself. SPEAKING, of the opening scene in Your Name:

Shinkai did not sexualize Suzume. So, if you hated that scene of Your Name, there’s none of that! There’s no chair peeping on Suzume or anything like that. So, if that knowledge helps you somehow, now you know.

Long story short. Should you watch Suzume. Well, yes obviously. By the time this video comes out, or, by the time you're seeing it, its theatrical run might be over, but like, if it’s not, then, yes, I recommend going and seeing it, like, today. And if it is, then remember to see it whenever it’s on blu-ray or streaming services or your local cat-themed anime distributor. Shinkai made a normal movie. I hope he makes an abnormally good movie next time. I believe in this man. Again. Somewhat. It’s not like it really matters what I say or think, but I do also hope that his next movie is just gay. I won’t matter, to me, or, to us, if his next movie is just a carbon copy of Suzume, but gay. I mean, he got away with making a heterosexual Your Name once after making the heterosexual Your Name. There is nothing stopping him. Except for the pigheaded businessmen who he may have to argue with.

Anyways, that’s that, I guess I’m going to talk more specifically about the plot now, so, if you didn’t see the movie, then, leave, now, if you care. If you did see the movie, or do not plan to see the movie, then, uh, don’t leave. Please. I’m going to put the Patreon credits here. It is not the end of the video. Please do not leave.

Intermission for extra thoughts and Patreon credits!

Hello everyone. This is Audrey, of the joystick system. The name of the brain that I’m the lead woman of. We’re still a plural system, as I’ve not forgotten, thanks to Luci and all my headmates.

As I already think I said, we saw Suzume a second time with a friend. As of this speaking, it continues to play in movie theaters, at least where we are, although it’s not showing nearly as often and probably not in as many places. Nonetheless, if it’s still playing in your area, I obviously very much recommend it. If you have the time and money to see it a second time after seeing it the first time, I think you should see it a second time. Because it’s good!

One thing I’d really like to change about this video, overall, is the tone of it. I think it came off way too much as “oh yeah, Suzume’s actually pretty good”, because I walked in with muted expectations, and then walked out feeling like it was pretty good but also kind of waiting for it to hit me that it’s actually bad… And, no, no, it’s an absolutely fantastic film and I imagine is probably going to line up with our top 5 movies of the year. Although, it’s not like we watch a lot of movies, so it probably won’t have too stiff of a competition. A different friend of ours saw it, and they absolutely loved it and had a lot of really good things to say that just made us like it more- so, yeah, no, Suzume is fantastic. Please watch Suzume. If you can.

I think I also should say, I disagree pretty strongly with the assertion that Suzume is “the same film” as Your Name and Weathering With You. As I’ve already said, the structure is much more cohesive in how it introduces the plot without the plot becoming the plot twist of the plot, and also there’s just a lot of improvements on writing and characterization and storytelling and the film is generally much more tonally consistent than either Your Name or Weathering With You. Sure, it’s a similar overall plot to both of those films, but I think there’s just as much merit in iterating on old ideas as there is in introducing new ones, and Suzume does a healthy amount of both. Maybe it’s a remake of the same movie, but if that’s so, Suzume is definitely the best version of that movie, and I think the growth Shinkai went through as a director and writer to get there is crystal clear.

And as I hope I’m about to make clear, the thematic weight of the film is much stronger as well. The decreased focus on the romance subplot helped a whole lot in that regard, I think, to bring the themes into greater focus, and like, gosh, is the film REALLY THEMATICALLY GOOD on top of being so well structured and written and visually spectacular. I walked into Suzume expecting it to be bad, I spent like two weeks while writing the script and making the video trying to think of flaws in this movie, and I can really only think of like two, which are one, that it’s not gay, and two, that some minor plot details are maybe a small bit inscrutable.

But neither of those things actively bring the film down! It’s just great! And, if we had the time to watch the film a third time and then do a complete rewrite of the script, I’d probably change the tone I took with it, but y’know what, I gotta say a thing, I’ve left people waiting long enough, this movie won’t be in theaters forever, so, it’s good enough, and good enough is perfectly good enough.

Also. The music was really good. It was a lot less intrusive than in Your Name and Weathering With You. Those two films really love going all ham on their mid-movie insert song sequences? In Suzume, the music is, the musical score, which is really really good and is used really extremely effectively in, specifically the chair chase scene, and the amusement park scene, and the opening of the film, and the big Tokyo scene, and really the whole film. It was just really very good.

And, other than that, I think I mentioned everything I wanted to mention in the script, so, uh yeah, that's that!

So, before we get back to the video, channel housekeeping. I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep doing videos, at least not regularly, as things are going. If you’re not already aware of the disaster life we lead, we’ve been aimlessly floating around quasi-homeless and unemployed, for about our entire adult life, and spent around three years crashing at a friend’s place, for longer than we should’ve been because of executive dysfunction, burnout, and general mental illness. And also money.

Most of the stuff we’ve been making our videos with, including our desktop PC, was stuff we got before we were quasi-disowned by our parents, almost, uh, six (note: four or five) years ago? and the rest of it is stuff we have, very not hyperbolically, emptied our bank account for because we kinda needed it. So, if that stuff breaks, and it’s going to eventually, we’ll be on even more hiatus until further notice. Obviously this is pretty untenable, so, we’re going to have to try to get a job, and I don’t see great odds of that working out for our transgender neurodivergent failwomanchild self, and it’s obviously going to mean we have less time to make videos and write things. Naturally the stress of our unstable situation has already been doing that job, but. Y’know.

So, if you want to help even our odds: Ko-fi or Patreon. That is currently our only steady source of income, and even a little bit extra would make a pretty big difference for us day-to-day. You can send us monthly donations through either, although, they take a smaller cut on Ko-fi, so, there’s that. Ko-fi is also the place for giving us money one time as opposed to regularly.

As for what you get out of this, well, besides the obvious your name here and access to our discord, you will earn our gratitude and also we will feel indebted to you, which will lead us to try our best to keep making things. And also if you ever encounter us in person, we’ll give you a hug, if you want one, as long as you’re not, like, creepy about it.

Is that everything? Um. Yeah. That is everything. Here's all the names of all the important people who...

Thanks to our generous Patreon backers:

Ada. Just Ada • Andrew P • Anime Omelette • ASabitsukiFlow • Brea • ColorfulCast • dameDiadora • deeso • Dorian Newlin • Duskpixie • Elvenoob • Emma • Femboy Bebop • Gwen Starlight • hikari no yume • Katherine Ullman • Kaylee Smerbeck • Korin • L Tantivy • Lilly • M • Mira Yeuden • Nichtschwert • Nik Gothic • Pigeon • R2Walker • RukaCollie • Sally • Saoirse Russell • Scimitar • SimplyAero • SleepySlug • Spiderrebelnews • Thijs • Trucy • Vile Lasagna

And, that’s that. Thanks to all of you, named onscreen and vocally, and also those of you not named but who’ve been watching, or encouraging us personally, for your support. Now, back to the normal part of the video. Spoilers for Suzume from here on, obviously.

Intermission over!!!

Okay, so, spoilers.

Plot of this movie! I’m just gonna steal bits of the Wikipedia summary, because I don’t want to write a plot summary myself and get waylaid.

Suzume Iwato is a 17-year-old high school girl who lives with her maternal aunt in Kyushu. One night, she dreams of searching for her mother (who, it's inferred later, died in a tsunami) as a child in a ruined neighborhood. The next morning, while headed for school, Suzume encounters a young man searching for abandoned areas with doors. He then is cursed to turn into a chair by a kitty cat who desires love and she runs away from home with him, and he explains that these doors in all these abandoned places are doors to an alternate dimension that occasionally let out supernatural beings called worms that do earthquakes, and they need to do the right rituals to close the door properly. So their journey across Japan to prevent the earthquakes and also get Souta back out of being a chair, thusly begins.

First of all, I think that Shinkai did an excellent job conveying the pain of losing one’s mother. I say this, because, uh, we have also lost our mother, and grieved her loss. She’s not dead, in case you’re wondering, she’s just a worthless piece of human garbage. So, I guess it’s a little perverse to compare our being estranged from our shitty nuclear family as a result of the events of our entire life up until we were twenty to Suzume losing her single mom in a natural disaster when she was four, but I can’t pretend that the former experience did not lend itself to us empathizing with her, in general. Like, we did definitely cry. That’s a thing that we did.

I also like how cleanly the movie conveys this information within a few minutes. Like, you get the opening sequence of the small Suzume searching for her mother in the Ever After, and then she wakes up a seventeen year old, and you hear her address the woman who is her guardian by that woman’s first name, and it immediately clicks, "ohhhh… orphan, got it, got it, got it," and yeah. In contrast to the previous two films where Shinkai took half the damn movie establishing what these characters’ lives and their relationships with their friends and relatives were like, this kind of storytelling efficiency (which, is present throughout the film, in establishing Souta's relationships as well) is impressive.

And like I said, I like the immediacy with which the plot begins, with Suzume meeting Souta, being asked about the ruins, and then going to check them out herself. I like that there's not a whole album of insert songs in this movie, no fancy opening cinematic, no big deal montage, just a smash cut to the opening title card while Souta and Suzume are trying to close the door in the old bathhouse. It's clean. It's real good.

So, then Suzume tries to patch Souta up when he gets injured, and then he gets cursed by this cat to become a chair, and then the movie gets further good! Suzume runs away from home to help Chair Souta capture this important cat that's supposed to be keeping the earthquakes from happening. And this greatly aggrieves her aunt Tamaki, who's just been trying her best her whole life and everything and I will say, um-

I'm going to get to that!

So, one thing I have to say specifically- I had not read any details about Suzume's plot or interviews from Shinkai before seeing it, and I kind of got the whole deal immediately with everywhere that an earthquake comes out of being an abandoned place of gathering. A closed bathhouse, school, amusement park. This all feels very harrowing to see onscreen- as an American! even though it's clearly intended as commentary on Japan's population decline, because, uh, have you heard of dead malls

If they ever do an American live action version of Suzume, it'll be about them visiting abandoned shopping malls, probably. please do not do that

But yeah, like, we live in Portland, Oregon, and compared to having grown up in pre-covid Philadelphia most of our life, post-covid Portland feels like a ghost town. Like, it's not actually, there's obviously still people who live here, and I don't mean that derogatorily because we love Portland and we'd like to keep living here, if possible, not the least because we get easy access to HRT. But like, there's a lot of closed and abandoned places in Portland, so many empty areas and business that have been boarded up and closed to the point that at times, wandering through downtown Portland almost feels like living in an open world video game where most of the buildings don't have designed interiors.

Places that all clearly closed within the last three or four years, with their signage up and everything. Places that are left in stasis to lie disused or else be reclaimed by the homeless until the homeless get chased out by the cops. It's all just really… eughf. It makes us sad to see this place, this whole country really, be stuck in this kind of disgusting degradation while our government fails to provide for us, let alone adapt to the challenges ahead of us, just leaves all these places where people lived, where people are living, now, to stagnate and stand like zombies of a past we can't go back to

There’s a scene in Heathers, one of our favorite movies of all time, where the main antagonist J.D. has a whole emotional reflection on how the stability of this franchised commercial convenience store enterprise has kept him feeling like there’s continuity in his life, and like, yeah, that’s kind of a feeling.

[Video ID: J.D. (played by Christian Slater), a black haired edgy looking teenage boy of about 16-17 wearing a long black jacket, paces about the convenience store "Snappy Snack Shack", speaking in an affected hard to place accent, to Veronica Sawyer (played by Winona Ryder), a brown-haired teenage girl of around the same age, who is wearing a grey dress that exposes her shoulders accompanied by a blue flower brooch on her chest, and black overalls)]

Veronica: I see you know your convenience speak pretty well.

J.D.: Yeah, well, uh, I've been moved around all my life. Dallas. Baton Rouge, Vegas... Sherwood, Ohio. There's always been a Snappy Snack Shack. Any town, any time, pop a ham and cheese in the microwave and feast on a Turbo Dog. Keeps me sane.

Veronica: Really?

Like, it’s eugh, because, obviously as an anticapitalist, we kinda dislike these sorts of places, the shopping centers, the strip malls, the gas stations, we're against all of this bullshit on principle these places are all kind of intensely hostile to… life, in general.

But also, these places are a part of the world we live in, and they are stable! Relatively. They are kind of the only way we've known the world to be. And it’s sad to see that stability be ever so more greatly upset by the pandemic and the… everything, with nothing on the horizon to replace it. And if and when we see this kind of stability disappear completely, it’ll be sad, even if it’s replaced by something better. We’ll probably miss something about wandering these gross, heavily commercialized disgustingly homogenized nightmare places that’ve been cannibalizing our communities this whole time. Yeah, we hate it, but... it’s where we live, and we’re not immune to nostalgia.

Nostalgia is just a nicer word for grief

And this same very such eughf feeling is very much echoed in Suzume. There’s this deep and palpable grief for these places and the people who used to live here felt in this film, and inherent in expressing that grief is Shinkai’s expression of the, y’know, important stage of grief, i.e., acceptance. Because, to close the doors, Suzume and Souta have to not just, close it, but also think of all the feelings and experiences of the people who used to live in these places, and then… let go.

When the amusement park scene happens, the ferris wheel starts moving, and Suzume is drawn in by the image of the ghosts of the people who once rode it, Souta starts yelling for her to stop, to not go in- not the least because she can’t see what she’s doing and is putting herself in danger, but also because she cannot go back. Those people who used to sit in that ferris wheel, laughing, crying, living, in this place, cannot come back. Suzume can’t go back. This past can’t be gone back to.

Okay, so, one thing I missed when I saw the film the second time. When Suzume was drawn into the Ever After through the ferris wheel door, she was seeing herself of the future in there, and that, was foreshadowing the end of the film. I’m keeping this part anyway because the emotional impact of that scene was still as described even if this plot foreshadowing bit was something I missed the first time seeing the film.

I read a few English language interview articles with Shinkai talking about Suzume right after seeing the film, both because I wanted clarification before I ran my mouth on two things. 1, I wanted clarification on what the cat wanted. I’ll get to him. 2, I wanted to be sure my interpretation of the doors thing was on point, which it was. Shinkai talks in one of these interviews about how when covid was happening and Japan was still trying to have the Olympics happen, it felt really irresponsible and bad, and he did not agree with this. He says, and I quote,

“You were opening this new door and not sure of what’s on the other side without bringing closure or understanding or coming to terms with what’s behind you. I want to say a lot of the Japanese population felt the same way. There was this kind of awkward air about us, and it really wasn’t time to open new doors without first reflecting on what came before us.”

And like, yeah, I agree. I just really, really agree with this. It is indeed what I took away from the film before I read this interview. Suzume spends this entire movie reflecting on the past and trying to grow beyond that and ultimately the one door that she opens, on purpose, is the one that she decides to open intentionally after reflecting on what brought her to this point and deciding what she needs to do and

Eugghhhh

I’m just saying, it worked. It really did work. For us, at least.

Now, to be clear: Japan and the United States are two different countries, and, while there are similarities in how the pandemic left our societies, they're ultimately two different societies, and I don't really know jack shit about Japanese society- I'm just relating, my feelings, of my experience, uh, our experience, as an American, to the feelings that we took away from Suzume.

And... even if I understand this all right. If the people who need to see this sort of message saw it, or, like, took that away, or acted on it when it did... that’d be nice, but ultimately I don’t think that Suzume will move any politician or other person in power making these decisions in Japan, or any country, enough, or in the right ways, to have any impact on policy. But y’know, Shinkai’s just a guy making movies, and I’m just one of the various split personalities of a deranged F-list anime YouTuber, so whatever. Such is life. It’s at least a nice sentiment.

So, the other things, in no particular order. I did cry a bit when Daijin, the cat, got sucked up back into the keystone. He’s hard to like at the start of the film, for, y’know, the reasons why he is, but ultimately when you consider that like… he’s been trapped that way, the same way as Souta spends trapped as a chair, for years? Centuries, for all we goddamn know? Once that clicks, it’s really hard to not empathize with him. And yeah, he might be a god now, I guess, but who knows if he was a person before, or, what even, and just, I think, I think if you spend god knows how long as a sacred relic keeping Japan from being destroyed by earthquakes, you at least, at least, maybe, maybe deserve, if nothing else, a little pet.

[pets microphone]

that was your little pet.

In one of the other interviews Shinkai did, he talked about how Souta becoming a chair, and also a Keystone sealing away the earthquakes, is intended as a metaphor for the experience of pandemic lockdown. It’s not a directly equivalent analogy, but, like, it does make sense! Souta is being forced into a position of being confined, to keep this dangerous and virtually uncontrollable force of nature under control, for the greater good and long-term preservation of society. And when you consider that Daijin was in the same position for gosh knows how the hell long, it makes it a lot easier to empathize with him! He wasn’t being malicious, exactly, not, willfully anyway, he knew that vacating his position was putting everyone else at risk, but, he did it anyway cause he just kinda snapped, like, fuck this, I want to go outside! That does make a lot of sense! Also it sticks out, also, when Suzume screams at Daijin, because that’s, y’know. It’s a whole scene. I feel like I want to say something about this! But I can't really land on anything to say about it? But yeah.

I think the whole thing with Suzume needing to sacrifice Souta midway through the movie is really well done. It’s extremely funny to me that Shinkai apparently thought to stress this point of the movie as how important it is for her to make this difficult choice because of how people criticized Weathering With You for not really being meaningfully critical of the consequence of Hodaka un-sacrificing Hina? And also that Hina never really gets a choice in being un-sacrificed, far as I remember, so... [whispers] that’s a little unintentionally sexist,

but whatever. I’d have to watch the film again, and I don’t feel like doing that right now

Suzume’s aunt, Tamaki. I do like her. She’s a pretty level-headed guardian, as guardians go. I like that when she finds Suzume and Serizawa in the car, and sees that going to this door is important to Suzume, she’s not immediately like, “fuck your feelings, we’re going home”? She’s curious about the child under her care. She’s concerned in a way that she’s willing to not only go all the way to Tokyo, but also to follow Suzume the rest of the way to see what's up because she clearly understands, logically, that even if she doesn’t know what it is that’s compelled Suzume to go this distance, it must be something that she needs to sort the fuck out in order to move on with her life, and that’s kinda good?

Although I should note that while she clearly sees the pragmatic value in not fighting Suzume on this, she’s also pretty reluctant to. She has a line where she’s like to Serizawa while Suzume is asleep, let’s turn the fuck around and go back, she’ll give up. So, y’know, Tamaki’s at least more open-minded than our mom was!

Speaking of that. There’s this one scene in the film, where Tamaki loses her shit at Suzume. Goes on screaming on about how she hates Suzume and wants her life back, and then she runs off to Serizawa being all like “I think I’m losing it,” and it’s a whole thing. On our first viewing, this scene felt a little out of nowhere. It was a whole sudden shock to have this intense scene happen and then also its pivot back into the magical realism aspects of the film with the black cat’s appearance, which confused us a bit cause I don’t think that was really explained at all.

But, watching the film a second time, and seeing the arc of Tamaki’s frustration reaching its peak with the benefit of hindsight, it made more sense that she’d come to a rope’s end and flip out like this. She’s been chasing her niece all across Japan, she’s ridden for several hours in a busted convertible in the rain, she doesn’t even have a proper explanation, her coworker has raised to her that this might be a kidnapping scheme- I get it. It’s a scene that I get.

I still do not understand the role of the large black cat though. Our friend agreed that that part didn’t make a whole lot of sense. So, that didn’t change.

I think the reason why it felt out of nowhere to us the first time is because it was entirely too familiar to our real life experience. In the middle of Tamaki’s rant, Suzume responds by saying, “but you said, ‘you’re my daughter,’” referring to when Tamaki first took her in, and said that. And Tamaki snaps back, “I never said that.” Our mother also did this exact thing, vehemently denying that she said and did things that we definitely remembered her saying and doing. (There's a word for this, it's... it's called gaslighting!) Living with someone who denies you this much, who makes you question your memory and your sanity and your general perception of the world this much, by forcing their own grief onto you like this, is just… really, simply, awful.

Throughout our childhood, we heard our mom say similar shit to us numerous times. That we were a horrible incorrigible child, that she hated us for ruining her family, that she wished she’d aborted us— all those sorts of things. The tone of Tamaki’s unadulterated rage in this dialogue was all too familiar to those memories. So, yeah, on both viewings, we were, very uncomfortable. Even knowing it was coming the second time around, it kinda caused us to actively recoil in our seat, to the point that our friend who we were seeing it with noticed our reaction and held out a stuffed animal she’d brought with her for us to pet.

So, um, yeah, that specific scene may or may not have triggered the PTSD that we may or may not have.

Tamaki does apologize for this later!

And she also, debatably, gets a bit of a pass for this since she’s not Suzume’s mother, and thus cannot reasonably wish that she had aborted Suzume, but can instead wish that she’d not done the unambiguously good deed of keeping Suzume out of the Japanese child welfare system, which, I can’t imagine is a good experience for a child. I don’t imagine any country’s child welfare system under capitalism to be a good experience for a child, but, y’know. Well, we’re also kind of entirely opposed to the traditional family structure and the basic premise of parents in general, because giving only one or two people total power over a vulnerable young human life is not an ethical tradition to have in any case, but… eugh. That’s something for some other video.

In an interview with Deadline, Shinkai talks about this scene, specifically quoting the “give me back my life” part, and he says that on some level, all parents feel that way to their kids. And that while he acknowledges that it isn’t by any means acceptable to ever say that kind of stuff to a child, it is, y’know, a feeling that is there that he poured into it, and that he wanted to be there, for the parents in the audience who ever felt that way and regretted it. This is how we found out that Makoto Shinkai is apparently not single and does in fact have a child.

He also says, in this other interview with the Verge, that, he wanted the film to provide for an opportunity for people of different generations to emotionally connect with each other. So, in that context, I really understand why this scene is here. It’s serving the purpose of setting up that emotional bridge, that door between Suzume and Tamaki, these characters of two different generations who ultimately come to understand one another, with the hope that audiences in a similar emotional position might come away from the film having felt some sense of healing by way of, y’know, getting that. And also Shinkai talks about how the idealized nuclear family structure is not a thing that’s tenable or possible for a lot of families in Japanese society, and, it’s not very tenable for a lot of people in American society either!

So I recognize the intent of this scene. I think it’s commendable, even. If there is a parent and child out there who saw Suzume together on whom this had the intended impact, I think that that’s wonderful. I sincerely hope that they exist!

Even still… we, were a child, who regularly had this sort of thing said to our face by our real life mother, and tried, in good faith, many times over the years, to repair our increasingly fraught relationship with her, and failed. I am deeply, regrettably cynical about familial relationships because of our traumatic experience with our own family. Our mother is not the sort of person who would come to meaningfully empathize with us through seeing this film.

And we really fucking hate her, so… yeah, this scene is difficult to watch. It’s difficult for us personally to feel any sympathy for Tamaki when she’s saying that kind of stuff to Suzume, and once it was over I could only really kind of feel glad that it was over.

But! It’s not like it’s the film’s fault that our parents were bad. I don’t think our reaction was intended. It just happened! It just happens sometimes that different people other than who the thing was written for react to things differently. That doesn’t make the scene bad, or any less valuable to include. And I do think that Tamaki’s relationship with Suzume is portrayed pretty well and with a surprising degree of nuance! It’s good! Tamaki is a good character and she means well! And I do like what Shinkai said in that Verge interview about wanting to portray other family structures.

However I think that their relationship would work better if she was gay, because honestly, that entire “get out of my life” speech would hit a lot more and probably work a lot better in the context of being directed at a gay teenager rather than an assumed heterosexual one. But, hey, we thought we were heterosexual for most of our life, so, who’s to say much of anything!

Was there anything else I forgot to talk about? Um…

We cried at the end of the film, both times we saw it!

And also, while this film couldn’t have improved our relationship with our mother, it did serve as a very good bonding experience with our friend. I’m really glad we took her to see it. She really liked the scenes where Suzume sits and steps on Souta as a chair, that that was clever, that they took the opportunity to get away with that with him as a chair. And she also agreed that the chair in general was really well portrayed visually. She also cried! at the end. the heterosexual chair film made a lesbian cry. uh, two lesbians, cry. I’m not going to say anything more than that.

Thank you to everyone who watched this entire video. I have an excuse to do a bad job editing it now because there’s not that much footage of Suzume available and it’s all gonna get me copyright striked anyway

To summarize, Suzume Good. Suzume. Watch Suzume. I’ve been Audrey of the joystick system, and I did not hate Suzume. Thank you. Goodnight

#suzume #suzume no tojimari #suzume spoilers #video essay #youtube #joyce-stick #joystick system #your name #weathering with you

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andymakesgames · 16 days

Text

Balatro-Inspired Spinning Card Tweetcart Breakdown

I recently made a tweetcart of a spinning playing card inspired by finally playing Balatro, the poker roguelike everybody is talking about.

If you don't know what a tweetcart is, it's a type of size-coding where people write programs for the Pico-8 fantasy console where the source code is 280 characters of less, the length of a tweet.

I'm actually not on twitter any more, but I still like 280 characters as a limitation. I posted it on my mastodon and my tumblr.

Here's the tweetcart I'm writing about today:

And here is the full 279 byte source code for this animation:

a=abs::_::cls()e=t()for r=0,46do for p=0,1,.025do j=sin(e)*20k=cos(e)*5f=1-p h=a(17-p*34)v=a(23-r)c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6u=(r-1)/80z=a(p-.2)if(e%1<.5)c=a(r-5)<5and z<u+.03and(r==5or z>u)and 8or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 g=r+39pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c)end end flip()goto _

This post is available with much nicer formatting on the EMMA blog. You can read it here.

You can copy/paste that code into a blank Pico-8 file to try it yourself. I wrote it on Pico-8 version 0.2.6b.

I'm very pleased with this cart! From a strictly technical perspective I think it's my favorite that I've ever made. There is quite a bit going on to make the fake 3D as well as the design on the front and back of the card. In this post I'll be making the source code more readable as well as explaining some tools that are useful if you are making your own tweetcarts or just want some tricks for game dev and algorithmic art.

Expanding the Code

Tweetcarts tend to look completely impenetrable, but they are often less complex than they seem. The first thing to do when breaking down a tweetcart (which I highly recommend doing!) is to just add carriage returns after each command.

Removing these line breaks is a classic tweetcart method to save characters. Lua, the language used in Pico-8, often does not need a new line if a command does not end in a letter, so we can just remove them. Great for saving space, bad for readability. Here's that same code with some line breaks, spaces and indentation added:

a=abs ::_:: cls() e=t() for r=0,46 do for p=0,1,.025 do j=sin(e)*20 k=cos(e)*5 f=1-p h=a(17-p*34) v=a(23-r) c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6 u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if(e%1<.5) c= a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) and 8 or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 g=r+39 pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c) end end flip()goto _

Note: the card is 40 pixels wide and 46 pixels tall. Those number will come up a lot. As will 20 (half of 40) and 23 (half of 46).

Full Code with Variables and Comments

Finally, before I get into what each section is doing, here is an annotated version of the same code. In this code, variables have real names and I added comments:

[editor's note. this one came out terribly on tumblr. Please read the post on my other blog to see it]

This may be all you need to get a sense of how I made this animation, but the rest of this post will be looking at how each section of the code contributes to the final effect. Part of why I wanted to write this post is because I was happy with how many different tools I managed to use in such a small space.

flip() goto_

This pattern shows up in nearly every tweetcart:

::_:: MOST OF THE CODE flip()goto _

This has been written about in Pixienop's Tweetcart Basics which I highly recommend for anybody curious about the medium! The quick version is that using goto is shorter than declaring the full draw function that Pico-8 carts usually use.

Two Spinning Points

The card is drawn in rows starting from the top and going to the bottom. Each of these lines is defined by two points that move around a center point in an elliptical orbit.

The center of the top of the card is x=64 (dead center) and y=39 (a sort of arbitrary number that looked nice).

Then I get the distance away from that center that my two points will be using trigonometry.

x_dist = sin(time)*20 y_dist = cos(time)*5

Here are those points:

P1 adds x_dist and y_dist to the center point and P2 subtracts those same values.

Those are just the points for the very top row. The outer for loop is the vertical rows. The center x position will be the same each time, but the y position increases with each row like this: y_pos = row+39

Here's how it looks when I draw every 3rd row going down:

It is worth noting that Pico-8 handles sin() and cos() differently than most languages. Usually the input values for these functions are in radians (0 to two pi), but in Pico-8 it goes from 0 to 1. More info on that here. It takes a little getting used to but it is actually very handy. More info in a minute on why I like values between 0 and 1.

Time

In the shorter code, e is my time variable. I tend to use e for this. In my mind it stands for "elapsed time". In Pico-8 time() returns the current elapsed time in seconds. However, there is a shorter version, t(), which obviously is better for tweetcarts. But because I use the time value a lot, even the 3 characters for t() is often too much, so I store it in the single-letter variable e.

Because it is being used in sine and cosine for this tweetcart, every time e reaches 1, we've reached the end of a cycle. I would have liked to use t()/2 to slow this cart down to be a 2 second animation, but after a lot of fiddling I wound up being one character short. So it goes.

e is used in several places in the code, both to control the angle of the points and to determine which side of the card is facing the camera.

Here you can see how the sine value of e controls the rotation and how we go from showing the front of the card to showing the back when e%1 crosses the threshold of 0.5.

Drawing and Distorting the Lines

Near the top and bottom of the loop we'll find the code that determines the shape of the card and draws the horizontal lines that make up the card. Here is the loop for drawing a single individual line using the code with expanded variable names:

for prc = 0,1,.025 do x_dist = sin(time)*20 y_dist = cos(time)*5 ... y_pos = row+39 pset( (64+x_dist)*prc + (64-x_dist)*(1-prc), (y_pos+y_dist)*prc + (y_pos-y_dist)*(1-prc), color) end

You might notice that I don't use Pico-8's line function! That's because each line is drawn pixel by pixel.

This tweetcart simulates a 3D object by treating each vertical row of the card as a line of pixels. I generate the points on either side of the card(p1 and p2 in this gif), and then interpolate between those two points. That's why the inner for loop creates a percentage from 0 to 1 instead of pixel positions. The entire card is drawn as individual pixels. I draw them in a line, but the color may change with each one, so they each get their own pset() call.

Here's a gif where I slow down this process to give you a peek at how these lines are being drawn every frame. For each row, I draw many pixels moving across the card between the two endpoints in the row.

Here's the loop condition again: for prc = 0,1,.025 do

A step of 0.025 means there are 40 steps (0.025 * 40 = 1.0). That's the exact width of the card! When the card is completely facing the camera head-on, I will need 40 steps to make it across without leaving a gap in the pixels. When the card is skinnier, I'm still drawing all 40 pixels, but many of them will be in the same place. That's fine. The most recently drawn one will take priority.

Getting the actual X and Y position

I said that the position of each pixel is interpolated between the two points, but this line of code may be confusing:

y_pos = row+39 pset( (64+x_dist)*prc + (64-x_dist)*(1-prc), (y_pos+y_dist)*prc + (y_pos-y_dist)*(1-prc), color)

So let's unpack it a little bit. If you've ever used a Lerp() function in something like Unity you've used this sort of math. The idea is that we get two values (P1 and P2 in the above example), and we move between them such that a value of 0.0 gives us P1 and 1.0 gives us P2.

Here's a full cart that breaks down exactly what this math is doing:

::_:: cls() time = t()/8 for row = 0,46 do for prc = 0,1,.025 do x_dist = sin(time)*20 y_dist = cos(time)*5 color = 9 + row % 3 p1x = 64 + x_dist p1y = row+39 + y_dist p2x = 64 - x_dist p2y = row+39 - y_dist x = p2x*prc + p1x*(1-prc) y = p2y*prc + p1y*(1-prc) pset( x, y, color) end end flip()goto _

I'm defining P1 and P2 very explicitly (getting an x and y for both), then I get the actual x and y position that I use by multiplying P2 by prc and P1 by (1-prc) and adding the results together.

This is easiest to understand when prc is 0.5, because then we're just taking an average. In school we learn that to average a set of numbers you add them up and then divide by how many you had. We can think of that as (p1+p2) / 2. This is the same as saying p1*0.5 + p2*0.5.

But the second way of writing it lets us take a weighted average if we want. We could say p1*0.75 + p2*0.25. Now the resulting value will be 75% of p1 and 25% of p2. If you laid the two values out on a number line, the result would be just 25% of the way to p2. As long as the two values being multiplied add up to exactly 1.0 you will get a weighted average between P1 and P2.

I can count on prc being a value between 0 and 1, so the inverse is 1.0 - prc. If prc is 0.8 then 1.0-prc is 0.2. Together they add up to 1!

I use this math everywhere in my work. It's a really easy way to move smoothly between values that might otherwise be tricky to work with.

Compressing

I'm using a little over 400 characters in the above example. But in the real cart, the relevant code inside the loops is this:

j=sin(e)*20 k=cos(e)*5 g=r+39 pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c)

which can be further condensed by removing the line breaks:

j=sin(e)*20k=cos(e)*5g=r+39pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c)

Because P1, P2 and the resulting interpolated positions x and y are never used again, there is no reason to waste chars by storing them in variables. So all of the interpolation is done in the call to pset().

There are a few parts of the calculation that are used more than once and are four characters or more. Those are stored as variables (j, k & g in this code). These variables tend to have the least helpful names because I usually do them right at the end to save a few chars so they wind up with whatever letters I have not used elsewhere.

Spinning & Drawing

Here's that same example, but with a checker pattern and the card spinning. (Keep in mind, in the real tweetcart the card is fully draw every frame and would not spin mid-draw)

This technique allows me to distort the lines because I can specify two points and draw my lines between them. Great for fake 3D! Kind of annoying for actually drawing shapes, because now instead of using the normal Pico-8 drawing tools, I have to calculate the color I want based on the row (a whole number between0 and 46) and the x-prc (a float between 0 and 1).

Drawing the Back

Here's the code that handles drawing the back of the card:

h=a(17-p*34) v=a(23-r) c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6

This is inside the nested for loops, so r is the row and p is a percentage of the way across the horizontal line.

c is the color that we will eventually draw in pset().

h and v are the approximate distance from the center of the card. a was previously assigned as a shorthand for abs() so you can think of those lines like this:

h=abs(17-p*34) v=abs(23-r)

v is the vertical distance. The card is 46 pixels tall so taking the absolute value of 23-r will give us the distance from the vertical center of the card. (ex: if r is 25, abs(23-r) = 2. and if r is 21, abs(23-r) still equals 2 )

As you can probably guess, h is the horizontal distance from the center. The card is 40 pixels wide, but I opted to shrink it a bit by multiplying p by 34 and subtracting that from half of 34 (17). The cardback just looks better with these lower values, and the diamond looks fine.

The next line, where I define c, is where things get confusing. It's a long line doing some clunky math. The critical thing is that when this line is done, I need c to equal 1 (dark blue) or 7 (white) on the Pico-8 color pallette.

Here's the whole thing: c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6

Here is that line broken down into much more discrete steps.

c = 1 --start with a color of 1 low_dist = min(23-v,17-h) --get the lower inverted distance from center val = low_dist % 5 --mod 5 to bring it to a repeating range of 0 to 5 val = val / 3 --divide by 3. value is now 0 to 1.66 val = flr(val) --round it down. value is now 0 or 1 val = val * 6 --multiply by 6. value is now 0 or 6 c += val --add value to c, making it 1 or 7

The first thing I do is c=1. That means the entire rest of the line will either add 0 or 6 (bumping the value up to 7). No other outcome is acceptable. min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6 will always evaluate to 0 or 6.

I only want the lower value of h and v. This is what will give it the nice box shape. If you color the points inside a rectangle so that ones that are closer to the center on their X are one color and ones that are closer to the center on their Y are a different color you'll get a pattern with clean diagonal lines running from the center towards the corners like this:

You might think I would just use min(v,h) instead of the longer min(23-v,17-h) in the actual code. I would love to do that, but it results in a pattern that is cool, but doesn't really look like a card back.

I take the inverted value. Instead of having a v that runs from 0 to 23, I flip it so it runs from 23 to 0. I do the same for h. I take the lower of those two values using min().

Then I use modulo (%) to bring the value to a repeating range of 0 to 5. Then I divide that result by 3 so it is 0 to ~1.66. The exact value doens't matter too much because I am going round it down anyway. What is critical is that it will become 0 or 1 after rounding because then I can multiply it by a specific number without getting any values in between.

Wait? If I'm rounding down, where is flr() in this line: c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6?

It's not there! That's because there is a sneaky tool in Pico-8. You can use \1 to do the same thing as flr(). This is integer division and it generally saves a 3 characters.

Finally, I multiply the result by 6. If it is 0, we get 0. If it is 1 we get 6. Add it to 1 and we get the color we want!

Here's how it looks with each step in that process turned on or off:

A Note About Parentheses

When I write tweetcarts I would typically start by writing this type of line like this: c=1+ (((min(23-v,17-h)%5)/3) \1) *6

This way I can figure out if my math makes sense by using parentheses to ensure that my order of operations works. But then I just start deleting them willy nilly to see what I can get away with. Sometimes I'm surprised and I'm able to shave off 2 characters by removing a set of parentheses.

The Face Side

The face side with the diamond and the "A" is a little more complex, but basically works the same way as the back. Each pixel needs to either be white (7) or red (8). When the card is on this side, I'll be overwriting the c value that got defined earlier.

Here's the code that does it (with added white space). This uses the h and v values defined earlier as well as the r and p values from the nested loops.

u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if(e%1<.5) c= a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) and 8 or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2

Before we piece out what this is doing, we need to talk about the structure for conditional logic in tweetcarts.

The Problem with If Statements

The lone line with the if statement is doing a lot of conditional logic in a very cumbersome way designed to avoid writing out a full if statement.

One of the tricky things with Pico-8 tweetcarts is that the loop and conditional logic of Lua is very character intensive. While most programming language might write an if statement like this:

if (SOMETHING){ CODE }

Lua does it like this:

if SOMETHING then CODE end

Using "then" and "end" instead of brackets means we often want to bend over backwards to avoid them when we're trying to save characters.

Luckily, Lua lets you drop "then" and "end" if there is a single command being executed inside the if.

This means we can write

if(e%1 < 0.5) c=5

instead of

if e%1 < 0.5 then c=5 end

This is a huge savings! To take advantage of this, it is often worth doing something in a slightly (or massively) convoluted way if it means we can reduce it to a single line inside the if. This brings us to:

Lua's Weird Ternary Operator

In most programming language there is an inline syntax to return one of two values based on a conditional. It's called the Ternary Operator and in most languages I use it looks like this:

myVar = a>b ? 5 : 10

The value of myVar will be 5 if a is greater than b. Otherwise is will be 10.

Lua has a ternary operator... sort of. You can read more about it here but it looks something like this:

myVar = a>b and 5 or 10

Frankly, I don't understand why this works, but I can confirm that it does.

In this specific instance, I am essentially using it to put another conditional inside my if statement, but by doing it as a single line ternary operation, I'm keeping the whole thing to a single line and saving precious chars.

The Face Broken Out

The conditional for the diamond and the A is a mess to look at. The weird syntax for the ternary operator doesn't help. Neither does the fact that I took out any parentheses that could make sense of it.

Here is the same code rewritten with a cleaner logic flow.

--check time to see if we're on the front half if e%1 < .5 then --this if checks if we're in the A u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) then c = 8 --if we're not in the A, set c based on if we're in the diamond else c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 end end

The first thing being checked is the time. As I explained further up, because the input value for sin() in Pico-8 goes from 0 to 1, the midpoint is 0.5. We only draw the front of the card if e%1 is less than 0.5.

After that, we check if this pixel is inside the A on the corner of the card or the diamond. Either way, our color value c gets set to either 7 (white) or 8 (red).

Let's start with diamond because it is easier.

The Diamond

This uses the same h and v values from the back of the card. The reason I chose diamonds for my suit is that they are very easy to calculate if you know the vertical and horizontal distance from a point! In fact, I sometimes use this diamond shape instead of proper circular hit detection in size-coded games.

Let's look at the line: c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2

This starts with 8, the red color. Since the only other acceptable color is 7 (white), tha means that sgn(h+v-9)/2 has to evaluate to either 1 or 0.

sgn() returns the sign of a number, meaning -1 if the number is negative or 1 if the number is positive. This is often a convenient way to cut large values down to easy-to-work-with values based on a threshold. That's exactly what I'm doing here!

h+v-9 takes the height from the center plus the horizontal distance from the center and checks if the sum is greater than 9. If it is, sgn(h+v-9) will return 1, otherwise -1. In this formula, 9 is the size of the diamond. A smaller number would result in a smaller diamond since that's the threshold for the distance being used. (note: h+v is NOT the actual distance. It's an approximation that happens to make a nice diamond shape.)

OK, but adding -1 or 1 to 8 gives us 7 or 9 and I need 7 or 8.

That's where /2 comes in. Pico-8 defaults to floating point math, so dividing by 2 will turn my -1 or 1 into -0.5 or 0.5. So this line c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 actually sets c to 7.5 or 8.5. Pico-8 always rounds down when setting colors so a value of 7.5 becomes 7 and 8.5 becomes 8. And now we have white for most of the card, and red in the space inside the diamond!

The A

The A on the top corner of the card was the last thing I added. I finished the spinning card with the card back and the diamond and realized that when I condensed the whole thing, I actually had about 50 characters to spare. Putting a letter on the ace seemed like an obvious choice. I struggled for an evening trying to make it happen before deciding that I just couldn't do it. The next day I took another crack at it and managed to get it in, although a lot of it is pretty ugly! Luckily, in the final version the card is spinning pretty fast and it is harder to notice how lopsided it is.

I mentioned earlier that my method of placing pixels in a line between points is great for deforming planes, but makes a lot of drawing harder. Here's a great example. Instead of just being able to call print("a") or even using 3 calls to line() I had to make a convoluted conditional to check if each pixel is "inside" the A and set it to red if it is.

I'll do my best to explain this code, but it was hammered together with a lot of trial and error. I kept messing with it until I found an acceptable balance between how it looked and how many character it ate up.

Here are the relevant bits again:

u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) then c = 8

The two variables above the if are just values that get used multiple times. Let's give them slightly better names. While I'm making edits, I'll expand a too since that was just a replacement for abs().

slope = (r-1)/80 dist_from_center = abs(p-.2) if abs(r-5) < 5 and dist_from_center < slope+.03 and (r==5 or dist_from_center>slope) then c = 8

Remember that r is the current row and p is the percentage of the way between the two sides where this pixel falls.

u/slope here is basically how far from the center line of the A the legs are at this row. As r increases, so does slope (but at a much smaller rate). The top of the A is very close to the center, the bottom is further out. I'm subtracting 1 so that when r is 0, slope is negative and will not be drawn. Without this, the A starts on the very topmost line of the card and looks bad.

z/dist_from_center is how far this particular p value is from the center of the A (not the center of the card), measured in percentage (not pixels). The center of the A is 20% of the way across the card. This side of the card starts on the right (0% is all the way right, 100% is all the way left), which is why you see the A 20% away from the right side of the card.

These values are important because the two legs of the A are basically tiny distance checks where the slope for a given r is compared against the dist_from_center. There are 3 checks used to determine if the pixel is part of the A.

if a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) then

The first is abs(r-5) < 5. This checks if r is between 1 and 9, the height of my A.

The second is dist_from_center < slope+.03. This is checking if this pixel's x distance from the center of the A is no more than .03 bigger than the current slope value. This is the maximum distance that will be considered "inside" the A. All of this is a percentage, so the center of the A is 0.20 and the slope value will be larger the further down the A we get.

Because I am checking the distance from the center point (the grey line in the image above), this works on either leg of the A. On either side, the pixel can be less than slope+.03 away.

Finally, it checks (r==5 or dist_from_center>slope). If the row is exactly 5, that is the crossbar across the A and should be red. Otherwise, the distance value must be greater than slope (this is the minimum value it can have to be "inside" the A). This also works on both sides thanks to using distance.

Although I am trying to capture 1-pixel-wide lines to draw the shape of the A, I could not think of a cleaner way than doing this bounding check. Ignoring the crossbar on row 5, you can think about the 2nd and 3rd parts of the if statement essentially making sure that dist_from_center fits between slope and a number slightly larger than slope. Something like this:

slope < dist_from_center < slope+0.03

Putting it Together

All of this logic needed to be on a single line to get away with using the short form of the if statement so it got slammed into a single ternary operator. Then I tried removing parentheses one at a time to see what was structurally significant. I wish I could say I was more thoughtful than that but I wasn't. The end result is this beefy line of code:

if(e%1<.5)c=a(r-5)<5and z<u+.03and(r==5or z>u)and 8or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2

Once we've checked that e (our time value) is in the phase where we show the face, the ternary operator checks if the pixel is inside the A. If it is, c is set to 8 (red). If it isn't, then we set c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2, which is the diamond shape described above.

That's It!

Once we've set c the tweetcart uses pset to draw the pixel as described in the section on drawing the lines.

Here's the full code and what it looks like when it runs again. Hopefully now you can pick out more of what's going on!

I hope this was helpful! I had a lot of fun writing this cart and it was fun to break it down. Maybe you can shave off the one additional character needed to slow it down by using e=t()/2 a bit. If you do, please drop me a line on my mastodon or tumblr!

And if you want to try your hand at something like this, consider submitting something to TweetTweetJam which just started! You'll get a luxurious 500 characters to work with!

Links and Resources

There are some very useful posts of tools and tricks for getting into tweetcarts. I'm sure I'm missing many but here are a few that I refer to regularly.

Pixienop's tweetcart basics and tweetcart studies are probably the single best thing to read if you want to learn more.

Trasevol_Dog's Doodle Insights are fascinating, and some of them demonstrate very cool tweetcart techniques.

Optimizing Character Count for Tweetcarts by Eli Piilonen / @2DArray

Guide for Making Tweetcarts by PrincessChooChoo

The official documentation for the hidden P8SCII Control Codes is worth a read. It will let you do wild things like play sound using the print() command.

I have released several size-coded Pico-8 games that have links to heavily annotated code:

Pico-Mace

Cold Sun Surf

1k Jump

Hand Cram

And if you want to read more Pico-8 weirdness from me, I wrote a whole post on creating a networked Pico-8 tribute to Frog Chorus.

#pico8 #sizecoding #tweetcart #pico 8 #balatro #long reads

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