I was invited to the playtest for the sequel to one of my favorite gaming experiences ever. You can watch the VOD here to see me being nice to people and listening to chill music.
My First Ever Youtube Video: Faceless Content Creation
I made my first youtube video! It’s not good, but I made it. This post contains the script I wrote for it.
Content Warning: Discussion of violence, suicide, murder, death
Recently a creator I follow, Jawn Louis, posted the following thought on youtube:
I’m someone trying to get into making cultural/political content. I don’t show my face.
Now I get where Jawn is coming from. I actually don’t think you should trust anyone, regardless of the amount of face involved, but I thought I’d offer my perspective on why I choose not to show mine.
Whenever I think about about this topic, I think about Yuu Yuu Hakusho. (If you’re not familiar, it’s one of the best anime ever made. It was on Adult Swim back in 2002. Go watch it.) The third of a total of four arcs in the series is called the Chapter Black Saga, named after an item in the arc called Chapter Black–a video tape containing thousands of hours of the absolute worst of humanity.
If you’ve been on the internet as long as I have, you have may have realized that Chapter Black isn’t really fictional. It exists today, right now, in the real world. It’s just that it’s spread out in bits and pieces across the internet. These pieces lurk like little spiders, waiting in these dark corners for unsuspecting victims to reach an exploratory hand into their lairs.
I got my first computer in 1999 when I was still in middle school. It wasn’t long before I was downloading songs off of Kazaa and playing them in winamp. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen I was introduced to a particular website, probably by edgelord teenagers from some online game I had been playing, that probably changed me forever: rotten.com. For some people just hearing that name is enough.
Rotten had extremely graphic images and videos of real violent deaths. Some of the images are still burnt into my mind twenty years later. Morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I would click through the images until I found something that disturbed me enough that I’d have to stop. I continued playing this game of chicken with myself until the time I saw a video of a man beating a woman to death in an elevator. The images on the site were one thing, but this video was another. I can’t really explain it. It wasn’t particularly gruesome, but it was extremely visceral. It can’t have been very long because my 56K modem wouldn’t have allowed it, but it felt like it went on for hours. It felt more real than anything I’d seen before. The night I watched it, I had nightmares about it. When I woke up, I still couldn’t get the images out of my head. I was shaken to my core. It was probably the first time in my young life that I felt such a deeply unpleasant, persisting emotion that I had no way to process. I swore the website off for good and spent my time desperately trying to take my mind off of it until it faded into memory.
Unfortunately that wouldn’t be the last time I’d see disturbing things. It was a wild west era of the internet. We take Rick Rolling for granted these days given the types of things people would trick you into clicking back then. I’m not even going into detail about what sort of absolutely vile things I saw downloading videos from limewire with misleading file names.
It’s not just disturbing imagery. Hiding in plain site in the lawless forums and chat rooms of the late 90’s and early aughts was the original evil that spawned the type of stuff we see in places today like 4chan and kiwifarms with which you’re probably at least vaguely familiar. Places in which the most reprehensible things anyone could possibly say to another human being are said. This just seems to be how some people behave when they think they can get away with it. Our own special version of Lord of the Flies is being acted out in real time. People may not be pushing rocks off of cliffs onto each other, but in some ways the reality is even worse.
Targeted harassment can last for years. During this time, the victims can be psychologically manipulated, toyed with, and tormented. This can very easily lead to tragedy. Mainstream news has been covering cases like Tyler Clementi and Megan Meier for over fifteen years, but the majority of cases go unreported and we don’t really know yet how much mental illness, suffering, and loss of life actually stems from things like this.
Tyler and especially Megan were younger victims of bullying, but adults aren’t safe either. For one of the most prominent examples I highly recommend watching Innuendo Studios’ video on Gamergate. FD Signifier’s deep dive on the topic also explains how it’s not relegated exclusively to right-wing trolls, but people on the left like Contrapoints and Lindsay Ellis also received this kind of hate from the very people who they make content for. It’s generally understood that you’re bound to receive death threats at some point if you make content. The vast majority are idle threats, but it only takes one to matter.
Even if you can deal with the death threats and harassment, doxxers can target your friends and family. People who have nothing to do with the content you’re putting out can be involved in harassment simply because they know you in real life. While I might be able to deal with people targeting me alone, I don’t feel like I would be able to deal with people going after my family. I also have mental health concerns to consider. Some can easily brush it off harassment off, but not everyone deals with things the same way.
Jawn also mentions Cointelpro, but I gotta point out… William O’Neal didn’t exactly hide his face from Fred Hampton.
As for being targeted myself, I’m not under the illusion that not showing my face is enough to keep the government from finding out who I am if they really wanted to, but I guess it feels like it’s better than nothing.
Ultimately this is all kind of a moot point for me. I’m nobody. This is my first video. I don’t have a following. Odds are I never will have one. If the FBI was going to pick someone to infiltrate the left or put on a list they’d probably start with someone with greater than or equal to one subscriber.
Some of my favorite channels like Shaun and Jose do have a following though, and I really think you’re missing out if you dismiss them out of hand because they don’t have a face cam.
I’ll end by reiterating a point I made in the beginning: you shouldn’t trust anyone, including me, regardless of if they show their face or not. Just because they show their face doesn’t mean they can be trusted, and just because they don’t doesn’t mean they can’t. It’s ultimately up to us to listen and make informed decisions for ourselves. Thanks for listening.
additional sources:
SolForge Fusion digital card game adds NFTs to the surprise of customers
SolForge Fusion announced it would be joining the Solana blockchain network via Twitter on April 29th, less than two weeks after the game was launched in early access on Steam.
SolForge, a digital card game designed by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield and former MTG Pro Brian Kibler, was first released into early access in 2013 following a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $400,000. It stayed in early access for three years before its official release in 2016, but was shut down a year later with StoneBlade CEO and creator of the popular deckbuilding game “Ascension” Justin Gary citing only vague reasons for the decision.
The game was kept alive briefly until early 2019 by a group of dedicated fans running an unofficial server called ReForged. The unofficial client was taken down after the fans responsible were contacted by Gary and told to cease operations.
In 2021, a physical sequel called SolForge Fusion was announced on Kickstarter incorporating the unique algorithmically generated decks present in another of Garfield’s games, Keyforge. SolForge Fusion also promised that the same decks could be used online or in person by registering unique deck codes.
In November 2023, a campaign for the digital version of SolForge Fusion was announced and funded, but no mention was made within any of the campaigns that NFTs would be part of the game. Some users took issue with the announcement such as one reviewer on Steam who stated: “This is completely blindsiding. I do not play games that feature NFTs and I would have never given money to this project at any point had I known that’s what they were planning to do.”
I’m not sure if it’s required for these types of decisions to be disclosed ahead of time, but it certainly rubs me the wrong way. Crowdfunding has always been a very mixed bag. Paying for the possibility of a good game is a financial gamble that customers are willing to take because they want to believe in you. Not cluing in the people who made your game possible in the first place feels like a form of abuse. Of course, if you’re receiving a fat paycheck from investors to do it who cares about those chumps?
I often see leftists ask why they’re criticizing democrats instead of republicans.
It’s because when they republicans criticize the democrats they either don’t make sense or they’re factually incorrect.
Republicans are also in no danger of having their mind changed. That’s sort of their whole thing.
They grew up with everyone being a man or a woman. Normal people are straight, but there’s also The Gays™, and that covers all human sexuality. If people are poor that’s their own fault. Unions are a waste of money and the government ought to mind its business. Let the market sort itself out. This is just the way things are, and trying to change things is stupid at best and only going to make things worse at worst.
Democrats, liberals, can have their minds changed. A lot of us used to be liberals.
We can get pretty frustrated sometimes, I admit. Cut us some slack, please, we have a lot to deal with. We actually do call out republicans as they come up with new takes that indicate a level of brainrot that would make the eponymous Army of Darkness blush, but it’s like trying to shame an earthquake or admonish an avalanche.
So we have them to deal with, and we have the latest out of touch blue tie-wearing fossil inhabiting the oval office. We have everyone that defends and enables him and people like him to continue unabated. We could just call this whole group “capitalists but with at least some scruples probably.”
On top of that, we have people in our own group to deal with. There’s nothing some leftists hate more than leftists. Have mercy on your soul if you state one opinion that someone disagrees with.
So when we get upset if, for example, someone says we don’t care about “X” because we refuse to vote for the latest blue raspberry flavored oligarch then it’s probably because we are a little on edge from having to put up with derision from everyone else on the planet all of the time.
At the end of the day we need more allies, and with criticism we hope that some small fraction of liberals will be made to question things and possibly maybe at least give some serious consideration to the idea that the current socioeconomic system isn’t entirely perfect.
Biden’s Middle Class Mania and Industrial Job Illusion
Edit: added content: April 25, 2024
In the March 2024 State of the Union Address, Joe Biden pumped out some of his long-standing rhetoric, including the focus on the middle class with lines like “the middle class built this country,” and “I see a future where the middle class finally has a fair shot,” as well as a focus on creating blue collar jobs: “800,000 new manufacturing jobs,” “American roads bridges and highways will be made with American products built by American workers creating good-paying American jobs!”
You can read the full speech here.
The “middle class” concept has always, in my mind, been merely a conceptual buffer that protects the wealthy from the rest. It foments division, proposing a separation of power, status, and worth based on the income differences of the working class. It encourages people to look down on the fast food worker, the cashier, the store clerk, while reassuring them of how much better they have it. It allows the rich to make concessions to a small subset of people and lull them into complacence. To persuade them to otherize anyone who makes less than them, and dismiss discussion of systemic change as ‘extreme.’
I often think back to Howard Zinn’s writing about how white servants and black slaves often rebelled together against their masters:
“In Bacon’s Rebellion, one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty negroes and twenty English servants.”
“if freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done.”
“And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving discipline and punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly, Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.”
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (p. 36)
White people received benefits that white women didn’t. White men with property received benefits that white men without property didn’t. Small concessions continuously made over time. This is how you control a population. Credit where it’s due, it’s a brilliant tactic. You rob the most desperate and likely to rebel of potential allies, and lull the rest into complacence. Give them something to lose, and they’re much less willing to risk losing it.
Reading and listening to Biden’s remarks over the past four years, it has always stuck out to me how the middle class seems to take priority. The lower class is always an afterthought. Should not those in the worst situations be the highest priority?
“That’s why I’m determined to turn things around so the middle class does well the poor have a way up and the wealthy still does well.”
At the end of the day, I can’t reconcile my own understanding of the socioeconomic system of the US with Biden’s views. They can’t coexist in the same reality. I do not believe Biden’s goals can be obtained. All any of this can do is, at best, add some temporary stability to an inherently unstable system. At worst, this failing to understand and address the fatal flaws of capitalism will exacerbate the problems.
Biden talks about about a “way up” for the poor, but never specifies any of these “ways.” He mentions the middle class, and how the wealthy should pay their fair share, but cuts the middle class off at “$400,000” a year. The amount of people making this much money accounts for less than 2% of the population and means vastly different things for a single person living in West Virginia and a family of four in San Francisco.
“Look, I’m a capitalist.” I think we all understand that, Joe, but even as far as those go, you don’t seem to be a very good one.
Industrial labor, factory work, is largely considered one of the worst jobs you can have in America. The pay is better than other types of jobs, but it is often difficult work with little chance for advancement and leaves workers mentally and physically too exhausted to think of how bad things are. Another thing that helps maintain the status quo. It also is a dying job. Automation will eventually replace the majority of these new jobs Biden is creating.
Instead of focusing on creating more soul-crushing jobs of manual labor, we could be focusing on raising the minimum wage. On eliminating student debt. On drastically lowering or eliminating the cost of attending college. On healthcare. All obstacles that directly and immediately work to oppress and repress.
You want to help the middle class? The best way to do that is to help the poorest people in the country. Instead of giving the police billions more dollars, give money to poor black neighborhoods to improve their schools and their housing options. Listen and consider with respect the voices of civil rights leaders instead of throwing a temper tantrum because you feel threatened. Stop giving money to the border security that separates families and directly harms children. Stop propagating racism by painting all immigrants as drug and gun traffickers.
And stop fucking giving money to Israel so that they can bomb women and children.