The Male Hysteric

I get home from vacation and many larger subs of Reddit have gone dark, and all I hear about is how people can't search for normal how-tos because Reddit was the big repository for actual questions answered, especially now that Yahoo Answers is gone and almost all hobby forums are gone, disappeared into either Reddit, Discord, or otherwise.

Along with Twitter’s collapse in the last 6 months or so and ChatGPT clogging up SEO with garbage, all of this seems really... bad? Like it was bad enough before with the video takeover (especially because of my disability) but that was somewhat slow-moving and ongoing since about 2016. This is all happening in the matter of months. I know the reddit blackout is temporary but this all seems to bode ill generally with the reveal on how fragile this all is.

I would love it if forums came back, but I don't love that we will probably have to become much more desperate to make the jump back to them. Also a lot of things that made forums go round was free image hosting which is mostly gone outside of social media and let's be real everyone is on mobile devices which makes image upload extremely finnicky outside of apps specialized for it... and this isn't even getting into video.

All through this collapse I'm just watching and helpless. I mean maybe I could look into starting a forum, but what would it be about? I don't trust in my moderating abilities anyway...

I just. Don't like this. Don't like this at all.

Not sure if anyone else listens to Lo Fi Girl much, but apparently something is happening? There's a new site www.lofiworld.com, though right now it will just go through to the youtube page. The youtube video is not the usual lo-fi girl, but instead a picture of a door with a calendar with April 11 2023 circled and a digital clock counting down. Right now the countdown is at about 16 hours, so we'll see what happens in about 16 hours...

I am guessing they're launching some kind of new site or service, which is... of interest? I dunno. i can't say I'm a heavy user and have mostly switched to online radio instead of lo-fi girl which is only on platforms. If they're launching online radio (which I can't imagine, who uses online radio? Nerds? Like me?) that'd be one thing, but otherwise... who knows.

This is absolutely a matter of counting chickens before they hatch, but I have time to idly wonder as my nailpolish dries...

If I were to publish, how would I do it these days? I am not sure what I have would be a good match for traditional publication, and even if it was, the slush pile seems to be under attack by ChatGPT to the point that I'm not sure if there would be a point in trying. On the other hand, self-pub is also being overwhelmed by AI generated books. Of course the "solution" to this is generating one's own buzz, but alas, that is not something I am good at...

One thing I definitely want in the end is to be able to hold a book in my hands. I understand at this point that might involve me getting some POD copies. So would that mean a small press is out, considering a lot of those now seem to be strictly digital? I'm wondering if writing the whole thing and releasing as a serial on something like Patreon would be best? I know I just need to write it but I'm not sure my options anymore. Things have changed a lot since I poked my head out -- I haven't written much seriously since the pandemic began.

I did promise I would repost and compile my Frankenstein essays and posts from elsewhere as I am beginning work on my Frankenstein project. I'll start out with one of my most popular posts that's not a shitpost, even though I don't think this has much place in the analysis I'm working on:



Posted on April 8th, 2022 @brain-depoistary

Anyway, since writing this I don't think my opinion has changed much on this and while it is interesting within the context of today's social media etc. I feel like the extreme isolation built by this structure of storytelling and relationships is more in support of greater points than the point in itself, though I can see how on a site like tumblr this would seem profound and go somewhat viral (not really -- as of right now 153 reblogs and 334 likes).

As the hellsite has been dying I've been up to my usual shenanigans there as long as it will hold out (my mastodon instance has been down all day) and I've found a very bizarre yet thankfully somewhat trivial discussion to get caught up in instead of the rampant -isms constantly directed at me.

The discussion is based on this very bizarre statement about Viktor from the show Arcane while people were arguing about the Jayce/Viktor ship -- and that is that Viktor is somehow "cold and professional".

I don't care if people actually ship JayVik (though the morality police coming after shippers for shipping them because of Jayce's "like a brother" comment "means it's incest coded" is deliriously stupid if it's not actually straight-up in bad faith, which I'm sure it is), but the idea that Viktor is somehow "cold and professional" is so contrary to what actually happens in the show that I'm sure we could not have watched the same thing. The guy tried to explain sneaking a near-exile into a lab as some kind of intimate tryst, he openly berated the majority-shareholder of their company, shrinks away from spotlight and shirks professional responsibility to work on personal projects, waxes openly sentimental and mournful about his impending death, and this is not even getting into the tender looks he gives Jayce at every touch that the shippers keep obsessing over. Viktor is absolutely NOT cold or professional. He has wide range of expressions and body language like the other major characters in Arcane, which is one of the show's major strengths and definitely worth analyzing. VIktor's expressions read more as passionate which is an interesting contrast to his frankly slimy habit of doing whatever he pleases when he thinks everyone around him isn't paying attention. I think if he wasn't the blorbo du jour or if the things he was doing this way were more unsympathetic in nature people would point this out more -- but as it is, people weirdly do not mention this part of his character and kind of seem to ignore it, and when wanting to find character flaws go digging in his League of Legends character profile instead.

No seriously, if I talked to the majority shareholder of my company this way my ass would be fired so fast...

Anyway, back to the original comment, "cold and professional." It's a very weird comment unsupported by the text -- we know that viewers will see what they want to see. Viktor's a man, white, in STEM, and he's one of the few characters with a thick accent and that accent has specific stereotypes associated with it. Possibly part of the 'professional' comment is due to the fact that we see essentially nothing of his personal life except a flashback and use of experimental drugs and even those are still 'sciencey'. We have certain weird assumptions about men in STEM, about emotions even in general. Anger isn't an emotion, and with a broader brush only actual tears are the sign of 'getting emotional', which we never see Viktor do. I wonder if the 'cold' comment has to do with him not being demonstrative with typical displays of affection -- while he's obviously receptive to Jayce touching him with casual affection, he never seems to initiate it himself, but that seems more evidence of some kind of culture clash or at best taken as evidence that they're not really an item, but his response is never cold. 

I assume there is something of a Rorschach going on here. He has a lot of cues that viewers are primed to read a certain way. Are you paying enough attention to see what's actually there?

It's like the same discussion I saw elsewhere on Tumblr earlier this week, about Daphne from Scooby-Doo weirdly enough. Every new iteration of Scooby-Doo claims that they're doing something new with Daphne, that they're making her 'actually competent' and not 'just the hot one' out of some sort of misguided 'girl power' message, failing to account for how in EVERY iteration of Scooby-Doo was competent with useful skills even if she was not as technically inclined as Velma. Instead of paying attention to anything actually occurring onscreen, she's a teenage girl who's attractive and interested in fashion -- that must be all there is to her.

With Viktor, I don't know if it's because I grew up with these kinds of guys that I know there's way more to them than what media and even they themselves may want to project -- my dad was an engineer, my grandfather was an architect, my brother tried to go into medicine, my uncle is a trekkie, I'm a programmer myself, my family a few generations back came over from central and eastern Europe, etc -- but I kind of don't think that's it, because that's not really a super common environment, and it makes me wonder about things I've experienced from others. People have such a hard time reading my emotions and expressions to the point it often feels malicious. It makes me wonder if it's a neurotypical/neurodivergent thing going on here. Apparent 'masters' of reading body language, aren't they supposed to be? Every time a new 'body language' article is published online it's about how to tell if someone's being 'deceptive', perhaps making people search for paranoid readings of bodies and expressions instead of reading the plain text right in front of them. Or maybe it's like the 'empath' trait described in other pop psych articles -- someone has already decided this person's emotions for them so there's no need to look at their actual face and body to get what they're feeling, and if they say something else, they're obviously lying.

I don't know. I may have more thoughts on this later. Something is afoot.

I think what people don't get about fic genres that torture characters intentionally like h/c is how much of these genres are about the writer and reader wanting to be treated in a certain, possibly more correct way, rather than how we normally treat people who have something awful happen to them. And it's so stunningly obvious why people write it and read it when it's framed this way, yet I'm old enough to see two different generations go through a hate of it -- the first when I was younger and any kind of dwelling in this space was considered 'whining' and needing to get over oneself (checkmark for one form of this mistreatment) and now that I'm older of pretending that this stuff is too horrible to even discuss in fiction and needs to be hidden and you're a bad person for talking about it (checkmark for second form of this mistreatment).

There's a lot of focus when writing about people who are marginalized in some way -- and when you're wanting to write about yourself as one of these people you end up having to -- and that your writing is supposed to somehow propose solutions to your suffering, when me doing that is actually making me have to contemplate what sort of problems people who have had all of the problems I have had solved for them. And maybe I'm bitter, but I don't actually find that particularly comforting to think about.

I keep seeing posts about people wanting Ao3 to be “more like TikTok”, and aside from how horrible that sounds it sounds like aside from the constant cries for censorship, people are very confused about Ao3’s “algorithm” and are either complaining about the one it “has” (it does not have one) or that t should get one.

I don’t navigate Ao3 terribly much but uh. It is an ARCHIVE, not a LIBRARY, and people don’t understand the difference, it seems like. 

Like, there’s this fantasy among people who love media of a “library of everything, wouldn’t that be cool”  and they have heart attacks when they see librarians throw out old books, but then they finally get to a place that, for a certain measure of ‘everything’ actually does have everything, and their puny minds have no way to deal with it. And like, fine! Yes, actually, everything is overwhelming and not useful! That is literally why libraries curate! We also need a place for everything, and that’s why we have archives, and why archives aren’t libraries!

With this in mind, and the fact that Ao3 is open-source, the most logical thing to do seems like it would be to build fic libraries that do this recommendation, maybe not by algorithm, but potentially by algorithm if you were clever enough to do so. And it is very weird to see so few attempts at this. Sometime in the last 10 years or so, any kind of halfway ambitious web project became the sole territory of a few megacorporations rather than dorks trying to glue together a website from free web space and twine. Everything has been so funneled into a few websites, and they all look the same and provide the same things. 

I wrote two pages tonight and don't like where this is going. I have no idea what I'm doing, and may want to actually have an idea before I write. I don't know.

It's something, maybe. I don't know.

I'm trying to write again, after... so much starting and stopping over the pandemic. I suppose I should not feel like I haven't done anything as I managed to write a whole 18,000 word piece of fanfiction back in like, March, and I've been writing tons of snippets off and on for the last two years including multiple Frankenstein projects. It's... uncomfortable. I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. I got the fancy leuchtturm and fountain pen and everything to see if I can feel it and I'm not, but maybe it's just a muscle I do not have right now. I don't know.

However what I thought was funny was the published news on "necrobiotics", or the repurposing of dead tissue for robotics, with the proof-of-concept being using a pump pierced into a dead spider as a gripping tool. This normally wouldn't be funny except that about last week I was coming up with one of the concepts I was working on now, which was a mech suit made for a human that could run for about a month or so after the wearer had died, or could perhaps be rigged up to run with a corpse to begin with. The original idea was about insuring the investment of the mech suit but this paper kind of makes it sound a little more believable why this would work, if not still disturbing.



Anyway, if you're curious on the fanfiction it's a Critical Role/Legend of Vox Machina piece called Trust Exercises. Mostly Percy and Pike, though not as a ship.