I remember you-- thanks again for your publicity when Harley first got sick. The money raised got us to the emergency vet, which is where Harley got the surgery and the oncologist that gave her another healthy year. I've never been the kind of depressive who has suicidal ideation, but I don't know what suddenly losing the last cat I'll ever raise from birth (because we were stupid about spaying when Harley was born, not because I'll never have another kitten) would have done to my brain chemistry. That extra year spared me a lot of damage, if not saved me.
Well, I've had a couple hours to think about your comment, and although parts of it have left me kind of shaky-- and the opening is political-- I think I'm ready to answer.
So let me start with the political situation in America right now. I consider it important background information, important context to Paradox07's last comment and my post above, but I also sort of feel like... expat or not, you deserve to know this stuff. I mean, you can skip this if you really want-- ctrl+f on down to 'this is not normal' if you just want the reason I tried to make a 'Nazis and Nazi supporters, fuck off' post on a Sims blog. Just let me answer the dog shit thing with: If Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign is equivalent to flavored dog shit, then Donald Trump is better compared to the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl. Licking either one is not without consequence, but the differences between those consequences are dire.
(go on and start skipping now if you want.)
Donald Trump is, for Americans, not the biggest threat in the Trump administration. Trump is a reality TV star; he's happy as a clam as long as he's getting any kind of attention whatsoever. The trouble comes in around his supporters and the more competent politicians he's surrounded himself with. His political partner, Mike Pence, believes in conversion therapy as a valid treatment for anyone who is not heterosexual, and he would like to divert government funding away from American HIV/AIDS treatment research. Trump's pick for Secretary of Education sees nothing wrong with child labor and thinks literacy isn't a right. His chief strategist runs the world's top white supremacist "news" website.
Hate crimes have increased exponentially since election day, generally punctuated with the exact sort of 'we're gonna have a REAL AMERICAN in the White House now!' screed that Paradox07 spewed at me last night. Even in the most liberal areas of the country, Jewish community centers are facing bomb scares. (All hoaxes so far, but I suspect this is an engineered Boy Who Cried Wolf tactic; eventually, when response times grow lax because 'it's never a real bomb,' the explosions will start.)
I am legitimately afraid that the upcoming administration will put forward, or try to put forward, legislation that re-classifies my sexual orientation as a mental illness treatable only by institutionalization, electro-convulsive therapy, and "corrective" rape, or make it possible for relatives who believe such to gain power of attorney over me due to my depression-- to say absolutely nothing about my fears for American POC, Jewish Americans, and Muslim Americans.
And okay, fine, so American Democracy is always a little bit of a circus, but this is not normal. It's terrifying. I'm happy that you're somewhere safe in a position where American politics don't affect you and yours, but I'm not. And saying that I don't make Sims content for anyone who supports the incoming regime feels like a very small thing for me to do, but I stand by it.
... I may reword it, that's a shaky-ass post I made up there, but I stand by the sentiment.
I'm very glad you complied with the unnamed Keeper-with-PTSD's request for a more visible content warning even if it didn't turn out the way you hoped it would. I'm sorry you lost an avenue for sharing your adult content; I know there are people who want that content for their games who aren't comfortable with places like InSim Adult or Back Alley Sims for whatever reason. I hope they find your sites. I appreciate you sharing the story of why you no longer post at the Keep, and I'm afraid mine is way less interesting.
I feel like I fit in, in terms of personality, better at Garden of Shadows than Plumb Bob Keep, and it's a lot easier for me to limit myself to one messageboard than split my time between two. This means I do most of my content-sharing right here on Dreamwidth, but as it's an easy site to manage and edit, I'm fine with that.
As for the divisiveness... Okay, I really should edit my post-- I meant the 'not on my side' comment with my tongue firmly in cheek, but I did not do as good a job as I should've making the sarcasm come through. (The joke was supposed to be about how hard Paradox07 was trying to get me on her side and then metaphorically shoving me off of it when she realized I wasn't buying what she was selling. It was funny in my head, but I think maybe it was funny in my head in an adrenaline-crash 'haha oh my god did she just call me a monkey?' way.)
Anyway.
I've been active, to varying degrees and in varying fandoms, on the internet since... maybe 1999? That's at the very earliest, I think the first messageboard I joined was in 2001; it was an Aladdin fansite. So, fifteen, sixteen years, anyway-- certainly not as long as some, but long enough to learn what it looks like when someone is trying to start trouble. Not just drama, drama is 'oh my god do you KNOW what they SAID, did you see the thing!' and gathering together to mock Reylo shippers. I mean trouble.
Paradox07 sent me a nine-paragraph rant trying to discredit a woman in a position of (very) relative power. Those nine paragraphs were packed with insults, but were light on verifiable detail and heavy on room for Paradox07 to say 'Well, of course if you asked Sunni, she would say that, she's obviously lying to you.' (Why would the administration of a niche-interest Sims 2 board have more to do with activity slowing down than the releases of Sims 3 and Sims 4? How would Paradox07 know that Sunni was getting tired of Plumb Bob Keep? If I ask Sunni and she says yes, Paradox07 is right; if I ask and Sunni says no, Paradox07 calls Sunni's honesty into question.)
Nine paragraphs of 'trust me, the absolute stranger hurling insults at someone you don't know well but have known-not-well for seven years.'
I admit I figured my long-winded variation on the theme of pics or it didn't happen had convinced her that she wasn't going to get validation (or even diplomacy) here, because she didn't reply for two months. I was very wrong, so I shut her down again, far less ambiguously. Was I mean last night? Yeah, I admit I was, and honestly not as mean as I could've been (I told her I don't care about her ban, told her the way she called me 'My Lady' was creepy, and I used the phrase 'not my circus, not my monkeys' a couple of times trying to drive home how much the Keep isn't my home, playground, or business), but--
Look.
For me, this is not about Sunni, or the Keep, or StephSim and Sophie-David, although their names keep getting dragged into it. I literally hardly know Sunni in any meaningful way. I'm not defending her or her moderating decisions except to say that I support her right to run her website in the fashion that best pleases her. I support every webmaster's right to do that.
For me, this is about the way Paradox07's posts come off like a checklist of tactics an abuser may use to gain, isolate, or control a victim:
"... suffer [her] cruelty..." "... yet another of despot..." "... suffer her wrath..." " You will only experience heartbreak in the future down the road unless you do exactly what their "queen" says." "She is a selfish, lazy, vindictive webmaster who only cares about herself, manipulates others to do her bidding, and she gets nasty with anyone who tries thinking outside her little box." "[She] loves control, and despises those who are not followers." "She's a control freak." (this is ableist language and I got mad about it; we ALL have control issues in the Sims 2 community and I don't hold with making fun of mental illness) "She didn't like me because I don't think along the same lines she does, and she was looking for an excuse to be rid of me." "Again, do not put any trust to [her], do not associate with her or her friends..." (because if I'm not-friends with the target's friends, any mutual friends we have are forced to choose sides) "Her site can read IP addresses, so there's no point in trying to spy on her."
"I did not know about your condition or what state of mind you were in, so there was no way I could have known how you would react to my post." (adding this to an apology destroys the apology; this wasn't 'I'm sorry, that was uncalled for' but 'shit, if I'd known YOU were crazy, I would've chosen my words more carefully.' Not sorry she said it, but sorry I got mad.) "... I know that you are at least curious." "It's not flattery, I'm just being honest." "She even banished their friends to keep them quiet." "I'm no bully. In fact, hardly anyone has listened to me, save for those who also have been banished. It is [she] and her friends who bullied ME." "... but how well do you know her really? Have you actually lived with her? Have you spoken to those close to her? How well do you really know her?" (gaslighting; trying to make me doubt years of my own perceptions)
"... I take great pleasure in watching REAL AMERICANS thwart..." "I'm GLAD your bitch queen Hillary didn't win..." "... your false god on Capitol hill..." "... waste it on a pathetic creep like you." "Keep throwing poo, little monkey."
(That's all direct quotes, you can go read the thread if you want-- I froze it, I didn't delete it.)
This is about a stranger coming onto my blog while I was still on hiatus from Sims, viciously insulting a woman in basically every way short of involving profanity, trying to incite me to anger for her sake-- or at least to sympathy for her cause-- using absolutely textbook abusive tactics (long parenthetical incoming: the claim that she's not trying to bully her target but that her target the bully instead is used to claim the mantle of victim for the abuser, deflecting suspicion from even their actual victims; trying to remove me as a potential avenue of support for her target, trying to use or get me to use whatever pull I have among Medieval Simmers to isolate her target from other potential avenues of support, is a classic tactic for making sure a victim has no one to reach out to, and a way to 'win' a breakup (even a friend breakup) by 'getting all the friends in the divorce'; trying to make me doubt my own perceptions of her target is called gaslighting, and it's a tactic that's especially gross to use against the mentally ill-- we're more inclined to go "Okay was that legit or was that my anxiety talking?" and gaslighting can be used to make us dependent on the person saying "Are you really sure? Like, super-sure? Because that's not how I remember it,"), and finally exploding when it became absolutely clear that she wasn't winning me over. Or that I didn't care about her ban. Or that I wouldn't become somebody's enemy for her sake. Whatever her motive, the political and personal insults only came out when she finally realized she couldn't use me for her purposes.
I'm not even giving her the benefit of the doubt and saying maybe she didn't know how she was coming off, not at this point. If any of that had been subconscious rather than a concentrated effort to manipulate me into giving her whatever it was she wanted from me, she would have taken "I don't care, you're not going to convince me to care, it's been two months and I was glad you were gone, it's not my circus and these are not my monkeys, get off my blog" for an answer and just left.
So that, I guess, is your answer to where all the divisiveness is coming from: One, I refuse to bother being nice to someone who's trying to use me, and two, anyone who champions Trump is championing Neo-Nazis, and I don't agree to disagree or try to get along with Neo-Nazis or anyone who supports them.
... Shit, is Paradox07 bothering you about this? I mean, I'm pretty sure she approached me because I used to post on the Keep, stopped, and kept posting Medieval content on my personal site, which let her hope I'd had some sort of conflict at the Keep-- that all applies to you as much as it does me, with the added bonus of you actually having had an administrative issue over there. If my post here is causing you trouble on your site, I'm really sorry.
Oh GOD this is long, you were prepared for a novella, right?
Well, I've had a couple hours to think about your comment, and although parts of it have left me kind of shaky-- and the opening is political-- I think I'm ready to answer.
So let me start with the political situation in America right now. I consider it important background information, important context to Paradox07's last comment and my post above, but I also sort of feel like... expat or not, you deserve to know this stuff. I mean, you can skip this if you really want-- ctrl+f on down to 'this is not normal' if you just want the reason I tried to make a 'Nazis and Nazi supporters, fuck off' post on a Sims blog. Just let me answer the dog shit thing with: If Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign is equivalent to flavored dog shit, then Donald Trump is better compared to the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl. Licking either one is not without consequence, but the differences between those consequences are dire.
(go on and start skipping now if you want.)
Donald Trump is, for Americans, not the biggest threat in the Trump administration. Trump is a reality TV star; he's happy as a clam as long as he's getting any kind of attention whatsoever. The trouble comes in around his supporters and the more competent politicians he's surrounded himself with. His political partner, Mike Pence, believes in conversion therapy as a valid treatment for anyone who is not heterosexual, and he would like to divert government funding away from American HIV/AIDS treatment research. Trump's pick for Secretary of Education sees nothing wrong with child labor and thinks literacy isn't a right. His chief strategist runs the world's top white supremacist "news" website.
Hate crimes have increased exponentially since election day, generally punctuated with the exact sort of 'we're gonna have a REAL AMERICAN in the White House now!' screed that Paradox07 spewed at me last night. Even in the most liberal areas of the country, Jewish community centers are facing bomb scares. (All hoaxes so far, but I suspect this is an engineered Boy Who Cried Wolf tactic; eventually, when response times grow lax because 'it's never a real bomb,' the explosions will start.)
I am legitimately afraid that the upcoming administration will put forward, or try to put forward, legislation that re-classifies my sexual orientation as a mental illness treatable only by institutionalization, electro-convulsive therapy, and "corrective" rape, or make it possible for relatives who believe such to gain power of attorney over me due to my depression-- to say absolutely nothing about my fears for American POC, Jewish Americans, and Muslim Americans.
And okay, fine, so American Democracy is always a little bit of a circus, but this is not normal. It's terrifying. I'm happy that you're somewhere safe in a position where American politics don't affect you and yours, but I'm not. And saying that I don't make Sims content for anyone who supports the incoming regime feels like a very small thing for me to do, but I stand by it.
... I may reword it, that's a shaky-ass post I made up there, but I stand by the sentiment.
I'm very glad you complied with the unnamed Keeper-with-PTSD's request for a more visible content warning even if it didn't turn out the way you hoped it would. I'm sorry you lost an avenue for sharing your adult content; I know there are people who want that content for their games who aren't comfortable with places like InSim Adult or Back Alley Sims for whatever reason. I hope they find your sites. I appreciate you sharing the story of why you no longer post at the Keep, and I'm afraid mine is way less interesting.
I feel like I fit in, in terms of personality, better at Garden of Shadows than Plumb Bob Keep, and it's a lot easier for me to limit myself to one messageboard than split my time between two. This means I do most of my content-sharing right here on Dreamwidth, but as it's an easy site to manage and edit, I'm fine with that.
As for the divisiveness... Okay, I really should edit my post-- I meant the 'not on my side' comment with my tongue firmly in cheek, but I did not do as good a job as I should've making the sarcasm come through. (The joke was supposed to be about how hard Paradox07 was trying to get me on her side and then metaphorically shoving me off of it when she realized I wasn't buying what she was selling. It was funny in my head, but I think maybe it was funny in my head in an adrenaline-crash 'haha oh my god did she just call me a monkey?' way.)
Anyway.
I've been active, to varying degrees and in varying fandoms, on the internet since... maybe 1999? That's at the very earliest, I think the first messageboard I joined was in 2001; it was an Aladdin fansite. So, fifteen, sixteen years, anyway-- certainly not as long as some, but long enough to learn what it looks like when someone is trying to start trouble. Not just drama, drama is 'oh my god do you KNOW what they SAID, did you see the thing!' and gathering together to mock Reylo shippers. I mean trouble.
Paradox07 sent me a nine-paragraph rant trying to discredit a woman in a position of (very) relative power. Those nine paragraphs were packed with insults, but were light on verifiable detail and heavy on room for Paradox07 to say 'Well, of course if you asked Sunni, she would say that, she's obviously lying to you.' (Why would the administration of a niche-interest Sims 2 board have more to do with activity slowing down than the releases of Sims 3 and Sims 4? How would Paradox07 know that Sunni was getting tired of Plumb Bob Keep? If I ask Sunni and she says yes, Paradox07 is right; if I ask and Sunni says no, Paradox07 calls Sunni's honesty into question.)
Nine paragraphs of 'trust me, the absolute stranger hurling insults at someone you don't know well but have known-not-well for seven years.'
I admit I figured my long-winded variation on the theme of pics or it didn't happen had convinced her that she wasn't going to get validation (or even diplomacy) here, because she didn't reply for two months. I was very wrong, so I shut her down again, far less ambiguously. Was I mean last night? Yeah, I admit I was, and honestly not as mean as I could've been (I told her I don't care about her ban, told her the way she called me 'My Lady' was creepy, and I used the phrase 'not my circus, not my monkeys' a couple of times trying to drive home how much the Keep isn't my home, playground, or business), but--
Look.
For me, this is not about Sunni, or the Keep, or StephSim and Sophie-David, although their names keep getting dragged into it. I literally hardly know Sunni in any meaningful way. I'm not defending her or her moderating decisions except to say that I support her right to run her website in the fashion that best pleases her. I support every webmaster's right to do that.
For me, this is about the way Paradox07's posts come off like a checklist of tactics an abuser may use to gain, isolate, or control a victim:
"... suffer [her] cruelty..."
"... yet another of despot..."
"... suffer her wrath..."
" You will only experience heartbreak in the future down the road unless you do exactly what their "queen" says."
"She is a selfish, lazy, vindictive webmaster who only cares about herself, manipulates others to do her bidding, and she gets nasty with anyone who tries thinking outside her little box."
"[She] loves control, and despises those who are not followers."
"She's a control freak." (this is ableist language and I got mad about it; we ALL have control issues in the Sims 2 community and I don't hold with making fun of mental illness)
"She didn't like me because I don't think along the same lines she does, and she was looking for an excuse to be rid of me."
"Again, do not put any trust to [her], do not associate with her or her friends..." (because if I'm not-friends with the target's friends, any mutual friends we have are forced to choose sides)
"Her site can read IP addresses, so there's no point in trying to spy on her."
"I did not know about your condition or what state of mind you were in, so there was no way I could have known how you would react to my post." (adding this to an apology destroys the apology; this wasn't 'I'm sorry, that was uncalled for' but 'shit, if I'd known YOU were crazy, I would've chosen my words more carefully.' Not sorry she said it, but sorry I got mad.)
"... I know that you are at least curious."
"It's not flattery, I'm just being honest."
"She even banished their friends to keep them quiet."
"I'm no bully. In fact, hardly anyone has listened to me, save for those who also have been banished. It is [she] and her friends who bullied ME."
"... but how well do you know her really? Have you actually lived with her? Have you spoken to those close to her? How well do you really know her?" (gaslighting; trying to make me doubt years of my own perceptions)
"... I take great pleasure in watching REAL AMERICANS thwart..."
"I'm GLAD your bitch queen Hillary didn't win..."
"... your false god on Capitol hill..."
"... waste it on a pathetic creep like you."
"Keep throwing poo, little monkey."
(That's all direct quotes, you can go read the thread if you want-- I froze it, I didn't delete it.)
This is about a stranger coming onto my blog while I was still on hiatus from Sims, viciously insulting a woman in basically every way short of involving profanity, trying to incite me to anger for her sake-- or at least to sympathy for her cause-- using absolutely textbook abusive tactics (long parenthetical incoming: the claim that she's not trying to bully her target but that her target the bully instead is used to claim the mantle of victim for the abuser, deflecting suspicion from even their actual victims; trying to remove me as a potential avenue of support for her target, trying to use or get me to use whatever pull I have among Medieval Simmers to isolate her target from other potential avenues of support, is a classic tactic for making sure a victim has no one to reach out to, and a way to 'win' a breakup (even a friend breakup) by 'getting all the friends in the divorce'; trying to make me doubt my own perceptions of her target is called gaslighting, and it's a tactic that's especially gross to use against the mentally ill-- we're more inclined to go "Okay was that legit or was that my anxiety talking?" and gaslighting can be used to make us dependent on the person saying "Are you really sure? Like, super-sure? Because that's not how I remember it,"), and finally exploding when it became absolutely clear that she wasn't winning me over. Or that I didn't care about her ban. Or that I wouldn't become somebody's enemy for her sake. Whatever her motive, the political and personal insults only came out when she finally realized she couldn't use me for her purposes.
I'm not even giving her the benefit of the doubt and saying maybe she didn't know how she was coming off, not at this point. If any of that had been subconscious rather than a concentrated effort to manipulate me into giving her whatever it was she wanted from me, she would have taken "I don't care, you're not going to convince me to care, it's been two months and I was glad you were gone, it's not my circus and these are not my monkeys, get off my blog" for an answer and just left.
So that, I guess, is your answer to where all the divisiveness is coming from: One, I refuse to bother being nice to someone who's trying to use me, and two, anyone who champions Trump is championing Neo-Nazis, and I don't agree to disagree or try to get along with Neo-Nazis or anyone who supports them.
... Shit, is Paradox07 bothering you about this? I mean, I'm pretty sure she approached me because I used to post on the Keep, stopped, and kept posting Medieval content on my personal site, which let her hope I'd had some sort of conflict at the Keep-- that all applies to you as much as it does me, with the added bonus of you actually having had an administrative issue over there. If my post here is causing you trouble on your site, I'm really sorry.