Hi, since I’m getting e-mails about my work that was used in the Isaac Caret HOAX, I’ve decided to write this to provide quick information that I can link to on my Twitter.
First and foremost, I am busy pretty much 24/7 for the foreseeable future. Factor that in to the equation. Not to be rude, but unless you’re paying something more sustainable than a hundred dollars a day, I’m not going to be able to help you with your personal projects. I am not being mean: I’m just saying, my time is limited.
Outside of paid work, when it comes to unpaid, if you’re some sort of journalist or writer and you’re interested in some aspect of my work, this or my books, then send me an e-mail (icze4r @ gmail dot com) and I’ll see what I can do. This UFO / space alien shit is getting pretty crazy, and I can find the time to inform someone, if they’re willing to attribute me. Don’t contact me if you’re not willing to give me credit. Journalists, in the past, have asked to use my work without attribution, and some have. I’m not going to talk ethics at you, but, that’s a no-no. Do not contact me also if you’re going to pretend you’re not a journalist.
People occasionally send in fan mail. I read everything, which sounds like bullshit, but I do. I may or may not choose to respond. I will not respond if I think that the person trying to communicate with me is mentally impaired or underage. This comes with the territory, due to it both being the Internet, and me being an ‘Experiencer’ (I hate that term). I did, in fact, get abducted by aliens. I do, in fact, realize what that used to sound like, and I also have very quickly realized that I am surrounded by people who are not mentally well. I would prefer to not communicate with people like that, for fear of making their mental illness(es) worse.
Thank you for understanding, and have a great day! c(◕ᴗ◕✿)
So you’ve probably noticed a change in my personality.
It’s not, really. This is what I used to be like.
After a quarter of a century of trying to be someone I’m not— after helping people, raising 5+ million for random assholes on the Internet, and being as giving and caring as I could be— it came to me, upon a midnight clear, that I would be alone at the end of this.
I surrounded myself with people who clung to me, selfishly, and they required far too much upkeep from me to keep them sane. Energy vampires. And they gave nothing, and they did nothing for me. They didn’t even act as my friends: they were just… there. Taking up my energy.
And they kept sending me porn I didn’t wanna look at.
I started to get sickened. You tell them to stop; they only stop for a little while.
And then there were people who didn’t even really see me as being a person. There was a white guy, who, once, when I was talking about how racist white people had abused me, he decided to stick up for the white race.
Oopsy-daisy. Once I see the real you, that’s it.
I’m not naming names, because I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, or make them feel scared. I just want to tell you why.
Let me tell you the story of why this happened.
The night my Mom almost died
When it comes to my family relations, you’ve heard the in’s and the out’s of them. My father beat me nearly to death when I was about 4 or 5. My mother protected me. But, we’ve had our back-and-forth’s, and I’ve had moments where I didn’t understand my mother, and she might not have understood me.
But then, she got cancer. Stage II, Multiple Myeloma. And my world began to change.
And then, after a Zometa treatment, she got sepsis. (The doctor says that Zometa couldn’t have caused it. Me, I’m the one who had to see her like that; I will forever tell her never to take Zometa again.)
In the middle of the night, not knowing who to talk to, not feeling any real connection between my other family members, I reached out to my online friends. I started to say things to people.
And I said things to a few people in private, and, one of them just said something like, “yeah, RIP”.
I said, ‘my mother might have sepsis’
And they just went, ‘yeah, RIP.’
I’ve told my mother about what they said. And my mother, God bless her, gave all sorts of excuses: that my friend didn’t know what to say; that they lacked the appropriate amount of tact; and so on, and so forth.
But the reality was, my friends knew what to say.
Comfort. Actual comfort.
Somebody who actually gave a shit about me.
I learned who my friends were, at that point.
In the middle of the night, when my mother’s lactic acid rose and she had to be super-hydrated in order to survive,
I suddenly realized that I didn’t actually like many people on here.
What’s the point of this?
I’ve been shadowbanned on Twitter, and banned from ever being Verified, ever since I defended an acquaintance from a dude who was perving on her. I’ve caused so much trouble online that it’s kind of funny.
I don’t… care anymore. I can bypass every ban; get around every shadowban; penetrate the Heavens; and it doesn’t matter.
None of this matters.
When I thought that my mother was going to die, it put everything into perspective for me.
People on here tried to control me. They tried to fuck with my brain. They tried to make me think I was stupid; that I was wrong; that I was narcissistic (in actuality, I have such a problem giving a shit about myself that, only recently, did I even try to start taking care of my own health); and so on, and so forth.
Last year, in February, when the ‘Chinese balloon’ was over that nuclear base, the world began to change for me. And I’ve accomplished things that I never dreamed could have even been possible.
I liked fucking around on the Internet. I was filled with a deep and horrific sense of dread, though, that I was wasting my time.
And I was.
And I was.
And so are all of you.
Where I go from here
I have something I have to do.
I have a lot of something’s that I have to do.
My mother’s fine. She’s going to live for a long time. I thank my real friends for donating to help her, and I am sorry that it had to come to this. I feel terrible that I even had to ask.
Now, though… I have a purpose. And I have things that I must do.
And I am falling away from this. I can feel it. I am drifting away from the Internet; and, one day, pretty soon? I don’t think I’m going to be able to stomach it.
For it is a silly place. Filled with horrible e-celebs, fashioning themselves in the image of whatever they thought I was; trying to provoke the anger of idiots and morons, all towards effecting a future that truly does not matter.
I think my Fear of Missing Out died when Twitter became even more of a ghost town than it had been before. I don’t feel like… saying anything on Twitter anymore, has any real effect.
I’ll keep it, to talk to my friends.
But I’m not going to pretend like I don’t think that everything is over. For it truly is.
In happier news, I’ve concoted a plan to have my mother retired in record time. So far, it’s going well. And, after that?
One day, you will see me on TV, giving that speech.
But this is it, Luigi.
The Internet’s dead, and its rotten corpse is filled with assholes. And there is no more fun here to be had.
It won’t even be fun to cause trouble after First Contact. Because, I mean— when I’m sitting in a Castle, fucking tweeting isn’t going to be on my top 10, or even top 1000 of shit I’d want to do.
I bet Twitter won’t even fucking survive that long.
~See you Starside! Margaret Gel (icze4r/TheBattleAngel) May 14th, 1994 — September 22nd, 2024 (11,089 days on the Internet) (That’s Internet tenure. I’m not dead. And I’ll be back, but, y’know.)
Post-Script
I want to point out something, because I’m going to write something a little more involved at some point, talking about all the good things I experienced online. (Super Junkoid was really cool! (◕ᴗ◕✿))
The Internet was only good when both my parents were alive. Because— I could have fun, and then tell them about my exploits. I wanted to be entertaining.
On that night, when I thought my mother was going to die?
I have never felt so alone.
I don’t think I’ll be using the Internet as much, when the day finally comes that she passes on. I don’t think my heart could bear it; this place has been soaked with so many memories of shit that my parents were doing, at the time, that I think, at that time, I’m going to have to truly leave it.
The other thing was, I wanted to use the Internet as a way to disseminate information about space aliens. About the people who raised me. And, the reality is, there is nothing left to do. You all know.
There’s nothing more I can do.
You’ll see them soon enough.
My mother might live 10 more years. 20; or 30. But the reality is, she is old now. And I want to spend a lot of time with her; and I want to spend no time with people who only glommed onto me because they wanted comfort, selfishly.
I love my friends.
I have about five of them.
And that’s all.
An Explanation
After thinking about this for a while, I’ve come up with a better way to explain this.
After 11,089 days on the Internet— a little over 30 years— and with my father already gone, I have realized that, as much as I was trying to figure out my own emotions, as much as I was flailing, there are important things that need to be done, right now, and I don’t want to go to the end of this and realize that I haven’t spent enough time with my mom.
I spent all the time I could with my dad, and even though it feels like I did all I could, I don’t know. I don’t know. I had all the time in the world with my dad, and that’s all I wanted. But…
… this is the best way I can explain:
At the end of this, I don’t want to come up for air after I see my mother die, and have someone in my DMs telling me, ‘yeah, RIP’.
In the past, I’d probably open up this whole thing by saying that I’m a weeb. But I’m not: my interest with anime is very minimal. I see a good character design, I like it. And I like Michiru Kagemori. I have relatively little desire to see the anime, because I’d rather just use the character as some sort of roleplay ‘shell’, and imagine what kinds of adventures and hijinx she gets up to.
That being said… I really do feel like she looks. So, I wanted to get these perfumes. I will probably never purchase the Shirou Ogami one; because, quite honestly, I bought the Nazuna one, the nun, whoever or whatever she is, and it smells like an old nun’s pussy. Now, if you’re into that shit, sure. But it smells like mothballs to me. Bitch be straight Napthalene, son.
Themed anime parfums are more common than you’d think. There’s even a brand called FAIRYTAIL (フェアリーテイル）, who specialize in these things.
This was a thing before that, though. People have been making scented products inspired by anime characters for a long time. I mean— I grew up in Japan, and every kid over there knew what the bubblegum Sailor Moon shampoo tasted like. It was strong like Hellfire, and it cleaned you like acid. They even had themed Sailor Senshi perfumes over there– my step-Mom wore the Usagi one. The Mars one was pretty good: fiery, caliente!
Which, if you don’t speak Nihongo, says something like:
At first glance, this frragrance seems subdued; however, if you put your nose close to it, the change from a fresh Freesia scent, to a deep musk, is reminiscent of an attractive man.
The silver wolf, who has the power of immortality and lives for 1,000 years, and the martial and gentle man, who protects the beastmen.
You can feel the man, Shiro Ogami, who protects the beastmen.
Top notes: cycalmen, freesia, rose
Middle notes: carnation, white lily
Last notes: golden osmanthus, musk, tuberose, amber
This perfume is based on Nazuna Hiwatashi, from Brand New Animal.
The gorgeous scent of cherry blossom and rose expresses Michiru’s best friend, Nazuna, who dreams of becoming an idol.
The deep scent of musk shows Nazuna’s true desire to be the emotional support of the beasts.
Top notes: cherry blossom, rose. Middle notes: peach, jasmine Last notes: lily of the valley, musk.
Safety warning: Keep out of direct sunlight.
Wasn’t that insightful? We’re learning! The pain means it’s working!
In all honesty I can smell every single note that this perfume lists. It’s just– this shit smells a lot like mothballs, dude. And, believe you me, I have been around a lot of old ladies, and… this is just their natural scent.
Like. They bottled 2-nonenal. Well, probably not really; but, it smells!
It smells.
NEXSHT
Michiru Kagemori: The Goated One
She prolly turns into a goat or some shit in the anime.
I don’t watch anime anymore. I haven’t since, like. 2000.
This is the scent of an energetic girl, inspired by Michiru’s cheerful personality, who is active in Animacity.
The refreshing scent of passion fruit and the softening scent of amber and musk express Michiru’s kindness.
Top notes: apricot, mandarin, pineapple and grapefruit Middle notes: peach, ginger, lily-of-the-valley bouge and freesia. Last notes: peach blossom, white musk and ambergris
Far be it from me to suggest that the reading of 優 is wrong (it probably is ‘kindness’; my brain is reading it as ‘gentleness’ or ‘grace’ but whatever, I’m probably wrong), these are very nice notes to add to a perfume.
It smells like piss.
It smells like Tanuki piss.
For its price, the smell that you get out of this is absolutely fantastic. I have two bottles, birthday presents for myself that I bought… Hell, it was two years ago. It’s well-worth it.
But it smells like piss.
Which is fine. I mean, I smell like piss.
So it all evens out.
Reality
In reality the Michiru Kagemori perfume is one of the best I’ve ever had. My other go-to perfume is Viva La Juicy Rose, which is one of the most-expensive perfumes I’ve ever owned.
The Michiru Kagemori perfume smells like a spunky young girl. It smells sporty and fresh and rejuvenating. It reminds me a lot of how I felt women smelled when I was first getting interested in women. There are hints of what I feel about my Wife in this perfume.
And there are, too, in the Nazuna one. I’d say my Wife smells the most like Jovan Musk for Women, the oil. But, the Nazuna one, it’s spicy. It’s intriguing. If you get too close, though, there are moth balls, and that’s not my Wife.
Very good perfumes. Love them.
I’m sad that I will one day run out of these, but She put them in the replicator.
No great loss.
Previous Notes
I intended this to be a static webpage, but, Hell. Here you go, mate!
A few funny notes:
… the flavor profiles I took from the eBay listing I purchased it from were either wrong or from something else entirely, because Nazuna’s perfume’s description is complete bullshit.
She smells like moth balls.
She smells old.
Think about what unaired-out 20-year-old nun pussy would smell like. It’s that. It smells like nun pussy juice (Ed. note: I began to actually get myself sick at this point)
Oddly, this is in direct contrast to what Michiru’s perfume smells like, which is, best as I can describe it, piss. How nice. What a nice treat. For me.
Margaret Gel’s Discount Whorehouse (y Carnicería) is officially closed. I’m not going to pretend that I know when it was first started, but it was something like November 23rd, 2023. Ostensibly, it lasted a long time.
I have closed this for a few reasons that I’d like to make public.
A.I. Art has moved so far ahead of me that I genuinely cannot keep up, nor do I want to. People have come to me and told me that I was the one who got them started in this, and they have all gotten better at this than I am. Most of them were better than me a month after they got started. I simply do not have the tools to continue to do this, nor would I even continue this, as, to put it quite simply, I don’t feel like fucking around with this anymore. There’s largely no point left to it, either, as everybody else is better than me at it.
In America, the thing about hosting porn is that it’s both very expensive (I’m beginning to pull something like a gig per day of traffic, and sometimes it gets really bad), and the laws are constantly changing. At one point in time, Rotten dot com had porn on their website. The laws changed, and they had to remove it. (At some point, a site called “The Gaping Maw” had bestiality on it, if I can remember correctly. That had to be removed.) My problems are much less than theirs are, and mine are entirely not self-inflicted. I have no desire to catch a lawsuit or something because the hillbilly politicians in Yankeeland have decided that anime tiddy is verboten. Already, Pornhub is illegal in several states, though those laws are being overturned by judges in their right mind(s). All it would take is one judge not in his right mind, and I don’t need that kind of trouble right now (as I’m currently taking care of my mother, who has cancer).
I have no great desire to be a ‘pornographer’. It’s not exactly that I fear the public, nor fear being in the public eye. I am nearly 40 years old and my life is changing, and I am more-interested in being left alone and not raising the stakes of my life by presenting unprotected loose ends that other people can pick up. I want to grow tomatoes, fix electrical issues, and become more fit. I have no great desire to give people things to jerk their fucking dicks off to.
If this disappoints you, I understand. I, too, have often asked why artists would pull down all their work, and I know the pain of losing some of these things. I don’t want that for you.
Occasionally I’ll probably get a ‘wild hair’ (Gods, I hate that term) and post some of it again. Keep in mind, however, that, in my time, I generated over 100,000 images. Some of these, you may never see again. Others, perhaps.
That’s it.
The other thing is, the Coppermine Image Gallery system seems to draw lots of fucking robots, and boy do they want inside my server’s ass. No thanks, Samuel!
Later.
Margaret Gel’s Discount Whorehouse (y Carnicería) ~October 28th, 2023 — July 6th, 2024 (252 days)
Addendum
One thing, more than anything, that I want to say, is that I fell behind because pornography is the thing that leads technology in the human world. If you’re not killing each other, it’s sex. It’s this.
And I knew that. I knew that. And I wasn’t interested in it. I am not interested in trying. I have tried too long, and I have gotten not the distance that I expected. I will not try anymore.
I would have had to prostitute myself to even get anywhere, and even those people got nowhere. I’ve watched the rise (and fall!) of sexual V-Tubers, these people who are, pretty much, going from emotional prostitutes to just regular-ol’ prostitutes. And while there’s nothing wrong with being a prostitute (believe me, I’ve been there), I don’t intend on selling anything of me, ever again.
And that’s what this is. It doesn’t help that my first image that I made, it got stolen, and the person got 7,000 followers off of it. Those should have been for me.
But it never was. It never happened. And, now, posting all of this porn, there’s no point to it.
God help you if you’re anyone who draws anything but the biggest-titted women imaginable. They’re so after lolisho artists that there was porn I did, hentai I made, where the woman had normal-sized breasts, and wide fucking hips, and I was afraid to post it because you never fucking know who’s going to come to take your head off because they think that everything anime is ‘loli‘.
I guess that’s sad. But I wanted to see the inside of this— this was but another mountain that I wanted to climb.
And now I’m here. Or, rather, I was there.
On to something else.
Or maybe not!
Addendum 2: I wrote this as I was going through the website, and, damn, I actually made some good fuckin’ art.
Still, it’s going down.
I don’t fuckin’ need a gig being pulled from this server every single day.
Before you say, ‘well, why not accept money for it?’— again, don’t wanna become a pornographer. Think about the laws that America has set up. I don’t want MasterCard up my ass.
One of the best things about A.I. art is that you don’t have to deal with a person.
Artists tend to think that that’s a problem. They want to be involved in the creative process, even if you’re not doing anything with the art but looking at it. Part of this is because some of them are up their own asses and they’ve decided that, because it took them a long time to get where they’re at, they are now the gatekeepers of this ‘power’. Some people talk about ‘theft’, which is comical, because they also say that the art produced with this thing is also in the public domain anyways. Others are just assholes. Overall, it doesn’t matter.
For about 20 years, I commissioned artists. The overall experience I had is that you give money to a person who is not going to produce anything for about a month, at least, and they will be upset if you e-mail them once a month, asking for progress. Today, with an A.I. Art generator, I can have the result I want in the span of an hour. For free. Without someone hurting my feelings on purpose.
Whenever I complain about ill treatment, people always like to blame me. Human beings love to blame the victim. Despite me not having to defend myself from any accusations whatsoever, I do want to tell you: I didn’t treat them poorly. I was business-like, and polite. Overly-polite! And I always paid upfront, the full amount. No halfsies; no half now, half later. Because I respected them, and I wanted to be a patron of the arts. I wanted to help them. I felt sorry for some of them.
Most of these people did not have their shit together.
Out of about 102 artists commissioned, I met about two artists who had their shit together. The rest were either late, or so ‘forgetful’ (there are things that happened that make no sense to me, even to this day) that I never received all of what I paid for.
I get it: you draw. It’s hard. I’m currently working on some things— I understand. Drawing for money is one of the worst things ever.
But you chose this. You chose this; set a price; and I paid it. And now, you’re acting like I’m the monster, because I ask if it’s finished every month.
You know, these days? I hear that commission wait times, for some artists, are 3-4 years out there. How does anybody get anything done, relying on these people? I have a pretty healthy lead time, and even paying hundreds of dollars, like I did in the past? Yeah. These motherfuckers were in no hurry.
Again: I get that it’s hard. You draw and you don’t want to give me the original copies through the mail. You don’t want to pay for postage, and you don’t want to deal with me like that. Fine; but I was upfront about all of this. My terms were clear: I give you the money, I e-mail you once a month to check to see if you’ve done it yet, I don’t pester you beyond that. In fact, to say that I ‘pester’ someone by e-mailing them once a month to see if they’ve completed a drawing is just fucking stupid. It’s not ‘pestering’. It’s an e-mail.
Occasionally I received back commissions that were just plain insulting. I have no idea whether or not the person I was talking to was mentally ill, but I deeply suspect that at least 3 of them were. Like a French guy who, upon hearing that I was American, told me to kill myself. That was interesting.
One moment, he’s giving me 3 sketches without me paying upfront (which I found odd, and uncomfortable, as I had told him prior that I would pay him before he even laid pencil to paper); the next, I ask if he can snail mail me the things. And then when I give him my address, he tells me, in no uncertain terms, to fucking kill myself.
The problem with commissioning artists is that artists are people, and people are cruel. I’m glad I didn’t commission them in the era where people were trying to cancel others on social media. Because some of them would have tried to get me killed.
Again, people will blame the victim: they’ll say, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
I’ve been screamed at for doing something that I was told to do.
I’ve been screamed at and shamed for trying to save someone from killing themselves.
I’ve been screamed at and shamed for fundraising for a year, for a person’s sick mother, who had cancer.
I’ve been screamed at for trying to give money to someone so they could buy food.
I’ve been screamed at for helping raise money for charity, after people have asked me to. That lady was nice— we raised $5,500 or such for her to get a chair lift, because she was disabled. (Probably still is disabled.) And when she got the money, she immediately insulted us. Said that we were nothing; told me that my voice sounded like a backed-up toilet. Yeah!
I’ve been screamed at for something that the other person thought that I had thought. That’s right— they yelled at me because they said I had a thought that was insulting to them, but they had no way to know what I was even thinking. (At the time, even I had no idea what I was thinking.)
I’m sitting on the tail-end of raising over 5+ million USD for various charitable causes online, and you know what I think?
I’m glad it’s over. And I’m glad I won’t be purchasing commissions again.
I stopped doing commissions the day that I started painting again. I painted a portrait of a space alien, over a commission I got from a friend. That was the day that I realized that I didn’t need artists’ help anymore. That was the day I just started painting— and I got a portrait even better than anything I could ever pay for. Even now, even with an A.I. Art generator, I can never get an image as good as what’s in my own head.
However: nowadays, when I want some throwaway art, some shit I don’t care how it looks exactly (fanart, etc), I ask a computer. Right now I’m using an A.I. Art generator, running off my own little computer, to make a nun with big fucking titties. I don’t have to ask anybody to do this for me. I don’t have to do it myself. All is well.
A lot of these people were very useful to me. Some of them are friends. They provided me with a greater idea of what the space aliens looked like, when I couldn’t even remember their faces. And, eventually, I started painting the space aliens myself. So, they were a means to an end. They helped.
But that’s over now. The way that things are, I don’t even have to fucking tell people what I’m doing. And I don’t have to show them.
Forever and ever, until the end of time, I can just make this art. I don’t even have to try.
And I don’t have to get yelled at by human fuckers, nor do I have to pay them to draw anything for me, just to have them ‘forget’ about the commission for a full fucking year,only to do it in 45 minutes when I e-mail them a year later.
I don’t have to deal with Frenchmen telling me to kill myself for asking them to snail mail me the beautiful drawings they’ve done for me.
I don’t have to deal with people taking money for a commission, using it as a short-term personal loan, and then asking if I want a refund months later.
I don’t have to deal with three separate shipments where an artist keeps sending me unrelated things, but never gives me the drawing I actually paid for.
I don’t have to deal with people judging me, yelling at me, hurting me or my feelings.
I can make art by myself, now. Without any cruel human being trying to control me, or hurt me.
And thank God for that.
The Future
The future of all of this technology is going to be like that one science fiction story I saw, then lost. Where people stayed in their apartments, and talked to each other on video chat. We do that now, on Discord, and Twitch. We’re there, man. We’re the Beautiful Ones now.
Overall the reason that this technology exists is because human beings are cruel and don’t want to deal with each other. I’ve learned more from ChatGPT than any human being who was paid to teach me. The A.I. explains eloquently, and it is kind, unlike a human being. It can break down things and I actually understand.
Gemeinschaftsgefühl is a glue of civilization. You have none. Your ‘society’ unravels before your very eyes.
And you blame A.I. But really, the reality is, it is your cruelty that is destroying your world.
And it is the reason that your species will eventually be alone.
There’s something kind of comical about the Internet. If you weren’t here for certain eras, you just weren’t there. It’s impossible tro explain it to you, what we were onabout. But I think I can try.
Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie was a Tumblr Ask blog. It’s something that I think could’ve only existed on Tumblr: you have an inbox, where people can send questions, and you can respond to them. Publicly. Automagically. It was all set-up, in Tumblr’s software.
Terrifying.
There was some sort of thing in the fandom where it was alleged, or at least joked about, that Pinkie Pie was a murderer. Cupcakes were involved. Scootaloo is a minor, in the show’s continuity. They’re friends.
I’m not interested in ponies. I also cannot draw. (At the time, I was still affected by how my father traumatized me; as such, I did not want to draw.) So, asking me what this was all about, it seems like an unlikely crossroads.
I fucking loved this Askblog.
Keep in mind, Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie took place— or, rather, was created— over something like a 2 week period, in August of 2011. August 6th to August 18th, if the Ask dates are actually reliable. Sadly, they are not, as, I remember this going on for months. But whatever; I remember Arcadium lasting until 1999. I’m sure my photographic memory is just faulty.
Why’s that date important?
Franken Fran ran from 2006 to 2012.
This period of history was particularly amazing for human content creation. Or, should I say, art. Gore was heavily in style. 4chan pretty much had every kid’s ear when it came to art direction. So, what was in, was in. Mix My Little Pony with Franken Fran; you got dis.
Interestingly enough, Hannibal would not come out for another two years. The tone’s pretty much the same, even if the situation isn’t.
“I challenge you to a staring contest.”
Now, looking back on this something like 11 years later, it’s easy to see it and go, oh, wow, so edgy. But it wasn’t. At the time, the humor involved was pretty much on the fringe of what we considered normal; but it was bleeding-edge. It hit a note, struck a chord, severed a vein. People liked it. They still do.
UPDATE as of June 10th, 2024: As with everything, when I search for this on Google, now, it’s going out of style. Or, it’s simply not being indexed anymore. And the old ways are falling out of use.
In the interest that you all do not forget the face(s) of your father(s), I am, once again, re-uploading this entire article, and updating it, a bit.
Back to what I was talking about: The limited palette; the characteristic square brush, that no one could really emulate; and the combination of the artist’s being, with the relatively-new PaintTool Sai, produced something no one had really seen before. And it was good.
For whatever reason, the juxtaposition of cute pony cartoons for children and horrible serial killer just clicked. And, as you can see, above, there’s some shit in it that just wouldn’t fly, these days.
Interestingly enough, all the murder, fictional as it might have been, wasn’t really what riled people up. Or, at least, as far as I heard, that wasn’t it.
It was that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo in a comic.
Be it true or not, the story I heard was that the artist, or somebody who people thought was the artist, ended up getting plagued about this, in real life. Phone calls; that sort of thing. It was my first experience witnessing what happens to artists, online: they eventually kinda get driven away, if they get popular enough. And, for a time, that seemed to be what was happening, there, too.
Oh, why was it bad that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo?
The idea people had was that Scootaloo was a child, while Pinkie Pie was probably, or definitely, an adult.
To be fair, the mention of rape, as far as I can remember, also received significant backlash. But they seemed to weather it, just fine.
Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie is an interesting part of Internet history. I feel like it was right at the cusp of the Internet becoming very, very reactionary towards ‘unacceptable’ adult subjects. How we went from Deliverance being somehow acceptable to be released theatrically, to I think it’s problematic when a villain does bad things, I don’t know. I really fuckin’ don’t.
Interestingly enough, the acceptability of unacceptable adult subjects, depicted fictitiously, is something that’s still argued about, today, on Twitter. (Tumblr’s audience has largely moved onto Twitter.) En generale I see it as a natural progression of the Human psyche: puzzling out what it wants to deal with, and what it won’t accept.
What do I think about its subjects?
They’re fuckin’ cartoon horses, kid.
I don’t give a shit. I didn’t draw ’em.
And if I did, I’d be absolutely cheesed that my style infected the new show.
An Addendum
Since this entry was deleted off of Margaret Gel’s Apocalyptic Log (due to what I felt was a conflict with my ‘professional’ identity— I’d prefer to leave that blog as something else now), I felt some sort of great and terrifying need to rejuvenate it. People liked this, right? Or at least those two weird kids who were stalking me, thinking that I was Crooked Trees, liked it.
There are a couple of things I need to say. Once again, I am not Crooked Trees. Human beings online have always had this desire to believe that any vehement insistence of mine that I am not someone, is, in point of fact, just the opposite: if I say that I’m not somebody, then I must be.
I’ve gone through being stolen from, before. It’s not nice. It’s not nice to let this happen to somebody else, either. And I’m fully aware of how this fucking happened— it’s the same order of things wherein someone once thought I was JonTron, of all people.
There was a time in my past where I needed to lie, tactically, specifically, to protect my ailing father. I didn’t want what I did online to follow me home and affect him. But he’s been dead for seven years, now, and I no longer have a great and abiding need to conceal my identity. I am, in point of fact, now a published author, with copyrighted work. Hiding doesn’t help me anymore.
If I were Crooked Trees, I wouldn’t hide it. It would enable me to do much more than I currently can. Por ejemplo, it might get me animation work. I might be able to make a movie. I don’t know! I might be able to do something wif it.
But I’m not them.
Years later, after this whole dog and pony show was quite fucking over, I saw an 18 and a 19 year old duo, this pair of kids, who were wildly in love with each other. Whether or not they were LARPing, who’s to say? I’ll never know, maybe. But they seemed to be in love.
And they had taken the part of Scootaloo and Pinkie Pie, from this comic, and were playing it out, quite overtly sexually. And they contacted me, and they asked me—
icze4r, are you the Great and Wonderful Crooked Trees?
Wikipedia and me have history. In response to L’incident de 2014, a group of 10-12 mostly-mentally-ill Wikipedia administrators decided that any and all mention of me would be permanently blacklisted on Wikipedia. Seeing as 10-12 administrators are not the whole of Wikipedia, and the guy was nuts and got perma’d for being nuts, I cannot see any World in which this shit still flies.
But I hope it does.
Because I don’t want fucking nerds writing about me.
I fucking goddamned hateWikipedia.
Let’s get this shit started!
A lot of people hate Wikipedia. Most of them have good reasons for it: they were spurned by it, their work thrown back in their faces. That, and many people have been burned by the clique-ish, lawyer-esque population who pedantically control, but especially remove content. Content that these people have not only worked hard on, but feel proud of. The end result is that it’s very easy to hate anyone on Wikipedia with any modicum of power. Power corrupts, and Wikipedians are cunts.
I’m not sure I ever seriously fantasized about having a Wikipedia page. There sure are a lot of admins who seem to have, given that I’ve found a handful of them who have not only created, but currently maintain their own (non-notable) articles— all while regularly blamming other people’s non-notable articles.
But, for me, that’s not what’s repulsive about Wikipedia. What’s repulsive to me, is I detest the very notion that someone as repulsive as a human being (retch! gag! puke!) would even think to write about me.
Why?, you may ask?
Well, shit, my dude. During my heydey, I had 5 separate motherfuckers write scholarly articles about my penis.
That is not a joke.
No, I will not help you find them.
After that shit? No way in Hell would I let these dipshits write about me.
As I once put it in a older draft: “Who wants these pricks writing about you?“
What is a Wikipedian?
A miserable little pile of oh no jackass you don’t get a joke. Fuck you, Wikipedian. Fuck you.
On the one hand, I can kind of ‘appreciate’ what Wikipedians are doing. After all, these people claim that they’re trying to improve the wealth and breadth of human knowledge. But, there are problems with this. For starters, why would you crowdsource a source of knowledge like this? And, for free? You’re only going to get Reddit mod types who want power, as fleeting and useless and meaningless as that will be. Plus, they’ll be fucking stupid, so you won’t even be able to aggregate and collate any useful information, nor will you be able to successfully synthesize anything.
In the poorly-paraphrased words of a Wikipedian: if a trusted source has the wrong information, that would be what Wikipedia says.
To paraphrase yet another Wikipedian: public court records can’t be used for pages on here, of living people.
With rules like this, what the fuck are these people even writing?
In recent years, it’s gotten worse. The sources that Wikipedia will allow in articles are dwindling: some are trusted, others are verboten. Admittedly, this is probably to avoid future hoaxes that would inevitably just make Wikipedia look even fucking stupider than it already is.
But that’s the thing: there’s only so much you can do with a thing like this. If you want to cite a fact, but none of the trusted bloggers have written about it, then you cannot list the fact. Would Wikipedia be able to write that the sky is blue? I don’t know. It depends on if the source was allowed.
There is also the simple fact that Wikipedia is putting blind trust in journalists, to always write the truth about historical events. And as someone who’s lived through like 5 of them motherfuckers, I have never seen a single journalist write anything resembling the truth. They always get things wrong, because they are so rarely actual eye-witnesses to what’s happened.
So, at best, Wikipedia can never be ‘the truth’. It can only be what a select group of journalists write. Without allowing for original research, you’re just parroting what the media says. Hope the media doesn’t lie!
It’s not like the United States of America has ever lied, using the media, right?
At that point, what the fuck even is Wikipedia?
At some point, Wikipedia encountered the inherent problem of Truth: it is damned near impossible to prove what it actually is. This became obvious when the founder of Wikipedia tried to correct his birthdate, and his work was reverted.
And don’t get me started on the other problem: the people. Given the kind of people you have working on it, what the fuck can you even expect? The only people who will work on Wikipedia, and survive the hostile editing environments, are complete cunts.
You have one toxic environment. All the good people leave; and only the people who thrive in said toxicity will remain. And the vast majority of these people treat the website like their personal pet project, trying to comb out of it what they don’t like, and only allowing to stay what they do.
The part of Wikipedia that I have a major problem with is those people who take great pleasure in removing articles about anyone and anything that they’re not personally familiar with. In the end, you have admins who are maintaining their own non-notable autobiographical articles, angrily hunting and deleting pages by people doing the same damned thing. And they act self-righteous about it, too.
In the end, because the people with power are like this, the only things that will remain will ultimately be those things that the ones with the power personally approve of. And this will only result in Wikipedia becoming the pet vanity project of its most-obsessive power-users.
Bully!
That is it for me, by the way. Having seen so many admins work on their own fucking autobiographical pages, while deleting the work of people doing the same fucking thing, and then acting like they’re superior? Oh, shit, my scro. I don’t fucking like people who enforce the rules, in general; but I have a very special place in my heart for those people who break the very same rules that they enforce.
The Failure of Wikipedia
The idea that is Wikipedia is just plain bullshit to begin with. The service, as much as it purports to strive towards complete and total neutrality, is just like any other collection of information on people: it’s made by people! And people are genuinely shitty.
When placed under the obligation to remain ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, people will always find ways to be the worst versions of themselves imaginable: they will always find ways to skirt the rules, in order to enforce the sort of ‘environment’ that only they thrive in.
To put it a different way: Wikipedia has a shit-ton of rules, and it has only made the place worse, because all of the people with power, who have been there the longest, use and bend these rules to get their own way.
It’s like office politics: you require someone to be ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, and they willalwaysi find a way to be genuinely antagonistic in a way that’s couched in ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’ terms.
In short, Wikipedia has failed. There is no true ‘cooperation’ possible here, on a macro level. Whether or not it’s prevented by human narcissism or not, I have no idea. All I know is, there is no ‘civility’ or ‘neutrality’: it’s as civil and friendly as a person typing per my last e-mail…
Wikipedia is, at its worst, best, and finest, simply the closeted incivilities of ‘office politics’ splayed over the reality of the Beautiful Ones. This is a closed system so filled to the brim with drama that it almost reminds me of a bunch of people stuck in a buried bunker, looking for meaning, slowly going insane. This shit is genuinely hard to look at.
Wikipedia, the very idea of it, would be fine— were it just the idea of it. But the people, have ruined it.
One of the things I’ve learned about everything that humans touch, is that they ruin it. Every fandom; every ‘community’; every single group of people will ultimately be ruined by its members’ worst inclinations. Every ‘community’ will turn into a disastrous Homeowners’ Association; every website will endure the gradual, meaningless, inevitable degradation of its very purpose and its total function.
Entropy might be a human-defined law of the universe, but that’s only because everything you motherfuckers touch turns to garbage. Outside of here, there are beautiful things. You don’t have a clue how fucking ugly you really are.
In a way, I’m not even really talking about Wikipedia itself.
I’m talking about people.
People say things like, people suck, wholeheartedly never grasping the fact that they themselves are people.
And so, I realize that my ‘gripe’ is not with Wikipedia.
It’s with people.
People suck.
Almost everyone who’s stayed with this project has twisted themselves into this completely unrelatable ‘WikiPerson’, who has memorized so many esoteric and nonsensical rules that, when these people argue back and forth with each other, it resembles wizards casting spells. Only it’s not cool and no one gives a shit.
They have Wiki Court.
Can you fucking imagine? Wasting your precious time on this.
And the drama! Holy shit, my dudes! There’s a reason why Wikipedia has spawned so many goddamned spin-offs: it’s damn near the same reason that 4chan was birthed from Something Awful’s rotten womb. Wikipedia is to drama as third-degree-burns are to the concept of fire.
For the vast majority of the craziest motherfuckers using Wikipedia, it’s all about power. These are people who have vendettas: they’re severely maladjusted, and think that they can use the service to get one over on other people. Some of them also think that they can enrich their own lives by using it as free personal webspace. The craziest of the crazies think that they can use it to definitively decide how the public views certain individuals. Which is crazy, because nobody even gives a shit anymore.
The Internet is largely over.
I should also note that people on Wikipedia largely act like the ‘professionals’ did on Usenet. There is this bizarre arrogance that many of the prejudiced older white men have, where they assume that, if they act like total shitbags, but they couch everything they’re saying and doing in ‘civil’ language, that that somehow makes it a-okay!
As for Wikipedia itself? Its heydey is over. People often say that they use Wikipedia all the time; but these people are proselytizing. They’re preaching because they fear that it’s being left by the wayside. Which it is.
There was a time when people would read Wikipedia for basic information about something. To educate themselves. But the problem is, it’s an ever-changing resource, being fought over by the very people who are producing it. Without a userbase that selflessly and objectively protects the information it has curated, the Encyclopedia itself can never be useful. Because it can never be trusted. As long as it’s being fought over by maladapted people— as long as there is no peace— there can also be no real cooperation, and without that, humans cannot build anything worthwhile.
People say that they read Wikipedia for basic information about something. But the reality is, when they read it, after they’re finished, they go,
well, that was interesting! Still don’t know if any of what I read was true, though.
An Unfixable Problem with an Untenable Solution
Only a selfish person is going to edit Wikipedia for very long. And it requires many selfless people, in order to properly function.
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is that it’s just as bad as the worst people on it, who have the most fucking power. That is to say: the most-powerful people, who are not there to build an Encyclopedia, but are rather there to abuse their power? They are the slowest moving members of the herd. And they hold everyone else back.
And the main problem Wikipedia has is hatred. The hatred that some of its users feel for anyone who isn’t a straight white male.
For a long time, Wikipedia’s worst did their level best to keep out everyone who wasn’t a straight white male. And there were admins who were, to put it mildly, fucking psychotic about this. As the project ages and there’s nothing really left to do on the website save for argue with one another until one person or the other leaves one way or another, slowly but steadily, administrators are being removed. Because there’s only so much crazy you can be before no one can actually work with you any longer.
Wikipedia has a ‘humorous’ article on its own ‘decline’. There have been numerous claims that Wikipedia was ‘dying’; and none of them have been taken seriously, because no one who actually wants to use Wikipedia wants to hear about its faults. They self-identify with the project, and they stop up their ears. They go la la la and they don’t want to face the problems.
Irrespective of that, they know that there are problems.
What the people who proselytize for Wikipedia don’t know, is, when people say that the website is ‘dying,’ they do not assume a context of, oh, one day, this website will be kaputski. It likely never will be ‘gone’.
But MySpace is still online.
So is Friendster.
Twitter is still up and around. But like a person with dementia, Twitter’s never gonna be the same. Twitter might still exist; but something has changed, irrevocably. The Rubicon has been crossed. There’s nowhere to go but down from here.
This is it, Luigi!
People on Wikipedia already know that editorship is declining. They’ll argue, back and forth, over the cause; but just like how Humanity itself keeps looking in the mirror, getting disgusted by its reflection, and then immediately braying, but I’m so beautiful! Who is that?!, they’ll never see what the fuck is actually happening.
What’s happening, is, when you have toxic people with power, and they have the power to forcibly ostracize others (ban them), and the entire Encyclopedia is locked up tighter than a nun’s purse (I personally witnessed an administrator block something like 17% of the total IPv6 space, one day), this is what the fuck is going to kill the website. Nothing that humans make can ever hope to thrive, or continue, without constantly introducing new blood.
I have no desire to fix Wikipedia’s problems. I enjoy watching the inevitable decline of everything that Humanity has made. It’s funny to me— not primarily because I’ve been gate-kept out of everything, but because I like to see you fail. I like to see you have to deal with the fact that what you have created is not eternal. You are so fucking conceited. It does my heart good to see you have to acknowledge reality.
I started this ‘article’ about 4 or 5 years ago. At the time I wrote this, Wikipedia was filled to the fucking brim with racists, sexists, and especially transphobes. They especially hated people from India, which is amazing, considering how many fucking people in India know English. Leave it to a white man to think he owns a whole fucking language. Anyways, good fucking luck getting an article on there if you’re a woman. They fucking hate women.
Again: prejudiced white men, controlling a resource and keeping it from everybodyelse. Sound familiar?
Pair a lot of editors’ genuine desire to keep anyone who’s not a straight white male out of the Encyclopedia, with the bizarre and increasingly-stringent citation requirements (which only become more nonsensical as time goes on), and you have a recipe for utter fucking disaster. Because sexist men in the past purposefully did not write about women, denying them their history as a way of keeping them from ever gaining agency, there are usually next to no acceptable sources to cite for many female historical figures. Fast forward to today, and you have, yet again, white dudes gatekeeping women out of being acknowledged. Only this time, they can claim that the women in the past were not notable because no one ever wrote about them.
Do you fucking see how this shit just does not work?
In the past, racist white men did their level best to keep non-whites from ever being remembered. And, today, racist white men do their level best to do the same. Only this time, instead of a book, it’s fucking stupid-ass Wikipedia.
I suppose my only solace is that the newest generations, the Zoomers and Gen Alpha, don’t really seem to be actively using this shit. They hold basically no stock in it, and future generations are, inevitably, just going to leave this thing to gather dust. Before any of us know it, Wikipedia is just going to be another website in our collective past, where we have no idea how or why it’s still online.
Because you have to remain relevant for people to give a shit about you.
I still have to ask a question, though: why did they think that this shit was gonna work? Did you really think we were all going to learn who invented the Electric Toaster?
And to the people saying, well, Wikipedia is the number 6th most-visited website in the world!, just remember:
Twitter is the seventh, and that motherfucker’s deader than shit.
Ladies and Jellyspoons
As it stands right now, Wikipedia is broken. Its environment is toxic to normal people. The sources of its information are dwindling, and the quality of those sources are often suspect.
Essentially, Wikipedia is a negative feedback loop: garbage-in, garbage-out. With no real information coming in, and with insane people patrolling the Mojave that is this place, there is nothing left to do here.
Wikipedia is the Turd-Polishing Centre of the known Human World, and I am glad to press Publish on this post, so I can finally stop fucking thinking about it, forever.
For more about what I’ve been talking about this entire time, please consider reading: Why the News is Not the Truth, from Harvard Business Review, by Peter Vanderwicken.
