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pikipekarmy https://www.tumblr.com/pikipekarmy/715416615346438144/deceased :

deceased

I’m writing this from beyond the grave, rest in peace me–

i got one of those scan tasks, right? Scan Pokestop! I got it on like a Wednesday or something and i was like ugh. you know what, this is a pokestop that is the mural on the wall of a business. It is on an exterior wall. I will wait until Sunday, when the business is closed, and come back and scan it when the parking lot will be empty and nobody will see me do this.

Like, there’s ways, to scan a Pokestop without looking like you’re taking videos of things, which tends to unnerve people you know? But it’s sort of hard to get good footage that way. And I know someone who was talking about someone else who’d gotten banned from scan tasks for uploading junky scans. So it’s best to take good footage if you’re going to bother with it.

(Someone else was like don’t do them, don’t do extra spy work for Niantic, and they’re so right and valid, but I do collect poffins because I’m weirdly obsessive about making my buddies happy, and the other thing is often 10 of those blue pokeballs and i never have enough of those, so. I am a sucker and i do the scan tasks. I think it’s valid to resist them but I also can’t resist them.)

Anyway. Sunday. I rolled down there and hopped out of my car and just super lazily took a video spinning around in the parking lot and then ran the camera across the whole mural and the surroundings. I also know that if the pokestop is marking something that’s not there anymore, it is noble not to snitch– refuse those assignments guys!! Don’t get someone’s fave stop decommissioned because you narked by uploading a scan that shows it gone!– but in this case, the business was still there and most importantly the mural was unchanged, so I did it.

And then as I finished and turned around to go back to my car, a woman popped out of the door of the dark business. “Excuse me,” she said, “why are you taking video?”

Fuck. I didn’t have it in me to dissemble. “Oh no,” I said, “it’s that stupid Pokemon Go game, it wants pictures of landmarks, I didn’t think anyone would be here so I figured I’d just take a picture–” and I turned my phone toward her to show where I had just been attempting to catch a lil dude on my way back to the car.

She gave me an incredulous up-and-down look. “I didn’t know people still played that game,” she said.

Well, busted. “I do,” I admitted, defeated, and in that moment as she stared at me I remembered I was wearing terrible yoga pants and, most damningly of all, socks with sandals, because I hadn’t planned on going anywhere and hadn’t even really meant to get out of the car. So I died on the spot, and she turned around and went back into the business, which in my defense was closed, I should have been safe.

Anyway. The afterlife is not as peaceful as I’d hoped, but perhaps such an ignominious cause of death doesn’t get you much by way of eternal rest. Don’t make me haunt this pokestop in my sandals, ma'am.

(And always remember folks, if the pokestop or gym is of a landmark that’s been torn down or otherwise heavily altered, don’t fucking snitch. Delete that scan task!)

(PSA: You can opt out of scan tasks entirely in your settings menu. Under Uploads deselect Enable Pokestop Scan.) (Your picture was not posted)

centaurianthropology:thiswaycomessomethingwicked:it really does bug me that we have this weird...

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centaurianthropology https://centaurianthropology.tumblr.com/post/715261263989686272/thiswaycomessomethingwicked-it-really-does-bug-me :

thiswaycomessomethingwicked https://thiswaycomessomethingwicked.tumblr.com/post/656103659173789696/it-really-does-bug-me-that-we-have-this-weird :

it really does bug me that we have this weird caveating in some conversations around Dark and Messed Up Writing (fanfic and real fiction alike) where there’s that pussyfooting of “they could be working through trauma/they could be processing things/they could this that or the other” in some way to still cater to the purity politics brigade.

And it’s like, who cares? Who cares why people write what they write? Who gives a fuck? Maybe they’re working through trauma, absolutely. Maybe they’re not and they just really like the dynamic of these characters. Maybe they think it’s interesting to explore the dark, twisted and fucked up side of what it means to be human. Maybe they thought it was hot. Maybe they just had this thought and it wouldn’t leave them alone, and sure it was twisted, but they had to get it out so they did in a safe normal way which is through writing. Maybe it’s some combination of the above. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Who cares.

*Who fucking cares. *

Christ ya’ll. No one needs to make excuses for why they write what they write.

Full stop.

The end.

No more, no less.

tag appropriately; if you don’t like don’t read; if someone doesn’t tag appropriately be an adult and be polite about giving them a heads up; if you can’t be an adult about that you shouldn’t be online reading fic.

god.

Not sure if I’ve reblogged this before, but even if so, I feel like it’s always a good thing to repost. Honestly it always baffled me why people were like this until I realized it might be something similar to what I’ve seen in TTRPG spaces. It’s widely known there that different people RP for different reasons. Some of us, like me, see it as an acting challenge. We love getting out of our own heads, writing characters who are nothing like us just to try to settle into and get at least something of a glimpse of the world through new eyes. I often write for the same reason: I love writing people who aren’t and never will be me, because it’s so interesting trying to settle into completely different perspectives and work through them in my head, even and sometimes especially the perspective of terrible people who do terrible things. It’s fascinating. What sort of mental gymnastics does someone like that do? What justifications do they come up with? And what about the people who know they’re terrible and have just decided to double down on it? How does that work? I love trying to figure my way through all those perspectives! Doing research, watching documentaries and interviews, all that stuff is part of what makes both writing and RP fun for me.

But there are a different sort who see both RP and, I expect, writing, as purely an extension of themselves. They are locked into their own perspective so tightly that the thought that what you write or what you play might not 100% just be exploration of yourself or your own beliefs/experiences seems impossible to them. So they see something RPing a terrible person, or they see someone write Dark Fic or stories that deal with really gnarly topics, and they think “this is what that person believes and who they are, because literally the only reason I have ever written/played/done anything is to Express or Explore Myself”. Often these people are very young, but sometimes they never grow out of that “I am the protagonist of reality” phase of young teenage-hood, and so of course everything they do is about themselves. And they think the same of everyone else. So if you write about something, to them, you must believe it. If you have a villain who is not a mustache twirling caricature who gets visibly punished for their wickedness a la the Hayes Code, you must secretly agree with that villain. Because why else would you write something, if not to Write About Yourself?

Once I realized that, I think I at least sort of understood where their fallacy lay, and how difficult it would be for them to break out of it. If you’re so trapped in your own perspective you can’t imagine playing/writing something that isn’t your own personal experience, of course you can’t imagine anyone else doing anything else. It’s literally the same root problem.

Add in a healthy dose of weird internet Purity Culture/fundamentalism rebranded, and the feedback loop only further traps them into never stepping outside their own perspective and their own well-trod comfort zones. They are terrified of stepping out of them because they’ve conflated exploring other perspectives as appropriation in every context, and firmly believe that, since their own perspective is the only one they can truly know, it’s the only one they can ever explore. They lock themselves down harder and harder in an effort to be a ‘pure’ and ‘wholesome’ person, and end up never breaking free of their own very tiny worlds.

It’s a vicious cycle, and one I genuinely don’t know how to address. (Your picture was not posted)