Just Another Lurker

...but occasionally I feel the urge to reply to stuff

[tanadrin]

the kitsch is growing on me a little. who potentially needs to buy 3 magic wands at once and maybe a devil girl body pillow? idk. but if you do salem has you covered. it’s all very Gilmore Girls meets Halloween Town. needs some kind of TV show where the local chamber of commerce is trying to keep tourism up and also dealing with the forces of darkness. im imagining the style ams register of parks and rec with the occasional intrusion of buffy the vampire slayer-like hijinks.

[bodegadulac]

So, apparently some of you aren't aware???

Wildbow comics is fucking old, but i might as well start easy and tell you the lore of pre Apollyon Wars Taylor.

(Actual first appareance of Taylor Hebert and the homage i did for badly drawn worm)

Around the 60s Wildbow comics finally won a whole shitshow of a lawsuit against DC comics, that at the time was suing whatever superman shaped characters they could find, and Wildbow had several superman ripoffs, so, in the meantime they tried to create new more original characters, one of them was Aegis, the human shield.

He was hip teenager that had to deal with both teenager problems and superhero problems yadda yadda, and one of those troubles was falling in love with the creepy supervillain.

Taylor Hebert was created as both a supervillain and a love interest of Aegis, as well as a clear parody of spiderman, having a similar background as bullied teens that got bug powers, but while Peter got bitten by a radioactive spider, Taylor got cursed by the Skittering Scarab medallion (wich was a blue beetle rip off instead).

This silver age Taylor didn't go by skitter (and she wouldn't be called that until the Apollyon Wars reboot) but instead she was bug girl, and she had more vaguely insect powers (stenght, agility, endurance etc)

The thing that made her different from others was that she was a sympathetic villain that never went to far. She was esentially a teenager lashing out, just in the more augmented reality of comics. And that made it very interesting to flirt with redemption, but there was one thing that prevented that from happening...

[bodegadulac]

(Screenshot of 'Unbeatable Aegis' episode 8 season 2 'The Undersiders Unite')

The undersiders, led by the mysterious Coil was a group of supervillains Aegis had previously beaten, now joined together to finish him, and commits many crimes along the way. They were also surprisingly great friends.

Don't get me wrong, they betrayed each other a lot, but they always ended up forgiving each other, because they were the only people that truly got what was to be a supervillain with a gimmich that everybody laughed at. Specially Bug Girl, who finally got friends that accepted her in this sort of toxic found family.

It was a clear contrast with Charlie's (yeah, he became Carlos after the first reboot) own lonelyness, he constantly ruined relationships to keep his secret and it really made tempting for him to just... change sides.

It was the easy road that Taylor took, and that he was still happy about. And thats honestly quite facinating, because it then makes you think. What would happen if you take that away?

[bodegadulac]

(Aegis the human shield issue 123, the night tattletale died)

There is a reason the night tattletale died is considered one of the two things that ended the WB silver age (The other being Vikare's death), because the wiplash is fucking real.

You just had a whole arc of Aegis beating coil, about Sarah (i still find very funny how Worm made it her real name instead of the post apollyon one) trying to get out of the whole criminal lifestyle and wanting to run away with Taylor (With all the Sapphic vibes that had), so having Coil's fuckass son come back and fuck it all up is so heartbreaking man.

Because it was all so preventable. If Taylor had trusted Charlie to help her, if Leroy (Silver age Hellhound) hadn't accidentaly ratted out Tattletale, if Sarah hadn't decided to trust herself and not her powers as a show of trust... she would be alive.

Still salty they used it to springboard Taylor's and Charlie's relationship and rush her redemption arc. But beyond that, it's very fucking good. So sad this is the last good Bug girl story before Worm tho.

[bodegadulac]

(The iconic Giant-Size Wards #1 with Chariot, Flechette, Weld, Aegis, Weaver and Tecton)

You know when a story is good but your fave gets dragged through the mud in it? Because like, the All New All Different Wards are great, when it came out it was a great step forward in representation and Tecton is just so fucking cool (The Irregular Cinematic Universe shouldn't have focused on him tho).

But Taylor doesn't do anything besides being Aegis' girlfriend in it? Like, you can't tell they didn't know what to do with her, hell Peter Ness didn't bother to make her gay (and he did make everyone he could very fucking gay).

You could make a good arc out of how she doesn't really fit in the group compared with the undersiders, but whem they meet it's like they don't know each other, it's so fucking infuriating.

Are you telling me there is no angst because she switched sides? Thats some bullshit. The only good thing that came out of Taylor has weaver was the name and the suit. Nothing more. Except one single story.

[bodegadulac]

(The both famous and infamous conclusion to the Deluge event)

So, at one point they introduce the travellers as this foil villain group. And one of them, echidna, makes a clone of tattletale to fuck with Taylor. And holy shit, that was so good, you finally adresses the elephant in the room, i wonder what developement will it lead-

She fucking dies in the next arc. Because Aegis has to suffer. Leviathan fucking kills her with no fanfare. Yeah, that leviathan (not really, it was like a dude, more like the villain from the protectorate movies).

You know that she was one of the reason's Gail Simone made the women in refrigerators blog right? It was that bad. Jean grey, Gwen Stacy, Barbara Gordon, Kyle's girlfriend and Taylor Hebert.

And in less than a year, Charlie started dating Shadow stalker because he is a SLUT and i hate him. And the worst part was that Taylor was so unpopular that she didn't get love from the writer's like for example Barbara becoming oracle.

No, instead she got...

[bodegadulac]

(Taylor Hebert comes back as Kephri, Wards #411)

Most people already know it, but this whole thing was just the result of one editor insisting really hard into making an event that nobody wanted to do that pretty much ruined the Wildbow comics lore.

So, the magical amulet? Actually an artifact created by the Skittering Entity or some shit. Because actually all capes get their powers from the entities, isn't that neat? Isn't that cool? Scion is now even specialler now.

And you know, even with that, even with fucking soace magic alien resurecting Taylor... it could have been good man. You could have Taylor changed by the experience, trying to come with terms with her own death and place in the world, confront Aegis for moving on so fast... but instead we got a Madellyn Pryor level character assasination.

The omnicidal jealous ex, thats the bedt they could come up with, holy shit.

This whole retcon fucked up the lore so bad they rebooted the whole universe to run away from it.

So you could say Taylor Heber is the indirect cause of Apollyon wars.

[bodegadulac]

(Fellow Fridged woman Glory Girl in Apollyon Wars #6)

So, even with the end of the world editorial needs to give Taylor Hebert one last fuck you. Do you know the amount of hatedom born from Taylor killing Glory girl? Do you know how many people, to this day, still refuse to read worm because she killed their blorbo in 1988???

And you know why? To make Scion sad, to show he had humanity unlike Apollyon and the other entities. People fucking clapped when Scion killed Taylor, nobody gave a fuck, or stopped to say "damn, so sad Taylor got possesed after death".

FLECHETTE, FUCKING FLECHETTE SAID "Take that you worm!" When i red it i was so fucking angry man. That book was just hype moments and aura wirh a side of mysoginy.

But in a cosmic sense I find hilarious that Gold morning and Worm is just reverse Apollyon Wars. You can tell McCrae also fucking hated it.

So yeah, thats how the story of Pre-Apollyon wars Taylor ends, dying alone how she was scared to.

Please tell me if you want me to get into some other WB comics characters or if to make a summary of Post Apollyon Wars Taylor (and i sure do have opinions about her).

[self-loving-vampire]

One pitfall when trying to analyze fantasy settings based on real world history is ignoring all of the worldbuilding implications the magic has, and I notice some posts here are maybe a bit over-eager about sharing such information to the point where they fall into it.

For example, posts saying that fantasy settings where gender equality and queer people are normalized are unrealistic because in real life the child mortality rate was very high and etc.

Except they're talking about a story is not set in Real Life Medieval Europe but in a world with versatile healing magic made accessible even to the poor to some degree through church charity or government public health institutions, and even spells or magical items that can instantly and completely transition someone.

Or that one post that was going around about how expecting the demon army to surrender after the defeat of the demon king is "great man theory" but in pretty much all fantasy settings that have such a thing as a demon king he's usually a demigod who can legitimately solo armies, is physically near-invulnerable, and obliterate entire cities.

Killing the demon king in such a setting would be less like assassinating the president and more like erasing the enemy's nuclear weapons. It's actually credible that the balance of power might start to shift from there even ignoring the effects on morale.

If you ignore stuff like that you might actually be engaging with the setting less than the rationalist fanfic writers.

[beleester]

I really love the bit in A Practical Guide to Evil where a noble who's nagging Catherine to get married and produce an heir tells her "if your majesty prefers the company of women, the House of Light does have access to certain miracles..."

Like, on the one hand it's a fun way to establish that it's a queer-friendly setting - nobody is inherently opposed to having a lesbian queen, they've had this problem before and you can solve it with magic. But at the same time it highlights the reason a magical solution would be necessary - because she needs an heir to ensure the continuity of her dynasty. And that problem isn't going to get handwaved with magic - the question of "how does Catherine ensure her reforms will outlive her?" is a major focus of the plot.

So the offhand mention of a convenient queer-friendly solution actually helps the story, by establishing that the nobles aren't just being sexist, they have serious concerns about the risk of a succession crisis!

[loki-zen]

has anyone considered that it was probably her house too. where else was she supposed to put her chintz?

[paxamericana]

the x files is funny because at the time it was “progressive” or whatever to have the ultra-rational, levelheaded character be a woman

but it’s also a show where all the fucked up alien shit actually is real, so she’s just constantly wrong about everything

[cryptid-sighting]

What’s funny is how often they’re both wrong. Mulder will be like “the victims all had their livers scooped clean out this is obviously the aliens escalating from cattle mutilation” and Scully will be like “don’t be silly Mulder this is clearly just a serial killer who’s really good with surgical tools” and then it turns out the actual killer is an immortal sewer man who comes out ever quarterly century to feast on human liver.

[feather-ball]

I cannot stress enough that this is literally the plot of an actual episode

[theaudientvoid]

Not just any epidode, but the third episode ever, and the first “monster of the week” episode. The series starts off with two episodes of aliens and government conspiracies, and then, Bam! Sewer Man!

[ewingstan]

I’ve figured out why barely anyone ships Brian/Taylor in the Worm fandom.

Its not because of the codependency. Its not because of the f/f preference in fanfic circles. Its not because of any perceived lack of chemistry between the characters.

No, the real reason is because any attempt at romantic fanart would look like this:

[impliedbass]

What if we kissed… in the bugs and darkness cloud 💕

[nerdy-arty]

Convention comm. They let me draw whatever two girls I wanted so I went with uminyamu

[freakinasheet]

That's not a normal girl thing???

X-Men vs Street Fighter (1996)

[feotakahari]

As TV Tropes points out, even Dan Hibiki is a superhero when compared to real people.

[beleester]

I'm not the first to point this out, but it is sort of odd how the Marvel universe has no issue with people who can throw fireballs unless your ability to throw fireballs comes from a genetic mutation.

[phaeton-flier]

Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.

[phaeton-flier]

The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there

[theaudientvoid]

[centrally-unplanned]

Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.

And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.

[c3rvida3]

The exit sign of a middle school hallway is a sort of mezuzah for tween boys if you really think about it.

[creature-adjacent]

Carnivorous plants doin this is so funny to me

They don't wanna eat their pollinators :(

[questionablepastries]

[chocolatesquared]

Visit Original Link

[mendelpalace]

So guess what? The composer of this legendary JRPG-esque song for The Weather Channel actually came forward recently, having learned about the song’s quasi-meme status. His name is Chris Kennedy.

[weaselandfriends]

Starship Troopers (novel)

My copy of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers proudly declares it "the controversial classic of military adventure." Military there is plenty, adventure not so much, but of course the real eye grabber is the controversy, which has mired the novel since its release. Is the futuristic sci-fi society Heinlein depicts fascist? Director Paul Verhoeven, who experienced the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands as a child, sure thought so when he adapted the book into a 1997 film; openly condemnatory of the novel in interviews, he framed shots to mimic Leni Riefenstahl and dressed Neil Patrick Harris in Gestapo uniform to make his point clear.

Verhoeven's film is itself one of the most fascinating Hollywood blockbusters ever made thanks to the satirical gloss it places on the source material, but I intend here to instead focus on the novel itself. I also don't intend to answer whether Starship Troopers is fascist, or libertarian, or some other offshoot (racially integrated fascism, maybe). Instead, I have one really pressing question:

Does the military in Heinlein's military society actually function at all?

Heinlein served in the military—during peacetime. Specifically, he served in the US Navy from 1929 to 1934, when he was discharged for health reasons. Prior to serving, he attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis starting in 1925. Taken altogether, this term of service is dominated by the process of training to become a soldier, and this experience is reflected in Starship Troopers by almost exactly half of the book being dedicated to boot camp rather than actual combat. In fact, there are precious few combat scenes in this tale of supposed "military adventure," limited to:

A routine raid at the beginning of the novel where the hero spends most of his time lobbing bombs at civilian infrastructure

A brief and confused depiction of "Operation Bughouse," an attempt by the humans to invade and capture the Bug home planet that immediately goes off the rails and ends in disaster

A detailed depiction of "Operation Royalty," in which the hero establishes a perimeter without resistance, manages troop reconnaissance, and finally goes to fight some Bugs in their tunnels only for a piece of debris to fall and knock him unconscious (the mission is over when he wakes up)

It's a strange absence of military action in a novel otherwise so committed to detailing the realistic minutiae of day-to-day military life, though a reasonable omission for an author who never saw any action himself.

However, Heinlein's personal understanding of the military from an entirely peacetime lens—studying, drilling, training—skews his ability to understand what a military actually does.

This confusion is most obvious in the depiction of the main branch of the military described in the story, the Mobile Infantry (MI for short). The MI are simultaneously framed as disposable grunts used mainly as cannon fodder and highly trained elites who perform special missions with unparalleled finesse. On the one hand, they fight in power armor, which protagonist Johnny Rico describes as intuitively easy to use, compensating for all deficiencies in strength and speed with "negative feedback," requiring only a few days of training at most to get the hang of (and that training mostly dedicated to using its radio circuits effectively), while able to pack firepower as devastating as portable atomic bombs. In Operation Bughouse, the MI is deployed en masse for (attempted) shock and awe tactics; while their mass annihilation is seen as tragic, it's also par for the course throughout the rest of the story. The low survival rate of MI troopers is constantly mentioned, any named character has a good chance of offhandedly dying in a paragraph summary at any given time, and even officers (who always go out onto the field with their men) are said to "buy it" in droves—one line mentions that officers die at a higher rate than privates, because they are always the first to make their orbital drops onto a planet.

On the other hand, despite this disposability, the MI is extremely choosy about who it lets in. Rico's boot camp starts with 2,000 hopefuls and ends with under 200; everyone else is simply sent home, deemed not good enough to be in the military at all. And this in a military branch that exclusively fights in power armor, which removes the physical limitations of elite combat. The training to become an officer is even more demanding, despite the fact that officers drop like flies and Rico claims there are never enough officers to enable a squad to operate at optimal efficiency. All of this is on top of the fact that even making it to boot camp is a struggle; the military actively uses its most mangled recruiters to dissuade as many people as possible from signing up, and once they do sign up the recruiter is liable to flunk them from joining any branch except as a guinea pig for weapons testing. This is a military that only wants the best of the best, the physical and intellectual elite, which it proceeds to train for years just so they can die a few minutes into their first Normandy Beach-like drop.

And while fighting an existential threat that is truly built on disposable fodder. As Rico explains: "Every time we killed a thousand bugs at the cost of one MI it was a net victory for the Bugs." This comparison is fundamentally illogical; if the military wants to kill Bugs, the Navy can nuke a planet from orbit and eradicate all life on it. The logistics of killing shouldn't be a factor for the MI, whose military successes as depicted in the story are performing state-sponsored terrorism (blowing up that civilian infrastructure during the raid is used as an alternative to glassing the planet because the goal is to terrorize them into defecting from the Bugs) and capturing a live specimen of a Brain Bug so the military can understand it better. Why does it matter how many Bugs are killed per MI, then? Why are the MI used like fodder when planet glassing exists?

Of course, everything in Starship Troopers is filtered through the perspective of its protagonist, Johnny Rico. And Rico is confused. He is confused about how he conceptualizes himself as a soldier. Sometimes he describes himself as a "foot slogger," sometimes as a "scalpel." Of course, Rico doesn't know anything, understand anything. He doesn't know why he's fighting. Is it to earn the right to vote in this society where only veterans can vote? He thinks so at first, then later decides he doesn't actually care about voting. Despite all his Moral Philosophy lecturers telling him that the current government is "scientifically moral" because it is founded on its members achieving self-sacrificing devotion to the highest possible cause (humanity as a whole), Rico seems to have no real interest in humanity and refers to civilians back on Earth dismissively the few times he does refer to them. His devotion is only to his unit. When he learns his mother died, "smeared" when the Bugs hit Buenos Aires, it screws him up a little. His lieutenant asks him if he wants some time off; Rico says no, preferring to "wait until the outfit all took R&R together." He continues:

I'm glad I did it that way, because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been along when the Lieutenant bought it . . . and that would have been just too much to be borne.

He's able to bear not being there for his mother's death. The implication is that his lieutenant, his squad, is more important.

This flies in the face of the lectures on morality littered throughout the story. In the same lecture about achieving self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity, the instructor Dubois discusses the "juvenile delinquents" of the 20th century. Street gangs, he means. Dubois claims these delinquents were morally undeveloped because they had loyalty only to the unit of their gang, rather than to society, the nation, the world... yet isn't Rico himself only really loyal to his "gang," his military unit? Is this "scientifically moral" society not simply sublimating the exact "immoral" impulses of the street gang into its own disposable tools?

That contradiction points to the real reason why Heinlein's military is so nonsensical. Despite officers being hard to come by, despite the MI being chronically understaffed, officers drop first -- to boost the morale of the troops who jump after them. It's the romantic notion of the general who leads from the front, which flies in the face of even basic military strategy (it's bad, actually, when the chain of command gets disrupted and your best men die first), but which feels virtuous, which hearkens to heroic ballads of soldiers past (ballads Heinlein loves and quotes liberally throughout the story). Hence too the confusion about what the MI even is: it is whatever it needs to be to feel pride about itself at any given time, whether that be via expression of elite soldiering, when the MI is doing elite tasks with finesse, or the beautiful expression of noble sacrifice, when the MI is mowed down as fodder.

(As an aside: Despite how highly Heinlein esteems sacrificing one's life for one's country, he manages to mention as one of the positives of his ideal society that taxes are low. Sacrificing one's money for one's country, I suppose, is a bridge too far.)

Heinlein's vision of the military is one seen by a man in perpetual training, never in combat. A man who served safely between the two greatest wars humanity ever fought, who got to watch both wars from the sidelines. A military that can always be the ideal it wishes it was, righteous and noble, and never has to butt up against the reality of what it becomes when its true function is inevitably brought to bear.

Verhoeven's adaptation does not really critique fascism. There is no explicit commentary on Heinlein's society within the film, only implicit commentary via the visual connection to the Nazis. Verhoeven assumes the audience already considers fascism loathsome, and doesn't bother explaining why that is. In doing so, Verhoeven's adaptation becomes much more concerned with critiquing propaganda; the way an ideology can be implanted in someone, transforming them into a willing soldier for a cause. In doing so, Verhoeven much more directly strikes at the heart of what Starship Troopers the novel is really obsessed with. Is Heinlein's proposed society good, or even functional? Like all proposed societies, Heinlein claims it will be both good and functional because it will be run exclusively by good people (military veterans). At its base level, it's merely another shade of the theoretical "benevolent dictatorship," only Heinlein is convinced veterans must necessarily be benevolent. (As with all these proposed benevolent dictatorships, nobody ever stops to ask whether the benevolent dictator is competent too.) Heinlein has wholly bought into the narrative of the military, and prioritizes that narrative over the reality of how the military functions. Starship Troopers is, for all its dry logistical minutiae, simply a story where the man Heinlein wishes he was stands on top.

Before Starship Troopers, I read a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, an author who was actually a fascist, or at least a Nazi collaborator in occupied France. This novel, the semi-autobiographical Journey to the End of the Night, details Céline's experience in World War I, a war Heinlein only ever understood from a distance. Céline recounts being caught up in a sudden rush of patriotic fervor to enlist, only to realize in the trenches the utter horror of war, the depravity and the insanity of it, and to immediately do anything in his power to escape it. Despite this, he was wounded—wounded heroically even—and received the medaille militaire, an award that would later save him from serious prosecution after his much less patriotic activities during WWII.

Céline looked upon the medal as a joke, the war a joke, all of it a joke. He would despise war thereafter, he would despise governments, he would despise all authority. In his cynical writings he skews anarchist, if not merely nihilist. Yet he wound up carrying water for the Nazis, producing propaganda for them that even the Nazis at times found too extreme to print. Why? The reason is simple.

Céline really, really, really hated Jews.

These two novels by two supposed fascists could not be more dissimilar. Celine and Heinlein would despise each other, are in many regards utterly ideologically opposed. I suppose you can discover in this contradiction the mercurial nature of fascism, which seems to be any kind of radical right-wingism at any time. Heinlein reveals that his protagonist Johnny Rico is Filipino on almost the final page of the book, as though it's a twist, similar to the twist Verhoeven pulls when NPH marches into frame in full Gestapo regalia during the film's climax. Aha, Verhoeven seems to say, it was fascist all along—and you didn't realize! Aha, Heinlein seems to say, it wasn't fascist (or at least racist) all along—and you didn't realize!

In the end, though, Heinlein was an author of speculative fiction. He existed only in theory, only in the mind, only in the space of narrative. For him, the military—war itself—was a narrative. Céline and Verhoeven lived through war, and for better or worse that experience informed their art. Heinlein could write about war the way he did only because war meant nothing to him.

[cleolinda]

Alabama station in disbelief after 200-foot radio tower stolen

Radio station WJLX can no longer broadcast its AM programming since the incident.

“What do you mean the tower is gone? Are you sure you’re in the right place? I actually used more colorful words than that,” Brett Elmore recounted to NBC News. “He said there’s wires all over the ground and the tower is gone.”

[cleolinda]

My favorite tags so far:

[baenling]

so this lead me down a fucking hour-long rabbit hole. i watched a video (linked on the radio station's wikipedia page) where some young guys walk through the radio tower property a week after it was allegedly stolen, and it's an overgrown jungle. looks like it's been abandoned for years. the door is hanging open and there is lichen growing on the linoleum floor inside. down in the comments there are locals saying the area is not exactly out in the boonies, either; there are people and businesses on that road. not to mention that a 200 foot radio tower is fucking gigantic. there is no crushed vegetation from dismantling the tower. no sign of any vehicles recently on the property other than the 1 set of tire tracks from the police vehicle which came to check it out when the report was received.

the tower wasn't stolen. it hadn't been there for years before the report was filed. google earth shows the tower up on site in 2022 and gone in 2023 so in all likelihood, it fell down sometime then. ALLEGEDLY, the fcc had been on them for an inspection of their am radio tower, and then a week before the fcc were scheduled to come out and inspect it, the station reported the tower missing. so. that's an hour of my life gone. you're welcome? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[cleolinda]

Then how… I believe you, but how…

how had they been broadcasting

had they been?

[galaxy-sharks-and-bottled-ships]

It's easy. They WEREN'T.

Hi, so admittedly I own one of the other radio stations in the same freaking town. And by own I mean it's in my name but I leave the technical stuff to my dad and pretty much absorb my information from being around him and the station all the time.

ANYWAYS!

The guy who runs WJLX isn't actually licensed to run an LPFM he is licensed to run an AM station. The AM station is supposed to be the one he plays his music on and he can run a translator to broadcast onto the FM frequencies as well. BUT! Only if his AM is still the main station. He can't do FM only.

That means two power bills basically. Those can be pretty hefty for a radio station.

And since no one really cares about AM these days he did the worst thing possible. He LET HIS AM STATION GO OFF THE AIR. His AM station has been off the air since as far back 2013. We have video of us testing his frequencies that far back. He's been running full time as an LPFM only for at least a decade now which in his case is illegal AF and is a $10,000 per day fine from the FCC if he's ever caught.

Well, low and behold he was caught and now he's trying to claim he didn't know because his tower was "obviously stolen".

For starters, it was eventually stolen. But only after it had already collapsed to the ground and rusted for several years. Metal scrappers will take nearly anything that looks to have been abandoned long enough.

TLDR; If he'd been running his station properly then he'd have known the exact moment his tower stopped broadcasting. He'd have known the moment it fell. There are these things called silence detectors (at least that's what we call them) and their whole job is to tell us we're not broadcasting anymore.

[cleolinda]

no shhhh it’s haunted. between dimensions. by Carmen Sandiego.

(thank you, may your station prosper)

[mymatedave10]

Thank you tumblr for the mystery and the solution.

This is like an episode of Scooby Doo where there’s a mysterious event that surprises everyone but then eventually turns out to be a corrupt businessman lying about things.

It does sadly lack the mid-episode ghost/monster running and chasing scenes though, which is a shame.

[pleasestopthese]

thanks @galaxy-sharks-and-bottled-ships, elmore’s in deep shit, isn’t he

[galaxy-sharks-and-bottled-ships]

He would be! Except for one thing. I'll get to that in a second. Ok so without rereading to make sure I'm not repeating stuff already stated I'm just going to go ahead and start typing.

So he was given a ton of money and a set amount of time to fix it. Nearly a year later and he hadn't fixed it and the site looked much the same as the YouTuber saw it only somehow more overgrown.

Elmore had gone around telling the whole town he'd had the site cleared and fixed and bought the tower sections and was trying to find the perfect guys to actually do the build.

Little did Elmore know but my dad has his own drones. Those fancy DJI Phantom drones. With the really high quality cameras because my dad fell too old to be climbing up 600 feet just to look at antenna bays and guy wires these days.

So anyways, dad took the drones to the location and did an updated video showing the location still abandoned.

Two days later Brett Elmore drops dead from a heart attack in his favorite pizza joint in town while apparently "scrolling on his phone".

Coincidence? Maybe.

But we like to think it was the panic at the fact someone was publicly calling out his very expensive lies and he can't just clear up a tower site and make 200 feet of tower sections appear overnight. At least not cheaply and going by his very new and fancy truck we're pretty sure we know where all the donated funds went.

Anyways, it's actually been a few years (I think 2? Time is weird and has no meaning.) since he died and no one in town wants to "talk bad about the dead". Even though they all know he was scamming him at this point. They literally choose to ignore the bad he did and just praise the good. The stupid pizza place literally marked his favorite spot at the bar with a plaque and labelled it Brett's Seat.

And despite all the illegal crap Elmore's sudden demise saved his station for his equally corrupt buddies who are proceeding to run it exactly as it is. Illegally.

My family has since said screw it and moved away. We're trying to figure out what to do with the existing station in Jasper but at the moment we're much happier not dealing with the drama of the crazy town.

Now we have two new stations we lucked into in the new town because the previous owner was apparently gifted them as a wedding present from his rich wife but he wants nothing to do with them. Like, he literally told my dad "Take over running them or I'm turning them off and deleting their licenses." The dude married rich and just wants to sit back and collect sports cards and memorabilia. His wife is not pleased with him but we're now in a contract acquiring two new stations.

Even funnier is the fact that my dad used to work in these exact stations back in the 90's and he found some of his old paystubs in one of their old filing cabinets. He came out of a back storage closet laughing and holding up this dusty yellowed old paybook.

According to Dad these stations have been here since the 50's so just letting someone shut them down because he didn't know how or want to run them would have been a crime. Not a literal one. But you probably know what I mean.

So now we have two older stations to update and repair.

And in a hilarious twist of things the country music station had its 400 foot tower snatched down by a careless log truck driver and the previous owner told a scrapping company to scrap it all without even looking to see if anything might be salvageable. He also spent all the insurance claim money on sports collectibles and things.

We have the country station now broadcasting off a 100 foot tower next to the building (normally that tower sends the signal to the bigger towers to actually broadcast) while we figure out how to replace the 400 feet of destroyed and apparently scrapped sections. Lovely.

But hey! The good news is the 600 foot tower that our classic top 40 hits station uses is doing great! We just need to replace the transmitter. Apparently, the transmitter on those is like a 3,000 pound ordeal or something.

So yeah... We're not running LPFMs anymore. Actual legit commercial stations with big power and large ranges now. And massive towers and transmitters. Neglected transmitters. Dying transmitters. Luckily, my dad repairs these things for a living and has managed to keep this one limping along. For now.

Does anyone here want to climb 600 feet and help change some light bulbs by the way? Dad can't do it anymore and I'm not a tower climber. The last guy we paid climbed up 100 feet and got stung by a wasp and backed out. And also dropped the bulb.

[thestolencaryatid-deactivated20]

Iranian brass amulet that renders its bearer more attractive and helps her capture and subdue a lover. The lover is symbolized as beast of burden.

[baking-potato-27]

Thank you Wolfram|Alpha, this is the worst unit of length I’ve ever seen

[aniconist]

when people are like “he’s not even attractive you could find a guy that looks like him at any gas station” i’m like….. well you see there’s beauty everywhere actually

[what-even-is-thiss]

You can also find a sunset at a gas station

[thriftedspacesuit]

time to break out my favorite photo I ever took