And I believe that we are capable of good as well

Minerva | She/her | 18 | Transformers | Lobotomy Corporation | Library of Ruina | Ao3: MinervaLamenta

[teaboot]

I just reada really good fic but halfway through I realized "oh shit this is really familiar.... didn't I write something like this once?" And as I kept reading I kept predicting what happened next and the further I went the more convinced I was that they'd ripped off my story-

like, copied the ENTIRE plot and re-written it, just better than I had? The characters were more fleshed-out than mine were, and the POV was more interesting, and the pace made more sense- but it was MY STORY?

So close to the end I was like "holy shit.. do I message them? Ask if my story inspired theirs? Should I be angry? Flattered?" Cause their tags and description didn't mention me AT ALL, which, sure, it's fanfiction to begin with, but if you're using my work than at least credit me as inspo, right? Just to be courteous?

But I get to the end of the final chapter, and it's not finished, and I'm kind of disappointed cause I never finished my story and I was really immersed in their version now and had been looking forwards to seeing how they tied up my loose ends- so I scroll to the bottom to leave a comment, and.

It's MY URL.

IT WAS MY STORY THE WHOLE TIME.

THE ONE *I WROTE*.

In *2013*.

And FORGOT ABOUT

BECAUSE I WAS SO INSECURE ABOUT MY SLOPPY, SHALLOW, AMETEUR WRITING

And I'm just sitting here now staring into space thinking about every shitty story I've ever written now like

IT WAS ALL GOOD?

IT WAS GOOD THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME??

I'M A GOOD WRITER?????

[seven-oh-four]

you didn't ONCE think to check the url?

[teaboot]

I WANTED TO FINISH READING IT FIRST

[bloedgetuige]

having a cat is great. there's a small little animal wandering around. effervescent

[bloedgetuige]

EATING MY CHARGER

[decepti-thots]

reading volume three and. roberts.

[decepti-thots]

ROBERTS.

[decepti-thots]

Diversity win: only men get pregnant in mtmte.

[taoistyuri]

evilmario

[skunkstripe]

(via)

[jailforwriter]

Getting inspired to write is actually really easy! All you need to do is be the busiest you've ever been in your entire life and as far away from a computer as humanly possible. Hope this helps 🥰

[agender-witchery]

On Project Moon

Hey, this is gonna be long, I'm putting most of it under the cut. This post is about the recent firing of VellMori from Project Moon, I know that it warrants some tags for triggers, but I have no idea what's commonly used, so if I miss something, please tell me.

Additionally, I have written this up in a way that if it escapes the target audience of Project Moon fans, it can still be understood, so with that in mind, there will be Library of Ruina spoilers.

The tl;dr for those who don't wanna read the full thing is that Project Moon was put in a very bad position with some violent extremists targeting them and that I'm not happy about any of what happened.

So, for those unaware, Project Moon has fired VellMori, the CG artist for Limbus Company. Now, a not inaccurate statement that can be made from this is "Project Moon fired a woman for being a feminist" but this is... somewhat reductive. Let's immediately get out of the way that VellMori did absolutely nothing wrong. Some people have said she is a TERF. I've seen no evidence of this. Some people have said she wished death on all men. I've seen no evidence of this.

What I HAVE seen is that VellMori thinks sexual abuse is bad. Now, why would this lead to a firing? The short answer is that a bunch of violent incels, one of which was literally dressed as a clown, came knocking at their office doors.

See, Limbus Company has a "beach" event coming up. In this event, we are getting a water themed outfit for two of the characters, one male and one female. For Sinclair, the guy, he has been given an EXTREMELY slutty mechanic's outfit. For Ishmael, the woman, she has been given a very skintight wet suit outfit. Now, I wanna take care to note that VellMori is the CG artist - she had no hand in these designs, a man made them. I would also like to mention that both outfit designs are amazing, and I will be including them at the end of this post for reference.

Now, upon revealing the wet suit design for Ishmael, a bunch of whiny incels on what is basically Korean 4chan got upset that Ishmael, instead of being in a bikini as is usual for gacha games, was wearing a wet suit. Nevermind that the designs in Limbus Company have always been conservative and that the Sinclair design is the most skin we've ever seen and it's just an open shirt. Again, the wet suit is still super revealing, it's skin tight and this is literally the first design of her that doesn't make her look flat chested. They're not rioting over the lack of sex appeal, they're specifically mad that it's not a bikini.

The incels come to the conclusion that the lack of any skin being shown on Ishmael's outfit is a result of evil feminism. No, I'm not exaggerating. They initially begin harassing the artist who is actually responsible for drawing the outfits, but upon learning that he is a man, set their sights on VellMori because she's a woman, and being an artist is good enough I guess. What they do from here is they start digging and digging and digging on VellMori's twitter, making use of archived pages because many of the "offensive" tweets had been deleted.

I'd like to take a moment to point out that VellMori never actually tweeted anything out here - it was all retweets from a 4-6 year old archive, and retweets that have been long deleted. These retweets contain such transgressive statements as "I'm sick of misogyny" and "If being against patriarchy makes me antisocial, then so be it" and just... mirroring back to men what those men were saying to women. Some people would like to have you think she was calling for death to all men. She wasn't. She ALSO retweeted all this stuff while she was a teenager and well before she worked for Project Moon.

Nonetheless, the incels had decided that feminism was the reason Ishmael had a wet suit and not a bikini and they had found a feminist working for Project Moon. It is at this point that we must take a brief detour and talk about Library of Ruina, Project Moon's previous game.

See, in Library of Ruina, one of the protagonists, Angela, has this whole arc about escaping her abuser and becoming a human. Yes, she is literally a robot, but Project Moon isn't exactly a stranger to symbolism in their stories and a feminist reading of Angela is ridiculously easy. The main antagonist in Library of Ruina is Argalia, the Blue Reverberation, and his crew is called the Reverberation Ensemble. Every member of the Reverberation Ensemble is a violent lunatic who each want to reinforce the status quo in their own unique shitty way. In addition to this, typically in order to reach the titular Library, you would need to be invited. The Reverb Ensemble are the "uninvited guests", the ones who managed to reach the Library and knock down the door without an invite.

Why am I talking about this? Well, the incels decided to start calling themselves the Reverb Ensemble, and referring to each other using names of the Reverb Ensemble members such as Pluto, Elena, and Oswald. Having taken on the moniker of the uninvited guests, they then showed up to Project Moon's office to protest. Over the lack of a bikini. Now, remember how I mentioned someone was dressed up as a clown? One of the Reverb Ensemble members, Oswald, is a clown with an extremely tenuous grip on reality. So much so, that his ideal world is one in which there is no meaning whatsoever. That is the character they chose to dress up as. This is either a case of extreme self awareness or extreme self unawareness.

Eventually, the incels were let into the office possibly as a form of damage mitigation to prevent the crowd of protestors from getting any bigger. This was a questionable decision, but they had a group of violent incels at their doorstep either way, and I don't exactly have full details on this. Regardless, Project Moon had on their hands a group of violent protesting incels, who they felt compelled to let into the building, and who had demands including the firing of their feminist employee.

So while "Project Moon fired a woman for being a feminist" isn't inaccurate it also isn't the full picture. More appropriately, it'd be "Project Moon fired a woman because a group of violent incels who weren't satisfied with a form fitting wet suit instead of a bikini showed up to their office demanding that an artist who did not make the wet suit design be fired because she retweeted some feminist stuff 5 years ago while she was a teenager".

I'm not happy with this. None of this is good. People are allowed to be feminists, and Project Moon stories have always presented progressive ideas to anyone with half a brain to do some basic literary analysis. I can understand why they would cave to the demands of people who were threatening them and showed up to their actual place of work, but at the same time, that's someone's livelihood gone and proof that in the future, the same sorts of people can use the same sorts of tactics to bully Project Moon into doing whatever they want. All of this sucks.

For those who would like to see the retweets in question alongside translations: https://twitter.com/danghwangs/status/1683884236888223744

And for people who would like reference as to what the artworks these incels were up in arms about, Ishmael in the wet suit and Sinclair in the mechanic's outfit.

[stalkiwi]

Very interesting post about the situation, I still would like to add some things about it:

The first is that VellMori did seem to have interacted with some Tweets by the past and not that long ago, with some being questionables, by using her second account, which is private.

(I don't really know how to translate exactly, but basically those are feminists posts promoting the men abusive behavior and saying that raising a boy is raising a sexual predator, from what I understood with Google Translate... A more accurate translation is very welcome!)

Now, I'm not saying that she is being wrong. Is it good, is it bad? Seeing how most Korean men have acted, can we really blame women for acting like this toward them? Is it something of the norm in Korean feminism? Maybe it was a huge important movement that most women followed without really thinking about it? Did VellMori changed her opinion?

I'm obviously not Korean, nor a professional in sociology, I can't reply to any of those questions. I however did saw on Twitter that VellMori draws male characters, have male characters herself, liked posts and art from male, gay and trans artists, so saying that she hates men/wants them dead because she interacted with RadFem posts, and that she is a TERF, seems quite untrue.

The second is that the gender war in Korea is awful, from what we've seen. But who's wrong, who's right, is another whole story. Men are being awful to women, women are being awful to men as a reaction, so men are even more awful... In the end, if you're a man, you're seen as a pig, if you're a woman and support women's rights, you're seen as trying to make men evil. There's no winning side, that's unfortunately how it is.

Now, I just want to ask something really important to all people who are mad at Project Moon for firing VellMori:

What would you have done if you were in their shoes?

As a reminder, you're a small company, in a country with norms and cultures that are very different and a very bad gender war going on, people apparently know where your office is located, your game, that you created to raise your funds, is being threatened of being deleted...

Can you really say you would have made a better choice?

I'm not saying it's the right choice. But in a situation as such, it might have been the best, for the company, for the artist, for the game.

I'm still not taking sides here, I just share information and want you all to think about it twice. I'm also upset to know that VellMori got fired (I really love her art!), but also, I hope she can find a job somewhere else, she did mentioned on Twitter wanting to join Sony studios, hope she can!

But other than that, remember that nobody is truly innocent, that nobody is truly evil, we make mistakes, we learn, we can regret it, we can not always make the best choices, sacrifices have to be made in the end, that's how it is. If you choose to not support Project Moon anymore, it's fine, but don't spread hate or misinformation please. And in any case you should not feel ashamed to love their games!

In my case, I will continue to follow both Project Moon and VellMori (as well as Na_gai, the artist behind the Identities art), and create content for the universe and fanarts, because I still love this game, this universe, and these artworks, from a purely artistic point of view.

[artistlara]

Hello cells at work fandom, I give u my offering

[lewinusart]

Tried gag-style comics. Did this after realizing Kromer was basically Jonah Hill from 21 Jump Street.

[r--g--b]

mtmte was such a good soap opera you just had to be there

[r--g--b]

imagine if you were a transformer and your husband went MIA during his time as an espionage agent and you went looking for him. he is missing for so long he is presumed dead and so you marry another guy who has a life-threatening addiction to infiltrating peoples minds. what if he got pressured into relapsing which causes a chain of events that ends up with him mercy-killing you. that sucks, but also what if it turns out theres an alternate universe version of you that basically ends up as your replacement. okay youre the alternate universe version now. so what if after all this you actually end up finding your other MIA husband ALIVE and not only has he been tortured and mentally incapacitated. now what if you were forced to choose to kill one of your husbands. this is one plotline.

[r--g--b]

this isnt even the protagonist

[sweatymasc-deactivated20260101]

the ten commandments

thog don't caare

if it sucks hit da bricks

play the cards i'm given

pobody's nerfect

this mess is a place

fuck it we ball

it's so over

we're so back

what if the world was made of pudding

there is good in every day

[minervalamenta]

Thoughts on the abyss staring back? Existentialism or nihilism?

Neither, absurdism.

[percyverance]

outis for the entirety of canto iv...

[taahko]

i dont know exactly how to articulate this in a way other people havent but everything is too fast now. 24/7 news cycle, online focuses that last for hours instead of months or years, songs written just so ten seconds can go viral. movies and books churned out to meet some nebulous income quota. idk. im motion sick

[dragonflavoredcake]

Bill Watterson, 1995

You're not alone or the first to feel like everything is going too fast

[mistgardens]

Vogel

[firestorm09890]

Carmen projectmoon is a great character because they went “yeah we fridged her sorry :( FUCK YOU JUST KIDDING SHE HAUNTS THE NARRATIVE” and then she haunted the narrative so hard she caused fundamental changes to the entire setting and affected literally everyone in the world of the story and she’s still haunting the narrative to this day, even after the game that was about her haunting the narrative. most recently they made her a narrator (probably) and made a song about her influence. she died before the first entry of the series

[kafus]

beginner’s guide to the indie web

“i miss the old internet” “we’ll never have websites like the ones from the 90s and early 2000s ever again” “i’m tired of social media but there’s nowhere to go”

HOLD ON!

personal websites and indie web development still very much exist! it may be out of the way to access and may not be the default internet experience anymore, but if you want to look and read through someone’s personally crafted site, or even make your own, you can still do it! here’s how:

use NEOCITIES! neocities has a built in search and browse tools to let you discover websites, and most importantly, lets you build your own website from scratch for free! (there are other ways to host websites for free, but neocities is a really good hub for beginners!)

need help getting started with coding your website? sadgrl online has a section on her website dedicated to providing resources for newbie webmasters!

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the core of what all websites are built on. many websites also use JS (JavaScript) to add interactive elements to their pages. w3schools is a useful directory of quick reference for pretty much every HTML/CSS/JS topic you can think of.

there is also this well written and lengthy guide on dragonfly cave that will put you step by step through the basics of HTML/CSS (what webpages are made from), if that’s your sort of thing!

stack overflow is every programmer’s hub for asking questions and getting help, so if you’re struggling with getting something to look how you want or can’t fix a bug, you may be able to get your answer here! you can even ask if no one’s asked the same question before.

websites like codepen and jsfiddle let you test HTML/CSS/JS in your browser as you tinker with small edits and bugfixing.

want to find indie websites outside the scope of neocities? use the search engine marginalia to find results you actually want that google won’t show you!

you can also use directory sites like yesterweb’s link section to find websites in all sorts of places.

if you are going to browse the indie web or make your own website, i also have some more personal tips as a webmaster myself (i am not an expert and i am just a small hobbyist, so take me with a grain of salt!)

if you are making your own site:

get expressive! truly make whatever you want! customize your corner of the internet to your heart’s content! you have left the constrains of social media where every page looks the same. you have no character limit, image limit, or design limit. want to make an entire page or even a whole website dedicated to your one niche interest that no one seems to be into but you? go for it! want to keep a public journal where you can express your thoughts without worry? do it! want to keep an art gallery that looks exactly how you want? heck yeah! you are free now! you will enjoy the indie web so much more if you actually use it for the things you can’t do on websites like twitter, instead of just using it as a carrd bio alternative or a place to dump nostalgic geocities gifs.

don’t overwhelm yourself! if you’ve never worked with HTML/CSS or JS before, it may look really intimidating. start slow, use some guides, and don’t bite off more than you can chew. even if your site doesn’t look how you want quite yet, be proud of your work! you’re learning a skill that most people don’t have or care to have, and that’s pretty cool.

keep a personal copy of your website downloaded to your computer and don’t just edit it on neocities (or your host of choice) and call it a day. if for some reason your host were to ever go down, you would lose all your hard work! and besides, by editing locally and offline, you can use editors like vscode (very robust) or notepad++ (on the simpler side), which have more features and is more intuitive than editing a site in-browser.

you can use ctrl+shift+i on most browsers to inspect the HTML/CSS and other components of the website you’re currently viewing. it’ll even notify you of errors! this is useful for bugfixing your own site if you have a problem, as well as looking at the code of sites you like and learning from it. don’t use this to steal other people’s code! it would be like art theft to just copy/paste an entire website layout. learn, don’t steal.

don’t hotlink images from other sites, unless the resource you’re taking from says it’s okay! it’s common courtesy to download images and host them on your own site instead of linking to someone else’s site to display them. by hotlinking, every time someone views your site, you’re taking up someone else’s bandwidth.

if you want to make your website easily editable in the future (or even for it to have multiple themes), you will find it useful to not use inline CSS (putting CSS in your HTML document, which holds your website’s content) and instead put it in a separate CSS file. this way, you can also use the same theme for multiple pages on your site by simply linking the CSS file to it. if this sounds overwhelming or foreign to you, don’t sweat it, but if you are interested in the difference between inline CSS and using separate stylesheets, w3schools has a useful, quick guide on the subject.

visit other people’s sites sometimes! you may gain new ideas or find links to more cool websites or resources just by browsing.

if you are browsing sites:

if the page you’re viewing has a guestbook or cbox and you enjoyed looking at the site, leave a comment! there is nothing better as a webmaster than for someone to take the time to even just say “love your site” in their guestbook.

that being said, if there’s something on a website you don’t like, simply move on to something else and don’t leave hate comments. this should be self explanatory, but it is really not the norm to start discourse in indie web spaces, and you will likely not even be responded to. it’s not worth it when you could be spending your time on stuff you love somewhere else.

take your time! indie web doesn’t prioritize fast content consumption the way social media does. you’ll get a lot more out of indie websites if you really read what’s in front of you, or take a little while to notice the details in someone’s art gallery instead of just moving on to the next thing. the person who put labor into presenting this information to you would also love to know that someone is truly looking and listening.

explore! by clicking links on a website, it’s easy to go down rabbitholes of more and more websites that you can get lost in for hours.

seeking out fansites or pages for the stuff you love is great and fulfilling, but reading someone’s site about a topic you’ve never even heard of before can be fun, too. i encourage you to branch out and really look for all the indie web has to offer.

i hope this post helps you get started with using and browsing the indie web! feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions or want any advice. <3