#shawndrabble

[atmosvoid]

I just stared into possibly the deepest and darkest cultural abyss I could have ever imagined. Oversharing inbound: Growing up with an Asian mom and a Caucasian dad, I put up with a lot of shit right out the gate for looking the way that I did, then for fulfilling some of my own stereotypes, and then for not. I've been called words that don't have to do with my Korean heritage but do pertain to East Asian people. At times even that generalized word, "Asian," came to have its own unique sting out of the wrong people's mouths. Unexpectedly, I've also been through a weird balancing act where I didn't perfectly fit in with my hometown peers and might as well have been white to my new town fellow yellow folks. I've been considered a bad or fake Korean because I have extensive knowhow on english, but speak kindergarten Korean in comparison. And to add to that, I barely know my own cuisine, can't stand the texture of Kimchi, and I frequently forget how to hold chopsticks if I think about them. Sort of like being made aware of your own breathing. I would also talk about my GPA compared to my Asian peers, but long story short fuck school. I've tried my best to grow up with all that. Didn't do so hot to be honest. I say that mainly because I developed a temper that veers between hilarious and terrifying, and I'm so defensive that I take literally everything personally. I've often felt that my tunnel vision rage and unjustified insecurity would be a perfect cocktail for some kind of arrogant psychopath, had my life been lead in the wrong direction. This sort of fear of myself kind of keeps that part of me in check. As it turns out I'm not as alone on this kind of upbringing as I once thought, and randomly stumbled upon a subreddit for (what appeared to be exclusively) men who were a product of similar parent combos to mine. For a very brief moment I felt like I found a new community to help me come to healthier terms with my youth. I was super wrong. In this place there existed a whole new layer of self hatred and evidently bitter racism that I never thought possible. These folks hate their mothers for supposedly loving only non Asian men, their fathers for having apparent yellow fever, and all Asian women that turn them down for perpetuating the cycle that brought them into existence. Any attempt to criticize this just results in being scrutinized as not Asian enough. It's like not being the grayest blob in a world of grey blobs or some shit. It's just a safe space (their words not mine) for bitter and resentful pieces of shit, enamored with having their one special way they get to call women whores and be racist to everyone. To an extent, maybe I don't actually have anything in common with these people after all. My parents met under circumstances that could only be described as K-Drama esque, and it's been very clear since my parents split that there wasn't just some racial preference. Just two people in an odd place at the right time, at that time. As Father's Day passes I'm also reminded that I had chosen to stay connected with my dad in my adult life, who had never stopped loving me. I'm not usually so mushy but thinking about my family in relation to the general path in my life, makes the memories of all the harassment and name-calling hurt a lot less.

[atmosvoid]

youmacon was kind of a bummer this year. I got to see Capcom Live but completely missed the adventure zone photoshoot at that same time, especially because a delay wasted even more time.

Then whenever I was with friends I felt either boring or tied down. I get into this mood sometimes when I can’t break out of my shell at a concert, most often on work days. The whole time I felt like I had to keep checking how I was acting, moving, etc. I didn’t even play anything in the exceptionally sized game room because I got nervous being around people who were good at the rhythm and fighting games.

So then I just went to a familiar burger place, drank enough to need a walk, and went home in time for tea with my mom. I think that this is just one of those weekends where I needed to be solo, but displaced myself in a social environment.

[atmosvoid]

I’m not much for shipping real people but whatever Hideo Kojima and Mads Mikkelsen have going on is a truly beautiful thing and it gives me life every time I see them.

[atmosvoid]

Recognizing boldly rude actions as power moves instead of providing the offender with an offended reaction is, in and of itself, a power move.

[atmosvoid]

Horror Game Let's Play Gothic

• You hear of a new game and wish to see fanart. You search the tag only find to find mountains of pictures depicting various colorfully​ hair dyed men dressed as the protagonist. Sometimes there's more than one. You wonder if that's who the game was about all along. • Growing tired of the same gif sets of the trailers, you switch to view recent posts. The recent posts are also filled with trailer gif sets. • You don't remember what the game is about. You are forgetting more with each inkling of fanmade content and understanding less with each new theory. You watch an informative video from the cursed man with two first names. You learn nothing. • You discover a new let's play from someone you've never seen before. You start the video laughing preemptively. The facecam thumbnail is growing larger. The game that was tagged isn't on. The title is blank. Tears are streaming down your face. • LP inside-joke shirts won't stop coming in the mail. You can't stop it even if you try. You post pictures to vaguely make a cry for help. Everyone is liking your posts, but no one is responding. You have no idea what the shirts are referencing. • Your favorite Let's Player has finished the game and the credits are rolling. They gag mid-farewell to reveal a message from their mouth. A sequel has already come out. You are overjoyed by this. It is already in your steam library. You will not finish it.

[atmosvoid]

I honestly fail to understand how anyone would want to retcon comics so hard that they have to not only walk back turning jewish characters into nazi allies, but also that said nazi allies were just using the real nazis and didn’t condone real nazi behavior.

There’s so much twisting and stretching of canon that the typically cynical assumption that it’s all just to sell issues isn’t cutting it anymore. It’s pretty shitty already to make overt dinosaur-esque references to words you don’t understand like “safe spaces,” but to do this much work to try and vindicate fucking nazi stand-ins is stretching past ridiculous into being outright sinister. Even if Nick Spencer and his defenders don’t like the standard SJW tone about normalizing nazis, what better way to do it than like this?

By suggesting that the real Hydra is distant from the past rhetoric that resulted in their creation, they’re essentially cleaning the image up in the same way that nazis are doing now under newer and more pretentious names. What good is a parallel when all it does is reflect its subject matter to be even greater than they should ever be considered? Given that: It isn’t hyperbolic to say that both parties are being glorified, it’s absolutely spelled out.

[atmosvoid]

Just wanna give a shout out to tin foil. Thank you for being cool when everything else is so heated.

[atmosvoid]

In light of the recent fucked up events, specifically the white nationalist banquet, I was having a very passive but persistent desire to play the Wolfenstein expansion I never installed. When I was thinking about these two things together I couldn’t help but imagine how pissed B.J. Blazkowicz would be to see yuppies and tabletop rejects hailing a hairpiece like he were the führer in modern day.

Then I thought about it a little more and I gasped, whispering to myself with a smile:

B.J. Blazkowicz is a SJW