They want you to despair and die. They want you to kill yourself because then they can pretend they aren’t the cause. It’s critical that you understand this: Despite any pain we endure in the near future, it’s nowhere near over and we will fucking survive.
I am not making an optimistic assertion when I say this cannot stand. Fascism always destroys itself. We may end up living under a fascist dictator, but the world has survived powerful fascists before, and it will again.
Recently I saw a video (When Your Hero Is A Monster) talking about the general response people have any time a celebrity is revealed to have been doing sex crimes. A common response is to claim you always knew something was up, as a way to process your grief at having been misled into believing they were a good person. The video suggests that this impulse is harmful because it signals to others that they aren’t “good enough” because they didn’t see it coming. But this is usually post-fact rationalization, not a belief that was held before the reveal.
When Your Hero Is A Monster isn’t really about Neil Gaiman, it’s sorta about how we are misled into believing celebrity is good, and have an unhealthy relationship with finding out the truth.
It made me think about how Honey blew up recently (How Honey Scammed Everyone on YouTube). I never installed it because it seemed suspicious1, but I never called it out, so now me saying so is exactly the same knee-jerk response. It doesn’t actually help, whether or not it’s true that I felt there was something wrong, because now it’s too late to have warned anyone. It made me realize that I should be more forthright in saying when I think something bad is going on. At the very least, I can point to proof and say “yes, I did actually suspect” and know that I’m not making false memories, but it also is helpful to talk about misgivings because that’s how you can work out whether or not your concerns are justified, and maybe even help others.
Everyone credits MegaLag for exposing this, and while they definitely made the video that got everyone talking about it, it’s a long video and Mental Outlaw‘s video not only explains it much easier and quicker, but also manages to cover similar suspicions/problems with VPN companies, how Linus Media Group unintentionally helped Honey stay incognito, and even mentions a sort of successor to Honey to be on the lookout for. I think this is the best summary of recent events.
This also made me think about COVID. In March or April 2019, I correctly predicted exactly (within a few months) how long it would take for vaccines to arrive, and how people would pretend it stopped being a problem despite becoming endemic. But I didn’t say anything publicly. I told close friends and family what to do to be safe, and what to expect. I made my dad take precautions and took over riskier interactions to help keep him safe. I should’ve told more people. It’s my only regret from all of 2019. I could’ve helped more people, but I didn’t.
When you are unsure of something, or you feel that is something wrong, talk about it. Markiplier called out Honey’s suspicious activity years ago. Through dialogue, you learn whether or not your fears are misplaced, you help others remember to stay vigilant, or even help others recognize something is wrong long before it becomes popular or common knowledge. This is a mistake I keep making, but I’m trying to improve. When I see something important to discuss, I should call out. It’s not about being correct, it’s about communication.
Markiplier Predicts Honey Scam In 2020 (there’s also a response he made being very excited about how right he was, and a very amusing animatic of part of this rant)
Footnotes
Linus Media Group pulled their Honey sponsorships over suspicions a long time ago, but didn’t talk much about it. One could easily argue they are partially to blame for not speaking up, but it’s also easy to argue that it was a private business decision, and they didn’t know how important it would be to say something. (Hell, they could’ve even been under contract requiring them to keep the secret2. We would never know.) They did post a response to the Honey situation. That’s also a class-action lawsuit underway, spearheaded by LegalEagle.
Ironically, I was suspicious of it primarily because of privacy violations (tracking any shopping you do, but possibly also just everywhere) and because I assumed it worked through backroom deals with sellers to give out discounts in exchange for customer information – allowing a company to keep its image clean because it wasn’t the one who stole your private information, it just bought that information. As we now know, that’s not at all what was happening.
Being under a secretive contract is always bad. You don’t get to know what secrets you’re required to keep secret without signing the contract. Because of this, it’s hard to blame someone for being required to keep a secret. Obviously, there are many secrets that are highly unethical.. but it’s understandable to value your life more than revealing such secrets.
Is it still footnotes if you’re just posting semi-related thoughts?
Jason crawled to the kitchen to keep his back from scraping the ceiling. He knew he was too tall, and that it was unlikely he would find a place comfortable for him – too expensive. He picked up an egg, careful of the way it distorted when rotated as he cracked it over a thin frying pan.
The Y-axis compression reached 300%, but thankfully it stopped there. How and why the error had occurred was lost to time now. Jason only wished the safeguards keeping humans from shrinking applied to the environments. Or maybe that they weren’t there at all.
Drabble is a form of extremely short storytelling, where you are limited to exactly 100 words. This one was written for Lawrence Simon’s Weekly Challenge, on 2024-11-24.
The world was due for cancer screening. A century prior, it had barely survived. From the fallout, symptoms were documented, and as the years of testing passed, the world was content that it would not return. Attention turned to its autoimmune disease. If left untreated, fever would come, and kill. A screening was missed while the autoimmune treatment plan was drafted, but the symptoms were minor, and the world was content.
The cancer, it turns out, had returned. Its presence accelerated the autoimmune disease, and the fever had started.
The world is dying, but it has survived worse. Have hope.
Drabble is a form of extremely short storytelling, where you are limited to exactly 100 words. This one was written for Lawrence Simon’s Weekly Challenge, on 2024-11-07.
A couple years back, Bionic Reading took the internet by storm with influencers advocating it as a method to increase reading speed and comprehension for people who have ADHD and dyslexia. Readwise quickly debunked this1, and in their conclusion highlighted studies2, 3 that show what really matters: Font choice significantly affects reading speed without affecting comprehension – but this effect is highly individualized. There is no “best” font.
Bionic Reading has since changed its website dramatically, but used to make the claim that on an independant test of 12 participants, there was a “positive effect”, despite also claiming that some participants found it “disturbing” and that the results were unclear4, 5. Bionic Reading claims to improve how fast your eyes/brain can see words, but as The Conversation points out, reading speed is based on language processing, not how fast your eyes see or visual cortex processes visual information.
Bionic Reading appears to be a solution in search of a problem, with a profit motive rather than an altruistic motive. Their service is partially a font, partially bolding certain letters. The concept is patented and charged for. This is not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a genuine interest in helping people.
While some may benefit from using it, this does not make it special – it makes it equivalent to any other font choice. It has been researched thoroughly6, 7, with no significant benefit found.
References
I try to make sure all references are archived through services mentioned on Archives & Sources. For this post, all references were backed up using Ghostarchive, as it was the only public-facing working archive at the time of writing.
