I'm someone else's problem

There are people who are starting to ask what's going on, a little bit, but I've been the one person I've seen talking about this as being queerphobia and ableism, and it's been extremely lonely. (I suspect there are people talking about it, in twos and threes, in private discords or untagged. This is not to say that people aren't talking about it. This is to say that I haven't seen it.)

So, let's talk about the current complaint du jour. That Taliesin was avoiding interacting with other characters- he didn't talk to them he wrote a letter, doesn't he want to interact with them????

This is a dumb and bad complaint. Made by people who do not understand storytelling.

Taliesin didn't sit down with Sam and Whitney and explain to them that he is a sentient mask on a body because he has already had that conversation.

The audience doesn't need to hear it again.

If he had sat down and had that conversation, people would (rightly) be unhappy because we already knew anything he might have told them. He knows that, so he did something different. And he did what he often does with Bolaire, which was make sure that he did something actually quite creepy and unsettling, and mix it with that letter, that genuine warmth that he exudes towards people he is fond of (and he seems genuinely fond of Tyranny, and clearly has quickly developed a soft spot for Wick). It was a leap of faith and a moment for him to trust people he's less intimate with.

It was a good character moment.

And the eventual result was we got a really great scene between Bolaire and Wick and Tyranny whilst Tyranny was wearing Bolaire, it just happened after the confrontation with Yanessa- which was the correct pacing. The conversation with Bolaire was a lot less important than the one with Yanessa and the stuff at Wick's home and Taliesin knew that and Sam knew that and Whitney knew that and they all behaved accordingly.

It is fine to dislike the character. Bolaire is absolutely a character that's not to everybody's tastes. I have no beef with people who just dislike Bolaire.

I have a problem with people inventing reasons why Taliesin Jaffe is somehow uniquely bad at his job for doing something, storytelling wise, that is very similar to a lot of stuff that Liam did with Caleb. Being cagey, only talking to certain people. Liam sent most of the cast away from the table, at one point, to have a secret conversation. Very frequently in the early campaign (particularly) he shut down any attempt to have any kind of emotional conversation with him. He started several fights (have we forgotten bowlgate so quickly?) Caleb is a beloved character and there are (well deserved) odes to how well Liam played him. Current campaign example- someone tried to talk to Teor (I believe it was Julien) and Travis responded with, "I am Teor." End interaction. Which was fucking fine with everybody, because that was a fun in-character moment.

Gee, whiz, I wonder what the fucking difference is?

"This makes me feel bad, so this person is doing it on purpose because they're bad and want me to feel bad."

Media that makes you feel uncomfortable and/or challenged is not trying to hurt you. The creators are not bad people because you don't like what they have created or it made you feel something you didn't like.

Nothing is perfectly "good" or "evil" and trying to force everything into a perfect black/white binary is childish and harmful.

Taliesin really leans into some darker elements, which can be more difficult to analyse, particularly to folks who do not understand horror media and its deeper subtexts.

A character that requires a victim, practically like a vampire, is always going to be somewhat evil. But that character is doing good things. But they're doing them for a neutral reason because they like the protagonists, not out of any moral obligation. If the action is good, does it matter? If they only consume bad people, are they good?

Speaking of binaries, bigotry is on full display when folks assume malice because of the various biases they hold. Just because someone is part of a certain group, marginalised or not, that is not an excuse to treat them differently. Especially if others from those groups are quite publicly awful and hostile.

This can be applied to so many bad faith arguments as to why x player is bad when they did something comparable to what another player was ignored or even praised for.

Unfortunately, folks who call themself allies can be just as racist, transphobic and so on because they narrow mindly and hypocritically see people the "bad" groups as morally ok to treat poorly. They are racist in queer spaces and oh boy do men (even transmen and masc non binary folks) get treated like they're not welcome by brainrotted folks.

random assholes, who want to make everyone as misarable as they are:

"We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

It's why C4 is so great because it's putting many of these more nuanced issues in a fantasy framework. Cutting out media obfuscation and the chatter of a billion bots trying to trick us into believing everything is fine and we should just accept it.

Their website is run on a charity/non-profit thing and you can report them (It might only work if you're in Australia, I'm not sure), for violating the rules of a charity/non-profit here! You just need their ABN, which is 30162159097!

(This is a guide here!) (You can also report their website directly to the charity website they used here and request the charity website make a statement against them or take them out or ask why they support them! They won't take them down but making any kind of response would be valuable!)

(Their group is also on youtube, tiktok, twitter and more, if you're interested in reporting them there too.)

This is also a list of their Team, their board members and their ambassadors, all largely Australian. If there's anyone specific you want to be reporting, contacting, etc, it's the ambassadors.

In particular, people like Susan McLean (website here) and Andrew Lines (website here) explicitly because they have companies, books, associates and strong online presences outside of Collective Shout and you want to make it clear associating with and giving support to this group will have significant backlash.

You want to make them back out or at least make their associates back out. You want to create continuous noise. Not just for a couple days but sustainable noise that builds on itself.

For example, if you push them into making a statement (whether that statement supports Collective Shout or not), it gives you press. You want this to stay in the news cycle and press is good.

Frankly, contact the press! Write your local news, especially if you're in Australia! Tell them what this group is doing.

Also her book is awful. Said comedian reviewed it and it comes up first when you look up reviews for it.

Where the numbers get fucky is the folks who bypass any trans-affirming care and access hormones illegally or paid for surgery in another country to bypass requirements. These are the ex-ftm folks the TERFs adore and invite to all their rallies to speak about how they were brainwashed when they were the ones deliberately skipping big important parts of the transition process and regretted it afterwards.

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

Most artists don't care if you copy their style for personal use, but AI art bros vocally don't know or don't care about personal use and go straight to using mimiced AI art for commercial use, which is a huge no-no. Sure the AI says you can use it but not the artist you're ripping off.

One example is minting AI art as NFTs which is not only a commercial use but is just a shitty thing to do if it mimics a real artist. The same folks will just mint anything they like which by every definition is art theft. They don't care or understand this either.