Koora the tigeress

If he wasn’t in the room, I was assigned to answer the house phone and say “Hello, Edward will be here in jutht a moment,” in my high-pitched lisp typically described by family members as “elfin”, and then yell for my dad. Then I’d listen to him walking them through the issue because I found it interesting.

One time my dad went in for a meeting with the CEO of a large company, like, one you’ve heard of, and the CEO said “Oh, by the way, your assistant is amazing! Fixed my problem immediately."

After some very subtle investigative work - because if the CEO of a billion dollar company is pleased you don’t answer with ‘wtf are you talking about’ - he determined that what happened was the following:

The CEO called my dad at a very odd time of day, because rich people are like that.

The phone was answered by an elfin, lisping voice, which said “Hello, I’m thorry, Edward ithn’t here right now. Can I help you?”

“…okay, do you thee the power button? Can you rethtart the computer? …that means turning it off.”

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

they tell EVERYONE to get a new drink so that nobody is singled out, AND so every woman has an excuse and public support to walk away briefly from a situation that might have been getting uncomfortable and know she’ll have backup, AND so that the person who did it can’t retaliate against their target in a “c’mon don’t you trust me” way

Astronaut readjusts to life back on Earth

IT’S NOT FUNNY IT’S VERY LOGICAL THAT HE WOULD HAVE ADJUSTED TO LIVING LIFE WHILE HE WAS IN SPACE BECAUSE IT’S DIFFERENT FROM EARTH BUT I CAN’T FUCKING BREATHE

And UCD reportedly payed $175,000 for this image to not appear when you search it on google: