*Insert title here*

It’s always a possibility. Though if he thought he did, he would have tried to milk it for everything he could. It would have blended will with his massive ego issues.

This is typified by the way he reacts to criticism in public/in person (he was known for giving long thousand-yard stares when confronted with a worldview or opinion he doesn't like, or one that contradicts his set-in-stone beliefs, and was alleged to have devolved into sudden outbursts of tard rage at MCAD) and online, where his histrionic personality would deliberately antagonise anyone who he views as lower than him or opposed to what he views as "the mainstream school of thought"(a "school of thought" that he's both too lazy and retarded to properly research or learn about, which is why he got kicked off of the Social Justice circles due to both his anti-social behaviour and his past being so hypocritical, not even SJWs wanted to support him, which says a lot) for cool points. This was exacerbated by his spoilt upbringing in the midwest, where he would compartmentalise any perceived slight towards his interests (not just his own person, his interests, material attachments and metaphysical attachments) or the tiniest instance of a minor dispute as a personal grudge/vendetta. And this started when he was a child, the fact that he wasn't properly referred to a therapist at any stage of his youth, condemned him to his current fate of obscurity and eternal ridicule online and offline.

Hell, I don't even harbour any ill will towards Dobby(only losers and A-Logs hold any legitimate barrels of hated against such jokes to humanity). It's mainly on his shitty parents for sheltering his arse and capitulating too many times in his formative years. This is saying a lot from me, considering that my views on mental health are very, VERY low, negative and cynical because of individuals like the Fat Elf that is Dobby, who hide behind their disorders, diagnosed or otherwise, to justify and rationalise their fragile egos, slothly attitudes to self-application, penchant for bullying and intimidation and aversion to perseverance.

The most important and influential Dragon Ball Z character in recent times is a guy who never existed at all, and was created entirely by Western fans playing a garbled game of telephone in the early internet, where lies and insane rumors could flourish unquestioned. In 1999, everyone had “a friend in Japan” who told them the next great Dragon Ball villain in the upcoming series was going to be a silent, intimidating Ivan Drago-like albino bruiser named Xicor, who is half-Saiyan and half-god.

There is some precedent for this. In the 14th Century, a forged letter spread among the people of Europe. A powerful Asian Christian king, Prester John, who lived beyond the domain of the Turks, offered to aid the Christians of Europe against the Muslims. There obviously was no Prester John, he was a fictional person from a fictional country (and skeptical people probably should have guessed that from the fact his letter mentioned he owned a griffin and the Fountain of Youth), but the search for Prester John changed real world history, even though this guy never existed. If you like this story, read Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, my favorite novel about the beginning of the Renaissance. 

To understand where Xicor came from, you have to understand that, in 1999, the great currency of the internet were lies and tall tales about fannish entertainment. Every single website had a “News and Rumors” section that passed on absolute unverified lies that were sometimes pulled from thin air or made up on the spot. There were no official sites releasing news and casting on new release movies and television at all. You often only knew a show existed when you saw a trailer or, at best, if it got a prerelease pictorial in Starlog magazine. And because sites were in competition, a weird unsubstantiated rumor posted in one place was quickly posted everywhere else in no time flat.

To be clear, we were not that stupid. We absolutely took all of this with a grain of salt and an eyeroll. When a Nintendo fan site mentioned someone’s story about how they found a way to play as Luigi in Super Mario 64, the reaction by most was to roll their eyes. Nevertheless, we kept on reading the News and Rumors, because sometimes, once in a blue moon, something would turn out to be true. It was kind of like the technique of cold reading in that people remember the one time someone got a real scoop, and ignored the 12 times they passed on weird, false rumors, like the idea that Episode I was going to have an R-rated version when it was released on home video (I don’t have time to go into it, but ask any Star Wars fan around in the run up to the prequels who SuperShadow is).

In 1999, Dragon Ball was the biggest anime fandom and it wasn’t even particularly close, but the trouble is, the show finished in 1997 and there was no indication more was coming. It’s not clear and probably never will be who started it, but there were rumors that, in Japan, there was a new sequel to Dragon Ball called Dragon Ball AF (After Future). Since then, “AF” is hip slang meaning “extremely” (as in “Frank is strong af”) but nobody used AF that way in 1999, making this extra-funny with the passage of time. A single piece of fan art showing an evil albino Saiyan in Super-Saiyan 4 (his albinism showed this was Xicor, not Goku in some new transformation as was sometimes believed) was passed around as “proof” this series was coming. Nowadays, we know this is just fan art. But the fact that this fan art has an albino Saiyan foe and has the title Dragon Ball AF, tells us that the rumors existed first and this fan art was made later, and in a weird cycle, the fan art was later used as evidence of the rumors, and so on.

These rumors got crazier and crazier because there was no official denial of any of this, because nobody was really on the internet, nobody official kept tabs on fan communities. In 1999, the only people on the internet were nerds talking about Star Trek and anime.

The interesting thing about Dragon Ball AF is that the rumors stayed pretty consistent on what the storyline was going to be. In other words, everyone hallucinated the exact same fake show into existence. I guess everyone had the same “friend in Japan.” The opening of the series was always described like so. Years after GT, a pair of pods arrive on earth, and two beings emerge: one, a beautiful albino woman, and the other is a massive, intimidating silent albino bruiser named Xicor. The woman, we discover is a former Kai, and Xicor’s mother, who works as the brain to Xicor’s muscle.

Now we start to understand exactly who Xicor is. He’s a secret son of Goku and the Western Kai (who faked her own death), making him half Kai and half Saiyan, or a Super Saiyan God. He’s essentially Sloth from the Goonies, in that he is a massively powerful, mostly nonverbal, monstrous and deformed third son, commanded by an evil mother (Mama Fratelli), who can throw everyone around easily when he really gets mad. Goku’s two earlier kids are kind of like the two less effective, squabbling Fratelli kids, I suppose.  Instead of tearing off his shirt to become Superman when enraged, Xicor became an albino Super Saiyan 4.

If you’re a long-time DBZ fan, you’ve seen the DB AF hoax image of Xicor so many times that it probably makes you pissed to see it now. Every 5 years, a rumor starts up that someone is going to do Dragon Ball AF “for real” this time, and it’s wrong every time…or is it?

This should be where the story ends, right? A crazy rumor from the wild west days of the fan internet created by wishful thinking.  Alone, it would just be a story about how crazy the 90s internet was. But here’s the thing: the story didn’t end here, because that’s the thing about rumors. People wanted Dragon Ball AF to be real so badly they created dozens of fan comics about it. And because there were all these rumors that were weirdly consistent, a true oral tradition right out of pre-writing cultures (or like those filthy rhymes we all learned at summer camp that have no point of origin, like “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man, I live in a garbage can”), the details of Xicor (albino, red eyes, wears green and shoots green lasers, silent, half god, Goku’s third superpowerful evil son, bossed around by an evil mother) stayed the same. 

The story of Xicor didn’t end here, because a funny thing happened; the guys who were big fans in the 90s started to run the asylum. That is, fans started to be put in charge of Dragon Ball Z. One person who made DB AF fan comics (and the idea of a “fan comic” of which there is no original is very funny to me) was Toyotarou, a fan comic artist. He was asked to do creative for the video game Dragon Ball Xenoverse. And…who were the villains of Dragon Ball Xenoverse? Mira and Towa, a mother-son pair of evildoers where the mother is the brains, and the son is a silent Ivan Drago-like bruiser who was pure intimidation.

The following is a fan comic done in 2000 by Toyotaro,  the guy literally making Dragon Ball Super now:

By the way, in case you’re not convinced Mira and Towa were inspired by Xicor, here’s a look at Mira’s final, albino and beastlike form in Xenoverse 2: 

It gets better. Traces of Xicor, a character who never existed in canon, are everywhere all over the DBZ revival, Dragon Ball Super, which is essentially a canon Dragon Ball AF. It’s as if fan desire wished the series into existence.  When I first heard the title, Dragon Ball Super: Battle of the Gods, my immediate assumption was that they were making Xicor canon and the villain (side note, but my initial reaction on hearing the premise of Star Trek Nemesis back in the day is that Tasha’s daughter Sela was going to be the villain). And he wasn’t, but they canonized the existence of Super Saiyan God. In other words, the instant fans got the keys to canon, they made Xicor real. 

It gets better. In a later DBS arc, there is a villain who is made from both Goku and a Kai, Goku Black, who is tremendously powerful for that reason. I guess the reason they went with Black is because Goku White would have suggested Xicor a bit too much! (Also, I wonder if the humorous viral clip would have been funnier….or less funny….if they said “don’t shoot, he’s not white!”) Personally, I think Goku Black would  have been more intimidating if he didn’t speak, like the taciturn and laconic Xicor. 

Interestingly, all this is a case of everything coming full circle. As I’ve written before, Dragon Ball was inspired by Chinese martial arts novels and shows, and the most popular martial arts series from China in Japan the year Dragon Ball was created was Bastard Swordsman, which inspired the Super-Saiyan transformation…except it turns you albino-white.

Palestinians will tell you that one of their greatest wishes is that the world would not forget them; this is what their oppressors are aiming to do. Unfortunately the attacks in Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa mosque are just instances in decades of horrific oppression and ethnic cleansing. You can directly help Palestinians by buying from them and helping them take economic power back.

The above are some examples of the beautiful and high quality products available at Shoppalestine.org including their honestly addictive Olive wood series and stunning embroidered goods (just to name a few).

!!! Hadeel.org is a UK alternative !!!

Similar and equally beautiful products here too^

You can also donate to one of the emergency appeals here:

Why do I say that Palestine's an irredeemable shithole and that donating to Palestine is a really idiotic idea?

Let's start with the basics:

Palestine has no constitution.

While the region's Legislative Council has claimed to approve Basic Law back in 2002 and claims that "respect and sanctity for other divine religions" are upheld under this Law, they 1) REQUIRE all citizens to publicly declare their religious affiliation on identification papers, this means that if you're a citizen of the territory, you are tagged for whatever faith you have, and there are consequences for this invasive level of identification, since one the main issues (excluding the various geopolitical and historical issues) with both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have been attributed to religious conflict. And 2) Islam is the official religion of Palestine, this means that preferential treatment is given to various Islamic institutions and places of worship, meaning that all that money you're giving them is going to the Offical Religion, so any minority Christian charities are shit out of luck here in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Additionally, because Palestine has NO CONSTITUTION, this means that Freedom of Speech is vulnerable to crackdowns and police intervention. For example, criticizing the Palestinian Government online sometimes leads to detainment in one of their finest shithole prisons.

-In 2012, a university lecturer Ismat Abdul-Khaleq was detained for two weeks under a defamation charge against the Palestinian President at the time, Mahmoud Abbas, for calling Abbas a "Traitor" and calling for his resignation.

-In February 2013, a 26-year-old man was sentenced to 1-year in prison for criticizing the Palestinian Authority.

-The Palestinian Authority uses 50-year-old Jordanian Law to suppress anyone critical of their management, governance, and general policies. Specifically, a law that regards "extending one's tongue" against the Monarch of Jordan, even though Jordan is a foreign country, and only maintains Waqf institutions in the West Bank.

-A journalist, Tarek Khamis, was detained for defending Abdul-Khaleq.

-A 2016 report from the Human Rights Watch, documented several reports of human rights violations conducted by Palestinian police and Hamas, notably a case where an unidentified activist was detained and intimidated by the police for criticizing the government for failing to protect a man with a mental disability.

-Selling land to anyone of the Jewish faith in Palestine is a crime punishable by death.

Palestine is also against homosexuality.

Palestine has no laws that protect anyone who is a member of the LGBT community from discrimination or harassment, and while male homosexuality was "decriminalised" in 1951 in the West Bank, it remains illegal in Gaza.

-In 2016, Hamas executed one of its leading commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, for allegations of homosexual intercourse.

-And in 2019, the Palestinian Authority bans ALL members of the LGBTQ+ community from any activities in the West Bank, under the claim of "dubious parties working to create discord and harm civic peace in Palestinian society"

-It's gotten so bad that many members of the LGBT have fled to Israel to escape persecution, death and torture by the Palestinian Authority and even their own families.

Honour-killings, racism and sexism are very prevalent in Palestine

Honour-killings are very common in Palestine, according to a March 2000 UNICEF estimate, two-thirds of all murders in Palestine in 1999 alone were very likely attributed to honour-killings. In 2019, a 21-year-old woman, Israa Ghrayeb was beaten to death at her home in Beit Sahour as an honour-killing, for taking a selfie a day before her marriage. Really dumb, but it happened.

According to the US Congress' 2008 report on Global Anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial has been common in Palestine since the 1990s.

Hamas also bars children from learning about the Holocaust, with one of its religious leaders, Younis al-Astal, describing the UN's teaching of the Holocaust as a "war crime".

Former U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was subject to various levels of ridicule and racial abuse in Palestine, with one cartoon depicting her with an armed monkey, with a caption reading "Rice speaks the truth about the birth of a new Middle East".

Palestine is also flagrantly corrupt.

According to AMAN(who are linked to Transparency International), almost 70% of Palestinians believe that their government institutions are corrupt.

According to a Sunday Times article from October 2013, the European Union's Court of Auditors accuses Palestine of embezzling over £1.95 Billion in aid donations between 2008 and 2012. So if you're still not convinced with my warnings, here's this one for free.

In 2017, money was embezzled into an airline that doesn't even exist.

And to add more misery and despair, 62% of Palestinians think that corruption has increased in the past 12 months.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. I could go on, but the point is very clear, clearer than a clean window, so clear it's see-through.

Illustrations of mutated animals from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s 1621 text Vlyssis Aldrouandi patricii Bononiensis Quadrupedum omniu[m] bisulcoru[m] historia.