p-pokemon..

For example, some of you may remember an advertisement campaign from Dr Pepper from the early 2010's that "Dr Pepper is not for women!". A friend of mine wrote a very lengthy, yet calmly and rather academically written essay on why this wasn't harmless fun, and actually quite damaging and misogynistic. She posted it on her blog and shared the link over social media, and everywhere people tore her to shreds for committing the cardinal sin of being offended by something.

That was it. They had no other argument on why her essay or points were wrong or bad other than "she's offended aha!!" and then acted like they totally just owned her and put her in her place by pointing this out. Am I missing something? Why is it worse to be offended than to be offensive?

For example when I was taking a media class here at the University of Iceland, I had a few French classmates in that class, and one time for class we had to watch something were there were ableist jokes about a man with cerebral palsy, and one of my French classmates said "I'm not American and don't want to sound like a whiny American who gets offended at everything, but I thought it was insensitive how they made fun of and beat up that man with cerebral palsy and we were supposed to find that funny, sorry to sound like an American!"

When I lived and worked in Finland for about half a year I heard from multiple Finnish colleagues how ridiculous it was that Americans are so sensitive and uptight they actually get upset when you use the r-slur around them, what a bunch of uptight whiny babies!

When I worked retail at a souvenir shop in central Reykjavík one of my Australian co-workers asked some of our other co-workers from many various countries across Europe to stop saying racist things about customers of color, to which more than one responded something along the lines of "Oh come on you're not American, are you? Oh don't act like a sensitive American who has to cry racism at every little thing!"

When I worked an office job in the tourism sector, several of our tour groups coming from the U.S. in 2023 still had mask mandates while on the tour bus, especially when most of the people in those tour groups were elderly and/or disabled. Or many tour groups coming from the U.S. required the group to start wearing masks if someone in the group tested positive for COVID while in tour. And again, most of the people in these tour groups were elderly and/or disabled. None of our tour groups from other parts of Europe had policies like this.

My (all Icelandic) co-workers laughed and made jokes about this non-stop, things like "I can't believe Americans are so crazy and uptight that they're still afraid of a little germ in 2023! Come on it's Iceland, we're not still doing ridiculous things like that here because we're not still scared of a little germ in 2023!". One of my co-workers would specifically say things like "Well I'm a viking so I'm not scared of a little germ! Come on, they should come and cough and breath on me because we're vikings here, and vikings aren't scared of a little germ!", and generally endlessly talking about how still requiring (elderly & disabled) people to wear a mask in 2023 is proof of how ridiculous and uptight USAmericans are.

Viktor Lyapkalo Artwork: 'Blowing bubbles' & 'Evening' Painted 9 years apart.

I got a comment on a fic that is less than a year old and it was mostly an apology for being a comment on an "old fic" and how late they were in commenting.

Fandom is not trends.

Fandom is a cross between a library and having a slumber party with your friends.

...

the dress has always been gold

r u saying this doesn't look white and gold to u???

Yes! It's actually very interesting. The Dress was such a huge phenomenon because people genuinely perceived different colors for no obvious reason

Scroll the reblogs on the announcement for good points to raise. If nothing else, according to Tumblr’s own policy you have to be 13 years old to make an account, so any account that was made more than 5 years ago must be at least 18 years of age or is already breaking policy, thereby making it not Tumblr’s problem.

and please for the love of fuck don’t give them your ID.

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made awhile back :P