snowsongs

My current assessment is there’s a pattern with 144 using great female submissive bloggers for street cred and a safety badge. (I fell for it and credited their words to his character!) I noticed several commonalities such as these bloggers didn’t usually participate in theme days or most of the reblogging chains. They were considered pillars in what would later become known as the Tribe, but didn’t seem to actively engage in it.

PleasureWhore and Submissive-seeking have something in common; they both left under tragic circumstances. It makes them convenient idols to hold up because they’re not here to say anything about their personal experiences with 144.

Based only on my personal experiences with 144, here’s what I’ve learned in looking back. His best trickery was his “TAKEN” and repeated insistence that he never discusses his private business on his blog. He often recommended the same to others. So when he insisted on total secrecy, couched as privacy, it didn’t ring the alarm bells it should have. To engender familiarity and trust, he gave and asked for IRL names and locations. The results being once you did, he had leverage over you if you caught on. With me, he encouraged me to end a relationship I was in, my first serious D/s one, because of my partner’s history with ethical nonmonogamy (while he was actively lying about being in a long term vanilla marriage). When I did, 144 was very attentive: checking in on me, inviting me to chat and bonding with sharing what I believed at the time to be his own history. I believed him to be a friend. When we began discussing and exploring our kinks, I let myself believe there might be more possible. During this period, there was corporate and legal shenanigans at my work. I was under a great deal of stress. He then asked if I would check in daily to let him know I was doing ok. I recognized from his writings this was the first foray into a D/s relationship. I agreed. Then I began to notice an odd thing. He was less available and less interested as my wellbeing improved. See, I also went to therapy and changed jobs. Our communication began to drift away. I wrote it off to one of those things. My therapist was encouraging me to get engaged in my new city, to put down roots and make IRL friends. I did. When the purge came, it was the final push I needed to finally to go to a munch. The rest, as they say, is history.

I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I do know that much of what I believed about D/s and being a submissive was formed here. I am interrogating every belief I have now. Disentangling the other bloggers from 144 will be laborious. But, I do not trust myself to move forward in the kinky world safely until I have made certain that I am not going to repeat my mistakes. No one wants to rewrite their origin story; the mythos is always better than the realities. However, in my case, it must be done.

I’ll have more to say about the female submissive bloggers I mentioned as my emotional work goes on. For now, this is what I’m willing and able to share.

None of my experience rises to the level of abuse of his victims. I imagine tho there are similarities in how he hunted. I am fortunate that I didn’t become one of his trophies.

Please continue to support the victims and be respectful of the obligation we all share to not re-victimize them by inundating them with questions or opinions.

I never felt taken advantage of or used for street cred. 144 said many times that he liked to rely on people much smarter than himself to give better advice, which is why he reblogged so much from others. If I felt like he was “drafting” off me or otherwise using me, I wouldn’t have responded to so many of his asks. There were also many times when I or others told him he was wrong. And he admitted it. Tumblr is fundamentally a platform for reblogging. That’s why I like it. I reblog and comment on things that interest me or motivate me to share my perspective. I expect those things to be shared, and I have several followers who actively collect these kinds of things in their own D/s reference library. So, others can see it however they want. But I just see it as an exchange of ideas, which is the whole reason I’m here. 

I’ve said before that I don’t really consider myself part of the tribe. The only theme day I didn’t filter out was the bad jokes day. Because I love bad jokes. That said, from seeing what others have posted, it seems that maybe I’ve missed some of the negative impact and cliquishness of the tribe precisely because I’ve been on the periphery. I don’t follow a lot of the people more central to it—not out of any inherent issue, but mostly because then my dash gets all clogged up with repetitive and (to me) less interesting posts. But anyway, I apologize if my actions have ever directly or indirectly made someone feel excluded from this community.   

I was the one who suggested 144 add “taken” to his profile. He had a submissive at the time (whose name and blog name he shared with me…not public information, but not a secret) who felt uncomfortable with the amount of fawning attention he got. He asked me what I recommended, given that he didn’t want to be public with his relationship (which I don’t blame him for, given how that has exploded for so many other popular bloggers). I recommended that he just put “taken” in his blog header. And so he did. I am not in his inbox to know how he conducted himself privately before or after that. But I thought I would at least share how that part materialized.

While I can’t speak to the OP’s experience with 144 or his intent in those messages, I can share my own experience. I reached out to 144 something like 6 years ago, because I was seeing a dominant who minimized my feelings and told me I was a bad submissive for having emotional needs. He gave me a much-needed gut check. Then we struck up a friendship. There was about 2.5 seconds of flirting, and then he stopped himself and said NOPE. And we continued to talk at least a few times a week after that, for the next couple years. As long as I kept up communication, so did he. As a friendship tends to work. He looked out for me through the end of a few relationships, including one that threw me into a dark bout of depression. When I told him I very much wished I would stop waking up, he checked in more. It’s the closest he ever came to taking a dominant role with me (I’ve had submissive friends tell me they would have done the same in that situation). He told me to get the fuck up and go shower. He made not want to disappoint him. And that got me through the closest I ever came to suicide. I can’t speak to his behavior with other people or whether he had ulterior motives in his communications with them. But this was my experience.

I spoke with both pleasurewhore and submissive-seeking when they were still here, more about their own lives and relationships than about 144. But they were both good, smart people. Submissive-seeking called 144 her “brother from another mother.” She was a strong-willed, badass lady—and clearheaded enough even at the end to be medically cleared for physician-assisted suicide. So remember that if you’re insinuating that she was weak and vulnerable from her illness and allowed 144 to manipulate her. Also, she is 100% a real person. I have seen real things about her real identity out in the world. So, just laying that speculation to rest. 

Listen, I get that this person I knew for six years may have had a completely different set of behaviors with others than he did with me. I have seen it enough to know that it happens. And if others felt used or hurt or made uncomfortable by him, then those experiences are just as valid as my own. But I would just caution people against too much historical revisionism. While it’s not bad in itself to reinterpret your life through the lens of what you know now, it can be tricky. This wouldn’t be the first time I saw someone reinterpret a caring act as a malicious one because they no longer had positive feelings toward the actor. No matter what you feel or believe about 144 now, the truth is that we all have some good and some bad in us, in varying quantities. I don’t think it’s necessary to reinterpret every positive interaction as having malicious intent, even if it comes out that the person has done bad things. 

Welp, the fuckers nuked instructor144. They clobbered onelittlekingdom, oneguysview, and me, all in the same day. That's not some random T glitch, that's a deliberate targeted strike. 🤬 Many years of community building and priceless #tagged info, gone. It is what it is.

We will rebuild. WE. WILL. REBUILD.

Anyways, a couple of asks from the Tribe:

1. boost this so people can find me. Of my 45K Followers, I figure roughly 44,500 were bots 🤣 but would love to reconnect with the 500 or so actual live humans.

2. I want to start rebuilding my #tagged repository of good info. In particular, my #vetting and #redflag tags. Also any pleasurewhore content (I can recover the #submissiveseeking content from her blog, but pleasurewhore is gone, and her stuff was a gold mine). Hit me up via Ask or DM with any links that can help rebuild the repository.

Other than that, Asks are open, and I am here.

Of the 2,977 victims killed in the September 11 attacks, 415 were emergency workers in New York City who responded to the World Trade Center. This included:343 firefighters (including a chaplain and two paramedics) of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY);[1]37 police officers of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department (PAPD);[2]23 police officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD);[3][4] and8 emergency medical technicians and paramedics from private emergency medical services[5]3 New York State Court Officers1 Patrolman from the New York Fire Patrol[6]1 Special Agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)[