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Hibiscus posted:This thread was so good that it inspired me to buy an account. I've read most of it; Denise is interesting but the Sai Baba girl story is wicked as well. There's a reason  originated from this very thread.
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Jan 1, 2014 00:27
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AlbieQuirky posted:Where do you live that therapy is $400/hour? In a fancy Park Avenue practice in Manhattan, it's $250/hour. SF Bay Area, CA; and Des Moines, IA; both charged $400 amounts per session, and considering the MASSIVE price differences between those two areas otherwise, I thought mental health care prices were pretty standard. Even at $250 an hour, that's still a pretty significant chunk of change for someone who probably can't even hold down a minimum wage job, yes?
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Jan 1, 2014 00:28
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It doesn't really matter because most of the "crazy" people who turn up in these threads are either really just kind of assholes, teenagers (and most teenagers are a bit off, thats basically normal) or are so beyond the pale that all the talk therapy in the world wouldn't solve their issues.
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Jan 1, 2014 00:30
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Hibiscus posted:This thread was so good that it inspired me to buy an account. I've read most of it; Denise is interesting but the Sai Baba girl story is wicked as well. This thread began as astral-plane-loving anime people, and has grown to encompass "Tell us about a weird person(s) who impacted your life in some way, whether grand or minute." Please share. Entertain me. This thread is all I live for.
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Jan 1, 2014 00:34
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A lot depends on the qualifications of the therapist, I can see a psychiatrist charging $400/hr easy, but most mentally ill people don't need to see a psychiatrist on a regular basis. Also, I can see health professionals in highly in-demand fields charging more for services in less desirable locations. If you can get a job anywhere, you probably won't choose to live in Des Moines over the SF Bay, so there might be an upward pressure on prices in Des Moines to get those professionals to move there.
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Jan 1, 2014 00:36
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sweeperbravo posted:This thread began as astral-plane-loving anime people, and has grown to encompass "Tell us about a weird person(s) who impacted your life in some way, whether grand or minute." Please share. Entertain me. This thread is all I live for. Alright, then. Here's the thing, though: the people I'm going to be talking about have a pretty vast Internet presence, even today, and the main ones I'm going to talk about are really identifiable, even if I use fake names. Is this still okay? I read the rules and I know doxing people isn't okay, but what about just referring to them by their screennames/linking to their sites? I'm not entirely sure I couldn't tell this story without linking/naming, but it would be really difficult. I mean, god, I could do it, but I don't know if it would really be quite as good if I didn't show you the Youtube videos they made. I remember the thread about the Sarah Saga (the girl who was "soulbonded" with Suikoden and lived in the house) and I remember people digging up her info, and people were cool with it. Is this similar? I don't want to get banned after just buying an account today.
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Jan 1, 2014 00:50
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Hibiscus posted:This thread was so good that it inspired me to buy an account. I've read most of it; Denise is interesting but the Sai Baba girl story is wicked as well. Post! Post! Let's start 2014 with a fresh dose of crazy trainwreck.
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Jan 1, 2014 00:51
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Hibiscus posted:Alright, then. Here's the thing, though: the people I'm going to be talking about have a pretty vast Internet presence, even today, and the main ones I'm going to talk about are really identifiable, even if I use fake names. Is this still okay? I read the rules and I know doxing people isn't okay, but what about just referring to them by their screennames/linking to their sites? I'm not entirely sure I couldn't tell this story without linking/naming, but it would be really difficult. I mean, god, I could do it, but I don't know if it would really be quite as good if I didn't show you the Youtube videos they made. I remember the thread about the Sarah Saga (the girl who was "soulbonded" with Suikoden and lived in the house) and I remember people digging up her info, and people were cool with it. Is this similar? I don't want to get banned after just buying an account today. I would err on the side of caution and try to do as much as you can without direct links. If they somehow figure out their referral links they can be led back here and that might be ugly for you, you know what I'm saying? I mean, if they're "big-big" where a goonrush in their traffic stats isn't going to make them bat an eyelash, you're probably okay. I'M SO WISHY WASHY LET'S HEAR SOMEONE ELSE'S OPINION.
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Jan 1, 2014 01:12
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sweeperbravo posted:I would err on the side of caution and try to do as much as you can without direct links. If they somehow figure out their referral links they can be led back here and that might be ugly for you, you know what I'm saying? I'm not in touch with any of these people anymore, and they're not the sort of make things "ugly" for me. They're completely non-confrontational. Their sites are all locked down so people can't really get in to troll them. They'd probably actually like the publicity otherwise, because they're big on being known and getting new girls to notice them. Plus, most of the sites I'll be linking come from the Wayback machine. I've concluded that it's literally impossible to do this without linking, because without that, there's no context and you can't actually get a feel for things. Okay, so maybe I'm making half-assed justifications here, but I'd really like to give you guys the whole picture. This whole thing is downright Byzantine, and I can't just give you a piece of it - it's all or nothing.
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Jan 1, 2014 01:32
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Hibiscus posted:I'm not in touch with any of these people anymore, and they're not the sort of make things "ugly" for me. They're completely non-confrontational. Their sites are all locked down so people can't really get in to troll them. They'd probably actually like the publicity otherwise, because they're big on being known and getting new girls to notice them. Plus, most of the sites I'll be linking come from the Wayback machine. I've concluded that it's literally impossible to do this without linking, because without that, there's no context and you can't actually get a feel for things. Okay, so maybe I'm making half-assed justifications here, but I'd really like to give you guys the whole picture. This whole thing is downright Byzantine, and I can't just give you a piece of it - it's all or nothing. You're basically waving red meat in front of hyenas here. Quit teasing and post or they'll all start snapping at you instead. 
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Jan 1, 2014 01:41
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Angsty Gay Teenager Bullshit In high school, I was suddenly struck by the realization that I liked girls. And, being a girl myself, and living in a small conservative community, this was kind of hard to deal with. I knew that if people at school found out I liked girls, they'd give me poo poo for it, so I tried to keep it under wraps. It was confusing as hell - I wasn't sure if I was gay, or bi, or just hosed up in the head. I went for awhile trying to deny it, and started telling people I was asexual (I had found AVEN - I spent a lot of time online) as a way to avoid dealing with my sexuality entirely. My parents had always taught me to accept gay people, but I knew most other people in the town didn't. I knew a boy a few years older than me had gotten his nose broken because he was "a queer," and then had been kicked out of his house. I figured I was safe from being kicked out, but I didn't want to get my poo poo ruined, so I kept quiet. After a year or so, I thought it would be alright to tell my parents, since they were all accepting and poo poo, right? They were not pleased. It became apparent that they were fine with anyone and everyone being gay as long as it wasn't me. My father actually sat me down and explained to me how lesbians have sex, and then said, "Doesn't that sound gross? You don't want to be doing that. You're just confused." I stopped bringing it up and continued keeping quiet about it around my friends and people at school. Your Land of Heart's Desire? The one place I was free to express it was the Internet. I had my own laptop and we had high-speed bandwidth, so I spent a lot of time online. I visited a lot of sites geared towards gay and lesbian teenagers. I wasn't quite comfortable with acknowledging my sexual (as opposed to romantic) attraction to girls just yet, so I wasn't looking at porn or anything, and was actually kind of put off by the descriptions of how things functioned I found on these websites. It reminded me of my dad. He'd said it was gross, right? How it all went down is kind of fuzzy (this was a LONG time ago), but somehow I came across this site http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010720225049/http://aristasia.co.uk/. For those who don't want to read the page, let me quote the gist of it for you: quote:Have you ever wanted to live in a feminine world - a world without men? Now, the idea of a world without men appealed to me, because I, for some reason, thought that liking girls meant I couldn't also like guys, and that guys were somehow supposed to be the enemy. Gentleness, beauty and innocence appealed, too - I wasn't comfortable being worldly and sexual about my feelings for other girls. I read on, and it talked about "Aristasian ideals" and philosophy. What was this Aristasia thing? Aristasian Infodump Well, I read on, and I quickly found out just how bizarre this group was that I had just stumbled across. Here's a brief summary of everything I know about Aristasia in one place. All of this is available online in myriad sites. I'm just consolidating it. Basically, Aristasia is an alternate world (Like Narnia, I thought? Cool!) where no men exist, and everyone looks like a girl. Instead of having men around, Aristasia has two female sexes: blondes and brunettes. Blondes are hyper-feminine, whereas brunettes are more butch (but still innocent and gentle and all that jazz!). Blondes are considered more spiritual, and brunettes are considered more practical. In Aristasia, they can marry and have kids with each other, but the precise mechanism as to how this is done wasn't explained for a long time. Here's a map of Aristasia:  See that? That's the Feminine Empire of Aristasia. There are seven provinces, or nations or whatever. Notice the little stick figures wearing clothes? Those represent the character of each province. You see, each province corresponds to a different period of history. Amazonia corresponds to the distant past. Arcadia is the Victorian era. Vintesse is the 1920s, Trent is the 1930s, Kadoria is the 1940s, and Quirinelle is the 1950s. And then there's Novaria, which corresponds to, well, the future? Apparently. Here's the flag of the Aristasian empire:  Wait, I thought - and you might be thinking, too! What about the 1960s, 1970s, and the rest of the decades up until the millennium. Why weren't they represented? The Eclipse It took some digging to find this out, but I soon learned that Aristasians believe society to have collapsed around 1964, and that every piece of culture created afterwards is barbarian and not worth paying attention to. They call this "The Eclipse," and describe it as if they were talking about the aftermath of a nuclear war. Basically, when women stopped wearing dresses and stockings and started wearing pants, pantyhose and shorter skirts, the end of civilization was nigh. When the strict conformism of the 1950s gave way to the flower children, everything was ruined forever. Aristasians were cool with using computers and other technological things made post-1960s, but no fashion, pop culture, or philosophy. A little bit of terminology. Aristasians don't refer to decades afterwards as the 1970s, 1980s, or so forth. They call them Decades of Darkness. So, when one talks about the Fifth Decade of Darkness, it means the 2000s. They refer to anything created after the 1960s as "out-of-date." Anything created beforehand is called "up-to-date." They also talk a lot about what they call racination, which refers to the quality of being real. Things and ideas from the eras before the 1960s are "racinated" or "real," whereas everything afterwards is "deracinated" or "unreal." They also use some peculiar slang terms. Computers are "ordinators" or "ordies." The Internet is "elecktraspace," and emails are "elecktraposts" or "lekkies." They also refer to the real world as "Telluria." They also occasionally call it "The Pit" when specifically referring to the period after the 1960s. I wasn't so sure about that, but drat, they wore some nice dresses back then! And there were pictures all over the Aristasian sites of girls from old movies wearing that sort of thing! Gloves! Cigarette holders! Pencil skirts! It all seemed so glamorous. At the time I basically wore jeans and t-shirts everyday, and this was so exotic and interesting to me. I figured I could really get behind Aristasian fashion sense, if nothing else. Being that I was progressive and was (or thought I was) gay, I wasn't too keen on the idea of everything after the civil rights era being considered a downfall, but still, those were some nice dresses. More Worldbuilding There was a religious aspect to all this, as well. Aristasians, being a completely feminine race, worship God the Mother. Never "The Goddess" (they were trying to distance themselves from Wicca) - they always called their deity "God the Mother" or "Mother-God." In addition to worshiping her, they also venerated seven angels or "emanations" of the divine. These corresponded to the Aristasian provinces, but beyond that were basically cribbed from astrology and classical mythology. For example, there was a Sai Vikhe, the Angel of defense and battle, who corresponded to the nation of Kadoria and the planet mars. Another example is Sai Candre, who corresponds to the nation of Vintesse and the moon. Basically, if you know the basics of what the planets stand for in traditional astrology, you know all about the Aristasian Angels (sometimes called Janyati). Here's the first part in a series of videos about Aristasian religion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDfq4bHybTA Then there's the part that really hooks people in. Spanking. You see, Aristasia is a very strict place. They can't have girls straying and acting all Pittish. So what do they do? They spank them, or employ other forms of punishment. This can range from a light spanking to a full-on caning. In fact, Aristasia has no prisons - all punishment is dealt out physically by women known as District Governnesses, who act as a sort of judge and punisher in the area where they live. Aristasians were all adamant that this was completely non-sexual and not fetishy in any way. They referred to S&M as "silly monkeys" and try to distance themselves from it. The public face of Aristasia was a woman named Marianne Martindale, who wrote books all about disciplining women, and also wrote a column in Chap Magazine about how awful things have been since the 1960s. She owned a business called the Wildfire Club, which sold canes and straps and such things. At one point in time, the site also offered audio files about women being disciplined and referred to them as "delicious." Curiouser and curiouser. Here's Miss Martindale:  Aristasian Life Now, this is all some intricate worldbuilding, but where does it all come from? The TVtropes page (yes, there's a TVtropes page. Always is) describes it best when it says that most of Aristasia isn't centered around books (though there are a few) or online fiction (there's some of that, too), but on actually "living it." That is, dressing up in old-fashioned clothing and taking on an Aristasian persona and acting it out with other people. At the time I was finding all this, there was an enclave of Aristasians living in London who regularly held events out of a house they called the Aristasian Embassy. These events included "kinemas" (their word for going to the movies) coffee bars, cocktail parties, and a peculiar enterprise known as Avenbridge school. Avenbridge School was... a school, with real lessons, tests, quizzes, grades... and punishments. Girls would attend this to socialize and apparently actually learn things - a few people were talking about how they'd improved their French there. They were also punished when they strayed. I'm not sure how far that went, but I know that at least spanking was involved, if not outright caning. There was even a part that said that you could bring a "note from mother" requesting the schoolmistress discipline you. You can read about it here, on a very old site that I believe was taken over by someone trying to preserve it after all that's changed: http://wildfireclub.co.uk/Avenbridge.html As mentioned, there were Aristasian books. One was called The District Governess, and featured scenes of discipline taking place in Aristasia. Another was Children of the Void, which was about people roleplaying as Aristasians. The third was called The Feminine Regime, and featured a girl entering an Aristasia-like world that ran parallel to the rest of the world. You can read part of it here: http://aristasia.net/TheFeminineRegime%28inprogress%29.pdf Miss Martindale ran the embassy and at one point invited some non-Aristasians to visit and receive discipline. Some TV station in the UK recorded the whole thing and now it's up on Youtube. Check it out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hxVnKUrHU I was really interested, not particularly because they fit with my philosophy or worldview or anything but because it was all just so drat unusual. I decided to hang out with them. I wasn't about to take it too seriously, but I also wasn't really out to troll them. Think of it as participant anthropology. In the next few posts: my first contact with the Aristasians, the breakup of the Aristasian embassy, Second Life exodus, Operation Bridgehead, the civil war, and Chelouranya.
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Jan 1, 2014 03:50
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This sounds like it'll be a good one.  (also welcome to SA!)
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Jan 1, 2014 04:01
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Holy crap, this is great. I can't wait to hear about the Second Life exodus.
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Jan 1, 2014 04:04
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I think my favorite part is on the map there's a place literally called "northern wastes"
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Jan 1, 2014 05:20
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Holy poo poo, that came up in this book, but the author wasn't sure whether or not it was real so he just mentioned it in passing. This stuff has a long intellectual pedigree, Hibiscus.
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Jan 1, 2014 05:41
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Holy poo poo is it like a sort of inverted GOR or something.
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Jan 1, 2014 06:19
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Holy poo poo, that came up in this book, but the author wasn't sure whether or not it was real so he just mentioned it in passing. This stuff has a long intellectual pedigree, Hibiscus. Yeah, just going from what you've said, Hibiscus, what you've described sounds like something different from what we've usually seen in this thread. This isn't just some lonely person cargo-culting an identity out of pop culture and pulp fantasy; this is more built up than that. The fact that there is a mythology that cites actual dates and historical periods (instead of being in the historyless "once upon a time" era) that is (relatively) free of the paraphernalia of sparkly magic kingdoms definitely sets it apart from the typical personal consolatory fantasies. I'm not entirely sure what to call it. Cult? School of philosophy? Alternative modernist movement? At this point, it sounds like some remnant of 19th-20th century lesbian culture reacted to the sexual liberation of the 1960s by burrowing even deeper underground and getting mystical. In any case, keep posting. I'm genuinely curious about this.
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Jan 1, 2014 07:25
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How fascinating, I was expecting a roleplay board, but it seems they prefer to larp. From the way you're hinting at things, it sounds like you got there just before everything collapsed. So this should be a very interesting read. Thank you for sharing with us.
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Jan 1, 2014 11:34
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BingeHooligan posted:I think my favorite part is on the map there's a place literally called "northern wastes" Is there any fantasy thing where The North is somewhere you want to be?
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Jan 1, 2014 12:07
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Mind Loving Owl posted:Is there any fantasy thing where The North is somewhere you want to be? Well, Hogwarts is in Scotland...
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Jan 1, 2014 12:24
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Mind Loving Owl posted:Is there any fantasy thing where The North is somewhere you want to be? No, actually. The Northern Wastes are considered quite dangerous. Let me tell you about Sai Rayanna, which was a big part of their mythology. Aristasians, generally, as a rule, say they don't "kill their own kind." You won't find many murders in Aristasia, and none of those provinces have ever been said to go to war. But wait, you say! There's an angel of battle! Why? Well, there have been wars in Aristasia, just not between Aristasians. You see, demons used to regularly ravage the land, coming down from the north to lay waste to cities and towns. This was in the distant past. Then, a brunette was born named Sai Rayanna who was an avatar (for lack of a better word) of Sai Raya (the angel of the sun). I don't really remember the details beyond that (its a LOT of worldbuilding to remember), but she drove away the demons and made the empire safe. Nowadays, though, the area just next to the border still suffers demonic attacks and is staffed by the Kadorian military. I'm not familiar with Gor, but from what I've read about it, Gor is much more sexualized than Aristasia. Remember: this was all supposed to be non-sexual.
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Jan 1, 2014 12:31
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Hibiscus posted:Basically, Aristasia is an alternate world (Like Narnia, I thought? Cool!) where no men exist, and everyone looks like a girl. Instead of having men around, Aristasia has two female sexes: blondes and brunettes. Blondes are hyper-feminine, whereas brunettes are more butch (but still innocent and gentle and all that jazz!).  This whole thing sounds like a steampunk version of someone's fevered dream about a vintage lesbian video he watched when he was 12.
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Jan 1, 2014 12:44
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This is fantastic stuff! I can't wait to see how deep this rabbithole goes.
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Jan 1, 2014 13:10
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moerketid posted:This is fantastic stuff! I can't wait to see how deep this rabbithole goes. All the way to the Northern Wastes 
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Jan 1, 2014 14:16
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The blonde and brunette weirdness (do redheads not exist? Are they evil in this mythos too?) makes me think 2 Broke Girls must be like a dream come true to these sorts. Then again, they wear pants and have sex with men in the show, so it's probably considered blasphemy. Truly we live in dark times.
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Jan 1, 2014 16:36
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The History Of Aristasia As Far as I Know It So how did this all start? Well, the origins of Aristasia are shrouded in mystery, and it took me a long time to figure out anything about it. Apparently, at Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford in England, there were some female students in the 1960s who didn't like the way the culture was going, especially in the U.K, (or, the Yeek, as they call it.) They were mentored by a woman using the alias "Hester St. Claire," and together formed the basic idea of Aristasia. They dropped out of Oxford and started their own little college enterprise called Milchford. At some point they seem to have collided with an occult group called Lux Madriana, which is where all the ideas of the angels and Mother-God and such come from. In the 1980s they (or a splinter group) seem to have started a commune of sorts in a large house in Ireland where they attempted to live without modern technology. They weren't very good at it, and it soon collapsed, but not before they began taking in curious people who wanted to experience their particular mode of existence. They, like the Aristasians would later do in London, ran a mock-school where adult pupils would learn things and, well, be caned. There are some accounts of how this went on the Internet, with some people reflecting fondly upon it while others flat-out call it a cult that they're glad to have escaped from. Read this: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Talk/talk.religion.newage/2005-11/msg00000.html. For some reason, despite their aversion to modernity, they got into video games and had a Commodore 64. Some of them even programmed a few video games which are still available online if you can get an emulator. One was called "The Secret of St. Brides." It's ostensibly an adventure featuring schoolgirls, but has a lot more in common with those hard-as-hell games like Crimson Room, more so because it's entirely in text. I can't be sure, but I think Miss Martindale got her start at this school (it was called St. Bride's) and went on to basically be the public face of Aristasia. Different Types of Aristasians As previously noted, there were different types of Aristasians. They were generally divided into blondes and brunettes, and I've said a little bit about what that means. Blondes were the child-bearing sex with fair hair (what that means is never fully explained) and were fairly weak physically. Brunettes had dark hair and were incredibly strong (about twice as strong as a man). In the LARP-ish events and online games, hair color was not really given much thought. Instead, you were a blonde or a brunette based on personality. At Avenbridge School, blondes were distinguished fro brunettes by a small pink ribbon on their wrist. I can't be sure, but I think that they may have worn wigs sometimes to distinguish themselves from each other. Beyond that, there were the Circles of Manifestation, a series of levels of involvement in Aristasia. The farthest circle was girls who were just curious. This was followed by people who had an "Aristasian Persona" online. Then there were people who attended Aristasian events in London, followed by fully seceded Aristasians who lived an Aristasian life twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. A lot of people will say it was a cult, but I actually have to argue against it. It was really more of a roleplaying game/LARP. There was no real brainwashing going on and people were free to leave whenever they wanted to. Also, despite their abject hatred for the modern world and the discipline thing, Aristasians didn't really keep much control over their membership. The big rule was that people needed to stay in character while participating in Aristasian events, or they would be asked to leave. I am unsure how many people were at the heart of this, but there were enough that elaborate events did happen in London, including the school and other things. Via their website I learned about these events, holiday parties, dance clubs, that sort of thing. One of these endeavors was a monthly dance club called Sweethearts. The premise was that girls were going to dress up in 20s/30s/40s fashions and dance to period music. Unfortunately, for the first time this was supposed to happen, the people in question failed to get a dancing permit. I had no idea people needed a permit to dance, but apparently in London they do. So, instead of dancing, they just talked and smoked and drank. Here are some pictures from Sweethearts: http://aristasia.net/firstnight.html As with the previous links, this one was saved by someone trying to preserve it and is not supported by current Aristasians. Originally, there was a little story posted to go with the Sweethearts business, an account of attending the club by a fully-seceded Aristasian. It began by talking a bit about the London club scene. My favorite part about it was that the person had said something like, "They say that illicit drugs are used in London clubs, and I can believe it. The music is so awful and the people so coarse that I personally wouldn't be able to tolerate them without being thoroughly drugged." That was such an unusual way of looking at things. It was just fascinating. Types of Non-Aristasians Aristasians believed in three types of non-Aristasians, or mutants as they called them. They believed that the Pit mutated people and transformed "real" (or racinated) people into one of these three types. Basically, there were Type Ones, who lived as though the Eclipse had never happened, really, were generally conservative, and didn't really go for pop culture. Then there were Type Twos who did consume pop culture and had all the viewpoints and opinions associated with the Pit. Finally, there were Type Threes, who were super-mutants and rebelled even against the rebellion of the Pit and became goths or S&M freaks or whatever. All these people are commonly called "bongos" for some reason. I realize that term has some serious racial overtones, but it was very clear from the way they used it that they had no intention of implying racism at all. These people flat-out didn't understand racism or even acknowledge it's existence, which led them to doing and saying a lot of problematic things without really meaning to. At one point they used some symbols associated with the Nazis on their website and were really surprised when people complained because they didn't even know the symbols could be seen as racist or problematic. There were rumors that the BNP had corresponded with some of them in the distant past, though, but these people flat-out refused to acknowledge that racism was a thing, for the most part. They wrote a little bit about it in their FAQ, something to the effect of Aristasia containing girls of every race, but that their race was unimportant since, while in character, they were "Pure Aristasian." In terms of the mythology, Aristasia had different races, but they weren't really seen as such. The southern regions of the empire were filled with dark-skinned people, and the eastern regions had Asian analogues. There's one Aristasian book that makes the strange argument that the same races exist in all worlds and in mostly the same locations on each world, but this came much later, after Bridgehead. First Contact with Aristasians When I first got involved, Aristasia didn't have a real forum or anything for people to talk about it. There was an enterprise called the Aphrodite Cocktail Bar where you could email in notes and pictures and they would be posted on the website. I wasn't much for that, so I wrote in asking if anyone wanted to correspond with me through messsenger. The person I contacted was fully-seceded and lived at the Aristasian Embassy in London. I asked some basic questions like, "Do you get funny looks when you go out dressed all Aristasian?" She said yes, sometimes, but it depended on what she was wearing, because some Aristasian styles could pass for normal conservative dress. She was evasive about her age and other personal details. The thing about Aristasians is that they operate through personas, which are basically roleplaying characters, and there can be more than one per person. For example, the person I was talking to confessed that she was an ambi, or a person who played both a blonde and a brunette at different times. They also tend to identify with different ages - the person I talked to identified as (IIRC) seventeen, but was clearly much older in reality. I want to say a bit about how I saw all this. I wasn't about to buy into all this business about society collapsing in the 1960s and I wasn't about to believe in this Mother-God or Angels or anything like that. My religious beliefs are very, very different than that, and always have been. I also really appreciate most of the changes of the 1960s, like the civil rights movement. Still, their fashion sense was dead cool, and gooddamn, it was all just so drat intricate and interesting. I also wasn't really keen on the spanking thing. Female domination has never interested me all that much. I wanted to be involved on the periphery and know what they were doing, basically, and also look at all these great pictures of girls in period dress that they kept popping up on their websites. The Embassy and Operation Bridgehead I wasn't in London or anywhere near there at the time all this was happening, so I never met any of them in person. I heard all kinds of interesting stories through their websites, though. For example, at one point they all went to France on April Fools Day, and there was some kind of drama with (I think) one of the "younger" people getting lost and having to ask for help from a "frozzer" or "French rozzer." The person in question wrote a song about it called "Frozzing in the Capital of France." They also always did something funny for April Fools Day, but the jokes were usually kind of depressing. During the France trip they made this elaborate joke about Aristasia being really, really big in France and being greeted by thousands of people, which only underscored how very small the movement was in reality. They took pictures on the trip and blurred out the "bongo" cars and people. At one point they all went to America and visited Disneyland, which they found absolutely enchanting. They said that Disneyland was one of the few "innocent places" left in the world, and they cherished it because of that. They made quite a show of running around Florida in period dress and acting peculiar. There was some kind of major argument about whether or not a lady should remove her gloves to pet an alligator while on one of those boats that goes through the Everglades. In (I think) 2005, things got a bit weirder than usual. It was announced that Aristasia had entered a new era called "Operation Bridgehead" and that things were going to change. Remember that minor Aristasian province called Novaria, the one that corresponded to the future? Well, it suddenly became very important, and the key players were saying that Novarians (real Novarians from another world? Not sure here...) had contacted the Embassy and were set on reshaping Aristasia-in-Telluria. What this meant wasn't really explained at first, except that Aristasia was going to reach a wider audience and help new girls find it easier. It also involved a much bigger internet presence. People also began saying that not only was Aristasia real, but that they themselves had been Aristasians in a past life. Previously, most people had considered it a roleplaying game, if a fairly serious one. Here's the thing, though: I think I was partially if not entirely responsible for the change. I talked to Aristasians, especially the core group, rather regularly. I didn't have an Aristasian persona or anything, but I did talk to them. And, at the same time, I was enjoying all the weirdness the Internet had to offer. I'd discovered Portal of Evil and learned about otherkin and stuff. And, well, for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to mention this to the Aristasians. And they were fascinated by it. So fascinated, it seemed, that they decided to become otherkin themselves by declaring Aristasia to be a real place in another dimension or whatever, and that they were reincarnated Aristasians receiving messages from the Motherland. Suddenly Second Life entered into the equation. Someone at the Embassy had discovered it and decided that it was a great platform for Aristasians. They joined Second Life and bought property there, building a virtual embassy. I was still really fascinated and couldn't wait to see how this was going to play out, so I joined Second Life to visit their Embassy. Problem was, it wouldn't run on my computer, so I had to kind of suss out what was going on in there from sparse second-hand accounts. Most of Aristasia had moved to Second Life, leaving behind the assorted forums and websites that had previously made up Aristasia. Oh, there were still websites, but they were different than anything previously seen in the community. They were all focused on Second Life, and had pictures of Second Life and the Embassy. The sites about Aristasian events in London were shut down, and soon, the exodus was complete. This all seemed to center around a woman called Sushuri Madonna. This is obviously not her real name - it's a Second Life name. I had talked to her throughout all of this, and she was a very nice girl. She considered herself blonde, and very young, though, so it was strange to see this persona taking such an active role in controlling the direction of things. Then, apparently, things went bad at the Embassy. I will probably never know all the details, but from what I can surmise, there was some kind of break-up between some of the key players. A blogger on the periphery of all this wrote a bit about it on Tumblr, which I'll quote to save time but won't link to because hit counters and goon-rush. I'm truncating it a bit. quote:The circumstances surrounding the Operation Bridgehead is inexplicable. In particular, sudden removal of the old-timer Aristasian heavy-weights such as Miss Martindale and Miss Langridge, sudden cancellation of the old mailing address (“BM Elegance”, London WC1) at British Monomark without even providing a forwarding address... and inexplicable appearance of characters such as “Commander Thamla Caerelinde” and odd shift from the old imagery of a pre-Eclipse culture to that of a science-fiction involving extraterrestrials and space navy, all make no sense in the retrospect... By the time this all happened, the exodus to Second Life was complete. I still couldn't access it, though, so I stayed on the periphery. In my next post, which will probably happen soon as I'm on school break right now and have nothing else to do with my time, I'll talk about what happened when I DID get into Second Life and started hanging out with Aristasians, which was some years later. I really hope these posts aren't too long and boring. I'm trying to make it interesting, and maybe it is, but I can't tell anymore. Aristasia is old hat for me. I know all the details about it and have been following these people for about ten years, just watching events transpire.
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Jan 1, 2014 16:41
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Anoia posted:The blonde and brunette weirdness (do redheads not exist? Are they evil in this mythos too?) makes me think 2 Broke Girls must be like a dream come true to these sorts. Then again, they wear pants and have sex with men in the show, so it's probably considered blasphemy. Redheads do exist, but they're always either blonde or brunette. Darker red hair means brunette, lighter red hair means blonde. There was some argument about whether red hair indicated instability or a hormonal imbalance.
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Jan 1, 2014 16:42
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The Internet never fails to surprise, but I'm fascinated with pre-Internet sub-sub-cultures and other oddities. Thanks for sharing this, Hibiscus. All the girls-school and discipline reminds me of the character Rosa Coote who appeared in a bunch of Victorian erotica where caning was totally about discipline and not sexual at all, no really guys. I'd be shocked if the whole Aristasia deal wasn't based on reading flagellation stories in 'The Pearl.'
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Jan 1, 2014 18:01
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Marshal Radisic posted:I'm not entirely sure what to call it. Cult? School of philosophy? Alternative modernist movement? Hibiscus posted:At one point they used some symbols associated with the Nazis on their website and were really surprised when people complained because they didn't even know the symbols could be seen as racist or problematic. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jan 1, 2014 |
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Jan 1, 2014 18:53
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Holy crap, a whole internet subculture I'd never heard of before. e. haha that link you gave to the cult lady makes them sound so pathetic, like a meeker version of the Hawaii commune Corridor fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Jan 1, 2014 |
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Jan 1, 2014 19:09
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I feel like this story is the culmination of everything this thread could ever possibly be.
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Jan 1, 2014 19:32
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The accidental use of real slurs, plus terms like mushroom for the Madonna chick's splinter group, is just precious.
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Jan 1, 2014 20:29
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What a terrible name. My brain keeps tripping over it every time I read the word. For some reason I read it as Aristania.wikipedia posted:Aristasia is a feminine version of the Greek word aristos, which means 'the best' 
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Jan 1, 2014 23:15
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hyperhazard posted:What a terrible name. My brain keeps tripping over it every time I read the word. For some reason I read it as Aristania. How could they gently caress that simple thing up. It's "άριστη". Aristasia sounds like a knock-off of Anastasia. Or some sort of stand made by Ares.
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Jan 1, 2014 23:21
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So I assume that anyone who was "outed" as a real-life biological male was instantly ostracized from Aristasian online RPs and the like? During the 1990s the Internet was, for the most part, extremely male-dominated. From my memory of that period, if Aristasia would have advertised itself at all on the Internet it would have gotten invaded by hordes of teenage boys wanting to have lesbian cybersex. Did that ever happen, and how did they deal with the drama it caused?
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Jan 2, 2014 00:19
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Konstantin posted:During the 1990s the Internet was, for the most part, extremely male-dominated. Not true. People tended to avoid mentioning if they were women though.
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Jan 2, 2014 00:21
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a travelling HEGEL posted:The word that a lot of people use is Traditionalist. Alternative modernist/anti-modernist/revolutionary and reactionary at the same time. There are lots of schools of thought like that; many are Fascist. I'd recommend that book to everyone. As to being fascist, well, they would probably call themselves royalists or something to that effect. I didn't say much about the government of their little alternate world, but it's not democracy by any means. There's a queen for each province, and they're ruled over by the empress of the whole thing. There was some talk of voting in district governesses, but that wasn't widely accepted as "fact" or whatever.
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Jan 2, 2014 01:03
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It cracks me up whenever people make single sex utopias and then just find a way to separate them into essentially Females and Males, but with different names. Some weird  happenning.So how did non-white women/women of color fit into these societies? Were they all
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Jan 2, 2014 01:12
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ms_hyena posted:It cracks me up whenever people make single sex utopias and then just find a way to separate them into essentially Females and Males, but with different names. Some weird Hibiscus did say that blonde/brunette was determined more by personality than actual, uh, phenotype. But I wouldn't be surprised if your last sentence was true.
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Jan 2, 2014 01:36
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Konstantin posted:So I assume that anyone who was "outed" as a real-life biological male was instantly ostracized from Aristasian online RPs and the like? During the 1990s the Internet was, for the most part, extremely male-dominated. From my memory of that period, if Aristasia would have advertised itself at all on the Internet it would have gotten invaded by hordes of teenage boys wanting to have lesbian cybersex. Did that ever happen, and how did they deal with the drama it caused? It's flat-out not true that the Internet was male-dominated. But they did have problems with men trying to get in. When I first made contact with the people from London, they quickly said that they would need to have a phone conversation with me to prove I was actually female. This never happened, and the issue was dropped and I was assumed female. They talked occcasionally about "gonks" - their word for men trying to infiltrate Aristasian spaces, and how they were easy to spot and get rid of. I never had any dealings with someone trying to do that, though I had male friends who said they really, really wanted to try. Thing is, they spotted these men through their extreme interest in the discipline aspect as opposed to anything else. I suspect there were men who were involved, though, but who weren't there for sexual purposes, and therefore didn't get found out. Someone told me that many of the people in the online school RP were actually male, but it's hard to confirm. There's also a man on Youtube - can't be arsed to find his videos - who followed Aristasia for some time, and made videos about it, and actually drove to the house Miss Martindale lived in and vlogged the whole thing. He kind of freaked me out, because that borders on stalking, and while these people are flat-out bizarre, I wouldn't want them in any danger. Also, watch the Martindale videos. There's the girl with the reddish hair. I showed that video to a friend, and he instantly said she was a transwoman, based on her appearance and also some of the things she says. May or may not be the case. Hibiscus fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Jan 17, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 01:42
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