empty whippet box posted:

Actually a lot of people in the thread do have interest in it and people like you just have to throw a pathetic fit every single time she posts. Just put her on ignore and move on.

botany posted:

well the great thing is that there's a dedicated thread for her nonsense and if you're interested, you can read about it there. you lose literally nothing if she keeps her stuff contained there, meanwhile we don't need to read political analysis based on vampire LARP forums anymore. sounds like a win-win to me.

botany posted:

well the great thing is that there's a dedicated thread for her nonsense and if you're interested, you can read about it there. you lose literally nothing if she keeps her stuff contained there, meanwhile we don't need to read political analysis based on vampire LARP forums anymore. sounds like a win-win to me.

botany posted:

her nonsense

botany posted:

well the great thing is that there's a dedicated thread for her nonsense and if you're interested, you can read about it there. you lose literally nothing if she keeps her stuff contained there, meanwhile we don't need to read political analysis based on vampire LARP forums anymore. sounds like a win-win to me.

empty whippet box posted:

There's way more worthless posts like this than there are posts by PJ. You're just attacking someone you see as an easy target, you don't care when the thread goes on food derails. We talked about Go for like 3 solid pages worth of posts and I didn't see you complain about that. There's at least one post per page that's just a picture of a dog.

empty whippet box posted:

There's way more worthless posts like this than there are posts by PJ. You're just attacking someone you see as an easy target, you don't care when the thread goes on food derails. We talked about Go for like 3 solid pages worth of posts and I didn't see you complain about that. There's at least one post per page that's just a picture of a dog.

ascii genitals posted:

gently caress sake--it has nothing to do with "easy targets" and bullying, stop being obtuse.

empty whippet box posted:

There's way more worthless posts like this than there are posts by PJ. You're just attacking someone you see as an easy target, you don't care when the thread goes on food derails. We talked about Go for like 3 solid pages worth of posts and I didn't see you complain about that. There's at least one post per page that's just a picture of a dog.

Liquid Communism posted:

If you'd rather talk about something else, post content. Otherwise quit bitching about posting.

botany posted:

people like you come out and start vigorously defending your collective rights to hear about compaction cycles in two threads rather than one.

quote:

Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock was quite the fan of President Donald Trump before he killed 58 people and left another 500 injured—the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history.

Paddock, a millionaire who reportedly would gamble up to $1 million a night in casinos, was attracted to the president's politics because of the boost the stock market has enjoyed since Trump took office, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told KLAS, a local CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, during a two-hour interview.

Paddock said "he was happy with Trump because the stock market was doing well," Lombardo said.

Stocks have indeed risen nearly every month since Trump took office—something that has been achieved under no other U.S. president, Forbes reported. But the magazine also noted that the markets have actually seen better gains under five other presidents.

Lombardo said he didn't know offhand who Paddock was talking to when he was talking about Trump, adding that it's the "only thing that we have seen that references politics." Authorities do not believe it correlates to a motive in the shooting.

Many have questioned Paddock's political affiliations since no clear motive was evident in the attack, and also because the shooting happened about four months after members of Congress were targeted in a Virginia attack during a baseball practice.

quote:

In the interview, Lombardo also offered more details on what apparently led Paddock to meticulously plan his sniping attack from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on October 1.

He said Paddock had no affiliation or communication with terrorist or extremist organizations, and is there no proof that he went overseas or met with any extremist groups.

Investigators have been able to compile a pretty thorough psychological profile on Paddock, Lombardo said, gleaning from interviews that he was narcissistic and obsessed with his status as one of Las Vegas's elite.

However, Paddock had lost a "significant amount of his wealth" since September 2015, which caused him to become depressed, Lombardo said, adding that the sudden changes could have been a "determining factor" in Paddock's plan.

But, Lombardo added, authorities still haven't been able to figure out the trigger point that led to Paddock choosing October 1 as the date for his rampage, or why he chose the Route 91 Harvest festival as his target. Lombardo said the police and the public may never know Paddock's reasoning behind the shooting.

Office Pig posted:

Prester I think people would be more receptive if you could use... like... any other analogy.

Mantis42 posted:

Ok, I think I understand PJ's comparison. For years I was a member of an online community of Noidkin. The Right fetishizes guns, we fetishized pizza. They wear red hats, we wore skintight bunny outfits. Its all pretty similar.

botany posted:

compaction narrativist PJ cycles.

Young Freud posted:

Newsweek makes a clickbaity statement: Las Vegas gunman was a Trump supporter, happy with President because stock market was going well


However, Paddock had a lot in relation to Trump, mostly his need for status and narcissism.


According to the Las Vegas NOW interview with the sheriff, Paddock had been planning on this since October 2016, so I'm wondering if he was planning on a Hillary victory. Given the planning of the event, the attempt to obfuscate his position, the surveillance of the hallways, and his vehicle with the unrigged explosives, I would think he probably had thought he could get away and have the blame put on Muslims or Antifa.

If you're interested, Lombardo makes the "Trump" statement at about 4:10 in the second interview.

Zoro posted:

Holy poo poo, the alt-reich Las Vegas shooter was trying to make a reichstag fire? This should be on every news station!

STAC Goat posted:

You know, with all this debate about the stuff Prester Jane posts and this nonsense #Nov4 group delusion the one thing I'm really finding myself completely unable to wrap my mind around remains "legislators vote to give toddlers gun rights."

My brain feels very broken trying to process that.

Kerning Chameleon posted:

I mean, according to the RWM he apparently has his own personal permanent portal to the Elemental Plane of Currency, so it's not like it'll bother him any.

Party Plane Jones posted:

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/926619770618859521

skylined! posted:

quote:

The White House on Saturday disparaged the legacies of the only two living Republican presidents to precede Donald Trump, after reports that both men castigated Trump in interviews last year and refused to vote for him.

Former president George H.W. Bush mocked then-candidate Trump as a “blowhard” and voted for a Democratic president, while the younger Bush worried aloud that Trump would destroy the idea of a Republican president in all but name, according to “The Last Republicans,” which is scheduled to go on sale later this month.

The White House responded after quotes from the book were published on Saturday, entering an extraordinary war of words involving three presidents from the same party.

“If one Presidential candidate can disassemble a political party, it speaks volumes about how strong a legacy its past two presidents really had,” the White House wrote to CNN.

Office Pig posted:

Why are your posts so loving weird

Mantis42 posted:

Ok, I think I understand PJ's comparison. For years I was a member of an online community of Noidkin. The Right fetishizes guns, we fetishized pizza. They wear red hats, we wore skintight bunny outfits. Its all pretty similar.

Vice posted:

So Syd walked out. It was August 2002, and the summer sun beating down on the blacktop burned his feet. He'd taken a change of clothes, a pocket knife, a sketchbook, a pencil, and all the money he had left—five dollars. "I was homeless a few days," he recalled on the website. "I had the freedom to walk where I wanted and sit down where I wanted. There were no smells. There was no fighting... I wasn't sick on the food I ate. No one was waking me up telling me to go outside and look at fairy rings. I swear to you, I would much rather be homeless than live with people like them ever again. The threat of homelessness does not phase me, because I have seen something much worse."


........


Many of the details of Syd's story are impossible to fully confirm. After he escaped, he recorded his and other's experiences in "A Public Warning" site that circulated widely online. According to the people VICE spoke to—Syd, other members of the FFVII House, and interested observers—those affiliated with the cult covered their tracks, deleting as many of their old blogs and message board posts as they could. The few people willing to talk about it, Syd included, asked me to use pseudonyms. The experiences they had at the house left them feeling traumatized, ashamed, and mistrustful. And the author of that trauma was the mini-cult's ringleader, "Joanna." (All names in this piece have been changed.)


Joanna was 20 years old when the FFVII house began in 2002, Syd told me, and had arrived in State College to live with her girlfriend, "Rachel." According to Syd and "McCullough," another former member, Joanna's background beyond that is tough to pin down: She went out of her way to obscure her origins, spinning tales of secret government programs and training camps in the desert. "Nate," a former friend of Joanna's, says that she spent time at Cross Creek Residential Treatment Center in La Verkin, Utah, a defunct reform school that has faced multiplelawsuits for its alleged brutal, widespread physical and psychological abuse of teenagers in the program. Supporting this is a LiveJournal post from 2004 by "Patricia," one of Joanna's roommates in a later incarnation of the FFVII house and a fellow participant in the Cross Creek program.

Joanna's mental instability, never properly treated, deteriorated after her stay at Cross Creek, according to Nate. She also had issues with her sexuality, Syd and McCollough said, explaining away her attraction to women by calling Rachel a reincarnated man. Both also said that Joanna claimed various occult powers, including the ability to "soulbond," or tap into multiple personalities at will. Some of these personalities were characters from anime or video games, particularly Final Fantasy VII. Perhaps the most famous JRPG of all time, Final Fantasy VII represented a landmark moment in gaming when it came out on PlayStation in 1997. It was a runaway hit, its various iterations eventually selling nearly 10 million copies and its success has been credited as the "ambassador not just for Final Fantasy, but for the entire genre of Japanese roleplaying games." The gaming site Ars Technica once wrote that the 3D graphics were akin to "people raised on the television (going to) the movie theater for the first time." IGN called it the 11th greatest RPG of all time.

The game's aesthetic influenced a generation of nascent Japanophiles, some of whom took their appreciation further than others and identified themselves as reincarnations of the spiky-haired characters. This had a precedent online, specifically in the "otherkin" community, where people claim to be animals, mythological spirits, or fictional characters inhabiting human bodies. Joseph Laycock, a professor of religious studies at Texas State University, says that otherkin status often functions as something closer to a personal identity. And despite the general scorn the internet holds for them, Laycock says, it's important to understand that people claiming the identity aren't necessarily crazy.

"Not everyone who takes part in this community is damaged or looking to take advantage of damaged people," he said. "But it does draw people who are very alienated. And alienated people are vulnerable."
His website put him on Joanna's radar. In 2001 they struck up a correspondence, chatting on AOL Instant Messenger about Final Fantasy and the practice of magic. Syd had dabbled in paganism during high school, so this didn't strike him as particularly odd. Somewhat stranger was Joanna's habit of insisting he call her Jenova—a villain from the game—and speaking as if she were the character. But he told me that this, too, was explainable, as roleplaying was a popular pastime in the community. So when Joanna insisted that Syd was a reincarnation of "Zack," another character, Syd went along.

Their subsequent interactions were pleasant enough that at Christmas, Joanna and Rachel offered to put Syd up for a weekend and introduce him to some like-minded people. Syd accepted and bought a bus ticket from New York to State College. The two-bedroom apartment was a mess when he walked in, he recalled, covered in dirty laundry dusted with glitter. Joanna herself was unpredictable, he said, screaming in Rachel's face one minute, smiling warmly the next. Slowly, Syd realized that Joanna's talk of reincarnation, multiple personalities, and magic was not roleplaying—from what he could tell, she actually believed the stuff. But despite it all, Syd enjoyed himself—Joanna and Rachel were fun to goof around with, and he liked the people they introduced him to. Joanna bestowed FFVII-related nicknames upon all of her friends. There was "Aerys," a quiet girl Joanna had romantic designs on; an otherkin guy nicknamed "Cid"; and McCullough, a community college student from Maryland whose friendship with Rachel put her under Joanna's thumb. She opted to call Syd "Zack."



Throughout the spring of 2002, Syd kept in contact with them online and often took the bus over to stay for weekends. The FFVII house at this time only consisted of three permanent residents, he said: Joanna, Rachel, and a male roommate Joanna had named "Gast" after a minor character from the game. But Joanna also played host to a revolving door of visitors she had met online. "Every single person who lived with her was named after a Final Fantasy character," recalls "Clark," an online friend of Joanna's from about this time. "She would talk about these people in really loving, warm words for a couple months, a couple weeks, and then just like a switch, something would happen and she'd say, 'Oh, this person is evil, they had to leave my house.'"

Strange things began happening when Syd visited. In one case, he said, Joanna began pressuring Syd and Aerys to hook up, since their respective characters were romantically connected in the game. When they refused to take the hint, she loudly announced that she'd added fistfuls of aphrodisiacs to their food. During another trip, Joanna and Rachel locked Syd in a soundproof practice room in the Penn State music building, hoping it would jar loose memories of his past lives. They only released him after he started panicking. One time, Syd said, Joanna insisted on doing a past-life regression on a college friend he had brought along for a visit, which involved lying on the floor in a dark room as Joanna chanted and music played on a loop—a selection from the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack called "The Nightmare Is Just Beginning."

But none of this was enough to dissuade Syd from moving in when Joanna offered to put him up that summer. His relationship with his mother was unraveling, he said, and the prospect of going home to Brooklyn and his family for months on end held no appeal. He moved in his belongings and pet rat, got a job at a local supermarket to help with the rent, and settled in.

Things deteriorated quickly. Joanna stopped leaving the apartment and quit her babysitting job, Syd says, relying on him to pay the rent. Multiple members of the FFVII house told me she relentlessly pressed them for money, all of which went either toward expensive food or an endless succession of "magical" toys like wands and angel figurines. Syd told me he was required to bring home day-old food and coupons from the supermarket, a practice that landed him in trouble with his bosses. Every night they ate $10 steaks and gatorade, a diet that made Syd sick. The apartment, already in shambles, devolved into a morass of laundry, toys, and glitter. Joanna wore the same clothing every day and rarely bathed, McCollough said, preferring to anoint herself with oils. Joanna and Rachel screamed and fought constantly, alternating physical abuse with noisy makeup sex. Guests were made to clean occasionally, but nobody took the trash out, and soon the air was rank with the odor of sex and rotting meat.

"God, the smell in that place," Syd wrote in an account on his website. "It was like a miasma of filth with sparkle sunshine fairy artificial sugar scent sprayed over it. It made me sick."

Any time Syd tried to communicate with the outside world, Joanna watched him like a hawk, making it impossible for him to tell anyone what was happening. His movements had to be accounted for—if he left the apartment for anything other than work, he risked being locked out for hours at a time. Worse, Joanna woke him at odd hours for magical errands such as setting up protective spells and investigating fairy rings. Isolated and exhausted, he went along with Joanna's ever-shifting fantasies as a matter of self-preservation. There was hell to pay if he cried or stood up to her, he told VICE.

The others weren't doing much better. Joanna forced Aerys to sit in a bathtub of ice cubes and green food coloring as part of her "magical training," Syd said. McCullough remembers being summoned up from Maryland for increasingly ludicrous reasons, and Joanna delighted in manipulating her, using her friendship with Rachel to control her online behavior. Crossing Joanna in any way risked having her turn everyone you knew against you, McCullough told me. When Aerys and Cid had enough and left, Joanna ensured that their former friends, on- and offline, shunned them.

........



Both Syd's initial LJ entry and the 2006 website attracted plenty of curious attention, both in the Final Fantasy fandom and on other corners of the internet. That attention grew as people from outside the relatively insular fandom picked up the story, spreading it elsewhere online as an example of a crazy internet horror story. Spectators made a game out of tracking down personal information of the people involved, or of digging up the stranger things they'd said on private LiveJournals or blogs. Some of this, Syd said, came from an honest attempt to make sure Joanna didn't hurt anyone else in the community. But it seems impossible to deny that much of it was old-fashioned internet poo poo-stirring. Joanna and her supporters fought back, deleting as much of their old material as possible, sparking flame wars where they raged against Syd and his website. They called him a liar and accused him of being insane, or addicted to drugs. Both sides of the debate took on the tenor of witch hunts.

The fights, egged on by trolls and rubberneckers, reached more absurd heights with the 2008 publication of a (now deleted) LiveJournal thread that detailed a similar situation to the FFVII house, centered around a nightmarish roommate who made money by conning otherkin out of money for her "religion." The posts, all supposedly authored by different people in the house, read in a suspiciously similar style, and I'm uncomfortable vouching for their authenticity. But the members of the online forum Something Awful ran with it, preserving the journal entries and launching a long-running attempt to dig up the identity of the woman allegedly described. Commenters on the thread eventually claimed to have discovered that the antagonist of the story was one of the FFVII house members, which drew yet more attention to Syd's original site.

.........


Syd estimates that about 20 people were sucked into Joanna's real-world orbit, and many more online. He and McCullough got their lives together, though they still feel scarred by the experience.

"Jo was very good at selecting people who could be manipulated and forced into being victims," Syd told me. She recruited the disaffected, he went on, those with bad home lives or issues with gender and sexuality. The kinds of people looking for fellowship online, who saw an offer of a place where they could be themselves and jumped at it—people a little bit like Joanna herself.

voltroon posted:

Wouldn't a community of otherkin where everyone was the same character devolve into infighting about who were 'fakes' and doubles? I thought one of the core components of otherkin-ness was believing you are "literally, actually, irl" your chosen character. Or are there multiple Noids in canon?

RuanGacho posted:

Actually, otherkin may be topical to the president since he presents as a Rich Smart Man whom has otherworldly powers of memory and correctness, except when said things would make him responsible for something.

Zoro posted:

People who believe they are mythical creatures in another universe/previous life and thus are that thing. Basically, furries but with faries and dragons and poo poo.

Zoro posted:

Holy poo poo, the alt-reich Las Vegas shooter was trying to make a reichstag fire? This should be on every news station!

voltroon posted:

Wouldn't a community of otherkin where everyone was the same character devolve into infighting about who were 'fakes' and doubles? I thought one of the core components of otherkin-ness was believing you are "literally, actually, irl" your chosen character. Or are there multiple Noids in canon?