Disillusioned with Humanity (The YouTube Sex Scandal)

This is a slightly nerve-wracking blog post to write (especially since my parents read this blog), but it's important and I'm going to write it.

By the way, this post concerns sex. So if you don't want to read about that, don't read it.

Here we go.

I was disappointed to hear about the recent events that rocked the Nerdfighter community last week. I found out about them from Hank Green's video (posted below) and have since researched the topic so as to better understand what happened.

So basically what happened is that several people associated with Nerdfighteria and specifically vloggers (YouTube video bloggers) have been accused of sexually manipulating and/or abusing their fans. It started with Tom Milsom, a popular vlogger and singer, being accused on Tumblr, and since then several more victims have come forward and spoken out, implicating Milsom and another notable YouTube celebrity, Alex Day, as well as a few others. Alex Day admitted to the allegations--read about that here and here (the first link is an internet news site and the second is Hank Green's Tumblr). And here is a link to Alex Day's blog, where he has posted his responses to this (scroll past the music video and the next three posts are the most relevant.) Alex Day's and Tom Milsom's music and merchandise have been removed from the DFTBA store (DFTBA=the Vlogbrother's record label. The acronym stands for "Don't Forget To Be Awesome").

I got into YouTube and Nerdfighteria about two years ago via Charlie McDonnell (a.k.a. charlieissocoollike) (here's a link to his blog if you're interested--first post down is his response to all this) and I still enjoy YouTube. My favorites are the Vlogbrothers, of course (that's John and Hank Green if you didn't know) as well as danisnotonfire and AmazingPhil.

I used to watch the very occasional Alex Day video, back when he was Nerimon on YouTube, but I was never a huge fan. I couldn't really pinpoint why. But since I never watched any Tom Milsom videos at all, the news about Alex Day was more surprising to me. It was especially weird because he used to share a flat with Charlie McDonnell, and they were really good friends, and I really liked Charlie McDonnell's videos (and still do). So it was really scary finding something like that out about him.

And it really made me think about how you can't know someone unless you've actually talked to them in person, and I don't mean a "Hey, I love your videos it's grand to meet you" conversation, I mean a real conversation about real things.

Being a fan of stuff is great. It can be really fun, but you have to be careful--I make it a point not to let anything I like take over my life. At least not for more than, say, a week.

But YouTube isn't your typical fandom. Vloggers tend to feel much more personal to their audience than, say, Justin Beiber feels to Beilebers Belibers Beliieliebers his fans.

YouTubers aren't just singing, or writing, or acting. They're telling you stuff about their lives. They're sharing stories with you. They let their fans tour their houses through videos, tell them exciting news about pets, projects, relationships--and they do it all face-to-face, albeit through a computer screen. It's easy to get attached.

It's easy to feel like you know them.

But no matter how much you know about them, no matter how many times you've watched all their videos and how much they feel like your friends---you don't know them. You cannot know a person without having had an actual, two-way conversation lasting more than five minutes with them.

And they don't know you, either. The YouTubers you're watching--they don't know you exist. They know nothing about you. There's no guarantee that you and the YouTuber would get along in real life.

That's also why I'm being super formal and not referring to anyone by first name only. Because I'm not on a first-name-only basis with them. I don't really know them, and they don't even know I exist.

I'm going to use an analogy that any Nerdfighter worth his or her salt should recognize. If you haven't read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and are planning to read it, well, SPOILERS.

So in the book there's this other book that Hazel, the protagonist, just loves. It's called An Imperial Affliction, and Hazel feels like it describes her, like the author wrote the book just for Hazel. 

An Imperial Affliction was written by a reclusive author called Peter van Houten who lives in Amsterdam. A big part of the plot is that Hazel gets to fly to Amsterdam to actually meet Peter van Houten. She naturally assumes that the author is brilliant and amazing and that he'll be at least reasonably friendly to his most ardent fans--but when she gets there, he's not. Peter van Houten is a rude, abrasive, and rather asinine drunkard, and he absolutely crushes Hazel's hopes of learning what happens to the characters after the book ends. He insults her and is just really horrible and mean, and Hazel leaves in tears, her dreams crushed to smithereens.

That might be a weak analogy, but I hope you see my point. My point is that you can't know someone you've never met. You just can't. 

That said, I still think that YouTube can be an enormous force for the positive in the world. We just have to be careful with it, and we have to be especially careful about the relationships between creator and fan. 

Having never been in any sort of romantic relationship, and certainly not an abusive or coercive one, I'll leave the explaining about that to the positive forces on YouTube:

Here's Hank Green's video response to the allegations:

And here's Charlie McDonnell's:

This whole incident is big, and scary. But it's also something we can learn from if we handle it the right way.



Here are the articles I'm using for reference:

The Daily Dot:
http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/tom-milsom-underage-sex-scandal/
http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/alex-day-sexual-assault/

The post on Hank Green's Tumblr:

http://edwardspoonhands.com/post/79572398708/wtf-is-going-on

Alex Day's blog:
http://that-alexday.tumblr.com/

Charlie's blog:
http://charliemcdonnell.com/

And a helpful overview of the whole thing, if you're still confused:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/the-dftba-sexual-abuse-scandal#fn9


(EDIT: I'm sorry the links are invisible. Hover over the little black space where it seems like a word should be and they'll appear. I'll fix that as soon as I figure out how.)

Curses on my stupid computer

So it might be a while before I can update my blog.

See, I decided to give up webcomics for Lent. Which means no checking Gunnerkrigg Court, Girl Genius, Namesake, Blindsprings, or any of the other billion webcomics I follow for another...let's see...thirty-two days.

To help me do this, I turned the administration over to my other computer account and set up the parental controls system to block out the webcomic pages.

Big mistake.

See, for some reason the parental controls not only blocks the webcomics, but it also screws with various other internet functions on my computer. I'm typing this from the other account on my computer, because my regular account no longer lets me access Blogger! Apparently it can't establish a secure connection to the server, whatever that means. It also can't establish a connection with my school website, which is really annoying. I'll take the controls down once I've learned to resist the temptation.

I'm also irritated because this side of the computer (the alternate account that I'm typing on now) won't let me access my school email--which means I can't share the awesome story I wrote with you guys. At least, not at this moment. I'll figure out how to get it up sometime next week. It contains the Everglades, an albino crocodile, leopard-people, and evil trees. You have been warned.

IN OTHER NEWS:

I am doing cello for the school's production of Evita! It's opening night and I'm currently sitting outside the theatre while the cast runs through lighting cues. The other musicians are talking to each other a few feet away. I think they're discussing boyfriends. And shoes. And possibly farting noises.

Here are some pictures of my surroundings.

A blurry picture taken from behind of my fellow musicians talking

My cello case. On the right (your right) are my backpack and green lunch bag.

Some palm trees and one of the school buildings. The light is really pretty right now.

To tell you the truth, I still don't completely understand Evita. It's about Eva Peron, who was the first lady of Argentina and a big, big figure.

I meant to write more, but I gotta go run stuff now. Bye.

The Best Way to Play Laser Tag

So on Saturday my day was pretty much packed. I had an art class at one thirty, which is pretty normal, but I have to take the train to get to it—actually, I have to walk two miles to the train station and then take the train to get to it. Then within the first five minutes of the class I managed to stab myself in the face with a pencil and it frickin’ hurt. See, I’d just sharpened the pencil and I was trying to get some stray pencil shavings off of the sharpener when the pencil, which was still in my hand, flew up and gouged me in the face. It actually drew blood.

Anyway, after I stopped bleeding I did some art and then I left the class early to go to a LASER TAG PARTY! Yaay!

I get to the place and it’s like the one time in my life when I’m not the last one to arrive at the party. Seriously, I have a problem with being late for things.

We waited for everyone to arrive and then we waited some more in the MASSIVE LINE—seriously, it was huge—and then we went in and shot each other with lasers and stuff. 

If you've never played laser tag, here's how it works: There are three teams, red, blue and green. Each person wears a vest that has lights of their team's color and a laser gun attached. There's a big indoor structure with lots of walls and passages, and you run around and shoot people from other teams. If you get shot, your vest turns white and you can't shoot anything for a few seconds. Each team has a base, and if you take out another team's base by shooting it four times, you get like two thousand points. The same person can't take out a base twice.

My friends and I were taking up both the blue and the green spaces and we were going to make an alliance, but apparently that went straight out the window as soon as we got inside.

I was on the blue team and I had NO idea what I was doing. I’m just running around shooting anything that isn’t blue. Actually, I shot some of the blue people as well, but luckily friendly fire doesn’t register on the vests so I couldn’t actually get them out.

My team won and I was happy. I wound up getting ranked number sixteen! (Out of something like thirty, so yay.) So we waited for like another forty minutes to get in again—actually, we got shut out twice because apparently my friends operate on an “If all of us can’t go in NONE of us are going in!” basis and I love them SO MUCH for it.

Then when we finally got in again, we were all supposed to be blue. But they ran out of blue vests so I wound up as green.

Here’s the best way to play laser tag: Against your friends, having heard their strategies, and with a rigged vest.

Seriously, there was something off with my vest. It only registered, like, one out of five times I got shot. I found the red base pretty fast—it was totally unguarded!—and took it out, then got someone else on my team to take it out again before moving on to the blue base (which belonged to my friends). I took that one out too. Then I found my own base, the green one, and stopped some of my friends from taking it out. I shot them all and then just kept shooting so that every time one of their vests reactivated I got it again immediately.

That’s when my friend Sally, who is an expert at laser tag, noticed that there was something up with my vest. I didn’t believe her, since people had been getting me out (infrequently), so I let her shoot me a few times until my vest turned white. It took several shots, though, so after the game was over I asked the Game Master about it.

Her response? “Oh yeah, some of the vests have power-ups, especially if you take out a base. Like they just don’t register as many hits.”

So yep. I had a rigged vest.

AND I got ranked NUMBER ONE! Woo! It was fabulous!

That was a fun day. The rest of the week, not so much. Lots of homework, and I'm doing cello for the school's production of Evita, so lots of rehearsal for that too. I don't actually know the story of Evita yet, but I'm sure I'll pick it up eventually.

A Short Story

Because my last blog post was lackluster, and I don't have anything witty prepared, here's one of my short stories. I read it aloud at the Conservatory Open House last week.

It's called The Hitchhiker's Tale.

It was just my luck that my car broke down on a deserted rural road in the middle of the night. Moreover, my cell phone was absolutely drained, preventing me from calling a cab. Fortunately it was a warm night, but that didn’t change the fact that I was squarely in between Danville, where my plane had landed, and Littlestown, where the mythology conference was. I was to present a paper on the symbolism behind Loki’s imprisonment the next morning, and I could not be late.

            That was what prompted me to stick my thumb out when the headlights snaked down the road ten minutes later. Inadvisable, I know, but I was desperate. It was almost thirty miles to Littlestown.

            The headlights turned out not to belong to a car, but a pickup truck. It pulled over and the driver, a ginger-haired boy in maybe his late teens or early twenties, leaned out of the window. “Hey, you want a ride?” he called amiably.

            “Thanks.” I got into the front seat, settling my briefcase under my knees. The car was, I had noticed, badly dented and scraped in several places.

            “Where are you headed?” asked the boy, pulling back onto the road and glancing at me curiously. I must have been quite an atypical hitchhiker: a thin man with academic glasses and a briefcase, wandering the empty roads at midnight.

            “Littlestown,” I told him. “I’m on my way to an academic conference on mythology. I specialize in the Prose Edda, you know.”

            “Oh yeah? I haven’t heard of that,” said the boy, a smile tugging on the corner of his mouth. “I don’t get out much, though.”

            “What about you?” I asked. “What brings you to this stretch of road so late at night?”

            “Me?” He shrugged. “I just like driving.”

            A thought struck me and I chuckled. “This is like something out of an urban legend. When I get to Littlestown and describe you, someone will tell me that you died ten years ago and still keep driving around picking up hitchhikers.”

            “Twenty-three, actually,” said the boy, turning the wheel slightly as the road curved.

            I frowned. “Twenty-three what?”

            “It was twenty-three years ago,” he explained, “not ten.” He glanced at me, deadpan.

            I laughed and after a moment his mouth quirked upwards and he laughed with me. “Nah, I kid,” he said, checking the rearview mirror. “So tell me—what do you do for fun?”

            The drive took less than half an hour, and the boy, who introduced himself as Asa Baker, let me out beside the hotel. I walked into the lobby and called in my reservation, planning to rescue my car the next day (or rather, that afternoon—it was one-forty-five a.m. when I got to the hotel).

            After I presented my paper, I got a ride from one of my colleagues, a woman who taught creative writing at Littlestown University and had presented a paper on story tropes. When I told her where my car was, she stared at me in confusion and said, “How on earth did you get all the way here in time for the conference?”

            I told her that a young man called Asa Baker had picked me up and brought me to the hotel, and she looked at me with half-lowered eyelids.

            “My students put you up to this, didn’t they,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Asa Baker. He’s one of the more popular urban legends around here. He was a nineteen-year-old farm worker who died in a freak road accident twenty-something years ago. People say he drives around in his pickup truck and offers hitchhikers rides. My students are always joking about meeting him on a dark road in the middle of the night.”

            I stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

            “Nope.” She raised an eyebrow. “So how’d you really get here?”

            “But…” I shook my head. “My God, he wasn’t joking. He actually wasn’t joking.”

            “Who wasn’t joking?”

            “Asa Baker. It really was twenty-three years!”

            


Did you like it? Let me know what you think.

I have no energy for an actual dance music.

I meant blog post. My friend was saying something about dance music and I started typing the conversation. Creative Writing Conservatory can get surprisingly rowdy. Right now someone's trying to do a standing splits while everyone else is talking. And my dance music friend just stole the pencil from behind my ear and stuck it in my other friend's hair.

My pencil-hair friend just gave me the pencil back and now they're talking about whether people can actually slip on banana peels. (Dance-music friend says that according to Myth Busters they can't.) And now they're wondering where the popcorn went and poking splits friend.

The reason that we have no more popcorn is that it was right behind me and it was delicious.

I have no energy for an actual post, so have some pictures. Yes, some of these have been on the blog before.

Something I made when I was bored. 

A shark is eating my head. 

Cosplaying Cousin Itt.

Mad scientist hair.

And here's some I found on the internet. 

Yay internet.

YouTube Tutorials Are Not Good For Everything

So our AP English teacher has been out sick all week, and today's sub had instructions to let us see our essays and vocab quizzes, which are locked in a filing cabinet. Ms. P (the teacher) said that Mr. B (the sub) should go get the key with the smiley face sticker on it.

But no one could find the teacher who has the key, so some of the girls decided instead to watch a YouTube video on picking locks and then try it themselves. Couldn't hurt, right?

The drama unfolded before my eyes.

They clustered around the filing cabinet, trying to wiggle a paperclip into the lock. I'm not sure exactly what they were trying to do, but it was fairly amusing to watch.

Then the paperclip got stuck.

It didn't break, but they couldn't get it out of the lock! Google yielded up no sufficient answers for "how to get a paper clip unstuck from a lock" (although according to one of those "ask questions here" sites, we're not the first people to do it. One person recommended taking the door off its hinges, which would be fine if we weren't talking about a filing cabinet). The paperclip remained stuck.

I'd like to point out that you don't often see a group of students trying to pick the lock on a filing cabinet for the sole purpose of looking at old essays and vocab quizzes. I love my school. :D

Anyway, things got worse when the paperclip actually broke off inside the lock. My friend Felix (who works with jewelry) says we'll need pliers to get it out.

One of the maintenance people is now using pliers to extract the paperclip from the lock. It doesn't look like it's going well. We may need dynamite next.

Now he's using a Swiss army knife.

He just left and came back with a different pair of pliers, which he is attempting to...ooh, I think he might have gotten it!

Nope. Now he's leaving again.

Okay, he got it! The cabinet is now fixed! Yay! And the teacher with the key just showed up too!

UPDATE: Turns out they were picking the wrong lock. The essays weren't there! And since there was only ten minutes of class left, no one wanted to look at the vocab quizzes.

UPDATE AGAIN: Apparently the Physics class had an interesting block too. While we were trying to get the paper clip out of the lock on the filing cabinet, they were getting busted for going off campus to do experiments (with their teacher, of course). Then they got back and discovered the gas leak in the building.

It's that time of the year again...

You know the time I mean. The time you dread all year long. The time that haunts your deepest, darkest nightmares. The time that, were you a wizard, would manifest itself as your boggart.

That's right. Next week is Finals Week.

Oh joy.

I know a lot of schools already had their finals before break, but we have ours afterwards. And it SUCKS. Because then you're studying and dreading it all through Christmas and New Year's and all the studying just ruins it.

So have some Christmas art I did before Christmas.

It's called The Angel and the Elf, and it just came from me wanting to draw a random Christmas angel hanging out with one of Santa's elves. There's not really a story. They don't even have names. It was for this Christmas card charity thing I did. 

Here's the other side of the card. 

So yeah. That was fun. Yay. And yes, I realize that it's completely irrelevant now, but what the heck. It was fun to draw.