OP is a Salzburger who founded a biotech startup. For some reason he really, REALLY wants bonnetheads.

Bonnethead sharks prefer water temperatures over 70 F and make seasonal migrations to warmer waters during the winter months. During these trips, they may travel in large groups of thousands of sharks. As an example of their travels, in the U.S. they are found off the Carolinas and Georgia in the summer, and further south off Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico during the spring, fall and winter. Bonnethead sharks are considered harmless to humans. Bonnethead sharks are listed as "least concern" by the IUCN Red List, which says that they have one of "highest population growth rates calculated for sharks" and that despite fishing, the species is abundant. These sharks may be caught for display in aquariums and used for human consumption and for making fishmeal.

--

Pics:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/Aquariums/comments/88s6jp/building_my_11000_gallon_bonnet_head_shark_tank/?sort=controversial

• https://old.reddit.com/r/Aquariums/comments/8oybeo/building_my_11_000_gallon_shark_tank_awuarium_in/?sort=controversial

• https://old.reddit.com/r/Aquariums/comments/a89zlv/update_current_status_of_my_11_000_gal_shark_tank/?sort=controversial

• https://old.reddit.com/r/Aquariums/comments/iicdxy/update_on_my_11_000_gallon_shark_tank/?sort=controversial

• https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfrickinglevel/comments/10ch4go/first_time_cleaning_my_new_11_000_gallon_mega_tank/?sort=controversial

--

Three years later, jannies start putting disclaimers and lock the thread:

Hey everyone! This may seem like a cool build, but I'd like to provide some info that will hopefully make you think twice when encouraging this practice.

OP is planning on stocking his tank with a species known as the bonnethead shark, Sphyrna tiburo. These sharks frequently fall victim to becoming bycatch in several fisheries in parts of the Atlantic ocean, and as a result they have recently been placed on the IUCN red list of endangered species following a 2019 stock assessment.

Although OP claims he's getting them from a breeder, he's been historically reluctant to give out any details. There are professional aquarists that have gone on record stating how difficult breeding these sharks can be, even at well-equipped commercial facilities, due to the tendency for parents to rapidly eat their young after birth. This comment reveals that he has to wait for a "breeding season" to obtain his sharks. I further reached out to the shark "breeder", Shark Supply LLC in Florida, and they also confirmed they're captive BORN sharks, not bred. This means he is encouraging removing endangered shark pups from a place where they otherwise could have contributed to population numbers.

Unfortunately, many threatened species are able to be captured in states like Florida with permits, so although unethical this is currently perfectly legal.

OP has also stated that he blocks anyone who opposes or questions this build, even if done in a civil manner. He has also repeatedly denied that this species is endangered, even when provided with sources pointing to the contrary. There are some comment threads in his posts that indicate he has little personal knowledge of his own filtration equipment or shark care.

I ask that people don't upvote and support a person capturing an endangered species for his private enjoyment, especially one who has little knowledge of their care, ignores alternative opinions, and actively seeks to craft his own echo-chamber of yes-men. There are many alternative choices for stocking this aquarium in its current form, as many have already suggested.

--

Users start crying about animal abuse:

Since /r/aquariums doesn’t care about animal abuse:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Aquariums/comments/relv94/update_on_my_11_000_gallon_shark_tank_applying/hoaered/?context=3&sort=controversial

Hey everyone! This may seem like a cool build, but I'd like to provide some info that will hopefully make you think twice when encouraging this practice.

OP is planning on stocking his tank with a species known as the bonnethead shark, Sphyrna tiburo. These sharks frequently fall victim to becoming bycatch in several fisheries in parts of the Atlantic ocean, and as a result they have recently been placed on the IUCN red list of endangered species following a 2019 stock assessment.

Although OP claims he's getting them from a breeder, he's been historically reluctant to give out any details. There are professional aquarists that have gone on record stating how difficult breeding these sharks can be, even at well-equipped commercial facilities, due to the tendency for parents to rapidly eat their young after birth. This comment reveals that he has to wait for a "breeding season" to obtain his sharks. I further reached out to the shark "breeder", Shark Supply LLC in Florida, and they also confirmed they're captive BORN sharks, not bred. This means he is encouraging removing endangered shark pups from a place where they otherwise could have contributed to population numbers.

Unfortunately, many threatened species are able to be captured in states like Florida with permits, so although unethical this is currently perfectly legal.

OP has also stated that he blocks anyone who opposes or questions this build, even if done in a civil manner. He has also repeatedly denied that this species is endangered, even when provided with sources pointing to the contrary. There are some comment threads in his posts that indicate he has little personal knowledge of his own filtration equipment or shark care.

I ask that people don't upvote and support a person capturing an endangered species for his private enjoyment, especially one who has little knowledge of their care, ignores alternative opinions, and actively seeks to craft his own echo-chamber of yes-men. There are many alternative choices for stocking this aquarium in its current form, as many have already suggested.

\

the sharks alone in there is abusive, but at the same time this guy blocks anyone who shares info on why this is horrible (endangered species, not enough room) so i wouldn't be surprised if he adds something else equally dumb

\

what kind of sharks are they?

Bonnethead sharks multiple endangered species sharks.

and their all going to a torture chamber of a tank for no reason

Lmao

Speaking of this… When you have giant butt sharks… how the frick do you clean the tank if you don’t have anywhere to move them into while you’re in there???

--

OP decides to stop posting on /r/aquariums and starts looking at a different shark species. Just two more years buddy

No, the current plan is not bonnet heads, as they have become very expensive. I would have gotten them from a breeder, so the cites (new endangerd classification) would not have been a problem, but I have decided against them. Going for a different type of small shark now. There is a small type of White tip... But for now I am slowly stocking it with small fish and when I know the tank is stable bigger ones will be socked... at some stage the sharks will be able to move in.. but that will still take a long time.

--

His wife got bored of pole dancing LOL

Pole is for my wife's abandoned sport... :(

President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea, who you might remember from my coverage of his lolcow wife, has run into a bit of a diplomatic scandal.

This ajussi thinks he has magical powers lmao.

Failures leading up to...

He went on a world tour that should have been a welcome escape from domestic politics given his low approval rating. But apparently his psychic powers aren't as good as he thinks. He failed to forsee everything going wrong that possibly could. First he went to London but missed Queen Elizabeth's funeral, blaming traffic for being late. Then it was on to the UN General Assembly, a place where all world leaders love to do a photo op and look dignified. He announced that he was going to have summit meetings with the Japanese PM and President Biden to b-word about Korea's grievances.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/BOOK_OF_CONDOLENCE_(52367854142).jpg/640px-BOOK_OF_CONDOLENCE_(52367854142).jpg

Signing the book of condolences after he failed to attend the funeral.

The Koreans want compensation for s*x slaves taken by the Japanese during WW2. The Japanese argue that they already paid massive amounts of reparations in exchange for the Koreans dropping all claims against them in 1965. Given that Korea never suffered the kind of devastation that China and the Philippines did, it really was a relatively sweet deal tbqh. So this is not a conversation that the Japanese wanted to have. They came out publicly saying that they had been talking about a possible summit but hadn't agreed to anything yet. In the end, Yoon managed to get a brief 30 minute meeting with the Japanese PM and no indication that the Korean demands are being taken seriously.

SHOW MORE

Yoon wanted to meet Biden to whine about how the American "Inflation Reduction Act" will subsidize American automakers and damage imports of cheap piece of shit Korean cars. Of course Koreans only care about free trade when it goes one way. This is especially rich considering that the Koreans have for decades been finding whatever underhanded methods possible to block imports of luxury cars from the USA. Yoon managed to spend an entire 48 seconds speaking to Biden, once again ending up achieving nothing.

Insane people demonstrate against beef actually being affordable enough for them to eat.

...scandal

Just as he was leaving the meeting with Biden, he was caught on camera saying something like "It’d be humiliating for Biden if those jackasses/idiots/frickers in the legislature don’t pass it." Presumably he was talking about the US Congress not passing a bill that Biden supports. This caused a lot of embarrassment because while Koreans might like to irrationally chimp out at America at home from time to time, they know better than to have their leader insulting the US government at a diplomatic function.

Actual footage of the average Korean's reaction to this news.

Yoon went into damage control mode and came up with an explanation. He actually hadn't said "Biden", he'd said a word in Korean that sounds similar. He wasn't talking about the US legislature, he was talking about the Korean legislature. Of course that just means that he's offending the Korean legislature too now and nobody believes him anyway. As some random Korean Youtube commenter said, "Mistakes can be forgiven but lies cannot."

Unfortunately I cannot find anyone who will actually spell out what the profanity was. The best I can find is "국회 이 XX들이 승인 안 해주면 바이든이 쪽팔려서 어떡하냐" with the word in question censored and the audio is way too hard for me to make out even after it's been cleaned up.

Sources

I've covered everything worth saying, but if you want to look into this more, we have:

• AFP

• CNN

• Leftoid reporting

• Leftoid reporting on his excuse

• Leftoid editorial - When you've got me agreeing with Hankyoreh about foreign policy you know you've done something wrong.

• Centroid editorial - Basically saying the same things.

• Rightoid reporting - They're not any happier about it.

In case anyone needs to verify Chis Hadfield's credentials: He's the f'ing man. We need more charismatic science and engineering leaders like him.

What now Anti-Muskers?? you gonna disagree with DA F'ING MAN?! I didn't think so

Insert "Two buttons meme". Does Reddit choose "Everything Musk does is bad", or "Chris Hadfield is literally Jesus Christ, even Keanu kneels before him"?

Hate the community of this website sometimes

It’s funny how the narrative is spun when it’s a company ran by someone everyone loves to hate… congrats to Elon and everyone at SpaceX.

🚨🚨🚨🚨 UH OH CHUD ALERT 🚨🚨🚨🚨

I hate Musk but I gotta give space X this one. They like to do these launches, their philosophy is to do them and collect data about what went wrong

of course you would say this now antimusker

A lot of braindead takes in this thread. Really waking me up to the fact that it's not just conservatives that are morons.

ARE THE CHUDS RISING UP?

To be clear, I hate Elon Musk with a burning passion, however, this is how rocket development generally goes. Basically, the massive stresses of rocket flight means a million complex systems have to work properly in an incredibly intense environment to work. Rocket development is a series of stress tests until you reach a point where things no longer explode. To have a new rocket design that has very impressive lifting capabilities manage to get that far on its first actual flight is pretty good.

this is like saying "TO BEEE CLEAR I AM A CIS WOMAN in TWOX"

On one hand i really don't care for Musk. On another im excited for the steps this has helped the industry take and if it helps brilliant minds and ideas of the future im all for it.

Yeah bud hes been craving your approval

---

ALL THESE COMMENTS ARE IN THE NEGATIVES, DID THE !chuds WIN? !nonchuds HOW DID YA'LLAH END UP AT THE BOTTOM!?

The launch is interesting but I find it so difficult to separate my disdain for Musk and the achievements of SpaceX.

You better clap and cheer if you work for Elon, or you'll be out of a job come Monday

Hate to see what he would call “Unsuccessful”…

>For some reason, I really don’t like this guy.

The issue isnt that people dont want to explore and learn. Its that a private company is being funded by publix money and they will develop things with a primary objective of profiting off those developments in the future. Capitalism has absolutely corrupted space exploration and working people have issues that need fixing, seeing money that shouldnt be going to private corporations blow up in the air is a reminder that this isnt for the pure honest search for discovery but rather the corrupt greed of the owners of capital

just the title alone seems like he's overcompensating with the Trumpian "enormously"

propaganda

Yep Musk paid this spacesuitcel to say good things

But my fav so far is this

[I don’t get why this is an achievement? We are cheering on a company that is actively working against science and many experts. The guy in charge of it is a neo-nazi butthole who doesn’t know what to do with his money. It probably polluted a huge area because methane is horrible for the atmosphere and ecological communities. And if we look at NASA, sure you can say that SLS was slow to develop, but they got a lot more out of being successful on the first run than they did when they threw shit at a wall a saw what stuck.]

another

Welfare rockets. Space X is privatized profits and publicly funded. Another of elons scams, stealing from the public and littering space with debris.

OH BTW LOTS OF COMMIE SEETHE TOO IN THERE CHECK IT OUT THEY POP OUT LIKE CARP POSTS DURING SLOW DAY

Ya, I’m a life time space flight fan, and SpaceX has done some amazing things, but I’m just not buying that this was success. Success was if it entered orbit like all the Saturn5s did. Sure they might be able to fix what went wrong, but engines failing is a design flaw. The PR people don’t need to over hype the parts of the launch that went well. I know one thing, it’s going to be a long long haul before they put astronauts on this rocket bomb.

That makes no sense. You don’t build a hundred million dollar or billion dollar rocket and then cheer when it explodes. People need to use their common sense. It was a disaster.

There is so much more seethe at the bottom is delicious

In the end I would warmly welcome Musk and Chris into the !illuminati

Some background

When they're not busy designing pride flags the folx at Microsoft spend their time coding shitty software. Among these is the new Windows Terminal.

Casey Muratori is a programmer who, despite never releasing anything, clearly considers himself to be some kind of genius.

With that out of the way, here's the drama:

ACT 1: THE ISSUE

Frustrated with the slowness of Windows Terminal when printing colors, Casey submits a github issue. He even develops a benchmark application to accurately measure the speed.

After a bit of back and forth Casey starts to becomes frustrated:

Am I missing something? Why is all this stuff with "runs of characters" happening at all? Why would you ever need to separate the background from the foreground for performance reasons? It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated.

He receives this legendary response:

I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively. I am not aware of the body of work around performant GPU terminal emulation

Casey gets angry:

When we're at the stage when something that can be implemented in a weekend is described as "a doctoral research project", and then I am accused of "impugning the reader" for describing something as simple that is extremely simple, we're done. Consider the bug report closed.

After which a different Microsoft employee goes in on him:

You were overly confident in your opinion, but I hope [what I linked] helps you understand that it's actually really darn hard.

Basically the whole team agrees that what is being asked of them is extremely difficult. While Casey is insistent that it's trivially simple.

So who is right? A team of senior engineers in a trillion dollar company or a reclusive game dev?

ACT 2: A WEEKEND PROJECT

Casey tweets the following:

I take back literally everything I said about Microsoft taking an interest in fixing their terminal.https://t.co/K9ojvy1liX

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) June 17, 2021

And, over the following weekend, he implements from scratch a terminal that works in the way he proposed. It's ~100x faster than Windows Terminal:

(video timestamped to the part with the pretty colors, although the rest is fun too)

Twitter thread with some juicy questions from the audiance

Then this happens:

Afterward, the same dev [lhecker] also used a fake name to hang out on our groomercord and talk about Windows Terminal without telling anyone who he was. I figured it out and confronted them, and they failed to see anything wrong with that behavior. It's a really special team they have there.

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022

ACT 3: MICROSOFT BENDS THE KNEE

Over the following months, there is an embarrassed silence from the Microsoft team. Eventually they release a blogpost basically admitting they were wrong, but don't mention Casey by name. Note that the person making the post is the one who snuck into Casey's groomercord.

Casey tweets:

When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided", being "somewhat combative" and am "impugning the reader". But a year later when they call the exact same thing "trivial", that is just, you know, them writing a blog post:https://t.co/AXrgZjvUPT pic.twitter.com/UTDrD9s0o6

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022

And finally one of them makes a post on Hacker News seething about the whole thing. Quotes:

We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.

-

Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it.

-

I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? The blog post is matter-of-fact, and Casey is right: however, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?

Truly a new low for Microsoft.

---

Want more nerd drama? See the previous post in this series.

---

Tldr

Man buys over a million cds, Vinyls, and cassettes from a failed company in an attempt to start the company over again. Abandons his family and buys and moves into a warehouse in another state in one of the most violent cities in America. Spends over half a million dollars to get cockblocked by the city for zoning violations and gets robbed over 30+ times. He sneeds about the city and it's inhabitants on twitter documenting his journey. He's also trying to build a fusion reactor and a science museum in the city

---

MY CASSETTES!

Backstory

Murfie was a startup company that focused on the digitization of physical media into digital media. People would send their CDs, Vinyls, and cassettes, which the company would store in their warehouse and rip the contents onto their own platform for people to stream. Murfie even allowed people to buy and sell with other users on their platform.

During sometime during early November, the company asked all of it's current customers to make sure they renewed their current subscription before November 17th. No more than 5 days later, the company sent out an email to it's customers saying that the compnay was ceasing all operations including the website. This abrupt shutdown shocked everyone, that even that former CEO had one idea what had happened .

The situation only continued to spiral out of control. Murfies ToS had a clause that promised its customers that they would return all of their physical media in the case the company shut down (For a small shipping fee of course ), but with all of their services down, customers had no way of getting back their cassettes and cds. In total, there were close to a million CDs, cassestes, and Vinyls left somewhere in limbo. Unsurprisingly, people were soying out about this:

😢 Our first “startup” client was Murfie. We’re super proud of being part of their story, and our world is better off because of their music-ownership-focused journey.

They have my 100+ cd's and $1000+ dollars. nothing to be proud of if they leave people in a lurch.

At this point everyone had lost hope that they wouldn't get their stuff back. Until one determined man showed up.

---

John Fenley

SHOW MORE

John Fenley is an investor, landchad, family man and an autist for music. When he heard the news of Murfie going out of business he stepped up immediately and offered to buy the remaining digital collection.

It wasn't his first venture into this type of busines. Fenley had a similar business that to Murfie that he started years ago, but was unable to find investors for his company. But this a second chance for him, because he knew what he could do it right this time. This was his white whale.

Shortly after, Fenley sold about 150k dollars worth of stock he received from another company and purchased an abandoned warehouse in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Before we continue let's discuss Pine Bluff for those unfamiliar with it. The only aspect you really need to know about Pine Bluff is that it makes third world shitholes look like a paradise in comparison. Let us look at some statistics to truly understand it

Homicide rate:

Pine Bluff had 29 homicides in 2021. Pine Bluff had 23 murders in 2020 - a rate of 56.5 murders per 100,000 people. The national average was 6.5 murders per 100,000 people in 2020

Poverty Rate:

The per capita income for the city was $17,334. About 24.3% of families and 30.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 45.6% of those under age 18 and 13.7% of those age 65 or over.

Demographics:

A fairly dangerous city to say the least. But, Im guessing at the time Fenley didn't understand this and would come across many problems in his journey for his whale.

---

The journey

Fenley has been documenting his adventure on twitter. These tweets are mostly in chronological order, but these aren't all of his tweets. You can check out Fenleys twitter account to see his full journey, but im just going to show some of the highlights.

Right off the bat, Fenley has issues with the Pine bluff city hall fining him for building violations:

Was handed this today by PineBluff zoning. Apparently semi truck trailers, shipping containers, and tents aren't allowed anywhere in the city. Even in industrial and commercial zones. Is this real? Just shut down the whole town.

He eventually meets with the mayor to discuss his future prospects but that ends up going nowhere:

Was handed this at the end of my meeting with the Mayor of cityofpinebluff. It's basically an eviction order barring me from living on property I own. I told them I would not leave the #Murfie containers unguarded regardless of their threats. Meeting did not go well.

I should mention too, that Fenley is also trying to turn the warehouse into a science museum and that he's attempting to build a fusion reactor

I was playing around with a GPU accelerated Penning Trap simulator we are building to help understand my fusion reactor and came up with a very weird idea based on what I was seeing when I start with a flat disc of particles.

Tragically for Fenley, the PineBluff goverment are a bunch of chuds that don't trust the science:

What kind of city government tries to prevent someone from opening a science museum?

Fenleys frustrations with the city government only continue to grow:

Pine Bluff just seems to want to tear everything down. All they know here is destruction. It's amazing to me that they act like this. Can you imaging any other city working so hard to bulldoze houses? They don't want anyone to fix things.

The downward spiral only continues for Fenley:

Had another break in at the warehouse yesterday. This time they were able to open all 4 containers. They stole the security system, 2 telescopes, 2 turbo molecular pumps and other high vacuum equipment tools, welders, RC toys, sculptures, etc. Murfie media seems mostly OK

He does offer a $3 bounty to whoever catches those robbers

Had over $20,000 worth of equipment stolen last Saturday. Putting a bounty on catching the crooks.

They never catch them lmao

I never could have imagined that I would have to lock up all my valuables, and carry a loaded pistol with me, to feel safe walking to the bathroom at night in my own home.

Fenley also starts sneeding at the police for being shit at their job:

I think we need to change the way the police in this town are paid. I say double the budget, but every time a crime happens, the police pay the victims to make them whole until they reach 75% of their current pay. Let's see how fast that stops crime.

Despair grows inside Fenley:

PineBluff is a cesspit. What do I do? I've put about half a million into trying to get started here, but I can't get anything done. I only have about $100k left to work with, and that's not going to buy much anywhere else. I will not put Murfie media in rented space again.

I should mention that Fenley is also married and has kids that live in another state. It appears that he's somewhat abandoned them in pursuit of his dream.

Surprise... I was robbed again in PineBluff today.

7 days later...

Robbed again! WTF! Pinebluff 2 guys in sniper gear and gloves came and robbed me again this morning. I've lost track of how many times I've been robbed. I'm seriously going crazy.

Several hours later....

Twice in one day... called 911 immediately. I went out and had the guy on the ground at gunpoint. Police were on site in 6 minutes.

Would you believe I was robbed again?

Febley is also is his own security guard too. He'll often confront those on his property with a gun of couse:

Robbed again? Seriously?

Fenley called the cops on the guy in the above video, and the police actually arrested him! But the guy was quickly released from jail and came back to Fenleys warehouse:

And they let the guy go, and surprise, he came back again today.

PineBluff happening right now. Two thieves were scoping my place out with this U-Haul filled with thievery tools. I had them at gunpoint but they ran away.

Three kids seeing if they can steal stuff. Just another day in PineBluff.

The constant stress continues to pile on our neurodivergent Ishmael:

3 years ago today I read an article that changed my life. Murfie had shut down and all the media they stored was headed to the dump unless a miracle happened. I stepped in to try to save the situation, but being stuck in containers for 3 years isn't much better. I'm so sorry.

I should clarify that he's basically living at the warehouse fulltime to ensure that one is trying to rob it. At least one has ever tried taking his security cameras:

PineBluff this is why I hate this town.

Can anyone tell from the sound what kind of gun I just heard firing shots outside my warehouse?

Fenley has been here for 3 years at this point and still hasn't been murdered somehow

I nominate PineBluff for "Most Purge -like" town. Criminals here have learned that nobody will stop them, and they won't pay any consequences for their behavior.I actually wonder if the city is complicit in this. Lack of investigation and prosecution is tacit approval.

Good movie reference!

I was having a pretty heated argument with somebody last night over a truck that they stole from me, and I'm pretty sure they burned one of my houses down. #PineBluff

Hopefully 2023 brings better luck to our hero

Not 4 hours into the new year and I'm already injured while dealing with an intruder. 2023 is off to a great start!

Its never going to get better for him

So far that's Fenleys entire story. An interesting one to say the least. Hopefully he doesn't get murdered so we can get more updates on his pursuit of happiness. Fenley doesn't look like he's giving up on PineBluff yet, since he's bought over 75 properties in the city so far. I truly hope he does catch his white whale one day

Thanks for reading!

TL;DR: GROOMERCORDCELS ARE LAME AND GAY AND ALSO CARP IS RIGHT ABOUT JOURNOS

CW: GROOMERCORD DRAMA, META DRAMA, SURPLUS AUTISM

OP image graciously provided by @Gandalf-the-Whey.

This is a followup post to @TracingWoodgrains' story of the events here, except with the juicy leaks included and not just a wall of

Since Trace pretty much detailed the whole thing for me already, I'll mainly be focusing on the behind-the-scenes stuff and the juicy inside leaks that he unfortunately failed to deliver.

---

THE GHOSTENING

A few days ago I was DM'd a Groomercord server invite from @Jackal AKA @TracingWoodgrains, who supposedly set up a safe space for all the drama-adjacent furry degenerates that currently plague the site. I declined of course, since I'm not a furry and I assumed this was some sort of doxing or grooming attempt by our local journo friend using the CNN playbook.

Skipping to yesterday, I had the dastardly plan of ghost awarding Jackal's weekly furry thread in hopes of disrupting the meta furry circlejerking and co-opting of the site. They didn't exactly respond well to this, and responded by bitching to Carp to get ghost awards nerfed and/or removed entirely so they could continue to namestrag and attention-whore while posting their weird fetish porn. Unfortunately Carp being the closet furry he is, kowtowed to the pressure and offered up a sitewide poll to determine the fate of ghost awards. When the voting didn't go his way however, Carp decided to then print off a frickton of ghost awards and plaster the whole site with them in hopes of causing a large annoyance, before opening up a second poll in hopes that his tomfoolery would be able to swing the vote in the furries' favor this time around - which in the end still ended with a plurality of users wanting to leave ghost awards unchanged. I'm sure the majority of you were around to see all this for yourself though.

---

THE INNER FURCLE

Whilst this big shitshow was going down however, I recalled the Groomercord invite that Jackal had sent me prior and realized they must have been coordinating their plans in there. Out of curiosity, I shot Jackal a reply asking for a new invite since the old one had expired - unsurprisingly, I was told that I was suddenly no longer welcome to see what secrets were waiting within, and he used two rather strange and flimsy excuses to why: one that I'm apparently a dangerous potential dox-sperg now because I happen to have a Kiwifarms account like the majority of dramatards, and two because I had previously banned one of their members from rdrama for a week for posting porn of an "aged up" version of the child-coded furry videogame character Ralsei.

This is the character in question for reference - I've been asked to keep a neutral stance on this topic, so it's up to the denizens of rdrama if you think this act constitutes as libertarianism or not.

Not to be dissuaded however, I was easily able to bribe one of the more impressionable furtwinks in their ranks to provide me screenshots of the hot gossip going on in their secret grooming circle, with a promise of disgusting erotic furry roleplay in return which was left unfulfilled. What I discovered will (not) shock you!

---

THE LEAKS (AKA THE JUICY BIT)

So it turns out I truly live rent-free in the minds of every furry dramatard that somehow found their way here. They had been talking about me non-stop for hours and were devising different gay-ops in hopes of getting me demopped/evicted from the site, all because I ghosted awarded their gay little circlejerk thread. Little did they know I tend to have a talent for getting into private groomercord cliques and proceeding to leak all their r-slurred nonsense.

Note: I've decided to omit a bunch of typical furry coomer garbage, as while it's disgusting, it's the same shit you'll find in any run-of-the-mill gay furry groomercord.

---

Conspiring about the mass ghosting which occurred yesterday:

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There was also plenty of gossip about yours truly, and their paranoia slowly began to bounce off each other until they started to convince themselves that I'm a deranged serial killing doxer that was ready to swat them all at a moment's notice. Rude!

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Eventually this schizo paranoia culminated in our mildly neurodivergent friend @Suicidal_Tendies attempting to coordinate a gay-op where tried to convince a bunch of furries to paypig, in hopes of then pressuring Carp/Aevann to revoke my mop and get me removed from rdrama. It's a shame this plan fell through, because it would've been funny to let them all hand over their neetbux to the site first before getting told to kick rocks and having all their shit leaked afterward.

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THE FALLOUT

After compiling screenshots for a couple of hours, my lurking PoC acquaintance @SneedCityUSA - whom I had been watching this unfold with - decided he wanted in on the action. He used the 67000 dramacoin generously gifted to him through reparations to start grass awarding the main culprits of the furcel conspiracy, including messages about the server's intimate happenings in the process which gave away the game that there was an imposter among them.

Predictably, the whole server rapidly descended into seething, paranoia and infighting.

Eventually they decided @of_blood_and_salt was the most sussy and kicked him from the server, which unfortunately meant I could no longer collect any more screenshots to show here.

At this point though I was already getting bored of this pathetic groomercordcel nonsense and just sent the server invite to Carp, where he found out all his furry-friends were shit-talking him behind his back whilst at the same time begging for his help against the ghost awardings.

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THE HALL OF SHAME

@Jackal REKT

@TracingWoodgrains DOUBLY REKT

@Soren REKT

@Jaukea REKT

@SparkBrave REKT

@of_blood_and_salt REKT

@Corvus REKT

@AshiahTheEgyptianCat REKT

@Suicidal_Tendies REKT

@Lycanroc REKT

@ThreeLetterAgent REKT

@adiosamigo REKT

Thanks for playing!

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I got exhausted last time of chronicling the most controversial and dramatic films I could find in Southern African history, but I believe I can pick up where I left off with some remarkworthy drama inducing films throughout history.

As you guys can imagine, the lionshare of sneeeed films would be those banned by the Apartheid regime's all powerful censor board, which had a hand in preventing both black and white citizens from seeing anything the regime considered amoral - be that polluting modern society with degeneracy like race-mixing, showing communism in a positive light, or stating anything even even remotely critical of the regime. Even white filmmakers could be jailed for a decade and up, depending on whether the Censor Board wanted to make an example of them.

It's also ironic that the most controversial black-made films, those usually critical of the NP regime, would only be seen mostly outside the borders of the Union of SouTh Africa, in foreign liberal countries like America, where other liberals would shower them in awards, yet the average black person in SA itself would remain in total ignorance of the Film's existence.

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1981 - FILMS BANNED BY THE SA CENSOR BOARD DURING THE VIDEO CASSETE ERA:

Known by burgers as the VHS (Video Home System), the VHS were analog video recording on tape cassettes invented in 1976 by the Jap company - Japan Victor Company. There were various video cassette products floating globally all over earth long prior to the 1980s, and from different nations who all were in a "format war" to design and engineer the superior Motion Picture recording devices.

The technology for magnetic tape video recording had existed in the global television industry since the 1950s, but these devices were expensive and specialized, and mostly used in professional environments. By the 1970s, magnetic videotape technology became affordable for home use and widespread adoption globally, but the market was distorted and diversified over many different models and products.

When the Japs arrived in the form of the Japan Victor Company, which had invented the VHS in 1976, they near instantly dominated the video cassette market. The VHS cassettes were cheap, reliable, easy to use and store, and thus VHS emerged as the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period.

Like most nations, South Africa suffered from the 5 year rule - in that it took about 5 years for the latest cutting edge innovative technology, which is commercially available in Burgerland public, to filter its way into SA public hands, as the devices became cheaper and more widespread. Even today in modern cellphone innovations, you can see the 5-year rule in action: BlackBerries, touchscreens, Smartphones, Androids, Iphones, all took about 5 years average for the "everyman" SA public to enjoy the same as their burger peers. So too was it with the VHS.

Released by 1976 in America, the VHS would later find its way in South Africa in 1981, and became instantly popular as format for storing film. The VHS would be primary storage for movies in South Africa for the next 25 years, until DVDs arrived.

Video cassette recorders caused a revolution in the industry, spurring on film rentals for home viewing, and giving birth to the retail industry. This was followed by the launch of the black television services TV2/3 by the SABC.

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IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER IN WHICH FAMOUS BANNED FILMS APPEARED HISTORICALLY:

http://blogs.uct.ac.za/memory/2019/05/unbanned-the-films-south-africans-were-not-allowed-to-see/

Saturday Night at the Palace (1982): "Based on the play by Paul Slabolepsky, it is about three characters that meet at a roadhouse one night (two are white, the other is black) and during the course of the film the bubbling pot of racial hatred explodes, leaving one character dead. The black waiter (September) who works there is shortly going on leave to visit his family whom he has not seen for two years because they are forced by apartheid to live in a homeland."

Place of Weeping (1986): "directed by Darrel Roodt and produced by Anant Singh became a landmark film both for the anti-apartheid movement, and for alternative cinema in South Africa. Singh personally financed the film, and it was the first anti-apartheid motion picture to be made entirely in South Africa. Receiving worldwide acclaim, it was released theatrically in the United States and most global territories. It was also the only South African film to play on US TV channel HBO (Home Box Office)"

Mapantsula (1988): "Mapantsula, a crime film that displays black South Africans’ struggle for freedom, directed by Oliver Schmitz and written by Schmitz and Thomas Mogotlane, was banned under the Apartheid regime. The film tells the story of petty-thief Johannes ‘Panic’ Themba Mzolo"

Biko : the Spirit Lives (1988) Biograhphy of Steve Biko, a rights activist as famous as Mandela in SA.

Any Child is My Child (1988): by Barry Feinberg "focuses its attention on the brutality and suffering experienced by black children at the hands of the security forces."

Have You Seen Drum Recently? (1989): "Have You Seen Drum Recently? uses photographs from the Drum magazine archives to document its contribution to the cultural and political life of South Africa. In the 1950s, articles covered the township jazz scene, crime and sport, and documented the hopes, aspirations and despair of the urban, educated black socialites."

Sarafina! (1992): "Sarafina! revolves around students involved in the Soweto Riots. The main character, Sarafina, has to deal with her humiliation that her mother completely accepts her role as a domestic servant in a white household in Apartheid South Africa, while at the same time inspiring her fellow students to rise up and revolt."

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As you can see what these banned films all had in common was they were highly critical of the NP regime liberal films, and were all near instantly banned by the SA Censor Board, with any copies confiscated and destroyed.

I've never seen any of them, but I think you can go look for them on Youtube as they are virtually unknown. From colleagues they are not good at all, only historically significant because of their anti Union sentiments.

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1984 to1985 - TAX CONCESSIONS AND B-SCHEME CORRUPTION IN SOUTH AFRICAN FILMS:

By 1984 Tax concessions for the export of films were introduced. The more spent on export, the greater the amount written off against tax. This motivated SA filmmakers to try an cater to foreign audiences, as by this time anti Union of South Africa sanctions were beginning to go in full swing, and the government had to find schemes to make money from all sorts of abnormal ways.

Additionally by 1985, the South African Censor Board had also began to relax some of its restrictions against showing films for black and coloured peeps in the country. Films of course could absolutely not show anti-government sentiment, but the production of "black feature films" (made by white producers with black actors for black audiences) reached an all time high.

http://blogs.uct.ac.za/memory/2020/07/a-little-known-era-of-south-african-film-the-b-scheme-industry-and-the-retro-afrika-bioscope-series/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13696810903488629

Remarkably the government even went so far as to pay out a government subsidy of maximum R80 000.00, based on the number of tickets sold for 18 cents or less.

"Construction boss Tonie van der Merwe, who had provided special effects for filmmakers Louis and Elmo de Witt, spotted an untapped market, having seen the enjoyment by his black employees of the American action flicks at Saturday night screenings. He lobbied the government to set up a subsidy for the production of films for the African market. Together with Steve Hand, a teacher, he established Tugela Films in 1975. In 1981, A-Scheme films for white audiences could earn up to R1.2 million in funding, while the limit for a B-Scheme film was R80 000 and subsidies were only paid out retrospectively based on ticket sales. Van der Merwe produced some 400 titles under the scheme, including the Zulu language film Umbango (The Feud) in 1986."

"To qualify for the subsidy, 75 percent of the dialogue had to be in an indigenous African language and 75 percent of the cast had to be Black. Approval of scripts was not required but the Censor Board had the final say."

Many of these B-movie films were not films at all, but bits of footage slapped together to benefit from the subsidy. There were many subsidy scandals involving cheap and conniving individuals and companies who produced 'visual diarrhea' in order to benefit financially from the government scheme. They would literally edit junk footage together in minimal effort, so in order to create the illusion of a film, and basically pocket the R80 000 gov grant after a sometimes quite literal shoestring budget just to offset any suspicions.

"Approval of scripts was not required but the Censor Board had the final say. For the predominantly inexperienced white male producers it was simply a business, so artistic merit was not a priority. Film quality suffered from poor lighting, sound and editing, minimal costume changes and recycled and excessive action scenes. Genres covered action, adventure, martial arts, cowboy, comedy, drama and the conflict between traditional and modern life but, in the end, good always triumphed over evil, and the moral of the story was that crime did not pay. In this way, apartheid ideology was promoted in the guise of entertainment; films could cover different forms of indigenous culture and traditions (often done in an offensive manner) but never address political, economic and social issues."

The SA Censor Board only ever viewed films from the eye of of a , so they never made any effort to judge the quality of film, any only screened these low budget shit spawn by these frauds for any pro-communist sentiment, or anti-apartheid messages. They had little interest to screen for quality.

By 1989, after years of sludge films had been aired in Black theatres, and after coloureds and blacks complained to the government, the SA Censor Board took action to investigate the quality and nature of these 'visual diarrhea' films, which were often just junk footage of black SA peeps spliced together.

http://www.movingimagearchivenews.org/a-scheme-that-made-film-flourish-amidst-apartheid/

https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/download/779/648?inline=1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40647601

===(from article)

"The way the scheme ended also has contributed. The scheme fell into disrepute due to corruption in its administration and operation. With little government oversight, and few formal cinemas, some of the recipients of B-Scheme funding inflated or simply made up attendance figures, on which funding levels were based."

“It was widely abused,” says Cowley. “Some distributors, not so much producers, would play with the numbers: They would say 1,000 people came to watch the film at this or that location, and when the investigators went there, there wasn’t even a cinema or building there.”

"Some filmmakers recycled films under different titles and claimed separate subsidies for those. In 1989, the Department of Home Affairs took over the reins of the program, stumbled on the fraud, and launched a major investigation. It could not — or did not — prosecute any film-maker or production company, nor recoup any falsely claimed monies. But, says Cowley, “going through that experience left a bitter taste.”

===(end of article)

Even though the Department of Home Affairs investigation didn't end these fraudulent junk films from being created, the black masses had reached an awareness of the sludge films being aired in Blacks only theatres. Word of mouth would travel between black people, between townships, and from the critiques written by black journ*lists in black-specific newspapers, on which of these B-Scheme films were junk, and which were good.

Soon only the "high-effort" films were even being viewed by black audiences, and the junk films could not even reach minimal numbers of audience retention, to qualify for the goverment grants. One of the most well like of these B-Scheme films were from Tonie Van Der Merwe, who in the very least gave substantially more effort in his production and direction than his fraudulent peers.

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Anyways that's all I have for now, I think making smaller Longposts in 15 000 character size is the best digestible for short-attention span dramatards