continued from https://rdrama.net/post/169431/marseylongpost-new-effort-post-series-sneedbuddysuperhero

Dedicated to @Bellicose-Twink (he payed me 300 dc to finish this)

Wanna read the comics I'm talking about here? Check out this link: https://archive.org/details/genesis-universe

Tom Mason's Dinos

When Scott Rosenberg financed Malibu in 1986 he placed cartoonist Tom Mason and Dave Olbrich as its heads. I'll note a cartoonist is someone who writes and draws their own comics (usually also implying they handle all art duties but not always) and I'm not entirely sure what Tom Mason drew. At Malibu he only wrote and edited comics. Tom Mason's commentary provides some insight into the Ex-Mutants legal case:

Ex-Mutants had been created by David Lawrence and Ron Lim, and was published by Campiti through the Amazing imprint. But they lost control of the title in a bizarre dispute with Scott that I could never figure out – this had all happened just before I signed on to Malibu. The end result was that Scott ended up with Ex-Mutants being published through Eternity.... Eternity still had some books that were selling well, but Scott wanted to move its operations to the West Coast so we inherited the Eternity books that were in the pipeline. That included Ex-Mutants.

Tom joined Malibu at its founding in 1986 and Ex-mutants was published at Campiti's company pied piped in late 1987. So I don't know how its possible for the legal issues around the book to predate Tom unless they somehow happened right after the move to amazing. I'm just assuming Tom either misremembered the timeline or was trying to wash his hands of the situation.

In 1988 Tom Mason wrote a comedic comic series called Dinosaurs for Hire. It originally going to be a comic about Elvis Presley fighting crime but he changed it to dinos to avoid a lawsuit. The titular Dinosaurs for Hire are a group of 3 dinos who act as mercenaries for the US government. They are never given a definite origin but are implied to be aliens. The first 5 issues feature Bryon Carson on art and is more of an action + comedy affair as the dinos uncover a soviet vampire corruption candle. The next 4 issues were just random one off comedy skits with a few different artists that learned far more on the comedy. I'll just say I didnt find these comics very funny nor that well drawn so I'm not gonna bother with an issue by issue summary. I'll just leave you with the reveal that Dinosaurs for hire invented braap posting.

In terms of drama there was a letter from a very angry beetles fan

It seems that Dinosaurs for Hire would be a victim of its own success as by issue 9 it was cancelled so Tom and Eternity could pursue tv and movie deals in hopes they had finally found their TMNT

Adventure Comics

In 1988 Malibu bought out the Canadian company Aircel and in 1989 it bought Adventure comics another Canadian comic company (which actually was originally part of Aircel). Adventure comics was used for licensed comics. One of these was 1991's Miss Furry in full color. Miss Fury (originally called Black Fury) was one of the first golden age female superheroes debuting in 1941 Sunday strips.

By the 90s the character had fallen into the public domain so Adventure published a 4 issue sequel series to the original following Miss Fury's Grand Daughter who finds the old costume in the attic and wears it to a costume party only to beat the shit out of a drug dealer on the way there which resparks rumors of the 40s era hero. There is an imposter called Black fury who wears a miss fury costume but does crime and a second miss fury also fighting crime. The art here looks okay in costume but the normal humans look awful and the story doesn't really go anywhere besides the obvious reveals of there being 3 Miss fury's and who the second non evil miss fury is.

Public Domain Superheroes

In the 1940s comics featured its first "bubble" in the form of superheroes themselves. With the wild success of characters like Superman and Captain Marvel dozens of publishers who shat out super-hero content. Most of it cheaply made by freelance publishing syndicates or directly from freelancers themselves for little pay. Many of the people involved too had criminal histories or were involved in shady industries like porn. As the 40s rolled into the 50s Super-heroes rapidly fell in popularity as genre anthology comics- horror, romance, western, monster, war, crime, sci-fi ect-became the new trend. This ended when the Anti-Comics Crusades led to the heavy regulation of comic book companies. Of the companies started in the 40s only two have continued unchanged from then: D.C. and Archie. This rapid collapse led to many of these heroes falling out of trademark and copyright. There is a whole community of people who keep track of golden age heroes in the public domain and make comics about them. Established comic companies will also use public domain heroes in order to get some of the prestige that DC and Marvel have with their long history.

The Protectors

In 1992 Malibu would publish another revival of golden age characters in the form of the Protectors, a superhero team book centered on public domain characters from the defunct centaur comics. I have no idea if this idea was done independently of Miss Fury or if the success of Miss Fury led Malibu to pursue other golden age revivals. Similar to miss Fury this isn't a reboot of the Centaur comics characters but rather a sort of sequel following the characters in the present day after their 40s adventures now roll call:

Man of war

Amazing Man

The Ferret

Fantom of the Fair (renamed to Gravestone) ironically DC would have the fantom in his original name and costume in their own series All Star Squadron and a few other golden age inspired books

Mighty Man

Prince Zardi, The Eternal Man

Masked Marvel renamed to Night Mask

So the Protectors serves as a sequel to the 40s centaur comics where the superheroes fought super villains until the early 80s when an event called the Brinkstone incident happened. All of the superheroes and all of the supervillains lined up in the town of Brinkstone to fight, a large explosion is seen and the town is left in rubble with only the heroes left standing. All of the villains and civilians were simply gone with no bodies recovered and everyone just assumed the superheroes were behind it so superheroes were made illegal. The protectors was originally intended to only be a 6 issue miniseries with 3 one shots but it was popular enough to continue for 20 issues, because of this the first six issues serve as a complete and stand alone arc.

The story starts with a pretty generic super villain named Mister Monday assaulting places. He's super scary so the seemingly immortal hero Gravestone tells the president he needs to assemble a super team. So he calls up Philip Reinhart, the man who was formally the non powered masked vigilante Night Mask, to assemble a team. He calls up the patriotic hero Man of War, Arc a woman who can shoot lasers, and Airman a guy with mechanical wings who flies and they fight some random thugs. At their new base, a decommissioned us tanker ship, Philip's son shows up as the new Night and demands to be let on the team despite having no powers and also not being all that fit. Issue 1 ends with the president telling Gravestone he needs to summon everyone "even the Ferret".

The next issue is the Ferret one shot where we met the Ferret. This sexy beast has advanced animal like speed and strength, a healing factor, and enhanced animal like senses. Him having "animal" powers also makes him very susceptible to hormones and very horny. His civilian identity is as a grunge musician because 90s. He's basically Malibu's attempt to make a Wolverine clone. So anyway Ferret is getting his favorite chinese takeout and then a chinese gang kills the owner which makes Ferret very angry. He finds out the gang has another old centaur hero named Iron Skull, who is a cyborg, under mind control. Ferret frees him and beats up the gangster. Hes also already a member of the protectors as this issue was written before Protector's 1 was finalized so there are some minor continuity issues.

In Protectors 2 the rest of the team is formed. There is prince Zardi, The Eternal man, a powerful and immortal sourcecerer. The Ferret actually joins in this issue. There is the Amazing Man who is plucked from an asylum do to having some unknown mental illness. Its never really explained and he just seems angry, but since its the 90s most of the male heroes are angry. There is Aura who is a black woman. Then the Protectors make their first public media appearance while a strange eye watches.

Next up is The Arrow One shot where we meet arrow a vigilante who doesn't join the protectors as he has less qualms about killing. You see one time Arrow was fighting a super villain and accidentally hit a kid in the knee before the Binkstone Incident. He then decides to return to heroics after the Protectors return and this time kills a kid in the crossfire. Man of War chastises him over this. The villain from the beginning takes another kid hostage but this time he don't miss. He determines that killing criminals is based. Then the weird eye watches him brood.

Protectors 3 the protectors fight Mister Monday's army. Night Mask is a wimp who can't fight. Amazing Man flips out till a new hero called the Witch uses her feminine wiles on him. People are naturally disturbed that their state sanctioned heroes are insane. Reinhart doesn't a give a shit if his son dies. The media debates if the protectors are good or not while the team argues. The protectors bring in one final member in the form of Mighty Man who is currently being just a dad. Mighty Man really hates the Witch for an unknown reason. The Protectors ship is falling apart as there is a union strike going on so no one will fix it. Rinehart goes to a mafia don to pull a favor to break up the strike. Mister Monday attacks Rinehart's car as he's leaving.

Protectors 4 Arrow and Man of War argue some more. Rinehart looses use of legs after the attack and thinks there is a mole in the organization. The witch vaguely threatens Mighty Man. The protectors publicly fight more of Mister Monday's minions and this time the public loves them. Ferret beats up Night Mask to show him how much of a loser he is and Night Mask has a moid moment and thinks the foid comforting him wants to bang him. There is also a shadowy figure telling Mister Monday what to do.

Protectors 5 is the big one where Night Mask is killed, as seen on the cover. The story starts off with a cool effect where the Protectors and Mister Monday are directly compared side by side. It doesn't really mean anything, its not the two have anything in common but hey we finally got something resembling a story telling device. The rest of the issue is pretty simple. The protectors go off and fight Mister Monday's minions. Night Mask gets separated from the group and actually manages to take down some minions on his own. The coms break down so he decides to trace Monday to his base. Monday reveals it was all a trap and broadcasts his fight with night mask which ends with him killing night mask. Looking at the art you probably notice a random hole in it. Well in the 90s one of the gimmicks was "bullet hole" issues where the book would look like it had some visual damage like what happens in the story. In this case its clear the whole thing was done after the issue was finished as the hole only lines up the cover and actively ruins everything else. Its just a random hole that's cuts into the art and letters page like it doesn't even line up with the wound in Night Mask's death spread. Like the one thing you'd want to look right for the bullet hole.

Next is the Airman One shot which mostly sets up the arc after this one. Airman is contacted telepathically by the water based hero thresher who is being held captive. Thresher is the son of Neptune and is captured by the villain The Conqueror who is torturing him to out the secret of "doors". Airman busts him out and beats up the Conqueror. The Conqueror runs back to his master The Great Question.

Now its time for the grand finale of this arc Protectors 6. The Protectors are at their lowest. Amazing Man goes insane and destroys Monday's whole base which was evacuated by the time they arrived and a US senator is using this failure to campaign for their disbanding. Arrow's killing of a child as seen in his one shot continues to escalate hostilities. The protectors then host Night Mask's funeral which is attacked by Monday himself and his goons. It turns out the Protectors had planned on this all along and make quick work of Monday and his goons. It turns out Monday is actually a midget wearing robot prosthetics and this victory is able to entirely reverse all of the bad PR the Protectors got so everyone loves them. We see that Monday's true master was The Great Question who is being watched the mysterious eye who is owned by a superhero called The Eye.

At this point comics were fully in the Image revolution so a comic like this seems quite quaint. Its very 80s inspired taking some basic cues from Watchmen and TDKR (slightly morally grey heroes, a media against the heroes, and government sponsored heroes) the art in the main issues is also more subdued then your average image revolution comic. I think some of the lore here could have made for a good story. The Brinkstone incident is interesting and has a lot of mystique around it where you aren't quite sure if the heroes did anything wrong in it as the heroes never defend themselves on it. Sadly I think the arc is let down by how little actually happens. Mister Monday is not an interesting villain and only two things happen of direct note: Night Mask dying and Mister Monday being stopped and no one is developed to justify such wasted plots. When you read the characters backstories from the back material they all have these insane backstories with weird powers that just aren't mentioned anywhere in the story. Like Mighty Man is the last surviving member of a race of giants who was given a belt to shrink down to human size but it broken so now he can shrink and grow at will. Or Man of War gets his powers from planets imagine if what powers he had and how strong they were were related to the orbit of the planets. But none of these are mentioned in story and everyone just has generic super strength. Then there is Night Mask. I like the idea of Night Mask. Its a darker take on non powered heroes that I think aged well. In the modern era of comics where any random teenager who is toats the biggest fan of x hero can become a fighter able to rival said hero in a week its interesting to see a story where someone of only above average physical ability tries to be a hero. Really the issue is I don't see a clear message with Night Mask. Issues 1-5 portray it as a tragedy. Night mask wants his fathers approval so he undertakes a fools errand by trying to be a hero while his father increasingly withdrawals from him as all this hero play does is bring back negative memories to Rinehart. Night Mask's last words are "I'm Sorry Dad" showing that he realizes this was a bad idea yet all of issue six and the rest of the hero everyone just goes off on how great a hero night mask was even though all he did was just die. From here itll just get worse as the book slowly devolves into pure 90s slop and any interesting plot threads are just forgotten.

The next major Protectors arc is told over issues 7-9 and finally reveal the truth behind the Brinkstone incident. One of the Protector's villains, Wisecrack, who was thought killed in brinkstone has actually been sent to some strange heck dimension with Jackdaw. Rinehart's secretary is summoned by the eye and gains super powers to be the new night mask. Some of the team gets new 90s costumes and we finally learn what was up with thresher. His back story was his mom was an Atlantean who traveled to earth via an interdimensional portal called a door to frick a fisherman. The conqueror supposedly died in Brinkstone with every other villain but he is clearly back and wants access to teleportation. Issue 8 starts in media res with the Protectors exiting a door portal into a heck dimension and being attacked by monsters. Through a flash back we learn that they had all realized that no one had died in Brinkstone and that a door had just been opened which teleported everyone but the heroes away and that The Eternal man will be able to temporally re open the portal so they can all enter and free any survivors. Arrow also sneaks in the portal. During the fight Gravestone and Arc are captured and sent to wise crack to be tortured. In issue 9 we further learn that every single villain was fed into a different pocket dimension and Wisecrack wants to unite them all before they head to earth. Gravestone dies while being interrogated and tortured but comes back to life a page later. The protectors fight their way through Wisecrack and his monsters before Wisecrack manages to open a door to another pocket dimension and forces all of the people of Brink stone to go with him but tricks jackdaw into staying behind. Jackdaw fights Ferret one on one and takes a woman hostage until Arrow kills Jackdaw and Ferret helps him dump the body in a fire moat surrounding the castle to hide the body. The protectors narrowly escape the dimension and Ferret puts in a good word for Arrow to join the team. We also see that the Mysterious eye guy watching everyone is dying and the great question is still scheming.

Around this time 3 spin off books were launched based off Protector's characters: Man of War, Ferret, and Gravestone. These are quite simply terrible and have bad art so Ill be skipping through them fast. Man of War 1-3: Man of War is sent to Cuba to recruit a super hero called lift who uses his telekinetic powers to cheat a casinos. Both are attacked by Man of War's brother who is an assassin and Man of War learns the US gov sucks so he leaves lift be. Man of war 4: Man of war's doctor is actually an evil scientist who ressurected Night Mask as his zombie slave and tries ti transplant night mask's zombie brain into man of War's super body. Man of War 5: Man of War helps a schizo superhero named Killinger who then turns on Man of War as hes crazy and wants to kill everyone even heroes idk.

The Ferret 1-4: The government has supernormal assassins. One named Toxin is seemingly programmed to kill Ferret and breaks free too soon. He attacks and poisons Ferret. Ferret needs to capture him to get an antidote. A female superhero named midnight blue is hire by the gov to kill Toxin so Toxin can die and Ferret can die. Ferret beats toxin and Toxin is used to make a cure for him. The gov still wants ferret dead for reasons. That's it over 4 issues.

Gravestone 1: Remember back when Gravestone died for a page? Well everytime he dies he just ends up in the underworld tells the dead to frick off and just walks right back to the land of the living. While he's in the underworld a teenage girl who died of shock at Brinkstone asks if she can hitch a ride back to the living. Gravestone says he cant do that and then immediately offers Night Mask's ghost a trip back to the living which Night Mask refuses but ghost girl gets pissed at this hypocrisy and hitches a ride back anyway. Gravestone 2: the ghost girl resurrects as a powerful demon which can reanimate any corpse creating a "death plague" where anyone killed by these monsters becomes one. Eternal man shows up and explains this death plague struck Atlantis which is why he had to sink it. The comic ends with Gravestone and Eternal man surrounded by zombies.

The last Protectors arc before the BIG EVENTtm is from issues 10-12 and features the return of Miss Fury from adventure comics. You see a new Black Fury assaults the white house and holds the president and his family hostage. The Protectors intervene and Black Fury runs off with the presidents son and Miss Fury pops in to say she knows where she went. Issue 11 then spends half the issue having her fight the protectors in a big misunderstanding. We then learn that when Marlene (the blonde miss fury) and her aunt who was also miss fury fought and fell into a vat in chemicals all the way back in the adventure comics issue the vat actually gave both superpowers and Marlene's aunt turned evil and became black fury for some reason. Then in issue 12 Miss Fury leads the Protectors to an abandoned mall where Black Fury is holding the presidents son but uh oh Arrow is there and super jelly everyone is paying attention to a foid over him so he blows their cover but they end up saving everyone and black fury escapes. In a epilogue we see a mysterious villain named Extreme attack the king of an alien world.

The New New Ex-Mutants

A few months into starting The Protectors Malibu also launched a new color reboot of the Ex-Mutants. It featured the same basic premise as the old series but entirely revamped cast and lore with no input from Lawrence or Lim. Its really quite bad and barely makes any sense so I'll be skimming it hard. So it starts off in Slugtown which is run by a slug like mutant named Sluggo who controls everyone through mind control headbands and he has a short blue servant named Zygote who is planning some coup we never see. Well now Doctor Kildare is now a robot and needs a power cell from slug town so the Ex-Mutants go there, kill Sluggo, free the people, and Zygote becomes Kildare's slave. This is all over 3 issues. The next arc takes place over issues 4-8 and is after a Dinosaurs for Hire crossover where the Ex-Mutants get sucked into the Dino's world and when they get back they need to head to a dimensional rift that has been created a close it. There is also a mutant in a suit named Nathaniel Gleeson who is giving the people of slugtown access to powerful tech like water purification but has a bone to pick with Kildare. Eventually the Ex-mutants find a facility full of robots which look like Kildare but have no consciousness and then one chick ex mutant falls in the time portal. In the past she sees that the facility was staffed with a people who look exactly like the Ex-Mutants and there is a human Dr. Kildare trying to cure the genetic mutations of a Dr. Gleson's son but instead they make him into a hulk monster. Then terrorists attack and the female ex mutant is shoved in a stasis. In the present Nathaniel Gleeson is the son who was also put in stasis and he hulks and attacks kildare but the ex-mutants kill him and then find the stasis tub where the girl has been sitting. Then in issue 9 one of the men finds a magic sword which possesses him. Then in issue 10 a bounty who tries to kill them but they are saved by a human bounty hunter even though all humans but the ex-mutants are supposed to be dead and we end off with the ex-mutants surrounding the bounty hunter who tried to kill them.

A somewhat funny thing I noticed

The Return of Dinosaurs for Hire

The original Dinosaurs for Hire is an interesting cancellation in that it wasn't cancelled for being too unprofitable but was in fact profitable enough to pursue licensing so Tom Mason was taken off the book to head up Hollywood deals. Well those went no where until 1993 with the hype leading up to Jurassic Park. Now every company wanted their own dino themed brand. To this end Malibu started up a new full color Dinos comic with Tom Mason still at the helm to drum up hype while they worked on a Saturday morning cartoon deal with FOX. I found this 4 color version of the Dinos to be quite a bit funnier then their old one with a little less focus on bland pop culture references and a little more on absurdist humor and satire (well at least the first 5 issues). The first five issues tell a barely coherent about the Dinos being bought out by a company called petro-global who attempts to IP whore them while super tax collectors and alien bounty hunters hound the dinos. There is some pretty funny running gags like there being a new 4th member, a pterodactyl, who is openly there by corporate mandate and simply talks about how little there is for him to do. The issues past 5 become increasingly to rely on pop culture references but hey its easily the best series of the 3. More info on the Dinos can be found here:

Street Fightin' Interlude

When Capcom wanted to start licensing out Street fighter to western companies to profit off of Street Fighter 2's massive success. The first company they went to for comics was Malibu as they had had previous success with licensed comics via Adventure Comics and Eternity plus Malibu had also recently snagged the high lucrative star trek license. So it starts off with Ryu becoming the street fighting champion and beating Sagat so Sagat and Balrog go and work for M. Bison who hates Ryu for reasons. Ryu is childhood friends with Ken and Chun-li with Ken becoming a popular martial arts actor and Chun-li becoming a police women to investigate her father's death at the hands of M. Bison. Then Ken walks off a movie set and is attacked by Sagat and Balrog. They beat and scalp Ken. Every other Street Fighter hears this and is sad they will never beat Ken in a fair and square fight. I mention this comic as in issue 3 Piston Honda meets the Ferret and Ferret challenges him to a duel and looses meaning this book takes place in the protectors universe. Issue 3 ends with some new female OC being trained by "Sheng Long" (yeah the hoax character) in order to gain chi powers so she can beat up Ryu for reasons. This series was so bad in fact that Capcom personally striped Malibu of the license after 3 issues leaving the series unfinished. Issue 3 ends with a text summary of the writers plans up to that point which included bringing back Ken who would simply be bald due to being scalped.

The Big EventTM

So Malibu had a superhero universe with the protectors and they had 2 unrelated titles which kind of crossed over once. Well Malibu wanted more so in a big event called Genesis they combined Protectors, Dinosaurs for Hire, and the Ex-Muants. The event ran over 6 main issues in a sequence of Ex-Mutants 11, Dinosaurs for Hire 8, Protectors 13, Ex-Mutants 12, Dinosaurs for Hire 9, and Protectors 13 with two tie in issues from Gravestone, Ferret, and Man of War in theory providing extra context, however this event is really bad. So Ex-Mutants 11 starts with Extreme talking about how his dad used to beat him (something that never comes up again) and how he needs to conquer worlds to raise his power basically a rip off of the Anti-monitor from DC. He then travels to Ex-Mutants world beats them up and travels to Protectors world.

Next in plot is Gravestone 3 where gravestone and some random dad blast away zombies until Gravestone kills himself to kill all the zombies and he comes back to life and is sucked through a random portal. Eternal man flies off to L.A.

This directly leads into Dinos 8 where the Dinos are revealed to have died via eating bad fast food and Extreme has already been beaten by the protectors and trapped in an energy cage so he sends out his minions to attack LA. The dinos end up in heck which is where Gravestone is after being pulled through the portal. Gravestone then leads the dinos back to Protectors LA where they witness the minion raid.

Next is a two part Ferret tie in over Ferret 5 and 6. Part of Amazing man's golden age backstory was that he was a baby chosen by an order of Tibetan monks to serve as a warrior against another evil cult and this finally gets mentioned. This evil cult sends a pupil, Bloodlust, in an exo suit to go and kill amazing man. The suit has a 30 minute power supply and when its up he'll teleport back to base. After the pupil leaves the Great Question goes to the cult says he needs Amazing Man alive and will them all if the pupil returns with everyone dead. So Amazing man is in the infirmary so when Bloodlust teleports into the Protectors HQ he actually finds Ferret who beats him up then Ferret randomly teleports to a fantasy kingdom and sees a princess about to get murdered by a warlord. Then he teleports back to the ship and times out Bloodlust and then Ferret teleports back to the fantasy world sees that the warlord has kills the princess and tries to kill the Warlord until he teleports to LA where we find out all this teleporting was because Eternal Man messed up his summoning spell.

Protectors 13 is technically part 3 of 6 but actually dinos 8 takes place in the middle of Protectors 13. So we see how Extreme got trapped in the energy cage it was via The Eye sending power to Eternal Man. Five out of the six ex-mutants are rendered nearly dead or dead so Kildare and guy who is left put them back into the pods which made them humans. Then Extreme breaks back out of the energy cage (no mention of his armies from Dino's 8) which seemingly kills Eternal man and then Extreme replaces LA with Slugtown from the Ex-Mutants would causing the two worlds to collide.

In Ex-Mutants 12 the Ex-Mutants pop out of their tubes with super powers and fight with the Protectors for no reason. Except one Ex-Mutant is still in her tube so Kildare uses up the last of his power to save her or something. The dinos and gravestone pop out in Slugtown battling some random goons and then Extreme shows up again to wail on the Protectors and Ex-Mutants.

Next up is Dinos 9 which has nothing to do with Genesis minus the Dinos being in Protectorsverse now. They meet with Widowmaker who was this really minor protectors character who really hates superheroes and they kept trying to push him despite his first appearance being in a random magazine and the plot from there going nowhere. Apparently the protectorsverse is actually really different then our universe in terms of pop culture oh and the Triceratops got sucked back in a portal back in Ex-Mutants 12 and is gonna be eaten by some rich club.

So Gravestone 4: in slugtown Gravestone saves an anti superhero reporter from a mutant. Gravestone then goes to an organ to play music until and evil gravestone (idk) shows up and beats him up and steals his powers and then merges with a mutant to become evil. Then in a back up story a halloween party goer saves Gravestone from a demo so he turns her into a cat as she was wearing a cat costume so this means she wants to be a cat.

Now its time for the grand finale of the Genesis crisis where both the protectors and ex-mutants get beat up by Extreme. Then the tube b-word shows up absorbs his lasers and explodes which knocks out Extreme. Man of War wont let anyone kill him so they send Extreme and his minions back to their home dimension and destroy the teleporter. After this crisis we get a glimpse of some big changes. Slugtown has now replaced LA and to better integrate the mutants the US gov forces grave stone and arc onto the ex-mutants and two ex mutants onto the Protectors oh and Man of War is down as leader and has been replaced by a bishop knock off named Chalice.

Its about time I bring up the Man of War Genesis "tie-ins" I only bring them up now as despite being tagged with Genesis and one cover showing Extreme the issues have nothing to do with the event and just continue the man of war story. Anyway Killinger is acting schizo and Rocket Ranger (a ww2 superhero who was from a video that Malibu adapted into an adventure comics series ) who is now an old man shows his son his rocket gear so he can fight off a nazi super villain named zeppelin who has returned and Rocket also saves Man of War.

Dead Clown and Lobomainia

So in 80s DC a bounty named Lobo appeared in Omega Men #3. Eventually Lobo was brought back in the 90s as a parody of grim and gritty superheroes but ended up being so popular he was shoved into all sorts of random books. Including a staring role in L.E.G.I.O.N a book about Brainiac's chuddy NRX son Vril Dox who makes an authoritarian private police force to bring order to the universe with Lobo as his body guard. Well Malibu wanted a piece of that pie so they made Dead Clown a book whose ad even calls out Lobo. You see Dead Clown takes place in the Dinos Universe and hes owned by Petro Global but he hates being a mascot so he breaches contract and the company sicks a stupid super team on him. The art is really bad here and barely coherent.

The New Genesis Status Quo

This new shared universe starts off with a Genesis 0 issue with a foil cover and basically a story for each book. These stories have no info beyond the Ex-mutants one showing that sluggo was a televangelist before his mutation. The Dinos story is a fantastic four parody with art by the prolific silver age Superman artist Curt Swan so thats fun.

The Protectors 15-18: Chalice is a black solider from the 1920s who had a meteor land right in his eye which lets him shoot lasers from it. In the 50s he was put into suspended animation and let out. Man of War is on trial for destroying LA because some how eternal man destroyed LA and not Extreme. Witch quits the team over the hypocrisy of the no kill clause which upsets Amazing man as his mental illness is berserk seizures. Aura and Mighty Man also quit to spend more time with their fams and Ferret also quits over the no kill clause. Witch is brainwashed by a street preacher named "Reverend Gloom" and attacks Ferret. Everyone hates superheroes until Man of war lets himself get beaten by an angry mob to protect a little girl which changes public opinion. Man of War is cleared of all charges after Arc shows that had he not sicced eternal man on Extreme Extreme would have destroyed all of earth and not LA.

Ex-Mutants 13-18: There is a super 90s super team called the Kill Corps that the US gov sends to patrol sluggtown. The only interesting one is a dude named Posse who can clone himself but looses control over his clones the more he makes and to get rid of them he has to kill them which could be cool in a better written story. The one depowered Ex-mutant, Dillion, finds a random floating cube which gives him cybernetic enhancements and also is secretly controlled by Cybernet. Slugtown is also expanding. It turns out Shannon is actually possessed by Chakra the blonde women who Gravestone sees every time he dies. She then kills everyone but Gravestone and then opens a portal to heck so all of the dead ex mutants just walk back into life and Shannon renters her body. Arrow then joins the Kill Corps and the entire Kill Corps and Dillion are brainwashed by Cybernet. Dillion then thinks really hard and Cybernet goes away and somehow this upgraded all of his cybernetics to be even better.

Dinosaurs for Hire 10-12: You know how the triceratops was gonna be eaten well now randomly hes tied by by a surgeon who wants to vivisect him so he can make dino clones. The dinos save him and fight off hoards of baby triceratops clones. They then fight a giant monster in manhatten who has taken out all of the random superheroes.

Man of War 7: The Nazi Zeppelin holds the president hostage and rocket ranger and Man of War fight him off.

Ferret 7-10: Ferret beats up some Thugs and then fights with old boomer Airman and then he saves a woman from killing herself (she was the woman he saved from Wisecrack's heck dimension). Ferret fights Posse before he joined the Kill Corps and gets pissed then the US gov recruit him. Ferret then meets Iron Skull again who is attacked by a ninja bodyguard of the Purple Dragon and Ferret holds the Purple Dragon's gussy hostage. Then Ferret finds and kills a superpowered serial killer showing he has fully broken with the protectors. Anyway I like Ferret he's cool and sexy and I want him to r*pe me.

Gravestone 5-7: The evil gravestone is like a shapeshifting mutant mimic who is killing moids for thinking about s*x and Gravestone uses Medusa's head to turn him to stone. Gravestone then fights a vampire clown. Then then mimic that Gravestone turned to stone is no longer stone and being studied by a lab and breaks free so Gravestone opens a portal to another dimension and throws him in it and also pulls out the sister of the Journo who hates supereheroes as her sister was at LA when Slugtown happened. This is contradicted by Protectors where Eternal Man claims everyone in LA who wasn't in the protectors forcefield instantly died.

continues in pinned comment

Greetings Dramastrags

I was watching some utube vids last night when I came a cross a compilation of of the worst Burgerland national anthem renditions of all time and it instantly brought me back to memory lane 13 years ago in 2009 when the absolute worst most atrocious version of the South African national anthem had been sung before!

So the year is 2009! On 15 November, the RSA rugby team, the Springboks :marseysa:, are facing off against the frogs in the Test Match. It was a good season, and SA team had been doing reasonably well.

Scheduled to sing the South African anthem, was Ras Dumisani. And whoooooooooooooooooooooh boi, it was not Ayoba. Haibo boys, it was fricking KAK! A highschooler with a breaking voice would have sung it better.

https://www.iol.co.za/sport/rugby/springboks/watch-from-kurt-darren-to-ras-dumisani-the-3-times-the-sa-national-anthem-was-butchered-live-f94ac40c-651b-4cea-9f4e-ed2e2b484a50

"In 2009, Ras Dumisani was asked to sing the national anthem for South Africa before the Springboks took on hosts France, a match they would go on to lose 20-13. Though the Springboks would have been left deflated after their defeat, they certainly did not receive any inspiration before the clash from Dumisani. He struggled to hold a note and he seemed to have no idea what the anthem should actually sound like."

I remember the good old days of physical newspapers, where my father or older male family members would give me R20 each sunday for me and/or sister to go down too the cafe and buy them a newspaper, and keep the change as reward. And if there was a notable event that week, he would call us and read out loud the country's latest corruption/shenanigans. That November, the Sunday after the Test match was national drama and sneed after what was considered by the entire rainbow nation, by all of its races, by all of its physical newspapers and fledgling social media, as the absofucinglute woooorst national anthem ever sung by man's lips

I remember vividly the front page Rapport afrikaans newspaper having a short and column written in the sports section, where literally NOTHING was mentioned regarding the events taken during the match, just 5 paragraphs detailing this controversy and its outlandishness. With a single fricking sentence following the drama, as if in summation: the Boks lost 20-13 implying the kak singing was the primary cause of the lose.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/16/ras-dumisani-south-african-anthem

=====(from article)

It was not just bad. It was not-knowing-where-to-look bad. And the man responsible is rapidly becoming public enemy number one in South Africa.

Reggae singer Ras Dumisani mauled, mutilated and murdered the national anthem in a hilariously off-key rendition before South Africa played France in a rugby international last Friday.

Some fans in Toulouse were in fits of laughter, but the Springboks players looked incredulous during the sub-karaoke wailing and later complained that it robbed them of inspiration.

Unfortunately for Dumisani, who was flanked by two bongo players, South Africa takes rugby very seriously. Outraged critics are blaming him for their team's 20-13 defeat in a heated national debate that is escalating in newspapers, radio stations and Facebook, where one group is called "Ban Ras Dumisani From Ever Singing Again"

The South African Rugby Union has written to its French counterpart to complain that Dumisani's tuneless attempt at Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika ("God Bless Africa" in Xhosa) was "absolutely disrespectful". This is despite his name having been on a shortlist of artists drawn up by the South African embassy in Paris.

Even politicians, normally preoccupied with crime, race and the economy, are piling in with strong opinions. The Congress of the People (remember these guys ) called Dumisani's rendition a "vocal misfire", saying: "It looked as though it came right out of the blooper reel of a reality TV singing show."

The Young Communist League of South Africa said Dumisani was a "howler of note" and should sing "only in his shower".

====(end)

There's a bunch of articles with lists of worst sung national anthems, but I personally believe none of the other artists can hold a candle to Ras Dumisani's bad performance, or had such a high profile public event involved.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/sport/rugby/springboks/springboks-watch-rendition-sa-anthem-trending-breaking-monday-21-novembr-2022/

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-04-17-watch-three-times-the-sa-national-anthem-was-mauled/

https://www.enca.com/life/watch-worst-anthem-blunders

You get the idea.

Here it is by the ways - Ras Dumisani sings what he believes to be his beautiful version of the South African National Anthem, before the 20-13 Test match defeat to France.

Lol, Schalk Burger was a rough and tough player which was memed that he started destroying the opposition whenever he wen Hulk mode

Bryan Habana, perhaps the most infamous and best coloured Rugby player in all of SA history trying not to lose his shit

SOME BONUS CONTENT: SHIT KAK BURGERLAND NATIONAL ANTHEM RENDITIONS!!!!!!!!

What inspired me to absolutely have to make this post.

It's good. It's actually really good. Let's discuss some of the themes the movie brings up. I'm quite surprised to see so many online calling it feminist garbage. It was actually a refreshing take on modern gender relations.

1. Men and shame

Although the movie is about Barbie, it pays plenty of attention to Ken as well. He is Barbie's sidekick, and he is constantly trying to get her attention. He goes to the real world and he discovers patriarchy, and he is immediately in love with it. After a lifetime spent in Barbie World, for the first time, he is introduced to the idea of male supremacy. In many ways the Barbie/Ken relationship is somewhat abusive, with Barbie not making the nature of the relationship clear to Ken ever. It is clear Ken is enamoured of Barbie, and Barbie allows this to continue despite the feelings not being reciprocal.

Situations like this happen constantly in real life. Unfortunately, we seldom hear about it because men are shamed when they are abused by women. In Abused Men by Phillip Cook, this is discussed.

How many of these red flags are in your life? How many make an appearance in Barbie (2023)?

2. Machoism

Ken wants to win Barbie's heart, and he does so by trying to appear macho and catch her attention. Machoism is a common burden placed on men. It is considered to be an essential component of heterosexual attraction. However, as the movie illustrates, there are harmful aspects to machoism and they affect both men and women. Let's turn back to Cook.

3. Idealized Womanhood

The central issue in Barbie is that too much is expected of women. Oftentimes, the demands are completely contradictory. Nietzche is often portrayed as being anti-feminist and misogynistic. However, many scholars have instead argued that Nietzche is tearing down this idealized image of womanhood, which is what Barbie (2023) aims to achieve as well.

4. Shunning of victimhood

Despite discussing women's issues in depth, the movie never portrays women as victims. In this way, it stays true to the history of Barbie as a representation of the potential and capabilities within each girl. As Kajsa Ekis Ekman explains in Being and Being Bought:

I would like to criticize this for a moment. Sometimes, it is necessary to accept your victimhood. Only then can you begin the healing process. Relieve yourself of the burden! Admit that you've been hurt and made to feel weak! stop holding the secret in.

5. Vagina and womanhood

The movie ends with Barbie visiting a gynecologist. This is noteworthy because she chose to become a real woman, which would mean she would gain genitalia, which she explicitly stated she did not have prior. Why is the vagina so intrinsically tied to womanhood? Why does Barbie only become a real woman once she has a vagina? Is a woman reducible to her s*x organs?

I don't have answers, but it is worth thinking about. Also consider how, as Ekman argues, modern women in s*x work view the Self as separate from the vagina.

6. Buying women

The movie jokes about the fact that Ken lives in Barbie's shadow. There is something quite interesting about this, however. It is normal and common for Barbie to be bought. Yet the idea of buying Ken never catches on in the movie or in real life. I believe this ties into how we view men and women. Women are commodities that are bought and sold. This occurs in s*x work, in the pornification of media, and in the unpaid labour of the domestic domain.

Though Barbie has no doubt inspired many women, it is worthwhile to remember that there are real women who are bought and sold every day. Their reality is far from glamorous.

It is also worth noting that Barbie LIKES being bought and sold. This is perhaps the biggest gripe I have with the movie. Though Barbie (Margot Robbie) chooses to be a real woman, the rest of the Barbies remain as dolls despite knowing of the existence of the real world. They're explicitly choosing to remain commodities to be played with, and they love it! Every day of being an object is paradise for them. In many ways, this parallels the myth of the "happy hooker" who loves being bought and sold for s*x.

Sorry for the sloppy piece, I'm writing this before bed after watching the movie. In closing, I really enjoyed Barbie (2023). Although there are some criticisms to be waged against its handling of feminist issues, it was surprisingly more competent than I was expecting. If you're looking for a laugh and some light-hearted adventure go for it. If you're looking for a perfect feminist piece, look elsewhere. My biggest compliment is that it manages to handle gender relations in a way that adequately explains some of the issues that modern men face beyond simply "man scared to cry" e.g. how to relate to women, how to deal with a society where gender power dynamics are shifting. I think men will find it surprisingly meaningful.

BONUS: Google the word "Barbie" for some fabulous!

Greetings Dramastrags!

So I've talked a lot about Loadshedding, the rationing of electricity across various districts, at different times, because South Africa's national energy-provider ESKOM, has been too dysfunctional to be able to provide sufficient electricity to cover the whole of the nation's electric-grid all at the same time. Because of this I had been in various internet rabbit holes regarding past occurrences of any events resembling Loadshedding in the past, in other countries.

I was very surprised that the closest similar event in modernity, that wasn't some post natural disaster story in a 3rd world backwater, involved our pals in Burgerland, specifically their powerful and wealthy state of California. Astonishing, because it is one of the wealthiest regions on planet Earth - so how the actual frick did burgers succeed in failing to provide electricity for a whole year, in such an advanced region?

The story involves Enron, the energy company so fricking cartoonishly evil and corrupt, that after their bankruptcy, their implosion would directly lead to much stronger International regulations for corporations in burgerland.

AT ITS HEIGHT ENRON WAS THE 7TH LARGEST CORPORATION IN THE USA:

https://www.citeco.fr/10000-years-history-economics/contemporary-world/collapse-of-enron-the-7th-largest-company-in-the-united-states

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/tutors-problems/Finance/45546828-Before-their-demise-Enron-was-the-7th-largest-public-corporation/

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/

"The story of Enron Corp. depicts a company that reached dramatic heights only to face a dizzying fall. The fated company’s collapse affected thousands of employees and shook Wall Street to its core. At Enron’s peak, its shares were worth $90.75; just prior to declaring bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, they were trading at $0.26."

"To this day, many wonder how such a powerful business—at the time one of the largest companies in the United States—disintegrated almost overnight. Also difficult to fathom is how its leadership managed to fool regulators for so long with fake holdings and off-the-books accounting."

At the end of 2001 however, it was revealed that Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal. Basically they had cooked the books to such a magnitude, that they had fooled the entire financial world, their investors, and pretty much whole world governments that they were superbly profitable, whilst in reality they were bleeding money and failing in all of their endeavors, having basically only kept afloat by continual new investments

"Enron created EnronOnline (EOL) in October 1999, an electronic trading website that focused on commodities. Enron was the counterparty to every transaction on EOL; it was either the buyer or the seller. To entice participants and trading partners, Enron offered its reputation, credit, and expertise in the energy sector. Enron was praised for its expansions and ambitious projects, and it was named “America’s Most Innovative Company” by Fortune for six consecutive years: 1996–2001."

Enron as a financial entity was considered the greatest scam of the financial world at that time.

ORIGIN OF ENRON: SKILLING AND KEN LAY:

ENRON as we know it, was created as a merger between Lay's Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth n 1987, both relatively small regional companies. This merger was overseen by CEO Ken Lay.

Ken Lay was a hardcore energy-deregulation fanatic supported in yank politics - which meant he believed laws and rules were for busybodies, basically the bad-guy character Frank Fontaine of Bioshock 1 was based on this guy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/23/energy-deregulation-worsened-texas-crisis-enron-is-partly-blame/

======(from article) Eventually, though, energy (like other industries) moved toward deregulation beginning in the late 1970s. Believers in the free market, including Texas energy executives like Enron’s Ken Lay, drove this change, actively pushing for deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s.

Infamously, Enron was a Houston-based energy company that pioneered the use of financial instruments in the natural gas business but collapsed in 2001 after years of accounting fraud came to light. Yet long before Enron became synonymous with white collar crime, the company’s leadership was deeply invested in energy deregulation. After finding success operating in the natural gas market (which had been deregulated in the 1980s), the company’s leaders, Lay and Jeff Skilling, turned their attention to electricity deregulation.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act into law, which represented a decisive, national step forward in the pursuit of electricity deregulation.

In the mid-'90s, Enron effectively declared war, intending to smash through any barrier standing in the way of electricity deregulation. Drawing on military metaphors, the company’s 1996 annual report stated: “In the U.S. we are moving forward in a state by state advance to support deregulation and quicken its pace.”=======(end)

SKILLING:

The REAL insanity started with a dude named Jeffrey Skilling, the subordinate of Ken Lay. Skilling was so monumentally corrupt and psycopathic that I believe American Psycho was based on this nut.

"Skilling wanted to change Enron from a gas supply company into a stock market for natural gas."

Over the course of the 1990s, Enron made a few changes to its business plan that greatly improved the perceived profitability of the company. First, Enron invested heavily in overseas assets, specifically energy. Another major shift was the gradual transition of focus from a producer of energy to a company that acted more like an investment firm and sometimes a hedge fund, making profits off the margins of the products it traded. These products were traded through the Gas Bank concept, now called the Enron Finance Corp. and headed by Skilling. In 1991, he became the chairman of Enron Gas Services Co.

Enron became known as the Wall Street Darling under Skilling.

ENRON POLITICAL TIES WITH BUSH:

https://progressive.org/magazine/meet-enron-bush-s-biggest-contributor/

=====(from article) Texas activists say that the tight connection between Bush and Lay bodes ill if Bush is elected. Andrew Wheat, from Texans for Public Justice, a campaign finance advocacy group in Austin, compares the symbiotic relationship between Enron and the governor to "cogeneration"--a process used by utilities to harness waste heat vented by their generators to produce more power. "In a more sinister form of cogeneration, corporations are converting economic into political power," he says. "A Bush election fueled by Enron dollars could ignite in the public policy arena, and consumers would get burned."=====

Before Bush was even elected, many politically savvy peeps in burgerland were already sweating bullets at the impending horror of a parasitical relationship between a Bush-administration and Enron

===== (continuing from article) And so may people in the Third World.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both criticized Enron for colluding with police who brutally suppressed protests at the company's giant power plant in western India. The plant's operating firm is called the Dabhol Power Company. From 1992 to 1998, Enron owned 80 percent of it, with General Electric and Bechtel each holding a 10 percent share. (In 1998, the Indian state electricity board bought a 30 percent share of the company, which reduced Enron's stake to 50 percent.)

"The project has met with opposition from local people and activists from elsewhere in India on the grounds of its social, economic, and environmental impact," Amnesty wrote in a July 1997 report. "Protesters and activists have been subjected to harassment, arbitrary arrest, preventive detention under the ordinary criminal law, and ill treatment. Amnesty International considers those who have been subjected to arrest and temporary periods of imprisonment as a result of undertaking peaceful protest to be prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely for exercising their right to freedom of expression."

For years, the plant has been the site of many nonviolent protests.

Just before dawn on June 3, 1997, police stormed the homes of several women. "The policemen forcibly opened the door and dragged me out of the house into the police van parked on the road. (While dragging me) the police kept beating me on my back with batons. The humiliation meted out to the other members of my family was similar to the way I was humiliated. . . . My one-and-a-half-year-old daughter held on to me but the police kicked her away," says Sugandha Vasudev Bhalekar--a twenty-four-year-old housewife who was three months pregnant at the time of her arrest, according to Amnesty's report. Amnesty found that another pregnant woman was beaten and several other women sustained injuries, including bruising, abrasions, and lacerations on arms and legs.

A January 1999 investigation by Human Rights Watch came to a stronger conclusion. "Human Rights Watch believes that the Dabhol Power Corporation and its parent company Enron are complicit in these human rights violations," it said. "The company, under provisions of law, paid the abusive state forces for the security they provided to the company. These forces, located adjacent to the project site, were only stationed there to deal with protests.===========

Lol ENRON was basically like the corporations out of fricking Robocop.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/feb/02/enron.usnews

Holy smokes. How you yanks didn't lynch Bush from his office is unknown to me. This was such an open sore of corruption. I guess wingcuckery was already full swing to Bush win the election in 2004, after this astonishingly open secret of corruption.

KENNY BOY:

George Bush was so fricking familiar with the founder of ENRON, that he was on a nickname basis with the fricking CEO. The media would bleat and screed after the collapse of ENRON in 2002, when it came out that Bush would refer to Ken, as 'Kenny Boy'.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/kenny-boys-connections/

"The Bush Family consistently acted to put Enron and its longtime CEO Ken Lay into a position to rip off investors and taxpayers. Why is the mass media ignoring that fact now that Lay has been convicted in arguably the most egregious example of white-collar fraud in US history?"

"Until he hooked up with the Bushes, Lay was just another mid-level energy trader complaining endlessly about being hemmed in by onerous government regulations and those terrible consumer lawyers who prevent free market hustlers from doing their thing. But after he and his company became top supporters of the Bushes–eventually giving $3 million combined to various Bush electoral campaigns and the Republican Party–doors opened"

"A long list of George H. W. Bush’s Cabinet and inner circle, including Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, went to work for Enron after his 1992 defeat. An even greater number of Enron officials returned the favor by joining the George W. Bush Administration in 2001 shortly before the Enron scandal exploded."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-edges-away-from-kenny-boy/

Just to demonstrate the fragrant conflict of interests.

ENRON COOKS THE BOOKS:

Enron continiously grew, and did so profitably according to their own accounting books, when in reality the entire conglomerate was a hollowed out carcass of debt and loss. But if the company was so tremendously unprofitable in reality, how the frick did they hide this from the gov and investors?

Basically this article explains: they used what's called Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV)

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/#toc-how-did-enron-hide-its-debt

"Fastow and others at Enron orchestrated a scheme to use off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles (SPVs), also known as special purposes entities (SPEs), to hide Enron’s mountains of debt and toxic assets from investors and creditors.2 The primary aim of these SPVs was to hide accounting realities rather than operating results.

The standard Enron-to-SPV transaction would be the following: Enron would transfer some of its rapidly rising stock to the SPV in exchange for cash or a note. The SPV would subsequently use the stock to hedge an asset listed on Enron’s balance sheet. In turn, Enron would guarantee the SPV’s value to reduce apparent counterparty risk."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spv.asp

"A special purpose vehicle, also called a special purpose entity (SPE), is a subsidiary created by a parent company to isolate financial risk. Its legal status as a separate company makes its obligations secure even if the parent company goes bankrupt. For this reason, a special purpose vehicle is sometimes called a bankruptcy-remote entity."

It's like creating random shitcoins, but with child companies, and throwing all the bad debt onto this child company, so it soaks up all the monumental bad credit you've build up, and they would stave of the overall company's bankruptcy for over a decade.

THE WALL STREET DARLING CRUMBLES:

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/#toc-the-wall-street-darling-crumbles

"By the fall of 2000, Enron was starting to crumble under its own weight. Skilling hid the financial losses of the trading business and other operations of the company using MTM accounting. This technique measures the value of a security based on its current market value instead of its book value. This can work well when trading securities but can be disastrous for actual businesses.

In Enron’s case, the company would build an asset, such as a power plant, and immediately claim the projected profit on its books, even though the company had not made one dime from the asset. If the revenue from the power plant was less than the projected amount, instead of taking the loss, the company would then transfer the asset to an off-the-books corporation, where the loss would go unreported. This type of accounting enabled Enron to write off unprofitable activities without hurting its bottom line."

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/28/us/enron-s-many-strands-early-scrutiny-10-months-ago-questions-enron-came-went-with.html

"Ten months ago, Bethany McLean of Fortune magazine became the first journ*list to highlight hard questions about Enron's balance sheet. The most startling fact she revealed was the absence of crucial information in the company's financial reports. ''How exactly does Enron make its money?'' she wrote.

Her questions were so pointed that Enron's chief executive, Jeffrey K. Skilling, called her unethical for failing to do more research. Three Enron executives flew to New York in an unsuccessful effort to convince her editors that she was wrongheaded. Enron's chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, called Fortune's managing editor, Rik Kirkland, to complain that Fortune was relying on a source who stood to profit if the share price fell."

The legendary article in question which initialized the shitcanning of Enron's stocks: Is Enron Overpriced?

https://fortune.com/2015/12/30/is-enron-overpriced-fortune-2001/

Unfortunately it's paywalled and I'm not fricking paying. The gist is, she asked Skilling stupidly simple questions, like how the company made money, or what it's main trading was, or how profitable certain ventures were, and the guy squeaked. He tried to bullshit the reported woman Mclean, by sending accountants to answer her with BS.

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/#toc-the-wall-street-darling-crumbles

"Skilling, Enron’s former CEO, ultimately received the harshest sentence of anyone involved in the scandal. In 2006, Skilling was convicted of conspiracy, fraud, and insider trading. Skilling originally received a 17½-year sentence, but in 2013, it was reduced by 14 years. As a part of the new deal, Skilling was required to give $42 million to the victims of the Enron fraud and to cease challenging his conviction. Skilling was originally scheduled for release on Feb. 21, 2028, but was instead released early on Feb. 22, 2019.

Enron’s collapse and the financial havoc that it wreaked on its shareholders and employees led to new regulations and legislation to promote the accuracy of financial reporting for publicly held companies. In July 2002, then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. The act heightened the consequences for destroying, altering, or fabricating financial statements and for trying to defraud shareholders. U.S. Congress. “H.R.3763 — Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002.”

HOW IS ENRON RELEVANT TO THE CALIFORNIA BLACKOUTS??

The above walls of text was to give context to the sheer magnitude of greed and corruption involved with the core leadership of Enron. It also showed how desperate the top leaders of Enron became by the time the year 2000 arrived, as they knew the influx of new investments would not be indefinite.

https://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/OurEnergyFuture/TheCaliforniaElectricityCrisisLessonsfortheFuture.aspx

The 2000–01 California electricity crisis, also known as the Western U.S. energy crisis of 2000 and 2001, was a situation in which the U.S. state of California had a shortage of electricity supply caused by market manipulations and capped retail electricity prices. Rolling blackouts became a common occurrence in California, in spite of the fact that the state on paper supposedly had twice the supply wattage than its daily demand.

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/02/03/enron.tapes/

https://archive.ph/20120905051311/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04energy.html?ex=1107666000&en=01449ebf62df572e&ei=5070

The primary cause of these blackouts was market manipulation by Enron executives.

=====(from article) The tapes and memorandums were made public by a small public utility north of Seattle that is fighting Enron over a power contract. They also showed that Enron, as early as 1998, was creating artificial energy shortages and running up prices in Canada in advance of California's larger experiment with deregulation.

The tapes provide new details of market manipulation during the California energy crisis that produced blackouts and billions of dollars of surcharges to homes and businesses on the West Coast in 2000 and 2001.======

This artificial supply manipulation across the california grid caused electricity prices to rise over 800% from April 2000 to December 2000.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-24-me-4235-story.html

BURGERLAND LOADSHEDDING:

https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/report/R_103CWR.pdf

Outside of inconveniencing consumers, many businesses were financially impacted by the unsteady supply of electricity. The state of California was SUPPOSED to have installed over 45 GW of generation capacity, and had only an a daily demand of 28 GW, so where was all that electricity going?? Enron traders took power plants offline for maintenance in days of peak demand to increase the price. Traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20 times its normal value.

Stage 3 emergency scheduling meant a similar structure as South Africa where americans in California would schedule blackouts over predetermined timeframes, to share the load of not having power over separate regions. But compared to RSA, california's rolling blackouts tended to be more spontaneous and erratic, because Enron executives would phone powerplant Overseers to order them to shut down, or disable their powerplants at random times.

Here's a timeline of the events:

It's only after the bankruptcy of Enron, when the power manipulation stopped, and records and tapes between plant managers and Enron executives surfaced, and journ*lists circled Enron like hungry sharks.

Anyways compared to RSA, shit and corrupt offcials actually tend to lose popularity in Burgerland, and the event basically lasted about only a year, and wasn't as astronomically intrusive as modern RSA loadshedding.

The Bush family somehow, both Senior and Junior, with their slimy friendship with the Enron CEO's, appeared to not have lost any of their popularity. I have no idea what Yanks though of Bush at that moment in time, maybe other events like 9/11 and the planning of the Iraq war was overwhelming the public conscience at that moment in time, older yanks should tell me if they remember this fiasco.

Anyways, that's all I got, GOOD DAY

The Iron March forums was founded in 2011 by the Russian nationalist Alisher Mukhitdinov [username Alexander Slavros]. Iron March attracted a wide variety of chuds from all across the internet and different rightoid militia groups which included; National Action, Azov Brigade This was before they de-chuded themselves, apparently Golden Dawn, and many more. And of course Iron March's own home grown larper terrorist group the Atomwaffen Division. Also Slavs, lots and lots of Slavs.

The main thing that separated Iron March from other mayo supremist forums like Stormfront or Vanguard News Network was that Iron March's forums were mostly filled with angst teens and young adults going through their edgy politics phase.

But alas; Iron March closed up shop in 2017, meaning there's no trolling opportunities or current year hot takes. But what we are left with is a time capsule from the 2010s internet. The internet archives aren't complete, a lot of threads and posts I was unable to view or document I really wanted to see that Pearl Harbor thread but I believe I was able to dig up enough r-slurdation and drama for an amusing post.

The Forums

Official IM Statement regarding the Muslim Terror Attack on AW

No surrender to system cowtools. You are scum, you are not human, we hate you all, we will detail your disgusting crimes against National Socialists

One of the forum members, Devon Arthurs, converted to Islam and immediately attacked two of his Atomwaffen roommates for insulting his conversion, killing both of them.

This is an official Iron March statement by Alexander Slavros. It's worth a read just for him seetheing at normal people for being happy that extremists were killing each other.

Also here's Atomwaffen's official statement.

A sign of the times we live in, when people of the same European race praises the deaths of members of their own folk for defending their race and heritage (a.k.a. being a “neo-Nazi”)! We look upon these comments not only with disgust, but also a sardonic smile. You untermenschen are only a further inspiration to our organization.

Negromancer, Fact or Fiction?

What if I told you that negromancy is not just a myth used by black mothers to scare little nigglets, but a powerful force used by young white rappers everywhere throughout history. Many of you might be skeptical of this, but it is my objective here to prove to you the awe-inspiring power of the negromancer.

We'll start with one of the first negromancers in known history, Eminem.

Eminem is one of those men who, at least among white nationalists many seem to dislike. Many refer to him as a "race traitor" and "wigger," but this is a gross misunderstanding. These dark wizards are the modern day slave masters, but rather than using a whip they use cowtools far more ingenius, their voice box and hand gestures.

Notice the bleached blonde hair, blue eyes, and deadpan stare, these are a typical trait of the negromancer. With his larynx, the negromancer is able to produce very rapid, tiny, imperceptible vibrations with the same rythm as an African congo drum. It is truly an amazing sight to see one of these powerful sorcerers performing their craft.

They're not even joking, their claiming it's a form of black magic.

White collar crime as a means to an end

When I speak of white collar crime I mean carding (credit card fraud), advanced fee fraud, ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, Identity Theft - links in with carding, counterfeiting, money laundering (goes without saying) and crimes like that. The good thing is you can even be selective with the audience that you target.

I have always had an admiration for White collar criminals such as Bernie Madoff and even the expert Jewel thief Bill Mason who stole from the likes of Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Johnny Weissmuller and Armand Hammer. Whereas I often have contept for blue collar criminals, most of which is the kind that the average negroes and other undesirables partake in, including dysgenic whites. Mainly the more intelligent partake in white collar crime and the blue collar criminals are often less intelligent and usually get caught sooner.

>Bro we gotta' form a ponzi scheme to save the west!

Ukrainian Happenings, Stage IV: Azov Battalion

Yeah, geopolitically speaking better Ukraine be in the Russian Federation sphere of interest, yet that does JACK SHIT for us fascists. Because again - you got shit on both sides. Putin will put all nationalists put down in Ukraine and western influence will turn the country into another fricking degenerate slum. What fricking joyous options come with inaction. Azov is literally in a desperate situation but how the frick do you expect them to just outright do nothing? And yeah if they by some miracle do manage to take over it's most likely that Putin will have his legitimatized excuse to roll in the actual RF army.

Ukraine thread were they b-word at each other over whos the real fascists. And I really, really want to know what these rightoids now think of Ukraine and Russia.

Do we have a future?

The thing is this, Europe is on the verge of going fascist. And when it does it will explode and we will hardly be able to keep up with it. Germany will erupt like a volcano and the whites will start fighting. When we had Cronulla race riot in Sydney l was in a white nationalist group,other groups sprung up over night ready to march. We had never heard of them,the were legit too.they meant frickin business. And when everything settled down they vanished. Don't worry,the peoples armies will rise overnight.Stay fit and keep your spirits up.

Two more weeks until fascism wins bro

Posted 19 August 2013

The Marxism of Mitt Romney

A few weeks ago I went fishing with some friends. During the course of our conversation one of my friends mentioned that he voted for Romney in his state's primaries. Needless to say we were all in rut over it (we now call him our token lib). Most of the fellers were the usual Tea Party Republican/pro-Santorum types (I was the sole fascist) and we all got into a discussion about Romney, the presidential race and the current state of the GOP.

The prospect of a Romney nomination inspired me to ponder a Romney presidency and I have come to some pretty grim conclusions. I felt i would share them (basically what I told my buddy on that interesting day) with yall.

Even the other larpers called him a

Globalization as the Antichrist's project

Well that's a whole lot of crazy.

Care to enlighten us why this would be "a whole lot of crazy"?

Because to suggest that Globalisation is caused by the Antichrist is crazy.

Its a reference to the Bible, only a complete idiot would take it literally. Try reading it before you start nagging..

Why Judaism must be removed...

Yeah well, uneducated anti-Semitic trendy guys like you should be crushed too

Interesting thread, instead of the usual chud circlejerk over Jews some of the larpers call him an r-slur.

And then there's this guy:

Dirlewanger Brigade

Unironically revering a child molester

What the Frick.

The Third Reich will rise again...

You do realise that the Third Reich bombed the living heck out of British cities, right? Or don't they teach that in year 8 history anymore? I don't want to rain on your angsty teenage parade, but I'm pretty sure any sane British person would think you were either a traitor or an r-slur for worshiping Hitler.

Yes, two of my Grandmother's family were killed during the Blitzs in Manchester. Yes, I do think that the British populace would view me as a traitor. But! They also viewed Mosley as a traitor too. It's not useless however, I worship the idea of the Third Reich, as I worship the idea of Adolf Hitler, being the Philosopher of Nazism.

As we all know the British now view Mosley fondly.

Where the white women at? I can't see them, my eyes are deformed.

As far as race goes, I'm Middle Eastern. However, I believe the white race is superior( specifically Anglo-Saxons) and intend to marry a white woman.

Apparently when the Iron jannies would get bussyhurt they would throw your thread into the "Showers" sub forum for mock and ridicule and edit the thread title.

This thread in particular generated a lot of seethe.

Million Dollar Extreme Central

To no ones surprise, both the Atomwaffen leader and Iron March founder are MDEcels.

TRUMP

Trump will become USAs caesar. Were living in ''spengler caesarism'' I bet we will eventually get more of these strongman types all over the fricking place and the nations with these people will seek to expand for their own personal glory and interest. Like Putin on Crimea. IT HAS JUST BEGUN.

Found the Trump thread.

Premarital S*x

Ahaha, that's rich. A product of r*pe and miscegenation like yourself calling me inferior. Listen you bolshevik ape, fascism has no use for spiritual bastards like yourself. Learn your fricking place before your beaner butt gets handed back to you, just like we did to the Argies back in 82'. Aryans are a MORAL race, as opposed to the cultureless and immoral mass of "White people" and hard-working Americans like yourself.

Larpers Around The World

Iron March had a sub-forum that was for country specific larping.

I only speak English so if any of you lads want to look for foreign drama then be my guest.

Gender Pronou-I Mean Ideologies

For our amusement I've collected some profile screenshots. A small sample but enough to give you an idea of your average Ironcel. Also when signing up for Iron March one of the required fields to fill out is an ideology box, meaning that wingcuckery is mandated.

Where are they now?

In 2019 someone uploaded Iron March's database to the Internet Archive, doxing every member of the forum in doing so. So what have the Ironcels been up to?

Iron March founder, the proto-zigger Alexander Slavros has apparently dropped off the face of the Earth.

The latest I could find about him was this write up from Meduza:

The BBC was unable to determine with certainty why IronMarch shut down, but its journ*lists did discover that Alisher Mukhitdinov still lives in Moscow. He has a three-room apartment in the city’s southwest that he inherited from his mother. Mukhitdinov is not wanted by any Russian law enforcement agencies, and he uses a cell phone, but he declined to speak with the BBC, which was unable to discover how the neo-Nazi leader now spends his time. Yevgenia Akulina, Mukhitdinov’s former classmate, told journ*lists that her acquaintance once said he would like to work as a translator for films and TV shows.

Forum member Lindsay Souvannarath is serving life in prison:

A former Iowa college student who plotted to go on a Valentine's Day shooting rampage at a Canadian mall was sentenced to life in prison Friday with no chance of parole for nearly a decade.

Lindsay Souvannarath of Geneva, Illinois, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit murder in a plan that involved opening fire at a mall in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2015.

Halifax mass shooting plot

Forum and Atomwaffen Division member Devon Arthurs pled guilty to murdering his roomates:

Devon Arthurs, now 24, spent years in a mental health facility after he was deemed not competent to stand trial, CBS affiliate WTSP reported. Now, he has agreed to spend 45 years in prison and be eligible for parole after 25 years, followed by 15 years of probation. The plea deal with prosecutors means Arthur will not face a possible life sentence.

Forum member Zack Davies is now serving a life sentence:

Dr Sarandev Bhambra was singled out by Zack Davies who was heard saying "white power" during the machete attack at the store in Mold, Flintshire, in January.

An ex-soldier rescued the victim.

Davies, 26, of Mold, was convicted of attempted murder at the town's crown court in June and on Friday was told he must serve at least 14 years in prison.

Brandon Russell [username Odin] forum member and Atomwaffen founder is facing 20 years in prison:

Brandon Russell, 27, and Sarah Clendaniel, 34, were charged with conspiracy to damage an energy facility.

The crime carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Forum member and ICE caption Travis Frey was fired from his job:

“We take allegations like these very seriously and have thoroughly investigated the matter,” CoreCivic spokesperson Amanda Gilchrist wrote in an email. “After carefully considering the findings of the investigation, the company has taken appropriate steps to protect the integrity of our workplace and ensure our values are not compromised. Mr. Frey is no longer employed by CoreCivic.”

*snip

In another post from 2013, he wrote, “it’s not until the snivel rights era of the 1960s that America started becoming ‘multicultural’ and thinking that non-whites had anything of value to add to our culture.”

Not a good lock there Travis

It was also discovered from the leak that Raivis Zeltīts was also a forum member.

!forumposters, I've dug up an archaic chud forum.

There is perhaps no show more infamous on the Internet than To Catch a Predator. As a lot of you know, I'm writing a book related to To Catch a Predator and my research has led me to a lot of weird and fascinating places. One of these weird places is in the case of one of the most well known predators caught on the show, Lorne Armstrong.

A Brief Background on Lorne Armstrong

There is enough knowledge and documentation out there of his early life before getting caught on the show that it could be its' own separate post, but to give a bit of background on who this guy is before he got caught on the show here are a few things:

1. Lorne was a former member of the Air Force but the actual details behind his service are murky. He served for only a year before being discharged and he claims he was discharged because he failed a test and was told he would either be discharged or have to change his career in the Air Force. The actual truth is unknown.

2. Lorne has the nickname of "87" because he graduated 87 out of 87 in his high school class.

3. He was born and raised in Maine but at the time of the sting was living in Nashville because he has dreams of becoming a country music star, Whenever he had money he would go to karaoke bars and sing song after song thinking he had a wonderful voice. The real reason he fled Maine was because he scammed an elderly couple out of tens of thousands of dollars claiming he would renovate their home on the cheap. In reality he had none of the cowtools and his alcoholic brother stole a lot of the money so Lorne just left the state to avoid getting sued.

4. Before the sting, Lorne had been catfished by a woman pretending to be both a woman named Amanda James and her niece. Amanda James convinced Lorne to send her memorabilia of the NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. among other gifts. Lorne apparently spent two years believing he was in a relationship with her before learning she was a catfish when his sister talked to Amanda James on the phone for a few seconds and figured it out immediately. No that's not an exaggeration. That's how dumb he is.

Falling In Love With a 13 Year Old Girl

As a newcomer to the city of Nashville with a completely empty apartment with no furniture:

Lorne didn't have a lot of activities to take up his free time as he was an unemployed bum living off the money remaining out of what he had stolen. So of course he spent a lot of time in Internet chatrooms talking up underaged girls. Lorne had actually talked up two other decoys from Perverted Justice ready to ensnare guys for the new episode of To Catch a Predator, but he wound up singling out a specific decoy who went by the name Kayla. Kayla is...weird. She's supposedly 13 but has the tone and vocabulary of a six year old. Maybe Lorne found that attractive as it would mean she would be easier to manipulate. Who's to say for sure.

This is how the conversation between the two starts:

It's important here to notice that the chatlog between the two is around 400 PAGES long. It would take far too long to break down every single day or moment of the chatlog, so I will just stick to a faint outline and the most memorable moments.

While Lorne is an absolute dumbass, he has enough braincells to formulate the beginning stages of grooming as evident here:

He tries to lure the decoy into a false sense of security by letting her know he is one of the "non-weirdos" and that she can trust him.

Here is where Lorne initially turns the conversation sexual. If you notice it takes less than two hours into talking before he feels comfortable enough to do it. The decoy playing as Kayle plays along and acts like she has no idea about s*x or masturbation beyond it hurting yet Lorne still pushes her towards it.

I'm going to fast-forward here because as I said this chatlog is ridiculously long and I'll hit the main points here.

Lorne tells Kayla to ask her dad to go shopping and buy a thong because when Lorne bought his underaged nieces a pair of tight shorts it made him feel good:

One reoccurring element in their chatlog is that Lorne is paranoid about the "Yahoo police" finding out what he is doing so he tells Kayla every night to delete her archives:

One of the more infamous moments in the entire chatlog is when Lorne gets jealous of Kayla's 13 year old ex, Derek:

To emphasize how stupid and pathetic Lorne is, here is a snippet where he opens his cam and shows off both sides of his brand new credit card to Kayla, bragging about the $300 limit:

Here Lorne professes his love for Kayla for the first time...after six days of chatting:

Lorne proposes that when they meet up Lorne could give Kayla a Walmart bracelet in exchange for a used pair of her panties:

Lorne explains to Kayla that if she were to swallow his semen she wouldn't be hungry anymore:

It's also important to notice that Lorne would have his cam on constantly and he would always be naked and have it pointed at his peepee. If Kayla clicked away from his cam he would get angry and tell her to click back. He referred to it as "Mr. Peepee":

Two days before their planned meeting Kayla tells Lorne her parents are both doctors. Lorne tells her that her mom could deliver their future children but not the dad because...well, you just have to read it:

Finally, on the day they're supposed to meet:

Oh, yeah, it's Lorne's birthday. The plan is to drive her from her mansion in Kentucky to his desolate, empty apartment in Nashville, where he'll spend the weekend having s*x with her on his mattress on the floor. Embarrassingly, he doesn't have enough money for gas to drive back and has to ask Kayla for some money that her parents have supposedly left her for the weekend alone. He makes the long drive to Kentucky ecstatic at the idea of being with his 13 year old girlfriend, completely unaware his real date is with Chris Hansen and law enforcement.

Part 2

In my next part I'll cover the actual sting and what happened there, what charges he was hit with, and some of what he went through in prison.

If you can't wait to see this guy's whole world crumble down here is the full, uncut sting segment with him.

If you're wondering how we have the full segment when we don't for so many others, Lorne sent it to a catfish since he had access to it as part of his defense. Not just any catfish, though. The second catfish pretending to be the decoy actress who greeted him at the sting. The second out of three different catfishes all pretending to be the same actress that interacted with him in the sting. And yes, he learned they were all catfishes and still fell for it two more times afterwards.

Trust me, this story gets insane.

Part 1 Here!

Hello again my beauties!

As promised, here's part 2 of my r-slurred furtwink adventure. If you're thinking of commenting "hurr hurr TL;DR Marco is a furry xDDDD" without reading anything, I instead suggest checking out this recent low effort trainpost which is probably more suited to the users here with your special brand of cognitive disability. Anywho, onto Saturday's shenanigans!

The Plush Pile Grooming Incident

Early on Saturday there was a meet-and-greet scheduled for "plush furs", also known as plushophiles, attending the convention - a niche group within the furry community whom have a shared interest in fricking their stuffed toys. In some rare cases, they even develop romantic relationships with them. Out of morbid curiosity, some of our group had a quick peek inside one of the panel rooms just as the plush thing was starting, and this picture was snapped on our way out again. Just in case you were curious about what the type of person to unironically go to one of these things looks like.

It wasn't until that night though that we learned that just a few minutes after that picture was taken, an occurrence of actual physical child grooming happened in broad daylight shortly after we left.

https://x.com/plushderg/status/1676260831456002049

I only really have two questions about this whole affair.

Q. Why in Allah's name is this whole event advertised as an all-ages thing with so much open degeneracy and creeps lurking around every corner? The answer of course is pretty obvious - the whole point of allowing children is probably to attract vulnerable naive kids where they end up as an easy target for grooming, which leads to my second question.

Q. Why haven't we systematically hunted down and publicly [Removed by the rDrama Anti Evil Operations Team] all furries yet?

https://x.com/Ursidae89/status/1676306533217337346

I have no idea how a normie could spend more than a few hours at something like this and not come to the conclusion that furries are total disgusting perverts.

Does He Look Like a B-word?

The plushfur pedos however, not content with just one controversy this year as a result of their horrific antics, decide to kick it up a notch.

What you're seeing here is some moid bound in a gimp/b-word suit (concealed by the outer plushy fursuit layer) being wheeled around in a wheelbarrow in broad daylight. His "handler" pretends that it's an actual plush toy, and encourages attendees of all ages to unknowingly pet the dude hiding a raging hard-on beneath the fursuit, all as part of some disgusting exhibitionism/humiliation kink. Fun for all the family, right?

https://x.com/AshTheWicker/status/1675502191044337665

https://x.com/apeslion/status/1675768221062905856

Good thing it's not hurting anyone though!

https://x.com/FionaMaray/status/1675868395693023232

https://x.com/arrowt/status/1674989036015075329

This shit is why I firmly believe all furries without exception should be banned from all online communities. I would do it in a heartbeat, but the fish and capy still won't let me.

On All Levels Except Physical

Moving onto a more light-hearted topic, another panel that one of our group actually did attend in full out of curiosity was a therian/trans-species focus group, who as you're probably aware by now are furry-adjacent r-slurs who genuinely believe that they have the spirit of a wolf/fox/whatever or were one in a previous lifetime but now remain trapped in a human body; dealing with species dysphoria and microaggressions such as the terms "humanity" and "human rights" on a daily basis. Remember though, that whole litterbox story was a hoax and nobody actually identifies as an animal, you dumb FOX news watching rightoid boomer chuds!

He took down a bunch of notes and funny quotes that I'm too lazy to summarize so I'm just going to paste them here in full. My personal input is that they were all very gross looking and ugly which is all you need to know really.

Therian/Otherkin Focus Group Notes:

• Lots of therians/otherkin focus on gender

  • Is there a consistency with how you’re experiencing gender within different parts of yourself?

  • conversations about gender can be very fraught and unhelpful

• Findings: the majority of therians/otherkin felt that their gender identities were consistent across All Parts Of Self Or Entities

• …ok this is a dull start; I’ll only take the cool notes

• “I am a trans female; the fox part of me is male but prefers to be referred to as female”

• You’re still a woman as an animal, but potentially like a second level of woman—more authentic and feminine. Stronger presentation of womanhood as animal self

• “I consider myself agender as human because the wolf part is so much more central to my identity—a pianissimo violin next to a blaring orchestra”

• “I’m otherhuman—alter-hearted. Did you touch on that kind of identity at all?”

• “As you get older, are you developing in the way that a dog would develop?”

• “My anthro identity and sexuality are very intrinsically tied together”

• A month or two ago, Vanderbilt gave the state LGBTQ personal info even tho it was completely unethical 😱 careful about anonymity!!

• “As a recent escapee of Florida, I have drastic concerns…”

• Trying to fit it into the DID cluster

• “Since we know animal alters exist…”

• “Have you considered correlating your methods with indigenous cultures? Because they have always been open to multi-culture and that connection with the natural world”

• “One of the things we try to be really careful about is cultural appropriation… certainly I’ve had people from indigenous groups say, ‘yeah, this informs my therianthropy’”

Really can't wait for this type of discourse to hit the mainstream, although I doubt it'll be for a while since it's currently inconvenient to normie leftoids that these people exist in moderately large numbers as it proves the rightoids were right all along.

Furry Planet

The last notable event of Saturday was a talk from some total boomer furry dude (literally 70+ years old) who wrote a book about furries and how they're going mainstream or something. His main argument for this was how media with "furry" characters i.e. Zootopia, Turning Red and Bojack Horseman were super popular, as if Disneyshit or anthro characters were some entire new novel concept for normies that haven't been around and popularized for a over century already. (I don't even think what he's saying is wrong persay, it's pretty obvious that far more kids than ever are being groomed into furshit, but his rationale for it was very weird)

But then the conversation moved onto a more interesting topic - he started talking about how furries are depicted in the media, bringing up the litterbox stuff that continues to make furries seethe to this day, and then he mentioned the Libs of Tiktok Wordsearch Prank that was devised by none other than yours truly and @Publiq (who happened to be right there with me) on this very site! We proudly came clean to the whole room that we were the culprits behind that whole gayop, and his response?

"That was hilarious, you guys should do more pranks like that"

And there you have it, we now have express permission from some clueless but well-meaning furry boomer to cause more trouble and spread disinformation about furries, all in the name of drama. I'll be sure to not let him down.

Part 3 soon, which covers everything that happened on Sunday (which includes me being an outspoken nooticer at a "furry science" social studies panel) and pretty much wraps up the whole awful journey.

There are people who pool up investor money to buy apartment complexes/hotels/other forms of real estate. These people are called syndicators. They make their money by charging fees for putting the deal together, managing the asset, and then eventually selling it. A "typical" deal is 1% acquisition fee, 1% asset management fee, 7% construction management fee, and then a 30% pref (once the investors get all their money back, profits are then split 70/30 investors/syndicators). This in theory incentivizes the syndicators to do a good job since most of the money they make is by increasing the return to investors.

When 2020 came around, the Fed reduced rates to 0% and hoovered up every bond imaginable. This drove rates down into the floor. A great time to lock in fixed debt right? To the syndicator, definitely not. By doing variable rateloans, your interest rate could be at 2%, juicing your return and hitting your pref even quicker. Besides, interest rates probably won't go up that much in the 5 years you're planning on holding this thing as you flip it.

SOFR (a benchmark rate) went from 0% to 5% in a year and a half. A lot of these loans were SOFR + 200-400bps. A property could have a $40 million loan and have a rate of 2% in 2021. So their interest expense of $800,000. For 2023, their interest expense would be $2.8 million. There are rate caps, but those only last 1-3 years and now they will cost $100k+ as opposed to the let's say $20,000 before 2020. Suffice to say, a lot of places are completely fricked. Once the interest expense gets that high (or the loan comes due), your options are either putting in more (a lot more) equity or telling the bank its their problem now. Just a couple of examples:

Houston Apartment Owner Loses 3,200 Units to Foreclosure as Multifamily Feels the Heat

Hines Reportedly Handing Back The Keys To D.C. Office Building After Law Firm Departure

Developer of Troubled Downtown San Francisco Tower Gives Property Back to Lender

Cue Wallstreet Oasis. A forum where analysts pretend they're directors. You'll even see people posting under their real name. Over the past few years they've been wondering what the heck is going on in the real estate sector because it made no sense. In August 2021, someone asked who these Tide Equities guys were..

Just curious if anyone knows much about how these guys. Guessing that they originally met through the Benedict Canyon/TruAmerica prior jobs (same office, same principal).

Given the volume they are doing (I have heard a few brokers that have sold them deals refer to them as "ultra aggressive"), I am just curious if they have some secret HNW investor backing them, or some other creative way of acquiring north of $2B in asset value the past 5 years.

Note they say $2 billion in real estate. As of two weeks ago, they had $7 billion so they bought about $5 billion in under two years. Also two weeks ago, the two partners told investors that roughly 20% of their portfolio will need to do capital calls (asking investors for more money) once their lines of credit runs out. And even then, they might not be able to pay the mortgages on them..

Now, up to 20 percent of Tides’ portfolio — which spans about 32,000 units — could need capital calls, Andrade told Real Estate Alert, which first reported on the letter.

Andrade added that Tides tried many other strategies to raise cash before resorting to capital calls.

To weather the storm until more money comes in, Tides is temporarily using its own funds to help make mortgage payments.

“As we do not control the situation in those cases, we unfortunately cannot guarantee that we will remain with our perfect track record” of making on-time mortgage payments, the co-founders said in the letter, adding that handing back keys to the lenders was a “possibility.”

In case you thought the wording of it was a little weird, yes saying you have a perfect track record of making mortgage payments on-time is not a flex. One would assume that to be the case. I'm putting the rough date when these were posted.

Yeah that inning is now over and Tides is going to be handing back the keys next couple of years on tons of deals (1+ year ago)

Any specifics? Because based on just our pipeline (bridge lender), they are looking at a recap and bringing in CIM for a $100MM deal in Phoenix, a $100MM acquisition in NV, a $50MM acquisition in TX. LP's including institutional ones after doing their due diligence appear to be on onboard. And note we are just one lender and may not see every deal of theirs, so they appear to be not just be busy but also actually executing on deals.

This is kind of interesting looking back because what it's saying is that Tides was selling a property of theirs to basically themselves with a new set of investors. Looking at a couple of their sales they seemed to do this a lot. Someone looked at the history of the NV property.

The sale's history of the subject is actually kind of comical: (today)

07 - $21.2M

11 - $11.25M (REO)

19 - $54M (Tides bought)

22 - $65M (Tides flipped to itself with new investors)

REO means sold price after foreclosure. Probably soon to be foreclosed on again.

According to the other forum about them on wso they have a rich uncle who signed their mortgage docs. I have also heard from a very well known multifamily principal I know that they are super liberal in their underwritings. I know one person who works there. (1+ year ago)

Seconded on the aggressive UW. My company partnered with them on a deal. Lots of obstacles had to be navigated to get it approved by the IC.

Are they sharp guys and a great shop or overhyped? I heard they underestimate renovation costs.

I can't speak to reno costs, but they're definitely a legit shop. As someone else mentioned, the Robinson Group manages most of their stuff so they can achieve economies of scale with everything they own, but they're a pain to deal with.

Can confirm they underestimate Reno costs AND cut down expenses such as maintenance and utes going into stabilization

They're just buying properties built in the 1970s and 80s. Probably don't need that much work.

They are still actively buying... (11 months ago)

Yeah and they are still getting 75% LTC non recourse debt. Institutional groups like CIM and Investcorp will be 95 or 97% of the equity on some of their deals but apparently according to the outsiders looking in, they are going to implode lol. Sure, Investorcorp, CIM and literally every bank is wrong, the smart ones here have it all figured out..... Especially during this time, the investment committees are putting everyone through the wringer and killing deals left and right. The fact that LP's and banks have signed off their deals must count for something. Dont get me wrong, deals can still go south (as it did for even some of the biggest names in the business in 09, that is par for the course) but given how deals are structured, it wont be Tides that is getting burnt lol there is a bigger fish to fry.

The funds and banks can't possibly be wrong.

One of the founders just bought a $15m house.. so must not be too concerned lol (5 months ago)

New article on TRD: https://rb.gy/0nyo5n

Thanks. This man is delusional.

Sooo, what's the latest on the rumor mill? (2 months)

They've got a few more months left on their corporate credit line, when that dries up no more loan payments. Unless the lenders figure out that the capex draws have also been servicing their debt. The word of the day is "misappropriation of funds."

Someone on my team point blank asked a guy on their acq team if they are running a ponzi scheme they said no it's called a recap. lmfao

This guy was dead on with the timeline. Also accuses them of committing fraud which could turn non-recourse financing into recourse (them being sued into oblivion). He's alleging that they're faking invoices to say they're upgrading a property and then get money from a repair reserve. They're doing this just so they then can get cash to pay the mortgage.

you can type super long paragraphs on here if you think this is a good use of your time and talk shit about a company that you only know via he said/she said information or you can actually try to create what they did which is be in the NMHC 2023 Top 50 List. Seriously, what a waste of time if you do not have loan documents, SREO, PFS, actual operations data, etc. So much is wrong on here, for starters- no, not all (a lot but not all ) of their loans are non recourse, there is some recourse with burn off tests on some loans, and it's laughable to think there were no caps or swaps in place lol, like wtf? You think they were getting debt from loan to own lenders or raising equity via realty mogul? Try convincing the investment committee at institutional LP's like IVC (or institutional banks too for that matter) that interest rate risk management is not needed. In fact it will be shops like IVC running the show and even actually bringing the deal to banks to get financing. I could keep going but you get the point. (2 months ago)

This post is rather funny. It starts a long chain back and forth where the poster is accused of either being one of Tides guys or an analyst working for them. I suspect they accusers are right because his argument wasn't making much sense.

The continued popularity of this thread increased my curiosity - so digging in a bit more on a single project to see what things look like under the hood. Obligatory disclaimer that I have access to limited data, so take this all with a grain of salt. (2 months ago)

Acquisition - Purchased for $33M with an additional $3.8M in closing costs for acquisition basis of $36.8M. In-place NOI of $1.08M for implied, in-place cap rate of 2.9%.

It's not clear to me how this was going to be profitable for LPs from the beginning.

Great write up. To add here and make matters worse they have a 2 year initial term at SOFR+425, even with that 3% rate cap they are paying 7.25% current, with a balance of $27.148M as of April. That's a $2m DS at the rate cap ($2.5m actual DS). (2 months ago)

I cut a lot out, but this is saying they bought a deal in June 2022 at a 2.9% cap rate. Cap rate being NOI/purchase price. This is before financing costs such as the mortgage. So it would break even at ~4% mortgage, and be cash flow negative over it. Once the rate cap goes away, it's going to be a 9.25% interest rate.

And yeah lol, Tides on missing debt service: (2 months ago)

"Susan Saelee, a Tides executive, said a temporary fall in profit at some properties is an expected part of a business plan that depends on renovating empty units, then leasing them back out at an initially discounted rate".

Right, sounds r-slurred to me.

"We spend money so we can charge less"

Two floaters were refinanced into fixed rate GSE loans. Tides at East Glendale- 5.10% fixed rate, full term I/O. Tides at Chandler- 5.17%, fixed rate, full term I/O. Sorry for those who expected keys to be handed over. But hey there is always next time! (1 month ago)

Two refinances happened. haters btfo

A letter from AMC was released today and they stated all class B investors would lose some or all of their money. They noted the lack of transparency with tide. They also noted that they were meeting with general counsel and looking at options. They also ask investors to be ready to upfront more money to keep that operation running till more favorable conditions for resale could be reached. Good luck with that. (27 days ago)

AMC was one of the big funds that invested through Tides. This is their website. If you look under investments tab, you see a bunch of property addresses instead of property names. I'm guessing this was to hide the fact that seemingly every single property they had was through Tides (I googled 11 addresses and 10 came back as a Tides property).

Here's another watch list thread to see which well known syndicator is going to go pop https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/real-estate/sponsors-going-under

Introduction - What is AO3

---

For those of you uninformed, ArchiveOfOurOwn often shortened to just AO3 is the second-largest Fanfiction archive behind fanfiction.net, known for generally having much less strict rules in certain regards (Mature content) than it's competitor FFnet whilst also boasting a robust tagging system for finding stories. Stories often boasting an entire wall of tags, compared to FFnet's limited array (genre, character, fandom).

As mentioned before AO3 is most well-known (in my experience) for it's very lax rules regarding mature content and it's tumblrina userbase. This is easily seen at the much more frequent use of transgender and gay characters, the wide spread angst fics, and swear words in every fic (On FFnet, you can barely use a swear word without the fic having to be marked as mature). If you think FFnet is degenerate at times, you have never seen the depths of AO3 content. Walls and walls of slashfics fill it's servers, a true testament to the depravity of foids and foids(male).

TLDR: AO3 is all the stuff that was too depraved for even FanFiction.net

The drama - Islamophobia?

---

With introductions out of the way, we can discuss the drama.

As of writing the AO3 servers are being DDOS'ed by a group claiming to be from Sudan. They claim to be performing this attack for moral reasons, owing to the encouragement and embracing of LGBT and degenerate erotica on the site. Initially, it was not revealed by AO3 that this group was muslim which of course led degenerates to do what they do best. Cope and seethe.

https://x.com/AO3_Status/status/1678513922649751555

Pagan is an absolute degen

Modern "Christian"

Strags living through the internet

Now, that's all well and good. Seethe at christians is classic dramamine.. but you know what this story needs? Islam.

Hating christians is all well and good. But muslims?? That's a step too far, people might think we're racist!

Owning the muslims by proving them right!

Obviously it was actually christo-fascists!! Muslims would never want to kill gays

There's a whole lot of tweets like this, they can't even slightly recognize that muslims might have it out for degens, even saying they're too r-slurred and underdeveloped to even use the internet...

1% of AO3 have some semblance of intelligence in them.

Various hecking islamophobia

´

Mary Whitmore is God's strongest soldier! I've already invited her to join us! She has had some great fights in the thread!

Using twitter is a pain, but this is the best drama i've gathered. I implore you all to read through Mary's replies as she has been having the most dramatic fights. The leaps in logic from these cute twinks on AO3 is crazy, classic hipocrasy.

PLEASE If you find more drama post it in this thread!

Links and all that

https://x.com/AO3_Status/

https://ao3org.tumblr.com/

https://x.com/marywhitmore45

And no, i'm not collecting links for all these indivual tweets.

Funfacts!

AO3 has an 80% userbase of biofoids. This is however highly dependent on the Fandom. My experience lies with Touhou Project, which is consoomed by in large part exclusively males.

One of the least degenerate fandoms i've seen, has a little girl as the main character. Biofoids take this win.

Sometimes they are self-aware

Hope you liked it!

Most posts about Australia (including my own) tend to feature either mayos or Aboriginals. That's fair enough because those are the two most dramatic groups in Straya today, but there is one group that has been left out- the Lebs.

(Lebs is a derogatory term for the Lebanese btw and one I will use from here on in)

1. Boring context

To begin with, the Lebanese were pretty much nonexistent in Australia before the 70s, because of the White Australia Policy that did exactly what you'd expect it to do and is a whole effortpost in itself. During the Lebanese Civil War, the Australian government decided to provide a special pass for Lebs to enter the country and some 30-50000 did so by the end of the 20th century. These were mostly Muslim refugees with a significant number of popechads as well, and they mostly settled in and around Sydney.

2. Oops, we've created ethnic ghettoes! I'm sure this will be fine

As all chuds know, when you import large numbers of refugees with little regard to integration, they tend to form insular communities in the bottom of society. What does this mean? Crime of course!

Illustrating this is a Reddit thread @Blackpokemon found from 5 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2rs73q/question_about_lebanese_in_australia/

Wherein, a Lebanese cryposts asking why Aussies hate them so much. We find out it's because Lebs-

• Are involved in crime

• Go around harassing people in gangs

• Are generally violent people

• R*pe mayofoids (this will come up again later)

So, now we have an idea of what we're dealing with. However, there is one more description of Lebs that may sound familiar to Aussies from shitholes across the country-

Which brings me to-

3. Eshays and HSP- what did the middle easterners do for us anyway?

Now it's time for the middle easterners (mostly Lebs but I haven't found anything to outright prove it was them) to give back and genuinely culturally enrich their adoptive country.

First we have the Eshay-

While nowadays adopted by the scummiest mayos across the country (including my mate's little brother), this youth subculture emerged as Leb culture and stereotypes mixed in with the rest of Western Sydney, and then unfortunately throughout the rest of the country. They dress the same as Lebs, act the same way but mostly don't have the muscles to back it up.

The second middle eastern cultural innovation given to Aus is the Halal Snack Pack or HSP for short.

This will give you a heart attack but it is a life well spent

Now, you may be wondering where the race war promised in the title is. It indeed may be the only reason you clicked. So, with no further ado, here is-

4. CRONULLA C*NT

Remember those r*pes I said would come up later? Well yea that kinda became a culture war thing in the early 2000s. Rightoid "shock jocks" (generally radio personalities that would say outrageous things for ratings) especially after started (not entirely incorrectly) painting Lebs as violent louts who hate Australia and Australians. This plus some cultural tension that I as a Victorian am unable to delve into (there are NSW dramaussies who should be able to patch this in the comments) boiled over in December of 2005 when a group of Lebs assaulted a surf lifesaver at a local beach. Said shock jocks snapped into action doing there usual thing, made even worse by the fact that they didn't really have to exaggerate much for this one. Read the Wikipedia article for the riots if you want to know what happened next

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Cronulla_riots

TLDR: mayos rampaged around beating up people of middle eastern appearance, Lebs returned the favour, the cops stepped in and cockblocked everyone after that.

The reactions were and are similarly fun- for example, every couple of years the prime minister up to 2007 John Howard says he still thinks the rioters (meaning the mayos) weren't racist. He last did it a year or two ago causing immense sneed- I can't find it easily because frick Reddit's search engine but if someone can find some threads from the time I'll add it in here.

Tell me if I've forgotten something big, but otherwise I think that's everything. Have a nice day

Hello users of rdrama.net and welcome to the first edition of...

LAPPLAND'S CHEMICAL SERIES

Today I will show you the process of methamphetamine manufacture.

Please keep in mind that the manufacture of methamphetamine is illegal and so is the sale and consumption. I @Lapp have never taken produced or sold methanphetamine. I do not personally condone the manufacture sale or consumption of methamphetamine.

rdrama.net does not condone the manufacture sale or consumption of methamphetamine.

If you struggle with meth addiction please contact the American addiction center at

406-220-5357or get help on the web at https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help

If you find yourself in any way replicating the process of meth production please contact your local police department so that they can assist you and get you the help that you need.

The creation of this post was endorsed by @carpathianflorist all legal issues are solely their responsibility

I still do not know what SWIM style is please inform me in the comments.

This guide is for education and informational purposes and is not to be replicated.

what is methamphetamine ?

Meth is a strong central nervous system stimulant that was discovered in 1893. Methamphetamine properly refers to the equal mix of levomethamphetamine and dextromethamphetamine in their pure amine forms though the most commonly known version of methamphetamine is the hydrochloride salt version commonly known as crystal meth. Methamphetamine was once readily available as an over the counter medication, the earliest prescriptions for it were for treating hay fever, asthma, and the common cold. During the second world war meth was given to soldiers to improve their performance. Factory workers and other laborers were also given methamphetamine to keep them awake and capable of working longer, it is during this time that the negative side effects of meth use started to be discovered. The first meth ban in the United States occurred in 1959 when meth based inhalers were regulated to stop abuse with them. Later in the 1970's and 1980's stricter restrictions pushed methamphetamine into being a schedule II substance. Despite its illegality meth manufacture has continued until today and due to many restrictions placed upon the process and materials meth manufacturing is a hard and dangerous process.

equipment

The manufacturing of meth requires at minimum the following materials:

Several round bottom flasks, a claisen adapter for the round bottom flasks, a still head that has a thermometer holder, Two condensers with straight central tubes one 35 cm long and the other 50 cm long, a vacuum adapter,a separator funnel, and multiple 24/40 size ground glass joints.You will need at least one each of the following round bottom flask: 3000 ml, 2000 ml and 500 ml; and two each of 1000 mi and 250 ml. I am not sure if changing the equipment type for a suitable replacement is possible or if the exact specifics really matter, I have never undergone these processes as they are illegal.

Due to the abuse of drug manufacturing most chemistry supply companies keep extensive records of customers and require an account to be set up before hand to purchase.

chemicals

The following are the necessary precursor chemicals:

Listed Precursor Chemicals:

1. Anthranilic acid and anthranilic acid salt

2. Benzyl cyanide

3. Ergonovine and ergonovine salt

4. Ergotamine and ergotamine salt

5. N-Ergotamine acid and N-Ergotamine salt

6. Norpseudoephedrine, norpseudoephedrine salt, norpseudoephedrine optical isomers, and norpseudoephedrine salts of optical isomers

7. Phenylacetic acid, phenylacetic esters (such as ethylphenylacetate) and phenylacetic salts

8. Phenylpropanolamine, phenylpropanolaminesalts, phenylpropanolamine optical isomers, and phenylpropanolamine salts of optical isomers

9. Piperidine and piperidine salts

10. Pseudoephedrine, pseudoephedrine salts, pseudoephedrine optical isomers, and Pseudoephedrine salts of optical isomers

11. 3, 4-Methylenedioxyphenyl-2-propanone

12. Methylamine and methylamine salts

13. Ethylamine and ethylamine salts

14. D-lysergic acid, its salts, optical isomers, and salts of optical isomers

15. Propionic anhydride

16. lsosafrole

17. Safrole

18. Piperonal

19. N-Methylephedrine, its salts, optical isomers, and salts of optical isomers

20. N-Ethylephedrine, its salts, optical isomers, and salts of optical isomers

21. N-methylpseudoephedrine, its salts, optical isomers, and salts of optical isomers

22. N-ethylpseudoephedrine, its salts, optical isomers, and salts of optical isomers

23. 57% Hydriotic acid

24. Ephedrine

25. Benzaldehyde

26. Nitroethane

27. GBH

28. Red Phosphorus; white or yellow Phosphorus

29. Hypophosphoric Acid, and its salts

30. lodine (must be over 2% tinticture)

31. N-phenethyl-4-piperidone

The following are necessary essential chemicals

list of essential chemicals:

1. Acetic anhydride

2. Acetone

3. Benzyl chloride (4 kg)

4. Ethyl ether

5. Potassium permanganate

6. 2-Butanone

7. Toluene

8. Acetic anhydride

9. Benzyl chloride

10. Ethyl ether

11. Potassium permanganate

12. 2-Butatone

13. Toluene

14. lodine

15.Acetone

process

This is an example of the Leuckart-Wallach reaction. This reaction converts aldehydes or ketones to amines by reductive amination in the presence of heat. The Leuckart-Wallach can convert phenylacetone into meth. The process that will occur is shown in a diagram below:

the process of creating phenylacetone is shown in the diagram below:

the process of creating N-methylformamide is shown below:

To test the two productsi in a glass test tube there should be one part N-methylformamide for every two parts phenylacetone for the reaction, at this point simply putting them together in a test tube will cause them to mix together. The Leuckart-Wallach reaction method is highly sensitive and if not done right will create a red like tar substance instead of the desired methanphetamine, if a red tar like substance is created as a result of the N-methylformamide and phenylacetone reacting in the test tube then there was water present in the reaction and the process to create both chemicals must be restarted.

If the red tar like substance is not created then the full reaction between the N-methylformamide and phenylacetone may proceed. For the full reaction there must be one part phenylacetonefor every 2.5 parts N-methylformamide. Though apparently the amount of N-methylformamide can vary from 2 parts to 3 parts and still be perfectly fine to react. The two chemicals should be mixed together in a 500ml round bottom flask, the flask should be set in a container filled 2/3 of the way with oil on a burner to apply even heat throughout the flask as the chemicals react. The oil may be vegetable oil or a subsitute oil which can similarly evenly distribute heat through the round bottom flask as desired. A metal pan is fine container for the oil as it will allow the contents of the glass round bottom flask to be seen. As heat is applied the contents of the flask should be stirred regularly with a thermometer. The temperature of the oil bath should be brought to 100° C over the course of 45 minutes or so. Once it reaches this temperatuee, the heat is turned back down so that the chemicals may stabilize at this point. Every degree of temperature must be closely monitored from this point forward. The temperature of the contents of the flask is heated up to 105° C. The chemicals in the flask must bestirred every 15 minutes. At about 105° C, the reaction will start, although sometimes the mixture's temperature must go as high as 110° C before the reaction starts When the reaction starts, the contents of the flask begin to bubble. After the reaction starts the temperature must be lowered down to the initial heat that the mixture started to react at. It may be left at this state for several hours. Tap water flow is proper for use in the condenser. The heat should be turned on to the 500 ml flask, and a gentle rate of boiling is to be maintained for 2 hours. The mixture should turn black. The reaction going on here is methamphetamine formyl amide. his is a hydrolysis reaction. After the two hours have passed, the heat to the flask is turned off. While the flask is cooling down, 80 grams of sodium hydroxide and 250 ml of water are mixed in a 1000 ml round bottom flask. When both flasks have cooled down, the black reaction mixture is cautiously added to the sodium hydroxide solution. It is added in small portions, and then swirled around to mix it. They react together quite violently. The reaction here is sodium hydroxide reacting with hydrochloric acid to produce table salt, with formic acid to produce sodium formate, and with methamphetamine hydrochloride to produce methamphetamine free base. At this point the mixture must be distilled. The salt will form at the bottom of the flask and not react with the liquid substance within, After the mixture is distilled either toluene or ethyl can be used as the solvent to make the crystals in. With whatever solvent is used the insides of the condenser, vacuum adapter and 250 ml flask must be rinsed to get out the methamphetamine clinging to the glass. This rinse is poured in with the product. Solvent is added to each of the Erlenmeyer flasks until the volume of liquid is 300 ml. They are mixed by swirling. Then the sulfuric acid is then added to the solution and anair blower is started to slowly keep the fumes of dry HCI flowing into the meth free base rather than ever being sucked backwards.Within a minute of bubbling, white crystals begin to appear in the solution. to filter the crystals out. There should be a small amount of formic acid added as it acts as a catalyst. The formic acid should be buffered by the presence of free methylamine, to prevent the pH of the reaction mixture from falling too low and becoming acidic. The presence of water in the reaction mixture will cause the reaction to not happen. It prevents the phenylacetone from dissolving in the N-methylformamide, which creates low yields of purple-colored crystal. The filtering flask and Buchner funnel are set up now. The drain stem of the Buchner funnel must extend through the rubber stopper, because methamphetamine will dissolve rubber. A piece of filter paper must cover the flat bottom of the Buchner funnel. The vacuum is turned on and the hose attached to the vacuum nipple. Then the crystals are poured into the Buchner funnel. The solvent and the uncrystallized methamphetamine pass through the filter paper and the crystals stay in the Buchner funnel as a solid cake. About 15 ml of solvent is poured into the Erlenmeyer flask. The top of the flask must be covered and shaken to suspend the crystals left clinging to the sides. This is also poured into the Buchner funnel. Finally, another 15 ml of solvent is poured over the top of the filter cake.after this the vacuum hose is disconnected and the Buchner funnel. All of the filtered solvent is poured back into the Erlenmeyer flask it came from. It is returned to the HCI source for more bubbling. The Buchner funnel is put back into the top of the filtering flask. It still contains the filter cake of methamphetamine crystals. The vacuum shluld be turned back on, the vacuum hose must be attached to the filtering flask, and the top of the Buchner funnel is covered. The vacuum builds and removes most of the solvent from the filter cake. as the filtering process continues, one flask is being filtered while the other one is being bubbled with HCl. Solvent is added to the Erlenmeyer flask to keep their volumes at 300 ml. Eventually, after each flask has been bubbled for about seven times, no more crystal will come out and production process is finished.

the end

Thank you for reading this far, please keep in mind that this process is illegal and that replicating any of it in part or in whole should not be done. Meth is a terrible substance that should not be consumed. I do not support the production or consumption of any illicit materials and neither does rdrama.net

Join me for the next edition of LAPPLAND'S CHEMICAL SERIES where I will teach the members of !cuteandvalid how to create estrogen for the use in male to female transitioning with just a plastic bag and a bathtub.

Greetings Dramatards!

Today I wanna attempt to finish this huge rabbit hole I sunk into. The large amount of controversial and banned films released all throughout history in South Africa, and Southern Africa. Most of course had been during the days of High Apartheid, during the NP regime, but there has since and before, been a bunch of other films been controversial for really r-slurred reasons.

FILMS BANNED FOR BEING TOO GAY FOR APARTHEID:

1988 - Quest for Love: Low quality Lesbian love story. Banned because of the ultra religious and conservative government, and would become unbanned by 1993. However still remained largely unknown because all of South Africa's races are pretty much very religious and conservative comparitive to liberal places like UK and USA. Although gay rights were legalized by the Mandela Administration, gay rights would remain obscure as the majority of attention would remain on race relations.

https://theculturetrip.com/africa/south-africa/articles/10-of-the-most-controversial-films-from-south-africa/

SHIT BANNED IN ZIMBABWE:

Jock of the Bushveld (1986) was a pretty inoffensive film about a famous Afrikaner story. It involves a young boy Percy rescueing a drowning dog, and adopting the puppy as Jock. Afterwards, he and Jock live through many adventures involving wild animals and slave drivers.

Banned because of its South African origins. At the time Zimbabwe boycotted South African products because of its apartheid regime. Zimbabwean were still very sore about SA having been Rhodesia's chief benefactor, and the new leadership was openly hostile to anything South African which could be easily boycotted.

Once again the film itself was not the cause of a banning or controvesy.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140502004908/http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/history-south-african-film-industry-timeline-1895-2003

2010 - Lobola

Our conservative zimbabwean cousins up north objected to the degeneracy which this movie displayed!

The film was banned because it "doesn't really portray African custom when it comes to marriage, since one does not get married while drunk." Another objection is a scene where a young couple kisses in front of their parents, as well as the "abrupt ending" wut

I still can't fully decipher what their censorship board was smoking, because drukeness in african weddings is pretty normal. It was puritan nonsense.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160305074953/http://www.newzimbabwe.com/news-3923-Munyas+movie+banned+over+smooch/news.aspx

2014 - Kumasowe

https://allafrica.com/stories/201408110765.html

This one's just another authoritarian regime banning any criticism of its heavy handed police brutality, the reason for its ban is obvious.

2015 - Fifty Shades of Grey

Hahahahahahahahaha. This one was hilarious. Our zimbabwean cousins wanted to save their middle ages black women from middles aged white women nonsense

Once again a demonstration how conservative most actual African countries and their people truly are in comparison to the libtard West. Banned because of the explicit erotic scenes. In some theaters an edited version was allowed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150224213508/http://news24zim.com/2015/02/20/50-shades-of-grey-banned-in-zimbabwe/

MODERN CONTROVERSIAL FILMS IN SOUTH AFRICA!!!

1995 - Cry, the Beloved Country:

Story takes place in 1946, on the cusp of the Verwoerd Administration implementing Apartheid as legal policy upheld by the gov. Drama between black and white fathers who overcome their racism and animosity, and they eventually come to unexpected understandings about their sons and their own shared humanity. Never seen it, no idea if its jank or not.

My understanding is the film is fine on its own, but in 1995, the country of South Africa was in flux, emotions were running high, and the people of SA still had raw feelings of divisiveness post Apartheid. The problem wasn't the film itself, but in 1995, the South African government had begun the "truth and reconciliation commission", which basically was a public forum in a quasi Nuremberg trial imitation, in which "victims of gross human rights violations to give statements about their experiences", and perpetrators (the bad guyz) give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Africa)

The TRC hearings deserve their own long Loooong post regarding how utterly fricking dramatic they were, but all that's relevant to know for dramatards was that fricking nobody was happy by the outcome. Whites on "amnesty" trials who confessed their oppression of blacks left a bitter taste in the mouths of other whites like Afrikaners, as they felt the ANC was rewriting history in their favour, and would b-word for decades after that ANC car bombings of Afrikaans schools by Mandela's freedom fighters would never get even mentioned, and you get the idea.

Blacks would b-word and moan similarly that the TRC hearings would basically allow the most aggregious and brutal of apartheid's chief leaders' basically to get away scot free, for just confessing their past wrongs, and many blacks wanted a public hanging of many top Apartheid leaders, most notably Nelson fricking Mandela's wife was outspoken about this against Mandela himself.

In the end Mandela wisely ignore the simmering, and probably avoided a race war after the democracy was achieved so remarkably peacefully.

With this in mind, when the film "Cry, the Beloved Country" came out, no one was in the mood for a deep political drama, tensions were high, and races still way too divided to give a shit about a deep message of coming to understanding of their shared humanity or fricking whatever. Thus the film was controversial, though ironically through no fault of its own.

Then there were other liberal journos who bitched that the film was tonedeath and didn't show the correct way of aparheid blablabla

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/12/20/black-white-in-golden-tones/a47ca034-d94a-4333-a6aa-7953260f1ec2/

Treurgrond (2015)

Oh this one is FANTASTIC FOR DRAMA

It's basically a thriller horror movie about farm attacks on white farmers in SA. As you can imagine this

The film tells the story of a farming community in South Africa trying to survive the numerous farm attacks confronting them almost every day. The title of the Movie translate to Terror-Ground.

Critics moaned that the movie was melodramatic and overly sentimental beyond good acting. Black people, and ANC cucks moaned that the movie exagerated genocide against Boers, and was instilling race discontent into the public.

Afrikaners hated the movie because it made entertainment out of a horror reality which many boers in isolated towns in the country dealt with, and that the movie was in very poor taste to capitalize this frequent tragedy. Instead of being a type of tragic holocaust type film, it was very slasher crap jank.

Anyways this film pissed off fricking everybody, and worst is I personally never heard of it before i researched controversial films in SA.

https://journals.co.za/doi/10.10520/EJC189433

The Wound (2017)

ANOTHER mega spicy drama uber turbo volcano in South Africa was this film, this time from Zulu and Xhosa people.

"The Wound plays off in the Eastern Cape and tells the story of a lonely factory worker who quits his job to become a Xhosa initiation school facilitator. The subject and practice of ulwaluko (initiation) is a culturally sensitive one among amaXhosa. The Wound premieres in South Africa at the Durban Film Festival in June 2017."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulwaluko

So what is Ulwaluko, you ask? Basically it is the African version of circumcision, but much more hardcore. Ulwaluko marks for men, the change from childhood to adulthood, is an ancient initiation rite practised (though not exclusively) by the Xhosa people. Other who do this include Zulus.

The initiation ritual is commonly conducted during late June/early July or late November/ early December, and during the ritual practice, the traditional surgeon (ingcibi) surgically removes the foreskin. After the cut is made, the period of seclusion that follows lasts about one month and is divided into two phases - but this is rarely the case in modern times and/or in urban areas, where it usually lasts at least 4 weeks. During the first 7 days the initiates are confined to a hut (bhoma) and the use of certain foods, for example meat, is restricted, but this may differ as certain homes have their own beliefs or ways of doing things. Water may also be restricted.

This practice has been uber controversial among South africans, and has been the source of much seeth and sneed between Xhosas and the rest of the country. The Xhosas and Zulus are very conservative and take their heritage and cultural preservation seriously; meanwhile other liberals criticize the practice as barbaric and archaic.

ANC wingcucks frequently have infighting regarding Ulwaluko, because according to the constitution an the principles which the ANC is supposed to uphold, the human rights of Xhosa boys are being violated, but the Xhosa and Zulu voting blocks are way to big and powerful to piss off, so it's perpertually swept under the rug amidst much bitching and moaning

https://web.archive.org/web/20211003000555/http://www.ulwaluko.co.za/Problems.html

Poor sanitation conditions and bad medical knowledge by the inductors has meant about 1000 young men have died from this tradition since 1995. Every time a zulu/xhosa boy dies, the controversial debate begins again. It has the same flavour of bitter controvesy as burgerlanders debating gun-control or abortion. So you guyz can imagine the nuclear seeth which erupted when a movie depicting this culturally sensitive secretive tradition made its way on the movie screen.

The ritual is supposed to be a secret, in that details of the ritual are not supposed to be disclosed to females or non-initiated males; according to the principle of 'what happens in the bush, stays in the bush'. This causes uproar whenever someone tries to address the inherent danger of unqualified morons cutting the peepees of boys far away from hospitals in the bush.

https://mg.co.za/article/2009-07-18-tackling-the-matter-headon/

Cultural prejudice is so great that uncircumcised or 'improperly' circumcised Xhosa/Zulu men are attacked and beaten for their lack of conformity. In March 2014 a young man was assaulted after he had spoken out during a community meeting about the complications he sustained through the ritual.

There's also been other types of frick ups, like a dude having part of his peepee cut off instead of just his foreskin.

https://mg.co.za/article/2014-03-25-man-severely-beaten-for-speaking-out-about-peepee-amputation/

=====(from article)

Three suspects are to appear in the Flagstaff magistrate's court on Wednesday for allegedly assaulting a 20-year-old man from Pondoland in the Eastern Cape after he spoke at a community meeting of his dismay at losing his peepee in a botched traditional circumcision in June 2012.

Dingeman Rijken, a doctor who treated the man at the time of his injuries at Holy Cross Hospital near Flagstaff, said: "The initiate was allegedly accused of 'shaming the custom' by sharing his story of penile amputation at the meeting on Wednesday last week. The next day, on the Thursday afternoon, three men beat him severely. He suffered injuries to his head, feet, arms and legs. He was hospitalised and has since been discharged, but his injuries are still so severe that he cannot speak."

According to a community member who witnessed the assault but asked not be identified, the attackers were in their mid-20s and appeared to be drunk.

=====(end of article)

When the movie The Wound (2017) aired in SA, cinemas in the Eastern Cape province were forced to cancel screenings of the film and offer refunds because of protests, intimidation and vandalism.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-02-09-inxeba-wounding-the-pride-and-prejudice-of-xhosa-men/

Nu Metro Cinemas subsequently cancelled screenings countrywide, while Ster-Kinekor continued to show it outside of the Eastern Cape (the Xhosa home base). Crew and cast received death threats and were forced to go into hiding.

Riots imploded all over the Eastern Cape. The film's producers filed complaints with the Human Rights Commission and the Commission for Gender Equality over threats and violence, but nobody with influence gave a shit.

Here is a Youtube news interview with a Xhosa Prince Abongile Ngozi over the backlash. The prince is an r-slur

https://www.ajol.info/index.php/actat/article/view/49044

https://ewn.co.za/2019/12/17/21-boys-dead-in-summer-initiation-in-ec-says-health-minister

CONTROVERSIAL FILMS TOO GAY FOR SA:

Beauty (2011)

Beauty (Skoonheid in Afrikaans) premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. The film is about a man named François, an Afrikaner in his late forties, who lives a seemingly happy life. He is openly racist and homophobic, but at the same time he has frequent sexual encounters with other white, married men. South African Brokeback Mountain,

Controversial because cristians in SA, both black and white, protest the Gay Agenda. I remember this shit being contraband, but since even teenagers were homophobic, it wasn't the popular kind of contraband in SA highschools.

Of Good Report (2013)

"An introverted high school teacher in rural South Africa starts a neurotic affair with a pupil, with disastrous consequences. Of Good Report was initially banned for containing, what critics called, child pornography , but was quickly legitimised on appeal."

I can't find the original articles it been scrubbed

2023 ZIMBABWE SHENANIGANS:

https://www.newzimbabwe.com/zimbabweans-react-to-banned-chamisa-president-documentary-after-south-african-broadcaster-comes-to-their-rescue/

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/africa/2022-08-11-post-mugabe-era-film-president-banned-by-zimbabwe-censorship-board/

Basically the ruling cucks post Mugabe banned a Danish film exposing the monumental corruption during the 2018 Zim election, and was pretty quickly.

https://cpj.org/2022/08/zimbabwes-censorship-board-bans-danish-documentary-about-opposition-leader/

Still an authoritarian hellhole

And that's the whole lot for now! Hope you douchebags enjoyed it!

Part2:

https://rdrama.net/post/185786/marseyflagsouthafrica-a-short-history-of-banned

Part1:

https://rdrama.net/post/185294/marseyflagsouthafrica-a-short-history-of-marseyban

Hello my lovelies!

Sorry for my relative lack of posting as of late, I've been SUPER duper busy these past few months and only really had enough time for lurking and occasionally making snide comments here and there. I recently went on a whacky drama-filled furry adventure though which coincides with a lot of juicy internet drama happening at the same time which you might all appreciate. I'll be making this a multi-part thing since so much took place in such a short amount of time - so put on your strap-ons and strap in!

And just to be crystal clear, all of the following events genuinely happened, this isn't some long-form shitpost or whatever. Because it certainly reads like one at times.

The Encounter

Set the scene: it's last Wednesday, I'm scheduled to be in the lovely city of Philadelphia for a week, primarily for boring work reasons - I was meeting with some nerd at UPenn who wanted to collaborate on a psych paper or some shit. Upon meeting this guy at the airport though, alarm bells started going off in my head right from the jump - his car was full to the brim with weird furry garbage, fox decorations, animal plushes, and not only that, there was some horrible furry/brony music playing on the radio as the cherry on top. Being the avid anti-furry researcher I am, I knew instantly what kind of situation I was in - this guy I had arranged to meet was an unironic raging homosexual furtwink.

I did my best to ignore this incredibly uncomfortable fact at first, as we drove through the historic streets of Philly and had a brief look at the Liberty Bell and all the obligatory touristy stuff. Eventually though, I had to address the elephant in the room (or car), and my suspicions were confirmed - this guy was indeed a massive gay furry, particularly the kind that fantasizes about tribal muscular wolfmen. Not only that, but he had plans to set off the next day to Anthrocon, the world's largest furry convention, which just happened to be taking place that weekend in Pittsburgh about 300 miles away. He even has the gall to suggest that I could come with him to experience IRL furry culture for myself, since it wouldn't interfere with either of our schedules. I of course think that this is a fricking terrible idea, even as I'm assured that Anthrocon is supposedly a "tame and family friendly furcon" compared to the hives of degeneracy that other conventions typically tend to be. But then, I thought - this could actually be a fantastic opportunity to be a dramatard in the field, to gather first-hand evidence of furry degeneracy right behind enemy lines where they think normies won't be watching, and possibly even get up to some mischief myself. So I begrudgingly accept his offer, and thus, that's how Marco ended up on his way to a major furry convention.

The Infiltration

After a long 7 hour drive to Pittsburgh under the smoky orange backdrop of the Canadian wildfires and the furtwink accompanying me rambling on about supreme court hearings or some shit for most of the journey, we made it to the hotel. Everything seemed eeriely normal at first, even as we checked in and made it to the room with a couple of other furtwinks that my potential research collaborator had been planning to meet there. At some point after I was putting the tallest one in a chokehold (I was already having a fight-or-flight reaction from being in a room with 3 furtwinks), cue another knock on the door - upon opening it up, we were jumpscared by a dude in one of those goofy horse masks that were all the rage a few years ago. Turns out this was our very own resident horsefricker @Publiq, who also happened to be attending and heard word that Marco was on the premises. From that point onward, he was officially part of our growing ragtag group of weirdos.

As we then made our way to the convention center (and my eyes were assaulted by a wide array of rainbow vomit fursuits filling the streets on the way), our first big problem arose - the con security were dutifully checking for con tickets and badges at the entrance, and obviously, one of us had come empty-handed. We were in a big group by now though, so we just sort of... huddled close together while everyone else flashed their badges, and while the security guy gave us the biggest stink-eye and even turned around and kept staring at us for several seconds after we squeezed through, the line was too busy for him to come chasing after us and I was officially in.

So what did I witness on my first day at this "family friendly" all-ages convention? Let's make a brief list:

>fat uggos walking around in gimp masks, harnesses and other assorted fetish gear

>neurodivergent Deviantart fetish shit being displayed out in the open (vore autism, footcute twinkry)

>NSFW furry body pillows, their privates barely covered by post-it notes to make things kid-friendly apparently

>a section aptly called the "hole in the wall", where it was life-sized artwork of furry bussies lined up side-by-side (again, with the holes/balls barely covered by post-it notes)

>a "musk candle" stall, selling candles that are apparently meant to smell like unwashed hairy gussy and butthole

>fursuiters grinding on and groping one another right in front of everyone

>mass public vandalism

>this bimbo horse thing

>and to top it off, a cub/libertarian fur stall, with an orange cat mascot called Marci!?

To call an event like this kid-friendly and let children roam around the stalls is at best profoundly r-slurred and at worst genuinely dangerous and sickening. I mean, holy shit, this was supposed to be the most tame of the big furry conventions, the one that the furfilth defense force can point leftoid media toward so they can say "ummm we're not all degenerate dogfrickers, see?" The other cons allegedly have uglies openly fricking in the hotel lobbies, throwing used diapers around and other nonsense that you're probably familiar with by now from other first-hand tales that went viral - I don't intend to check those ones out for myself.

These people genuinely deserve all the hate that they get, and don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

The Puppeteer

Pivoting away from my own personal experience to cover a juicy happening that transpired; a large attraction for this year's largely neurodivergent attendees was supposedly this dumb puppet thing, that I'm not sure how you could be entertained by if you're over the age of eight. Seriously, if you do a quick twitter search for "anthrocon", half the posts are just videos or shitty art of this thing.

https://x.com/WolfOfTheOldWar/status/1675325161946464256

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677012582190788609

Lets take a look at the puppet's creator and puppeteer, why don't we?

...Oh boy.

To unpack, this individual is a 35 year old non-binary therian with E/Em/Eir pronouns to boot - meaning that unlike most furries whom just enjoy pretending to be animals, this person genuinely actually believes that eir're a real life animal and no longer identify as a human being, basically what FOX news and other rightoid boomers think furries are. With an audience of eir size taking em completely seriously on this, trans-species rights is sure to be the next culture war struggle and I'm all for it.

Hearth also has a null fetish NSFW account, which for the uninitiated is having a kink for a complete lack of genitalia - imagine just a smooth featureless crotch down there. While irrelevant to the rest of the post, I thought it'd be funny to include this to help paint a full picture of our main character's mental state.

A common disturbing trend with these therians however, is making the logical conclusion that since they identify as animals and not humans, then surely it can't be considered bestiality when they go frick the family dog. And that kind of drama is exactly what gets kicked off here. During the height of eir 15 minutes of furry fame, our pal Hearth really puts eir paw in it and decides to tweet in defense of eir zoophile friend's illustrated animal porn stash.

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677070509484257280

"Feral" porn for those unaware, as opposed to regular furry porn that involves cartoon animal-people fricking, is just straight up artwork of four-legged animals mating, or in simpler terms basically drawn bestiality. Despite what many furries like to say, this type of smut is very popular with furries behind closed doors (or stables). The masses of naive clueless children and spergs who followed Hearth over the last couple days because "yay cute puppet :3" immediately run for the hills.

Direct replies:

Notable QRTs:

https://x.com/bara_moe_bltch/status/1677160431306039298

https://x.com/treyretry/status/1677203307218055168

https://x.com/ChemlabEnjoyer/status/1677337027153387520

https://x.com/cathyareborn/status/1677206919000227840

https://x.com/Litowo_/status/1677266821731299329

...And a ton of other furries feeling betrayed that their newfound fuzzy friend says yes to zoo rights. Who would've thought that a community that revolves around fetishizing animal features would turn out to be full of zoophiles.

There's a few lolipedos and fellow therian zoophiles playing defense for Hearth in the replies too, but they're outnumbered for the most part. Some solid advice from all this: if you see a non-greek person using weird greek symbols in their twitter name/bio, keep your pets far away from them.

The Meltdown

Distraught that eir moment in the spotlight had been cut short by opening their dumb fat mouth, Hearth being the lolcow e is reacts predictably by immediately trying to play the victim and deflect the blame. Clearly this was an organized harassment campaign by those darn Kiwifarmers all along! How do they keep getting away with it?

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677414791244140544

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677235453768921088

The typical furry behavior of suicide baiting for sympathy when caught out:

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677243094666735617

There's nothing wrong with masturbating to lion cubs voiced by children, let people enjoy things!

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677132622764417025

Chasing the White Rabbit

Still desperate to pin their downfall on someone else, Hearth digs up this random joke tweet by some dude with like a tenth of the followers e does while furry Twitter was still being flooded with the puppet thing.

https://x.com/LagoVirt/status/1675840458000326659

E concludes that this guy's tweet must be the true source of all the harassment e's getting, and it's all a big conspiracy to bring em down! E promptly lunges out, fangs bared, demanding a full apology for the immense harm caused.

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677237100020654080

Someone didn't get the memo that jokes aren't real anymore.

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677259051497930754

APOLOGIZE NOW!

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677268378099109899

And just like anyone here could've predicted, actually an apology isn't enough chud.

https://x.com/TheHearthFox/status/1677273942669574144

They're still sperging to this day, so I highly suggest keeping track of them yourself to see if their InkBunny account eventually ends up being discovered or something. This ended up kinda being two posts messily stitched together, but if you're in the 2% of non-illiterate dramatards who made it this far, then cool! I did in fact see the weird puppet r-slur in person though last week, and my verdict is that e is fat and I would not have s*x with em. Thanks for reading, and always remember to respect people's pronouns even if you heavily disagree with them!

Part 2 soon, which sadly includes an IRL case of actual child grooming at the Anthrocon plushfur furpile.

Happy weekend fellow r-slurs!

Last night, while doing my regular internet perusing, I learned that Roosterteeth announced that they're finally killing off ending Red vs. Blue, the flagship show that started the company. RvB had been in its death throes for some years now, with several seasons considered subpar, including an "offshoot" season that is easily regarded as the worst of the show and made the director of that season seethe about it for months on end (worth its own post).

That being said, with this new and final season making its appearance, some fans and myself were left wondering: what will happen to Caboose?

___

I'm going to apologize in advance as a chunk of this drama will be based off memory. Many of the tweets and posts referenced here are no longer readily available or easy to find online.

For our dramatards who have never seen RvB, the show and company was founded by several former college friends and coworkers who enjoyed playing Halo together. RvB was dumb but funny internet schlock about a bunch of soldiers in a box canyon getting caught up in wacky adventures that turned into a melodrama after several seasons.

One such soldier was Caboose, voiced by Joel Heyman, who quickly arose as probably the most popular character for his insanely dumb statements, such as calling another character "a gay robot," not understanding the meaning of timelines, and other wackiness.

As the company grew, Joel supposedly did a lot of work behind the scenes. It's speculated that he helped RT secure major deals and clients, as early on they made commercials for companies like Gamestop and other brands. A long since deleted tweet of his states that he brought in millions of dollars of value to the company with the deals he helped secure. How true this may be is up in the air, but I personally don't see it as untruthful.

However, as is somewhat known here, RT was never without controversy. And as time went on, it seems Joel would be one of their major controversies.

Joel was not someone who was typically in the limelight. He did have an acting background, and would act in several of the shorts RT made, one such example here:

(note that all 5 men in this short are considered the founders of the company). Other than that, he would also appear on their podcast, making rants about buying gold, indicating some sort of financial interest background (likely why he handled all these deals). When he did appear though, he too quickly became a fan favorite like Caboose.

As time went on however, and fascism returned to America with the rise of Donald Trump, things began to break down between Joel and his coworkers. You see, Joel made a tactical blunder working for an online company based in Austin, Texas. He was a rightoid. A chud, if you will. And every now and then he would get into arguments online with fans and coworkers.

After one of America's mass shootings, noted bong RT employee Gavin Free made reference as to how he couldn't believe America continued to allow guns, or something to that effect. Joel entered a bickering match with him, and stated something along the lines of how if someone ever breaks into Gavin's home he may only then appreciate the ability to own a gun. This was especially ironic when a couple of years later some dude did break into Gavin's home, jealous of how Gavin was fricking only fans slut Meg Turney, and killed himself in Gavin's driveway.

Many RT fans began to feel different about Joel after that. Joel also entered a bickering match on Twitter with noted leftist soyboy coworker Jack Patillo, and Joel stated that Jack's leftist friends would likely at some point burn his house down. Even more goodwill from RT's fanbase was dissipated by this comment.

But this wasn't the worst of it all.

John McCain. American veteran, American politician, and cancer loser.

In 2017, midway through the reign of Trump, John McCain, stricken with cancer, crossed party lines on some pretty important vote regarding Obamacare to spite Trump. As of this moment, he was no longer a rightoid ally but a darling of American leftoids. Joel was somewhat bothered by this and as McCain neared the end of his time on this earthly realm a year later, and only a day or two after Joel's house burning comment to Jack, he made some joke about how McCain's cancer should have taken him sooner.

My god, Joel? How could you be so heartless about John McCain? Wishing cancer would kill someone sooner is so heartless.

The RT community could not stand it. To this day, bringing up Joel still causes people to cite this incident along with wildly misremembered quotes of the other incidents

(Joel wished people would break into Gavin's home and burn Jack's house down!) as reasons as to why they're glad he's gone.

Overtime, Joel was seen less and it seems that sometime around late 2019, he departed (or was fired from) the company quietly. Fans on Twitter are usually able to gleam some info from him and his current feelings about RT. He's made jokes about current RT, along with defending his cancer joke.

Other RT fans have noticed that RoosterTeeth have essentially disappeared Joel from the company. New videos discussing the founders refuse to mention him, and threads on the subreddits about him always get filled with speculation. Many seem to think he also makes racist jokes, though no one is ever able to provide proof of those (lmfao).

A glassdoor review mentioned some founder was fired for bringing a gun to work, and many believe Joel was said person, which he has stated is a lie.

While he also was a founder of the company, he also noted that he was never in an executive/management level and had no clues about the controversy that @AverageBen10Enjoyer discussed in this post here: https://rdrama.net/post/113460/lets-check-in-on-roosterteeth-marseyfine

To sum up Joel, he was a funny but off kilter rightoid that was never going to last at a company that was slowly spreading more and more into leftoid American idpol.

So where does that leave us today? With the announcement of the new season, fans are left wondering what will happen to Caboose. A short RvB video involving Caboose after Joel's departure used a different voice actor, but many noted that it didn't sound right. A small portion of fans are wishing for him back, which is unlikely. Other fans make sure to soapbox about how he isn't wanted back: https://old.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/14u8ey6/to_the_vocal_minority_trying_to_get_joel_back/

And speculate about what the show will do: https://old.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/14tej10/red_vs_blue_final_the_season_announcement/jr1x1qd/

In any case, Joel Heyman was easily one of the most dramatic happenings at RT in the early Trump years, before the sexual pests and trains came out of the woodwork. Joel is still active on Twitter being a rightoid and interacting with many rightoid former RT fans. RvB fans themselves are somewhat thankful the show is finally dying and Roosterteeth still somehow chugs along on what seems to be its very long death throes.

This is her first post about her orgasms that as you can see drew a lot of attention.

As you you can see she goes into way too much detail about this including what kind of porn she watches (cnc is consensual non-consensual, in other words r*pe play) to what s*x toys she used and how "messy" her orgasms were. According to her first post she had 34 orgasms in a month (Jesus) and "gave" four.

A lot of the comments are the Reddit shit you expect:

The two things most I love; Data And orgasm. Thank you for your post!

/

Wish my s*x drive was this fierce! My orgasm number for January was 12 😄 (and that's 100% of my sexual experiences)

Hey 12 is a great number! As long as you’re satisfied and happy, it’s all good, it’s not about quantity, its about quality.

/

Just when you thought data couldn’t get any sexier this person comes and raises the bar. Well done, OP.

/

Wonder what reactions the community would have if a male posted their version of this.

She then posts a follow-up the next month with even more detail. This time she's had 36 (!) orgasms in February (and that's the shortest month). She moves on to rate each individual orgasm by quality. This month she gave out ten orgasms to someone else apparently.

She also posts a graph of how many messages she received from her post and the contents of said messages. It may seem like a low number (around forty) but once you see her you'll see why (yes I included her picture at the end).

Comments on this post include:

I'm genuinely surprised you didn't get any peepee pics.

By far the most surprising statistic

Check what she looks like

/

I am surprised that the dildo is beating out the clit sucker, which dildo are you using?

same my fiancee loves her clit sucker more than any of her other toys her new wand i got her may start edging it out tho

/

Why does the "toys used " circle diagram percentage add up to 111% ??

She returns for her post detailing the months of March and April. 40 orgasms in March and 42 in April. Does this obese b-word have any other hobbies? My God. This time she includes such info as how much pain she was in while orgasming and how much blood is involved. Why? I don't know.

She also includes a helpful guide for all of the weird kink shit she gets off to. This incudes the previously mentioned r*pe play stuff and also kinks like "risky creampie" which I can't believe is a kink.

There's something different about this post, though. Compared to the previous two this one is heavily downmarseyd and has very little interaction in the comments:

very intresting piece of information, now i have the knowledge to pass my history test

/

I was going to ask male or female, but then I noticed 6 orgasms in a single day followed by blood vs no blood and figured it out pretty quick.

Have you learned anything surprising or interesting from doing this?

I think seeing the amount of pain over time and how it’s been clustered together or spread out has been very interesting and helpful to me! Also understanding what has or hasn’t led to a “higher rated” orgasm.

i see a book. i see a movie. i see fame. i see drugs and rehab. i see a redemption movie.

I think it’s safe to say based on the lukewarm response to this post, a book is implausible & a movie even more so 😂

/

Exciting that playing with your partner is leading to strong orgasms!

Finally comes her most recent post. I'm not going to get into too much detail about this one because it is more of the same, but it's weird she has this six month long chart charting out how many orgasms and her mood for each individual day. I don't need to see my own kind of data regimented like that. This post though was extremely downmarseyd. Here are some of the comments:

Is it normal for females to experience pain and blood so often?

/

No one cares, just post the link to your OF.

I’m not selling anything, I made this as a design challenge for myself.

If that's all you got to say, why bother posting a response at all?

If all you've got to say is "Here are the times I had orgasms" why bother making a visualization and posting it on the internet?

That’s not all I’m saying, if it was there wouldn’t be a graphic with multiple data sets

because not all data visualization needs to be serious or about a serious topic, and I’m doing them for fun

because talking about s*x, masturbation, and even porn shouldn’t be shameful, it’s a human experience most people have

because I think it’s well executed, and I’m proud of the designs I made

because in the past, I actually got really great critique from posting in this subreddit, and I think that getting feedback is an important part of the design process

/

Wasn’t expecting I’d be turned on by someone’s orgasm charts

/

Nobody gives a flying frick about your orgasm diary, frick this place wtf is wrong with people

/

This is a perfect visualization. Conveys everything clearly and unequivocally. And is very interesting. And tells a good story. And moves the eye around comfortably and naturally. And is also aesthetically gorgeous. Seriously, dataviz at its finest.

Thank you!! I really appreciate your comment 💙

So who is this orgasm woman?

This is what her bio says:

31 | happily married & just here for shits & giggles | I’m not your babe, baby or babygirl

She has dozens of NSFW posts of personal nudes on subreddits like: /r/BBWFeet, /r/BBWThongs, /r/BBWHardcore, /r/BBWGW, /r/LingeriePlus, /r/BBWKittys, and more I can't be bothered to catalog.

Finally, this is what she looks like:

Abortion for all, indeed.

In anticipation of Oppenheimer and Barbie, I thought it may be interesting to chat a bit about the themes that surround the films. This will be a long post, but I hope you enjoy it.

PART 1 - OPPENHEIMER and ENOLA GAY

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Homosexuals have always existed, and they will always continue to. Nevertheless, the US military, for a long time, attempted to deny the existence of homosexuality, and it was listed as a deviant behavior that could result in a dishonorable discharge. For g*mers who are familiar with Red Dead Redemption, this is what is theorized to have happened to Bill.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of gays and lesbians in the military. The military was actually great for homosexuals! They were away from home for the first time, and in same-s*x communities, attraction and love inevitably formed. Many men discovered their sexuality in the military, and the prevalence of this is an open secret.

Despite the threat of persecution, gay and lesbian servicemembers thrived during World War II. As with most young soldiers, many had never left their homes before, and the war provided them an opportunity to find community, camaraderie, and, in some cases, first loves

As many of you may know, drag is a tradition in the military, and not just the USA. A somewhat clandestine newsletter called "Myrtle Beach B-word" was formed and distributed among queer servicemen and women.

https://gaycitynews.com/he-learned-from-the-master/

With the help of a straight soldier who was in charge of the base’s mimeograph machine, the uniformed duo managed to produce five issues of the newsletter before they were caught and sent to federal prison for a year.

Enola Gay

In 1945, as we all know, Germany surrendered and the USA dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. The atomic bomb was carried by a Boeing B-29 which was manned by Pilot Tibbits. On the morning that the bomb was to be dropped on Hiroshima, Tibbits had his mother's name (Enola Gay Tibbits) painted on the nose of the plane, which enraged commander Robert Lewis. Why did Tibbits do this?

... my thoughts turned at this point to my courageous red-haired mother, whose quiet confidence had been a source of strength to me since boyhood, and particularly during the soul-searching period when I decided to give up a medical career to become a military pilot. At a time when Dad had thought I had lost my marbles, she had taken my side and said, "I know you will be all right, son."

Hiroshima Gay

The G7 summit is an annual event to help world leaders align goals and ensure global democracy. In 2023, it was held in Hiroshima. It should be noted that Japan is the only member of G7 to not recognize same-s*x marriages. In an attempt to negotiate with other world powers, Japan, in 2023, introduced a LGBT bill that gave same-s*x couples some recognition, but is far from the inclusive legislation that is typically seen in developed countries.

It is funny that the plane that bombed Hiroshima is called Enola Gay, but it is a pure act of Jungian synchronicity that Hiroshima will play a role in ushering LGBT acceptance in Japan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/17/japan-g7-summit-lgbt-rights/

To close, I do not support the dropping of the atomic bombs and I believe it was immoral. I am shocked that I have not heard the name of the plane mentioned more, and quite frankly this entire post is just an excuse to talk about the fact that arguably the most important aircraft in the world is named Gay.

PART 2 - BARBIE AND BELONGING

When it comes to highly anticipated movies of 2023, it’s hard to do better than Barbie. Announced in 2022, the film is based on the Mattel IP which has been popular for decades among young girls. Before we discuss the themes of the film, I thought it would be worthwhile to get a bit of background.

Ken

Ken will be played by Ryan Gosling, who is known for films such as Bladerunner, Drive, and The Notebook. Barbie will certainly be a deviation from his typical roles, though there is no doubt that he can meet and even surpass expectations.

The first Ken doll was introduced in 1961 as a companion to Barbie. He is named of the creator’s son. When Ken was released, he was marketed as Barbie’s boyfriend, but audiences immediately interpreted him as gay and he became a queer icon. This has caused Mattel to release statements denying Ken’s homosexuality.

Barbie

She needs no introduction. Barbie is Barbie. Some fans might not know - she has a sister named Skipper and a dog named Taffy. She has held over 200 jobs, though her most iconic job is the role of a spokesmodel for Lily Fashions. She also has a rival named Laureen who is also a model, and has appeared in a few books, including A Very Busy Barbie. Barbie will be played by Margot Robbie of Birds of Prey and I, Tonya. As one of Hollywood’s current It Girls, there are few women who fit the role better than the Australian superstar.

It is impossible to discuss Barbie without bringing up the creator and founder of Mattel, Ruth Handler. Born in 1916, she is the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants. Barbie was created to be the “ultimate insider”, an antidote to the Jewish condition which has for so long centered around being the ultimate outsider.

What is Barbie?

No, not who but what? The easy answer is that Barbie is a doll. But clearly, she’s much, much more than that.

Growing up, my sister and I had matching Barbie bed sets. We would also go on Barbie’s official site and play the games there. I had to hide doing this when my dad was around or else he’d kick my butt. So why did I keep returning?

Barbie represents complete self-actualization. The achievement of perfection both inside and outside. She is a role model, an unrealistic one sure, but a motivating one nonetheless, which is why her role in various professions has been so important for young girls. Speaking of young girls…

Is Barbie for Girls?

Frick this bullshit. My local cinema is having a LADIES ONLY night for Barbie’s opening for the premier cinema. I feel deeply discriminated against, this is childhood all over again no dad please I just want to watch Barbie.

The idea that Barbie is for women is preposterous. Barbie is for humanity and if you find something in you that relates to her, then that is enough. Our humanity transcends petty labels. You might like Barbie because you want to be an insider. Maybe her archetypal anima is the reason you can’t turn away. Either way, those emotions are valid regardless of your chromosomes.

Belonging

I love Barbie because she has never had to worry about belonging. She exists in a form that is instantly accepted by those around her. To be Barbie is to be completely in tune with society’s Super-ego.

Have you ever felt like you’re being rejected from society? As though you’re being told outright that you don’t belong here and you’re not wanted? Ever felt like a complete detriment to everyone and everything around you, and come to the conclusion that it would be a moral good for you to extinguish your own life? If you ever feel this way, escape into Barbie’s world for a brief moment and enjoy a different life. One where all that anxiety melts away.

Who is deserving of belonging? Who decides who belongs and who doesn’t? These are all questions I’m hoping the upcoming movie addresses. What are your thoughts?

The @schizo made a post about this 2 months ago

pays for 3 months, then charges back the money. OF complies, given that no actual service was provided.

The foid featured in that post will make another appearance below.

And the @carpathianflorist touched upon this in a thot CashApp post 11 months ago

Digital hooker loses like $50, actual hookers discuss the finer points of tax law, fraud, and more

This has been an issue in the industry for a long time, but I noticed there's been quite a few more posts about this in just the last few weeks. OnlyThots are talking about rising up and switching to Fansly because they say they have better protection against chargebacks.

I recommend clicking over to some of these posts and then randomly clicking accounts to get eyes on these ladies. It's generally quite bleak.

Yesterday:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreatorsAdvice/comments/14s8wt5/it_happened_to_me/

Unfathomable coomer W.

I can’t believe this is even allowed without any questions asked. It’s far too easy for them to do this! I’m so sorry 😢

unfortunately, this is OF’s reality for us 🥺

So true. I’m very new on OF and it’s got me super nervous.

Everytime I see this, it pisses me off beyond believe 🤬 I can’t believe OF let the happen all the time. How are you supposed to even trust a single sub to do customs or whatever for him, when in the back of your mind you know this can happen?? I always cash out as soon as I’m able to, and the day my first chargeback hits me, I’m done with that fricking site 😤

3 days ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreatorsAdvice/comments/14q1tjo/money/

14 days ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreatorsAdvice/comments/14gtlg4/onlyfans/

In the comments of that one is the thot featured in schizos post 2 months ago /u/Britcolombia

I had chargebacks from a sub who quite clearly kept purchasing. So no dispute over the quality of my content. My first feeling was of abuse. What onlyfans need to remember is we are selling a service that involves our bodies. We aren’t selling furniture! I contacted onlyfans and they said sorry for the inconvenience caused! I lost a lot of money but also I felt violated. When people enter into a sexual situation and an agreement is made that is consensual, when one person breaks that agreement it is sexual abuse. No two ways about it! I’m willing to stand with you on this. ❤️

And one more from last month

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreatorsAdvice/comments/14030o0/youre_not_safe_on_of/

Luke...

Who will make a sigma coomer edit?

I'm relatively new to OnlyFans, and I had a scammer tip around $200. I was just starting out and knew nothing about chargebacks. It was my first post, and at first, I felt proud. I'm super shy and am learning to love all of my curves. When I saw that I was in the negative one day, I was shocked. That's when I learned about chargebacks and how the scammer gets to keep what we create and money is taken from us. I have never felt more defeated, and now I'm starting over, and it's hard. I just thought I'd share my story.

These foids give some words of wisdom as to why it's not as simple a fix as others want to believe

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreatorsAdvice/comments/14gtlg4/onlyfans/jp8xnnr/

Couple additional snacks

Foid declares onlyfans is harder than 90% of normal jobs

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreatorsAdvice/comments/14sccof/do_you_ever_feel_sorry_for_people_with_normal_jobs/jqx9wcv/

Listen moid, you may be out there in -10 weather at 5 am collecting trash or mowing lawns all day or fighting fires, but I smoked a joint, masturbated and then sat at my laptop for 2 hours. Literally slavery.

Foid gives a recipe for how to make fake c*m

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreatorsAdvice/comments/14src3j/fake_cum_recipes_with_pics/

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.

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.

==============

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."

======

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.

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.

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

Goooood morning dramatards! It's that time of the week again - that is, for long effort posts about really niche space industry shit. This time, there's actual drama. I don't want to hear anything about me posting no drama, this shit is entertaining and I take questions.

This is the story of the Next Generation Space Telescope - later named the James Webb Space Telescope - and the never-ending nightmare it became for the people designing it. This thing was a running industry joke for a while, because it was so heavily delayed, no one thought it would ever launch.

Hey, wait a minute. I know that name!

And you should. JWST was launched on Christmas Day of 2021, over twenty-five years in the making. It stands as one of the pinnacles of global science and engineering projects, and has already produced incredible amounts of cool desktop backgrounds useful scientific data, and will continue to do so for decades. It consists of 18 hexagonal mirrors, made of gold-plated beryllium (it evens sounds expensive), that span 2.4 meters across. The surfaces are so flat that if you were to scale just one of those mirrors up to the size of North America, the biggest bump on them would less than half a centimeter (quarter of an inch-ish) tall. You've probably seen pictures of it before:

It's responsible for a lot of the hexagon-shaped nerdshit that's been coming out for the last few years, in regards to space nerds at least. 3D Printer nerds are another thing entirely.

But this isn't a story about what the telescope's done. This is a story about the absolute nightmare that building this thing was, and the twenty-year dramafest it entailed.

1996-1998: BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2007

TOTAL BUDGET: $1 BILLION

Scientists and telescopes can both really be considered scientific instruments. They're fussy, temperamental at the best of times, expensive to acquire and operate, and usually result in dramatic stories when you know them long enough. The story really begins before the Hubble Space Telescope, the predecessor to our hero, is launched. The project is constantly beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. It was famously launched broken in 1990 because the mirror turned out to be ground (sanded) incorrectly, and they had to send a shuttle crew up to go fix it. It took a long time to get going, but the results fascinated the public, and was a great scientific achievement. You have to remember that extremely public science projects like these can result in a huge leap in investment across the board in all types of science, as people see the images and get hyped. There's real astronomy being done, but you can't forget this factor.

Projects like these are planned well into advance, and the scientists working on HST were already starting to think about what their next project would be. Serious planning began in 1994 after fixing the HST, as NASA began looking into the idea of an infrared telescope to see farther back into the past.

Sidebar: Why infrared?

TW: Science shit (skippable!)

Really high end telescopes like these are affected by something called redshift. The universe itself is physically expanding, and as light travels through the vastness of space to hit whatever's looking at it, the EM wave itself will be stretched. X-rays will become UV, UV becomes visible light, and most visible light will drop down into the infrared, microwave, or radio spectrum.

This is all dependent on what the wavelength of the light was when it was emitted, and how far it traveled to get there. When you are looking at a star a light year away, you are looking at light that was emitted a year ago. 10 light years, 10 years. You are literally able to look back in time. There becomes a distance, however, where all light emitted drops out of the visible spectrum, and you can no longer see anything beyond a certain time period ago.

So drop the spectrum you're looking at! Bottom line is: If you look in infrared, you can see millions of years more into the past. You could actually look at the formation of galaxies close to the beginning of the universe. Very exciting!

Back to Hubble

Hubble, unfortunately, was a warm telescope. It can't look at infrared because the heat from its own optics blinds the sensor to infrared light. Not helpful.

In order to actually see all this faint infrared light, the telescope has to be really fricking cold. Waste heat is a pain in the butt on space projects, because the only way to get rid of it is to radiate it out into space. In order to get something that cold (40 deg C/K from absolute 0), you need an enormously complicated cooling system that can suck out almost all of the thermal energy from something the size of a bus and get rid of it in the form of light. And block out the sun.

So in short, you need:

• A giant telescope

• that is close to absolute zero

• that can fold up and fit on a rocket

• that is manufactured perfectly with no issues

It was doomed from the start.

2003-2010: Uncle Sam, can we have a new telescope?

(These just show where the spikes come from on the images, all pictures listed after now will be relevant)

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2011

TOTAL BUDGET: $2.5 BILLION

NASA, at this point, had been dealing with a lot of problems with Hubble. No one's exactly happy when you spend a huge amount of money on some really complicated equipment, put it in space, and then have to send up a guy to go fix it. They wanted something "better, faster, cheaper". A telescope that would be better than Hubble, with fewer problems, a faster development time, and at a lower cost.

Let's see how that idea turns out

A few competing bids are put together, and a company called TRW gets the contract. Their bid involves a segmented primary mirror with moving parts, cheaper in theory than building a single massive mirror, but very complicated. The telescope project gets named, and the launch date is set for 2007. They get bought out by Northrop Grumman pretty shortly afterwards, and this is where the drama begins.

Drama starts here: What's in a name?

Setting the tone for the next fifteen years of development, the naming of the telescope was instantly controversial. NASA decided to make an exception to their previous scheme of naming things after famous scientists (usually related to the project) and name it after a bureaucrat instead, which was unpopular among scientists. It was named for James Webb, NASA's second administrator, who lead the agency through the Apollo program.

There was a lot of backlash for this, even internationally, but most of this this didn't come until the telescope was close to completion. An article in Scientific American accused Webb of helping to purge homosexuals in the State Department in the 1950s, and urged NASA to rename it. The source for this turned out to be a wrongly attributed quote from an article at the time. NASA conducted an investigation, and found that Webb had no personal part in any of the firings. Most of this seems to trace back to the firing of one specific accountant, who was fired by a completely different department with control over staffing. Having found nothing, NASA told them to frick off.

This has not, however, stopped Scientific American from continuing to scream about the name of the telescope.

Constantly.

The Royal Astronomical Society (UK) refused to actually use his name when referring to the telescope, even after it launched. They've revised their stance on the name, but they're not backing down on hating James Webb.

I could find dozens of articles on this. They're still being written. Despite the fact that a massive investigation turned up nothing, someone called the guy a homophobe and it just kind of stuck.

I just want to point out that while the rest of the nonsense relating to the design is going on, as NASA is desperately trying to keep the project alive, the only supporters of the telescope are writing hitpieces every single week about the fricking name of the thing. Christ people, it's not like they named it after Von Braun.

2010-2012: Back to the Accounting Books

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2015

TOTAL BUDGET: $6.5 BILLION

JWST had an initial budget of about $1b dollars, and this was broken up year-by-year. Northrop pretty quickly discovered issues with this, and they'd blow through their yearly budget fairly quickly. A lot of the expensive R&D takes place in the early years, and suddenly the checks are bouncing.

So they come up with a neat workaround: just push the expensive parts back into next year, and we'll deal with it then.

This makes all the bean counters happy, but is an exceptionally r-slurred way to run an engineering project. Everything is now being done completely out of order, and when you start designing parts that are dependent on ones that haven't been designed yet, you will have to redesign everything anyway when you actually get around to what you should have been doing in the first place. What it results in is a gigantic clusterfrick of a design, on top of what is already one of the most difficult engineering projects ever conceived.

The project gets delayed, year after year after year. It's not unusual for large projects like these to get delayed and cost more than you expect, but this one went very quickly in both directions. NASA does an investigation, and finds out how Northrop has been managing the budget. The massive document (summarized for you, you're welcome) boils down to:

• NASA massively lowballed the budget like r-slurs

• Northrop was fumbling the entire thing to make bean counters happy

• There was a complete and total lack of oversight on the project to stop them exploiting this

• Tacking on yearly additions to the budget like they were doing is not helping, it's just prolonging it

• It's going to be at least another quarter of a billion dollars just to keep going, and we have no idea how much it's going to be total

By now, JWST's main supporters are beginning to hate it. The telescope is massively unpopular, mostly because scientists are whining that it's eating up all their budgets. Nature wrote a hitpiece on JWST, calling it The Telescope That Ate Astronomy.

Keep in mind, this is not too long after the 2008 Financial Crisis. Congress is looking to save some money and a badly run project like this is a pretty easy target.

NASA's budget makes it onto the chopping block when the budget for 2012 starts to take shape. There's a lot of noise about the cost, and the House of Representatives votes to kill it in their proposal. JWST survives the Senate, however, and it gets a reduced budget for the next year. This, however, does not do good things for the launch schedule. It's still optimistically placed at 2015, but no one involved think it's gonna make that. NASA Deputy Admin Lori Gardner said they wanted a budget that would at least "... allow us to launch the Webb telescope in this decade".

2017-2018: Testing Everyone's Patience...

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 2019

TOTAL BUDGET: $8.8 BILLION

I'm skipping past general construction here. They installed the mirror in 2016. Not much happened that's funny until late 2017, where they began testing and then trying to put the thing together.

The telescope is delayed yet again, after completing a cryogenics test in 2017. This time, it's NASA's doing, in order to stop them rushing the thing into flight and breaking it. It's only six months, we can deal. Test it more, it'll work. Right? God, please let it work. 2018 was a great year for telescope drama, so we're breaking it down by segment. Bear with me, it's worth it. It was also very hard to put in order so you lazy shits better read this.

Oh God, Oh Frick.

The JWST was being built in two halves: the heatshield (which as far as I can tell was being built in southern California, if anyone can find otherwise I will correct this and credit you), and the optical assembly (which seems to have been built in Virginia and tested in Texas, same deal). God, too, is upset about the telescope delays, and as they're trying to test the optical half of the telescope at the Johnson Space Center, He sends Hurricane Harvey to obliterate Houston to let everyone know how much He is fed up with it. NASA scientists continue to work on testing the thing despite the massive storm.

The other half is having problems too: during a heat shield deployment test, the spacecraft manages to tear itself in half in 2018. The heatshield is made of five layers of super delicate material, thinner than a human hair and as large as a tennis court, that needs to unfold while in space. While testing the unfolding, it tore itself in half. There's another pretty comprehensive review as a result of this, and NASA finds no less than 344 single points of failure for the entire launch and deployment process. What that means in practice is that if any one of those 344 items goes wrong, the entire multibillion dollar project goes down the potty. Oh God.

Testing of the individual sections completes in early 2018, and Northrop begins shipping over the remaining pieces to Southern California. It requires a completely unique shipping solution to do this, which basically entailed a 75-ton hovercraft-version of a shipping container being flown on a cargo plane. Can you imagine being the pilot for that? I'd shit myself if I landed hard.

Gregory L Robinson.

In comes the savior of the project, Gregory L. Robinson. You don't need to know much about him, just know that he's an administrative genius (his boss called him "the most effective leader of a mission I have ever seen in the history of NASA") and the project goes from hitting only 50% of deadlines on time to 95%.

The IKEAScope

But enough about him, let's get back to the funny telescope news.

The optical assembly is delivered without incident to southern California in February 2018 without incident. What's that? There's problems putting it together? How unexpected . Technicians at the SoCal facility have just finished putting part of it back together, and found that they have a lot of extra screws and washers lying around..

“Right now we believe that all of this hardware — we’re talking screws and washers here — come from the sunshield cover,” he said. “We’re looking at what this really means and what is the recovery plan.” The problem, he said, was only a couple of days old, and he had few additional details about the problem.

“It’s not terrible news, but it’s not good news, either,” he said.

-- Greg Robinson

Oh shit.

You know how you finish building an IKEA cabinet and there's a bunch of extra stuff lying around that definitely weren't spares? Imagine the cabinet cost $9 billion, and you can imagine what these poor fricks are feeling like.

Thankfully, it seems to be OK, and Northrop begins to wire the two halves together.

Unfortunately, the people paying for the telescope are becoming very unhappy with how the project is going. An independent review of the project by NASA in June of 2018 concluded:

• The project is a fricking nightmare

• It's gone so far over budget that Northrop is officially in the doghouse with the feds over this, no amount of lobbying will save them

• It's a really important scientific mission, it's still worth it

• please please please please just keep paying for the next couple of years its worth it

It's really funny and worth a read if you aren't bored of telescope drama by this point. My favorite section:

This is an important chart to give a macro view of JWST. The statement of incredible capability and awesome scientific potential was initially thought to be “over the top.” After discussion, the Webb Independent Review Board (IRB) clearly believes that “awesome” is a correct assessment of the JWST scientific potential. To achieve this potential requires an observatory with significant complexity and risk. It is easy to defend that JWST has the highest complexity and risk of any civil space robotic system. Clearly, it is in the top few. The complexity and risk must be considered in all decisions that affect JWST mission success.

The observation that there are no small JWST integration and test problems was not initially recognized by the Webb IRB, and this also may be true of others involved with JWST. It is a most important observation that will be apparent in subsequent Findings and Recommendations. It is caused by the complexity and highly integrated nature of the observatory. Specifically, it implies, as an example, that a very small human error or test anomaly can impact the schedule by months and the cost by tens of millions of dollars.

Each member of the Webb IRB believes that cost and schedule are important elements of a space project and must be responsibly managed. Throughout much of the life of a space project, cost, schedule, technical performance, risk and requirements can be responsibly managed without compromising mission success. All projects reach a point in their development where this trade can no longer be made without adversely impacting mission success. JWST has reached this point and must now be completed within the principle that mission success is the top priority and is more important than cost and schedule.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Northrop Grumman is being hauled in front of Congress to explain himself A few of the Congressmen suggested that Northrop foot the bill for the overrun, and the CEO politely told them to go frick themselves.

2019-2021: Is it over?

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: MARCH 2021

TOTAL BUDGET: $9.66 BILLION

Is that a bird? A plane? No, it's the US House of Representatives, here to cancel the project literally at the last minute! The JWST is fortunately saved, and, in a weird stroke of fate, fully funded. The final round of funding comes with a strongly worded letterbasically repeating the sentiment of the report from last year, calling everyone involved an r-slur but continuing to enable them anyway. The letter says that this is it, and that they're not getting any more money after this.

The telescope is finally put together, as the two halves of the spacecraft are mechanically (read: screwed in) together. This was originally scheduled to happen in 2007. The final test on the spacecraft, the thermal vacuum test, passes in May of 2019, and the spacecraft is ready to launch. All that needs to happen now is to ship it over to South America, where it will be launched by the Europeans.

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: OCTOBER 2021

There's nothing really to report here until the telescope is delayed AGAIN, this time by Covid, which I guess is actually understandable this time, and their best bet is October. Basically all that happens through October 2021 is that the scope gets (very carefully) shipped through Panama, without incident. It gets delayed AGAIN because of shipping delays, which makes me laugh, because it's just funny to think that they spent $10 billion dollars on this and then cheaped out on priority shipping. A lot of this involves waiting around for the launch window, because they can only achieve their orbits at specific times.

November-December 2021: They fricking WHAT?

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 18 DECEMBER 2021

TOTAL BUDGET: $9.70 BILLION

True to the very last minute, the JWST is continually delayed at every possible opportunity. November rolls around, and the Ariane V rocket that the JWST is set to launch on is prepped and ready on the pad. All that's left to do is to attach the thing, launch it, have it transit, and then unfold. It's out of our hands, the Europeans have it, they'll do fine.

So on the 25th of November, the Europeans drop the JWST as they're putting it onto the rocket.

The incident took place as technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adaptor, which would then be used to fix the telescope to the upper stage of the rocket. According to NASA, “a sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band” took place. The clamp band fixes the spacecraft to the launch adaptor and then releases in orbit, allowing the spacecraft to separate from the rocket. This unplanned release caused a vibration to travel through the telescope.

You've gotta be kidding me. They fricking what? They dropped it? A $10 billion dollar spacecraft and they drop it attaching it to the rocket. The launch is pushed back from the 18th of December to the 22nd, to ensure that everything still works.

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 22 DECEMBER 2021

They can't get the rocket to communicate with the spacecraft. It's gonna take a couple days to figure out, guys.

Bad weather on the day of scrubs the launch, and they decide to try again when it's cleared up.

ESTIMATED LAUNCH DATE: 24 DECEMBER 2021

All the visiting delegations went home for Christmas. As it turns out, so did a lot of the staff. We can't launch today guys, sorry. Let's try for tomorrow

Merry Christmas!

FINAL LAUNCH DATE: 25 DECEMBER 2021

In a shocking bounce of previous trends, the JWST launches successfully without a hitch. It takes 29 days for the spacecraft to reach it's operation position, unfold, and radio home.

Robinson quits immediately after JWST phones home. It was such a nightmare of a project that he never wanted to deal with the industry again. As far as I can tell, he's now happily retired.

Post Mortem

This was possibly the single most mismanaged project ever concieved, on top of already being one of the hardest too. This whole thing was a clusterfrick from start to finish, until literally the last possible minute. I'm pretty sure 90% of the people who worked on this don't ever want to see what comes out of it.

What a shitshow.

Greetings Dramatards :marseywave2:

I've had this idea of covering a large deal of controversial South African films, but none of them had any large enough substance to make a worthwhile Longpost on their own. So after about having collected about 10 of them which separately all felt mediocre, I had the :wolfidea: why not combine them all into a collection of short stories :marseyexcited::marseyfsjal:

South Africa has had a pretty controversial relationship with films, especially regarding the censorship of religion, race mixing, and the suppression of any Anti-Apartheid sentiment during the National Party regime, and especially ESPECIALLY anything regarding the Red Menace of communism. So compared to the cultural titan Burgerland and its Hollywood, we have always been insignificant and inconsequential regarding international fame for films, but that doesn't mean we don't have our fair share of turbo drama all the way since 70 years ago, regarding what Films were considered appropriate by puritan proto-boomers, and actual unironic fascist Afrikaner-supremacists having their influence on our tiny film industry's history.

In order of their appearance throughout history:

1899 - THE VERY FIRST PROPAGANDA FILMS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA (ANGLO-BOER WAR):

To understand what an electric theatre is, we 1st need to go back all the way to when the very 1st movies were introduced to South Africa, or at least the very 1st time when inventions which could reasonably be construed as counting as films or movies began in SA, because during this analogue to electricity transitional period there were a lot of weird-as-shit inventions going around from europe - where determining the boundary of what counted as a film from various types of moving picture devices counted as films, whether for entertainment or education was blurred.

But for South Africans, so far away from europe where the majority of these post-industrial marvels were springing up all over, the definitive 1st motion picture device provably used to portray motion pictures within South Africa itself was the Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope (invented by Thomas Edison) is an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. :marseytv::marseywatchingtv: That's right dramatards! Hope you strags appreciate our modern 170 inch OLED Plasma HDTVs because back in 1895, the earliest motion picture devices were these wooden boxed with binoculars welded, in which the users looked to see the short 30seconds - 1 minute fast spinning reels of incrementally changing pictures, through which a projector shed light straight into the eyeballz of the user.

And the pictures were tiny! And the machine had to be placed within a darkened room to properly function, and the moviegoer had to bend over hunchback like to view this. Yet, even still these type of devices were instantly world wide popular.

The first Kinetescopes in South Africa were opened to the public on 19 April 1895 in Herwoods Arcade on Pritchard and President Streets in Johannesburg - then a small town only nine years old. Despite its incredibly isolated location, SA was one first countries in the world to see and hear sound motion pictures.

https://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/97/227102.html

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/life/2022-05-06-native-ster-kinekor-celebrates-127-years-of-multisensory-cinema-in-sa/

Lingards Waxworks in Durban, who exhibited a number of mechanical novelties of the penny-in-the-slot variety, first showed them in August 1895. One of these was a Kinetophone. The Kinetophone was basically a Kinetescope, but WITH SOUND!

https://www.2oceansvibe.com/2019/08/13/this-cinema-in-the-alex-township-is-a-unique-piece-of-sa-history/

I mention all this to showcase that despite being isolated from the "civilized" world of europe, asia and burgerland, SA always found a way to have access to the earliest film and projection technology, mostly a result of all the powerful and wealthy Bongs residing in the Cape of Good Hope, and using their influence to import comforts and deluxe items from overseas. Thus South Africa would always be technologically capable of making films just as technically competent as their betters from Burgerland and eurolandia

https://thebioscope.net/2012/02/26/the-bioscope-guide-to-south-africa/

===================================================================

The next evolution of motion pictures to hit South Africa, was the Mutoscope. Essentially it was the exact same type of device as the Kinetescope, but was cheaper, lighter (to transport), simpler to built than the Kinetoscope, and marketed by the American Mutoscope Company, the quickly dominated the "Motion Pictures Market" and "coin-in-the-slot peep-show business", and ended the short 5 year reign of the Kinetescope.

In South Africa, the 1st Mutoscope was a peep show "containing flick-over books of photographs taken from Biograph films", and was installed in 67 Pritchard Street in Johannesburg - a demonstration that within the span of a mere 5 years than Joburg had evolved from a dusty town into a burgeoning metropolis inland of SA, and

another demonstration that the Johannesburg gold rush had in the span of a decade gained traction and momentum from increasingly international companies, nationals, and especially the British Crown, which was ever hungry for mineral conquest.

Joburg would explode in population every concurrent 5 years since the discovery of Gold in 1884, and it would be this international influence and foreigners coming into the Boer Republics (especially the British) which systemically escalated tensions into open warfare. The use of film, as a new medium for propaganda, was discovered and exploited during that war, and it caused some early rotten tomatoes critique sneed

The 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer was is worth its own set of Longposts, but what's significant to understand for dramatards in the Film-drama of this post, is that virtually everybody in South Africa, was divided on the war and its progress. It might surprise you to know that not all Bongs were bloodthirsty barbarians who reveled in the misery of the Boers, or jeered at the cruelty and neglect of Boer women and children wasting away into living skeletons, as held by the British army.

https://theconversation.com/concentration-camps-in-the-south-african-war-here-are-the-real-facts-112006

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/women-and-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902

Opposingly, not all boers or residents of the Boer Republics were unified in the declaration of the war against Bongland. Some boers wanted to become subjects of Britain and the Commonwealth, as many were eking out a shit poorcel existence in the middle of actual wilderness. At this point in time, the Pound was the most powerful currency on earth. Many boers themselves had become blind with the Gauteng Gold Rush, and had rushed to the Pretoria and Joburg cities to find their fortune and a better life individually, and comfort which a modern city-state like joburg offered many people, like sewage and flushing pottys, and being quite literally not in danger of being mauled by predators like lions and cheetahs.

The Boers were disunified same as the Greeks were against the Persian invasion, and when war was declared against Britain, only half of all Boers actually tool up arms against the English, and shockingly to any modern Afrikaners, between a 1/4 and 3rd of Boers actively AIDED the British throughout the whole war!

https://www.angloboerwar.com/forum/11-research/4591-films-about-the-boer-war

"Eight British commercial cameramen are known to have filmed in South Africa during the Boer War. William Kennedy-Laurie Peepeeson for the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Walter Calverley Beevor and Sydney Melsom (there are doubts over his identity) for Robert Paul, John Benett-Stanford, Edgar Hyman and Joe Rosenthal for the Warwick Trading Company, all filmed in the period up to the fall of Pretoria in June 1900. Sydney Goldman, Rosenthal's replacement, and C. Rider Noble (reportedly one of three filming for Walter Gibbons) remained to film the later stages of the war, but no film from this period is known to survive. Other film companies filmed only troops departing or returning to Britain, or resorted to `fake' recreations of battlefield scenes. (There is evidence of at least one amateur taking a cine camera to the war. Although film companies in other countries filmed local news stories relating to the war or produced fake war scenes, only British cameramen were present at the war itself."

No actual battle footage has survived, and only recreations and troop movements, and British soldiers disembarking from their ships in Cape Town were ever filmed to survive. Additionally all film during the war was produced by British photographers, and through the eyes of the British, thus innately biased. However, it needs to be said none of the actually war photographers were under the employ of the British Crown directly, and gave fairly NEUTRAL coverage regarding the war, with almost little to no political intentions behind the film, other than capturing the reality of at the time modern warfare against a near-peer enemy.

From the SA historical archives:

Here is an example of how a British Photographer covered everyday life of British soldiers, during a point in which they set up camp, did their daily duties and were busy repairing a bridge destroyed by boers.

Another generic Hospital and wounded scene, which you would not find out of place in WW1 or WW2 footage. Pretty neutral

=======================

What WASN'T neutral was propaganda films and recreations filmed under Lord Kitchener's directive to display the war favorably towards the British Crown. as you can imagine, for many of the Boer non-combatants in Pretoria and Joburg, or Cape Town, seeing the side they greatly favoured portrayed as losing for the 1st time on modern Mutoscopes was pretty sneed inducing.

Many fistfights would break out between British and Boer supporters in Joburg and Cape Town, outside the arcades in which Mutoscopes or Kinetescopes were housed. For the 1st time in history here, peeps could have strong feelings regarding film on a personally divisive shown topic. Film reels worth a mere 60 seconds of propaganda would cause such turbo rage that sometimes the arcades the Mutoscopes were housed in, would be trashed or burned down in anger by Boer supporters

================

https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/emily-hobhouse

By 1902 it would be the British's chance to be horrified or foaming. As rumours ran down the grapevine from the warfront in the Boer Republics, all the way back towards British civilians, both in the Cape, and back in England, those who followed international newspaper coverage would find themselves horrified one morning, by the frontpage images of emaciated Boer teenagers and women looking like skeletons with rubbery skin skin hanging from gaunt cheeks. This sparked outrage from the English public at what they deemed to be dehumanizing barbarism, unbecoming of the British Crown. And all of this was through the tireless efforts of Emily Hobhouse, who went through superhuman efforts to expose the Boer concentration camps, towards the wider British awareness. Remember boys, no internet or cellphones those days.

Hobhouse visited concentration camps set up by the British in the Orange Free State and Transvaal. When Hobhouse arrived at the camps, she was appalled to see the conditions in which the women and children were forced to live in. For several months Hobhouse attempted to improve the living conditions of the Boers and in many cases provided them with some supplies and clothing. Eventually, Hobhouse also attempted to voice her concerns to the British administration at these camps and Lord Kitchener (the British Supreme commander in SA) himself. However, Hobhouse was unsuccessful in her attempts to persuade the administration to make efficient changes and therefore, decided to travel back to England where she voiced her opposition to the concentration camps and reported on the appalling conditions in these camps. She focused her campaign on the liberal opposition, and in this way was instrumental in the government decision to send a group of women, under Dame Millicent Fawcett, to look at the situation, where they confirmed the horror to the wider public.

Among her campaigns, Emily would distribute fliers and photographs of the concentration camps in Cape Town, and back in England. She would also distribute primitive films which would horrify british civilians, when they looked aghast at Motion Pictures of Free State concentration camps from the peepholes of Mutoscopes and Kinetescopes. It was believed that regular and motion pictures were mostly responsible for igniting the British general public regarding the shortcomings of the Transvaal and Free State concentration camps.

A very similar set of events occurred during the Spanish concentration camps which housed prisoners in suboptimal and negligent manners.

https://www.pbs.org/crucible/tl4.html

The American media's portrayal of the horror conditions in which the Spanish housed the Cubans, would also turn international sentiment against the Spanish, and spur the Spanish to improve conditions for the prisoners they housed.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/concentration-camps-existed-long-before-Auschwitz-180967049/

When she attempted to return to South Africa in 1901, Hobhouse was arrested in Cape Town and sent back to Britain. She returned again after the war and helped set up home industries in the OFS and Transvaal to help rehabilitate the Boer families.

https://londontraveller.org/2016/03/04/the-anglo-boer-war-museum-the-womens-memorial-bloemfontein/

1910 - THE FIRST ELECTRIC THEATRE FOR COLOURED PEOPLE ONLY:

By 29 July 1909, the Electric Theatre in Durban was the first permanent theatre to be established in South Africa. Electric theatres was the name given to specific theatres by a british company which used Bioscopes to project motion pictures. By 1909 they had 5 bioscopes - which was the 1st modern incarnation of projectors displaying moving images towards a wall that seats were arranged against.

Already in this early stage, racial separation had become a notable feature of SA, similar to America, and Indians or coloureds were not always allowed to all of the white portions of cities or ablusions or entertainment. This sparked outrage among the coloured and Indian communities there in Durban, as they too had desire to see the new modern marvel of motion pictures.

Going around this: On 11 December 1910 the first Electric Theatre for "Coloured People Only" was opened on the corner of Grey and Alice Streets in Durban. The first programmes showed scenes outside the mosque in Grey Street.

And thus, for a time the discontent was stilled in the Durban community, this early set of events on racial discriminations would however spark early movements in the Coloured community from Durban, all the way to Cape Town, on having racial representatives embark on equal treatment under SA government.

Hilarious that it would not be housing segregation which sparked the earliest racial rights advocates movements in SA, but the inability to see movies because of their race!

1931 - RISING AFRIKANER NATIONALISM IN FILM:

In 1931, the Capitol Theatre in Pretoria opened. At the gala opening, South Africa's first "sound films" were screened, as in films with you know sound accompanying the moving pictures. Among these "sound films" was Joseph Albrecht's Sarie Marais and Moedertjie, which portrayed the English/British cultural and economic imperialism negatively (the desire to spread the British language, culture and influence even where they were unwelcome). At this moment in time, England was the dominant cultural force on earth, similar as to how Burgerland is currently. And Irish, Scottish and Boers were constantly sneeding at the fact that the English had such profound influence upon them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_nationalism

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/december-16-and-construction-afrikaner-nationalism

Afrikaans nationalism was emerging as a force. And modern film of the 1930 was a powerful tool regarding the diffusion of information and ideals over very large amounts of peeps.

Having gained official recognition in 1925, Afrikaans now flowered as a language. Poets, novelists and historians began to contribute to a growing archive of literature. A new translation of the Bible was lauded by DF Malan as the greatest cultural event in the life of the Afrikaner people. Writers such as Uys Krige, Elisabeth Eybers and WEG Louw published their first volumes of poetry. During the 1930s, Giliomee writes, ‘a new generation of Afrikaners sought to rediscover themselves through acknowledging both the heroism and the suffering of the war’.

Point is that, after finally escaping the thumb of British dominance, afrikaners went into total turbo overcharge with regards to finding their self identity. Unfortunately, similar to the Serbians finally having thrown their cuckoldry yoke of the Ottoman Turks off of their backs, the Afrikaner self-identity would become hyper extreme, to extent that their self actualization would lead into Afrikaner-supremacy and the notion that they were meant to lead South Africa under the hand of God. This mythos became so strong that it morphed Afrikaner sentiment in turbo racism against all of the other races occupying SA, and would be the foundational building blocks that led to the creation of Apartheid as a state of societal being 15 years later under the Verwoerd Administration, the architect of Apartheid.

It wasn't that Bongs or Boers weren't racist or discriminatory before the 1930s to blacks ad coloureds in SA, but with the 1931 Afrikaner Nationalism spike, it became a profound norm, and not just colonialist snobbery against perceived inferior african indigenious cultures.

The Burgerland film, Birth of a Nation, was screened for the first time in South Africa in 1931, for a very limited run of four nights only in the Johannesburg Town Hall. This was some sixteen years after its first release in the United States. In spite of this time gap, The Birth of a Nation had major consequences in South Africa, especially on South African film makers.

7 years later, In 1938, a film released, called "Building a Nation". It was very similar in structure and tone to its american counterpart, yet surprisingly much less racist and no caricatures of blacks. It was banal and true to historic events, though biased as through the eyes of settlers. It depicts South Africa from Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival at 'The Cape of Good Hope' in 1652 until 1910, when South Africa became a Union. It expanded the mythos of the Afrikaner by depicting the heroic struggle of the proto-afrikaners, to their identity forging through the Great Trek inland, and so on.

It is a source of supreme irony that the entire film is in English, and made by mostly english actors who portrayed the historic events of SA, including the Anglo-Boer as neutrally and truthfully, and yet Afrikaners had their spike of nationalism and anti-english sentiment in 1938.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Voortrekkers

Another film made in 1916, called Die Voortrekkers made a resurgence in the 1930s amongst all of the new Afrikaner literary types, who dubbed the silent film with post-production sounds. It basically depicted the dutch fricking off from Cape Colony to establish an autonomous homeland inwards towards the interior of SA, and the trials which these nutcases faced as they travelled difficult terrain and faced off against black tribes for territory. Once again mostly inoffensive when compared to America's "Birth of a Nation" with its blackface caricatures raping women

But the IMPACT these two films had was extreme. By 1930s the Union of South Africa had existed for 20 years, and many people had become used to the new order of things, with the alarming spike of Afrikaner nationalism, many liberal journos of the time criticized the filmmakers of stoking disorder in the Union of SA, the ironically mostly english filmmakers whom were only interested in making a historic drama. After the war, a degree of reconciliation developed between the Afrikaners and British, facilitating the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, under the leadership of former Boer Commandos such as Louis Botha and Jan Smuts.

Like Yugoslavia and its underlying ethnic tensions, these 1930s era Afrikaner films would stoke discontentment by accident or design amongst the european residents for the next decade. Lucky for us it only produced instead of ethnic genocide.

1939 - WORLD WAR 2 INFLUENCE ON SOUTH AFRICAN FILMS:

On August 31 the Germans invaded Poland and World War II broke out. The war accelerated Afrikaner nationalism and motivated the movement to produce culturally specific films.

Large contingents of the Afrikaners were very pro Germany, both as wingcuckery against Britain, and becuase the Germans had been the primary benefactor for the Boers in terms of weaponry and supplies all the way back in 1899. It was a sour pill for many Boers, that (once again) they would likely be mobilized against a nation they had no beef with, and had had good relations prior to, since they were part of the British Commonwealth, and would be mobilized alongside Australia and New Zealand against the Krauts. This caused divisiveness within Afrikaner communities as they were basically split against whether to aid England against the Krauts in yet again another World War.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4185756

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossewabrandwag

A strong movement against the british was spearheaded by the Ossewabrandwag organization under D.F. Malan, a far right Afrikaner Nationalist movement, which opposed South African participation in the 2nd Global war. Afrikaners formed the Ossewabrandwag in Bloemfontein on 4 February 1939, as tensions between Germany, France and England had already been brewing and the world was once again reeling on the brink of international war after Germany had absorbed Austria back in March 1938.

The Boer militants of the Ossebrandwag (OB) were openly hostile to the British and sympathetic to Germany. Of course in spite of this bravado, they were overwhelmingly insignificant in their ability to oppose Union of South African security forces. Members of the OB refused to enlist in the UDF (Union Defense Force) and sometimes harassed servicemen in uniform. This erupted into open rioting in Johannesburg on 1 February 1941; 140 soldiers were seriously hurt.

The Ossebrandwag had a military arm (die Stormjaers ) filled with veterans which engaged in sabotage against the Union government. They dynamited electrical power lines and railroads and cut telegraph and telephone lines.

The Union government cracked down on the OB and the Stormjaers, placing thousands of them in internment camps for the duration of the war. Even so many of the internees, including future prime minister B. J. Vorster, became future leaders of the ruling National Party during apartheid. Moreover, the internment aroused Afrikaner opposition to the government and helped the NP win the 1948 general election. The perceived cruelty in which the SA Union government treated those who opposed the 2nd Word War, inflamed tensions against the Afrikaners, especially since many of the Ossebrandwag were respected veterans and members of general Afrikaner society. By the time 1948 arrived, Afrikaners had outpopulated british whites in South Africa, and were far more unified in their collective identity.

As for films,

In 1936: The South African Censor Board is created, allowing the government to control the public's access to films and their content. This included anti-Union sentiment, and the censoring of any films which were deemed to undermine the Commonwealth global war efforts, such as inciting riots or rebellions within British colonies or Commonwealth states. Anyone so much as in possession of Ossewabranwag propaganda films, would be instantly interned.

The South African Censor Board's power expanded dramatically during WW2, basically turning the organization from a prudish organization which censored taboo topics against conservative sensibilities, and turning the SACB into a powerful propaganda tool, which would find itself in the hands of Afrikaners during the 1948 election.

The hardcore censoring of the Ossewabrandwag also expanded to any films which exibiting Afrikaner nationalism. This clumsy attempt of the Union government to stamp out Rebellion and dissent during the war years, only inflamed Afrikaners more. And Ossewabrandwag films became black market objects.

===========

The weirdest part about Afrikaner wingcuckey during the war years were their naivety of Jewish extermination by Nazi germany. So far away from Europe, Afrikaners didn't develop anti-Semitism to the degrees their mother-continent peers had. On average, afrikaners had positive feelings towards Jews, and reality only supported Nazi Germany to oppose the British Crown influence on South Africa, and because of germanic affinity.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4185756

Additionally, compared to Norwegian and French who sometimes willingly cooperated with the Nazi military forces during their occupation of these countries, Afrikaner dissidents had often little contact with German High command itself. Even more absurd was that German High command was seldom even aware of the OB, or that there were even any dissention available for exploitation in the British Dominion state, half a planet away from Europe.

The r-sluration didn't end there.

https://www.sylff.org/news_voices/12240/

In an almost inverted state, Afrikaner Far Right Wingers would have opposing racial hierarchies to their German fascist counterparts. Afrikaners considered Jews equal and fully white, and thus decisively above blacks, whereas Nazis deemed Jews the lowest of the low, and especially below africans.

By 1946 the Nuremberg trials were underway. And footage by Yank troops of the Genocide factories in Poland were being circulated globally by Anglo newspapers, and Projection companies.

https://hdec.org/ushmm-eisenhowers-foresight-protecting-the-truth-of-the-holocaust/

Afrikaner wingcuckery towards the Germans evaporated overnight. To see the jews suffer the same horror in concentration camps on a much deadlier degree, than that they had suffered in their mythos of the Boer war, basically woke up the population in shock. The rumours earlier in the war of Genocide camps were now proven by disturbing film reels, aired in South African motion picture theatres, as sent from the British and American troops which had recorded all the camps they had relieved under the Western alliance supreme commander, Eisenhower's direction, so that none may deny the reality of german concentration camps.

Support for the Ossebrandwag also evaporated overnight, and the organization became as toxic in association as that of the Nazis which they had wittingly or not supported during the war with their sabotage of national south african keypoints like bombing powerstations and so forth. Pro-OB films were destroyed, but sentiment against the Union gov still remained.

1957 - THE FIRST SOUTH AFRICAN FILM INDUSTRY SCANDALS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Back,_Africa

Lionel Rogosin (South African born, but lived and died in the USA) released his film Come Back Africa. It depicted live of africans in Townships under the new SA regime and won a bunch of rewards for artistic crap in Burgerland.

Rogosin's crew worked in secret, disguised as a commercial film unit making a musical, and were in constant fear of confiscation and deportation. It was one of the first non-musical films, if not the first to document the lives of black people in Africa using native languages.

The tiny film crew shot on location in the streets of Johannesburg, Sophiatown and in restricted areas prohibited to whites, where 50,000 African homes were being annihilated to make room for a white suburb called Triumph. Filming finished in October 1959, and Rogosin left South Africa. The editing was done in New York by Carl Lerner, who was receiving the rushes from South Africa.

The South African government attacked Come Back Africa and banned it from being shown in South Africa. It was one of the 1st films to have influence on the international stage regarding the controversy of economic and rights disparity between whites and blacks under Apartheid South Africa.

=============

Later that same year a film producer named Roger Bray pleaded for funds (mostly from Afrikaans churches) to make a film on the life of Paul Kruger (an influencial figure in SA history, and the guy whom the Kruger National Park is named after) and then, without shooting a frame of film, disappeared with the investors' money!

1964 - FILMING OF THE ZULU MOVIE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_(1964_film)

"On its initial release in 1964, it was one of the biggest box-office hits of all time in the British market. For the next 12 years it remained in constant cinema circulation before making its first appearance on television. It then went on to become a television perennial, and remains beloved by the British public"

Zulu is a 1964 British epic war film depicting the Battle of Rorke's Drift between the British Army and the Zulus in January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War. It shows how 150 British soldiers, 30 of whom were sick and wounded patients in a field hospital, successfully held off a force of 4,000 Zulu warriors.

[1] Banned in South Africa!

When released in Apartheid South Africa in 1964 the film was banned for black audiences (as the government feared that its scenes of blacks killing whites might incite them to violence).

https://web.archive.org/web/20180104155650/https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/film-zulu-50-years-classic-racist/

The controversy of the banning of the film Zulu for viewing by SA black audiences was pretty ironic.

It was one of the pivot points around which Zulu ANC black rights activists rallied, when they became aware of the film in the 1960s, and that ironically enough that despite Zulus being depicted, the actual ethnic group would not have the ability to view the movie itself! They desired to see a movie which depicted themselves.

The irony specifically, is when the Zulu movie was unbanned in1973, black zulus were dismayed to find their portrayel to be less than flattering

A jingoistic portrayal of the British colonial soldiers made the film a classic for many patriotic Britons who take delight in its portrayal of military bravery. But for Zulus, they are basically displayed at their worst, and by their own standards come across as foolish barbarians who throw themselves as meatshields against the much better British.

When the few zulus, whom had TVs back in the 1970-1980s finally got a chance to view Zulu, they were as dismayed at their ancestors' portrayel, as the Iranians were with the display of Persia in the film 300.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/15/film.iran

[2] Modern woke audiences hate Zulu movie!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11839119/Sir-Michael-Caine-hits-bull-t-suggestion-1964-movie-Zulu-incites-extremism.html

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/activists-want-zulu-screening-banned/

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/world/2018-06-26-ban-racist-zulu-uk-activists-try-to-halt-screening-of-war-movie/

on the other hand, Zulus having played their part in the movie extras crew actually enjoyed their participation in the creation of the Zulu movie,

=====(from article)

IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi‚ 89‚ appears in “Zulu” playing his maternal great-grandfather‚ King Cetshwayo kaMpande‚ and in an article after he attended the 50th anniversary screening in London in 2014‚ he said the experience was “deeply poignant”.

He wrote: “For several weeks in 1964‚ a unique community was created at the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains. It was a thousands-strong community of actors‚ film crew and extras.

“What made it unique was that‚ at the height of apartheid‚ it was a community of both black and white where everyone was respected and everyone treated one another as equals. There was no fuss about race‚ no discrimination‚ no bigotry. It was simply a community of people working together to recreate a part of history that held tremendous meaning for all of them.”

Buthelezi said the re-creation of the battle for the movie was a “milestone event” for the Zulu nation. “Thousands upon thousands of Zulu men found themselves re-enacting the deeds and glories of their own grandfathers‚” he said.

“It was therefore almost incomprehensible when‚ a year after its release‚ ‘Zulu’ was given a ‘D’ certificate by censors in South Africa‚ effectively barring black South Africans from watching the film. I was grateful that a special arrangement was made to at least screen it for the thousands of extras‚ in places like Mahlabathini‚ Nongoma and Durban‚" he said.

"At those screenings ... the audience was drawn by the pathos of the warriors and soldiers into what was‚ in the end‚ a very human experience.”

=====(end article)

1970s - APARTHEID GOVERNMENT BECOMES HAPPY:

During the period of 1970s onwards, it was known by historians as High Apartheid, the height of National Party power, and they had attempted to consolidate what films the people of South Africa were allowed to view, as they believed it would inspire in them to oppose the Union, to harbour communist sentiments, to have blasphemous sentiments (the regime was also conservatively religious), and most of all inspire the non-whites of SA to stand up against the Apartheid government.

Above is just a few notable famous SA films banned throughout SA, but from the 1970s onwards a shitload of unknown, now lost and lower quality films would be banned, confscated or destroyed by the Apartheid government. Art like music and movies were heavily under scrutiny, and heavily censored. Even if you were white, you were vulnerable for long long prison sentences if you criticized the government, or promoted racial-mixing. Literally having s*x with a black woman was banned, and a white gut could get long terms like 10 frickings for violating degeneracy laws. Filmmakers who depicted interracial couplings were also under the danger having their freedom confiscated along with their projects.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/banned-films-list-south-africa/

Also hilariously, I found out that Bongs refer to videos that are highly taboo, as" video nasties". Typically low-budget horror or exploitation films. lmoa

A lot of the most liberal filmmakers were critical of apartheid in their secret and unknown films.

1980 onwards:

The industry was further fragmented in the 80s: on the one hand there was a blossoming of independent cinema, much of it highly critical of apartheid. Films of this sort include The Road To Mecca, Die Storie van Klara Viljee, Manie van Rensburg's The Fourth Reich, and the Darrell Roodt trilogy: Place Of Weeping, The Stick and Jobman.

On the other hand, substantial tax concessions made investing in film an attractive option and a boom occurred in the commercials industry. Several hundred films were made, mostly inferior imitations of American films. The tax scheme collapsed by the end of the 80s.

The anti-Apartheid independent films such as Place of Weeping, Mapantsula and, Windprints, were seen by only a few South Africans. Even if they were not banned, the big distribution companies (Ster-Kinekor and Nu Metro) would not touch them.

1980 - THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY:

The Gods Must Be Crazy is a 1980 comedy film written, produced, edited and directed by Jamie Uys. An international co-production of South Africa and Botswana. Set in Southern Africa, the film stars Namibian San farmer Nǃxau ǂToma as Xi, a hunter-gatherer of the Kalahari Desert whose tribe discovers a glass Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an airplane, and believe it to be a gift from their gods. When Xi sets out to return the bottle to the gods, his journey becomes intertwined with that of a biologist (Marius Weyers), a newly hired village school teacher (Sandra Prinsloo), and a band of guerrilla terrorists.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/28/movies/the-gods-must-be-crazy-a-truly-international-hit.html

This is without a doubt, the best film ever produced in Southern Africa. It was an instant international success, and the greatest financial hit in SA history.

Despite its success, the film attracted criticism for its depiction of race and perceived ignorance of discrimination and apartheid in South Africa. The actors and main white cast appears indifferent to the differential treatment that whites and non-whites received in the movie, which uhhh it was kind of a reflection of South African society at the time. In Burgerland, the film was picketed by the National Conference of Black Lawyers and other anti-apartheid groups when it screened at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City.

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/28/arts/film-view-is-the-gods-must-be-crazy-only-a-comedy.html

The New York times in 1980 wrote that they felt the depiction of the Khoi-San as simplistic people content in their primitive ways. Many Burger journ*lists accused the movie of being Apartheid propaganda, intended to portray blacks and coloureds as content with their way of life under the NP regime.

But the New York rimes 1980 review, reflected that possibly the creators of the Gods Must Be Crazy movie were in fact being sincere in their portrayal of Khoi-San and other Southern African peeps, and that they were so indoctrinated in their segregataed society under Apartheid, that the director and writers didn't even comprehend they were racist.

Point is for the movie was amazingly funny and entertaining worldwide, whilst activist groups boycotted it and journos would write sneed articles about how much the Union of South Africa sucked.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/19/opinion/l-despite-the-movie-there-s-little-to-laugh-at-in-bushmanland-249688.html

Other controversies involved the reality that most Khoi-San were similar to Burgerland-Indians. In that their culture was utterly destroyed and that they were living in squalor in their Homelands as designated by the NP regime. By 1980s most of the wild game numbers had been drastically reduced, and Khoi-San could literally not life like their ancestoes anymore. There was less water, foraging grounds, and wild game than 100 years prior.

The complaint was that the Gods MUst Be Crazy portrayed a distorted and idealized reality of the modern remaining populations of the Khoi-San.

The following year, Canadian anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee called the film "an amusing but thinly disguised piece of South African propaganda in which a peculiar element of South African white mythology receives prominent attention". Lee wrote that "the notion that some San in the 1980s remain untouched by 'civilization' is a cruel joke. The San have been the subject of a century of rapid social change and especially in the last twenty years have been forced to endure all the 'benefits' of South Africa's apartheid policies in Namibia"

======================================

Further drama involved the Khoi-San main actor and star of the movie, N!xau Toma, not having been paid his fair share.

https://www.znbc.co.zm/news/meet-the-namibian-actor-who-helped-gross-60m-for-the-1980-film-the-gods-must-be-crazy-and-was-paid-300/

https://news365.co.za/gods-must-be-crazy/

This comic role endeared him to viewers especially those in Asia who were convinced that he makes three eccentric movie sequels. The movie grossed $60 million dollars and according to Jamie Uys, the South African director who discovered the actor, N!xau, did not know the value of paper money and he let his first $300 wages blow away.

Despite his inability to attract heavy financial resource in the first movie, he had learned the value of money and demanded several hundred thousand dollars before agreeing to a recast in the film. He insisted that the money was needed to build a cinder-block house with electricity and a water pump for his family comprising of three wives and their children.

When his film career ended, N!xau returned home to a newly built brick house. He tended his cattle and raised corn and pumpkins. He had a car for a while, but had to employ a driver because he had never learned to drive, The Namibian reported.

By the way the ! character indicates a click vocal for which the Khoi-San are famous for. The basic clicks are four: dental (|), alveolar (!), palatal (ǂ), and lateral (ǁ)

There's more movie and film drama throughout South Africa's history of banned and controversial films, but I think here is a good point to stop.

Hope some of you enjoy this

Summary:

Basically every doctor is given something called an NPI number by the federal government. Every state also gives out licenses to work there.

Garry said he went to Harvard, worked in New Mexico as a hematologist/oncologist and also said he had a 5 letter last name. I looked up all hematologists/oncologists who have ever been licensed in NM. (The NPI database shows this, you can search by taxonomy) None with a 5 letter last name went to Harvard. (He was challenging people to doxx him)

Like a month ago I asked him about this. First he said he didn’t have to be licensed in NM as he wasn’t practicing as a doctor, just overseeing the clinic. Then he said he changed his last name so it wasn’t actually 5 letters in the NPI system. Today he claims he was only licensed in CA. Btw maiden names are listed in the NPI database, pretty sure.

This is on top of him lying about donating marrow post cancer (not allowed) & some other crazy things like $100 tires for his lambo, pics of which he won’t post. Think there’s more car drama but wasn’t here for it and idc.

He also said he was terminal with Burkitt’s lymphoma and had 5-7 months but now says he’s in treatment and will go back to work soon (??).

When I called him out earlier he said to look up his former boss at some lab who had an NPI starting with the “T15”. NO NPI STARTS WITH T. They literally ALL start with 1.

I always assumed he worked in a lab but wasn’t a doctor since he has tons of pathology posts (diagnosing disease) and not much about treatment. Oncologists DO NOT DIAGNOSE.

Also I have NEVER EVER heard of someone who is both an ER physician and an oncologist (two separate taxonomies). There are oncologists for ICU/intermediate ICU etc who work at hospitals but they are NOT ER doctors.

He also frequently misspells HIPAA as HIPPA which is a privacy law that you literally see every fricking day even if you’re a secretary in healthcare.

Anyways it just never added up so I made the post, and he made a post saying I was jelly of not being the only cancer survivor (fair). Then he sent me a message asking for a truce.

I asked for proof such as his NPI number. He said no. I said I can’t help u unless I can verify someone with your demographics exists (like 7 letters of last name & oncologist in CA, so not even that specific)

Then I said I would take it down (to get him to confess). He then said would make a post where he admits he “fabricated” some stuff but still say he is a doctor. I gave him 48 hours. He’s doubling down. So now I’m posting again.

Original post I deleted:

Garry Chess: Fake Doctor? No hematologist/oncologist with a 5 letter last name has ever been license in NM who went to Harvard

It’s easy to search for yourself.

I asked him about it but it still doesn’t sit right with me, especially after people saying he lies about his cars etc. Garry says his NPI (national provider identifier, every doctor, dentist, PA, etc has one) is under his “old” (?) last name and he’s not licensed as he’s not practicing. The NPPES database includes providers with expired licenses, just FYI, so it’s a very convenient excuse he has changed his last name at some point.

He’s now saying he was licensed in CA and references someone whose NPI allegedly starts with T15. NPIs are 10 digits and start with 1. LITERALLY ALL OF THEM. They do not start with letters.

I think he’s actually a clinical director or similar LARPing as a doctor.

I hesitated to say anything just in case the cancer stuff was real but even that seems to be a changing story….

Idk about the car drama. Someone else can chime in.

Edit:

Lol

Edit 2:

Claims to have had Burkitt’s lymphoma 2x but donated marrow after first time.

Click here to see how strict the donation requirements are

That was first thing that got me really sus

Edit 3:

Okay so idk how many of us have gone through chemo but I did at 27 & otherwise healthy and I would almost fricking collapse in Target and have to sit on the bench in the pharmacy or lean on the cart sometimes with sweat pouring down my face so this is laughable. Sometimes I couldn’t even get my mail. My mom had to do my laundry bc I couldn’t physically carry it to the laundry room in my complex. Idk, maybe he’s a super human who could go hiking during a very intense chemo regimen (worse than the one I went through). Don’t doubt there are people who can but…. I’m sure most people’s bullshit detectors are off the charts rn.

Edit 4:

Just remembered…99% sure maiden names come up in parentheses when you search if someone updated their NPI info.

Daniel, 22, Lubbock TX

His other half overrode the financially savvy asian half

Self-rated - 6/10

Personal Life:

• "Barely 22"

• Why'd you go in to the debt?timestamp

  • "Well it's a long process"

• Went to a trade school, Universal technical institute

  • Automotive, certified in Volvos

• Friend encouraged him to come on the show, doesn't watch the show himself

• "Last year I got myself into a predicament"

  • "I moved out by myself and I was paying so much in rent I didn't really think it through so last year was a year where I really struggled and this year is a year where I really tried to step it up"

Career:

• A Volvo technician

• 52'000 a year pre-taxes

• Lives in Lubbock for his job

Expenses/Debts:

• Credit Card - $1'628

  • Not spending on it while paying it off, made $200 payment (way more than minimum)

  • 35% interest, talked them down to 18%

  • "I honestly don't remember how I got so high up in debt, I think I did pay off some student I think I paid off a class and it really set me behind and then I used my credit card to get a car"

    • Put the downpayment on the card

• Collections (1) - $972

  • Medical Debt

  • When he was living in Arizona, not working at the time, wasn't feeling well

  • Two years ago, not something that will repeat

  • Wants to pay credit card off before this

  • "They can't report medical debt on your credit if it's less than $500?"

  • Tried to negotiate but failed, only tried once

  • Been in collections since last year?

• Student Loans (4) - $12'000

  • Federal but he thought they were private

  • Around a $150 minimum payment

• Maco debt toolbox? timestamp

  • 18% interest rate

  • Toolbox itself was 6'500

  • Owes 9'500

  • Minimum monthly is $180

  • There's something weird later on where he thinks it shows up differently on his credit report timestamp

  • Missed a payment at some point?

• Car Loans (2) - $30'638

  • "I have two cards, I'm thinking about getting a third, a Tesla"

  • "Well you save on gas, yuh know, it's always nice to have three cars"

  • "I have one car, the other ones from my mom, it wouldn't hurt to get another one... it's always an investment"

  • "My mom needed a car so I bought her a car under my credit"

    • "She's in a financial situation as well"

  • Sion IM 2016

    • 19'000

    • "I'm pretty sure it's overpriced... it's just my mom really needed a car"

    • Put down $2'000

    • 13% interest

    • "That's the cheapest they had on the lot" "I was in a tight schedule with work"

    • 72 months

    • "Well at the end of it I'm not really paying for it, Mr.. pushes up glasses Hammer, my mom is" timestamp

      • The plan is once she buys a house she will buy the car off him with her credit?

  • Ford Focus 2019

    • 11'703 remaining

    • 103k miles

    • 2 for one deal with the other car

    • He's not sure about the term or the interest rate

    • 9'000 downpayment?

    • $312 minimum payment

    • 24.39% interest

• Trashes In n out and Red Robin timestamp

Savings/Retirement:

• High Yield Savings with Amex:

  • $866 => $1'066

  • 4% interest

• Investment Account

  • All part of the Acorns

  • $200 in one

  • $300 in another

  • No match

Budgeting Conversation:

• Under contract at job, can't leave until it's over, Feb of next year, plans to move back home after timestamp

• Putting money into a "Christmas Fund" at work

• Doesn't pay renter's insurance timestamp

  • Apartment is under his roommate's insurance?

  • Not on the lease, "they didn't approve me" (because of the collections)

  • 

My name @sneedman, but I have also existed within the dramaverse as @acebarbieboy. I'd like to come clean today, explain how I utterly fricked up my life, and give a cautionary tale to any even vaguely thinking of walking in my footsteps. My life is so destroyed at this point that the only solution is suicide.

THE GENESIS OF A DREAMER

As a child, I've always loved literature and reading. It's something that hasn't changed much, and I still voraciously read. When it was time for me to enter university, I did what everyone told me the smart choice was - study computer science. But I was also studying English at the time and I loved it.

I ended up majoring in English and dropping computer science. I didn't know it then, but this was the beginning of the end. I studied with passion, and had my postgraduate studies funded through scholarships. After getting my Masters, I started my PhD.

It was at this point that I paid attention to the fact that I'd need a job afterwards. No problem, I'll just become a lecturer! So the job applications began :)

MENTAL ILLNESS

I should reveal at this point that I've struggled with anxiety and depression my whole life. I've been on and off antidepressants and I've got fricking degenerate self-harming coping methods. They come and go, and during the worst times, I can get very absurd ideas about life and reality.

Sometime in 2022, I had one of those moments. In response, I cut off all contact with everyone I knew online, moved cities in real life, and resigned myself to a life of complete isolation. I was not done with my Ph.D. yet, but I was in my final year (I thought), and I no longer needed to be at the university in person. I had a job too. It didn't pay much, but it was enough for me to support myself.

The plan? Save up money for about a decade, then retreat to a life of isolation in the woods after establishing a homestead that is fully self-sufficient.

ASEXUALITY AND INCELDOM

I am very ugly, extremely dark, short (5 foot 2), and socially awkward. During my time studying English, I learned about gender theory, feminism, and queer theory. It was wonderful to learn about asexuality. The label fit me perfectly, and for years I wore it without question.

It was only this year, after some distance from university, that I discovered the bitter truth - I am not asexual. I am a very lonely incel. Unfortunately, there is no escape from inceldom from this position. No woman in the universe wants anything to do with a 5'2 mentally ill poor black man.

AFTER DISASTER

After my "live in the woods" delusions wore off, I realised I'm looking at a life of the following: no wife, no children, no family, no love, no intimacy. The darn asexuality meme snatched my 20s away from me. I also have no friends and I live in a city where I know nobody. This is what I wanted, right?

PLEASE DO NOT STUDY ENGLISH

Here's the thing - lecturer jobs don't exist anymore. Less than 10% of PhDs will get academic positions, and the rates of tenureship are even lower. Even if you're a stellar student, the odds of you actually making it into academia are so low, you might as well aspire to be a celebrity. If you have mental illness, are a brainlet, are incapable of networking, then you're REKT.

During my year of insanity, I produced no academic articles. I also fricked off my supervisor and made no contact to build any academic relationships. The result? Countless job applications to academics positions to no avail. To be clear, the jobs themselves do not exist, and when they do exist, I am facing competition as stiff as a boner.

Here's the zinger - my fricking PhD thesis got rejected and now I have to spend an additional year on it. Of course, I have to pay for this additional year because I no longer have funding so now I am paying for a qualification I know will not serve me at all.

WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU STUDY ENGLISH

You will not become a lecturer. You will not become a famous writer.

You will be pushed to your limits emotionally to earn a useless qualification. If anything happens to you during your post-graduate year - let's say a family member dies, you fall ill - it's over. You'll fall behind in publications and YOU'LL NEVER CATCH UP.

You will be exposed to ideologies that will turn you into a firehouse of "social justice" and you will alienate people in your life with your self-righteousness. It will warp your self-identity, and you will struggle to develop normal relationships with women. You will be forced to write and say deeply racist things.

You will be poor. You will be depressed. You will regret it severely. Nobody gives a shit about your English PhD. You offer no value to the world.

I fricked up so badly. I was literally studying computer science. Had just one fricking year left. And I decided to switch to English. Now I'm a poor, lonely, shameful incel with no hope in life or reason to live. I'm so ashamed of the squandered opportunities I had, the sacrifices my parents made just for me to become absolutely nothing in this world. I can't show my face and I know what the next step is. I'm afraid of it - nothingness is so horrible - it but I can't bear life any longer either.

It's beyond over. The only choice now is whether to pick the rope or overdosing via trepeline.