I’ll be real. The reason I haven’t updated lately is because the arcade job went south. Not in the way you think-- nobody’s in jail, nobody’s dead. But I did lose a friend.
I was looking forward to talking to you all about how we broke into an abandoned resort, decimated thanks to COVID, to recover a cursed arcade cabinet. It’s actually a pretty fun game called Crime Stoppers, a light-gun game developed by the now-defunct Yumegemu Entertainment (they got bought out by Capcom in 2003 or 2004). But when you play it around loaded firearms, those firearms have a tendency to spontaneously discharge. Not a problem in Japan, but in America, where there are 1.2 guns for every person, it’s a big yikes. We’ve been going around and disabling them for years by ripping out the board that actually has the game’s programming on it and…
It doesn’t matter.
It just doesn’t fucking matter.
There are times when I really, really hate this fucking job. It’s not even my real job; god knows it pays pennies on the dollar. My job at the hospital isn’t much better, populated by miserable people who commit so many HIPAA violations on a daily basis that I’m surprised the hospital where I work hasn’t been wiped off of the earth by a wave of lawsuits-- a sue-nami, if you will.
Therapist says I deflect trauma with humor. Guess she’s right.
After the job was done… We went to an IHOP. It was the only place open late enough that we could get food. There were about half a dozen other people from the Institute there. One of them was a friend I’d known pretty much since getting into this business-- let’s call him David. It’s not his real name, do you think we’re stupid enough to use our real names here?
David and I were… I’m not sure ‘thicks as thieves’ would be the right term here. He used to be a really mean son of a bitch; I remember having to hold back Cecilcy (who’s AMAB and now identifies as trans-NB) from punching him because David used to be fairly transphobic.
I’m a misanthrope, and part of that is because I believe people can’t improve in terms of morality. In terms of skill, you can learn and get better at something, but actually improving as a person is basically impossible. People always take the easy way out, and it’s always easier to fall back on bad habits, to crawl back in the cave, to live in blissful ignorance.
David is probably the sole exception I’ve met. No offense meant to any other members of the Institute, but we do have a tendency to wallow. After being yelled at by dozens of people that his attitude wasn’t cool, on top of some personal tragedies that I won’t discuss for his sake, he’s one of the few people I know that has actually shown meaningful improvement over the course of his life.
The job was… it didn’t go smoothly. We were trying to contain the board by ripping it out of the machine, but I kind of smashed it in the process. Squirrel’s confident we can get it back together since the memory chip that actually contains the game was intact, but David broached a subject that many members of the Institute have questioned during our time.
“Why not just destroy it completely?”
At this point, Squirrel and their brother Matt conveniently had to make a phone call. And David and I got to talking. His reasoning was that shit like this was actively harmful, and served no purpose. A lot of the stuff we studied did; why talk about the Hemaphytes like they’re a valid art movement instead of a glorified bunch of serial killers? Why not burn every copy of Adventures in Alorane we find immediately?
I reasoned that we couldn’t realistically do that to every piece of media we find; beyond the whole bracing phenomenon, there’s all sorts of stuff that’s propagated online to the point where it would be impossible to mitigate or undo the harm. LiveLeak dying only helped so much, but the Garrison Footage has popped up on dozens of porn sites, and while we don’t think mind_the_gap$.mov is doing anything beyond giving people non-anomalous nightmares, it can’t exactly be scrubbed from the internet by a group of 200-odd people working on a budget of shoestrings and prayers.
Then he brought up an uncomfortable topic.
People in RPG circles have probably heard of Mr. Welch’s List, or as it is properly known, “(X) things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG”; the last known count was at around 2500. Copycats have popped up to the point where there’s a Tv Tropes page about them; there’s one dedicated to XCOM, one to the MCU, one dedicated to Shipgirls (I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to know)... basically if a fandom exists, assume someone has made a Welch list. (Or a Skippy’s List, apparently?)
He brought up a list that falls under our purview. “Things Mr. Drake Is Not Allowed to Do in [REDACTED]”. The redaction is there because I don’t want to call out the fandom associated with it. The Drake List is a fairly minor anomaly, all things considered; the person who wrote it somehow made it so that the entries on it are burned into your memory. Fairly harmless, all things considered.
But there was a secondary component we weren’t aware of until a couple of years ago. A second half of the list, as it were, one that the original person who wrote it would send to… to children. While it doesn’t have a name officially, we’ve termed it the “Things Mr. Drake Is Allowed To Do To You” list. It’s sickening, and I don’t want to talk about it; the man who wrote it is somehow still free, likely because he can coerce his victims to consent.
Inarguably, the world would be a better place without the list. We technically have the means to remove the first half of it from the internet, but it would be a logistical headache that would essentially be an all-hands-on-deck situation for the Institute, an expungement that would have to be approved by the Institute’s Board.
I’m for media preservation in general, no matter how harmful it is. I realize that’s not the best viewpoint to take when your job is literally to study media that can kill people, but in my eyes, it’s like studying diseases; we have to understand what’s causing it before we can make the vaccine.
It got heated after that. I barely remember what was said, but I remember it was stupid. I would like to think I told him that he was an idiot if he thought removing the public list would undo, or even mitigate, the harm that it did, but in all honesty, everything I said to him was a blur. I tried making a point about how, if we wanted to talk about harmful media, we should be destroying every copy of the Bible we find, and taking flamethrowers to Harry Potter.
I’m not very good at rhetoric. My friend Dora (not part of the Institute) says it’s a weakness of mine, and I’m hoping is a flaw in skill rather than a flaw in morals; if it isn’t, then I’m kinda fucked.
Eventually, I told him to go to hell and left. I didn’t drop below 50 until I got back into my hometown in Wisconsin.
I was looking forward to talking to you all about how we broke into an abandoned resort, decimated thanks to COVID, to recover a cursed arcade cabinet. It’s actually a pretty fun game called Crime Stoppers, a light-gun game developed by the now-defunct Yumegemu Entertainment (they got bought out by Capcom in 2003 or 2004). But when you play it around loaded firearms, those firearms have a tendency to spontaneously discharge. Not a problem in Japan, but in America, where there are 1.2 guns for every person, it’s a big yikes. We’ve been going around and disabling them for years by ripping out the board that actually has the game’s programming on it and…
It doesn’t matter.
It just doesn’t fucking matter.
There are times when I really, really hate this fucking job. It’s not even my real job; god knows it pays pennies on the dollar. My job at the hospital isn’t much better, populated by miserable people who commit so many HIPAA violations on a daily basis that I’m surprised the hospital where I work hasn’t been wiped off of the earth by a wave of lawsuits-- a sue-nami, if you will.
Therapist says I deflect trauma with humor. Guess she’s right.
After the job was done… We went to an IHOP. It was the only place open late enough that we could get food. There were about half a dozen other people from the Institute there. One of them was a friend I’d known pretty much since getting into this business-- let’s call him David. It’s not his real name, do you think we’re stupid enough to use our real names here?
David and I were… I’m not sure ‘thicks as thieves’ would be the right term here. He used to be a really mean son of a bitch; I remember having to hold back Cecilcy (who’s AMAB and now identifies as trans-NB) from punching him because David used to be fairly transphobic.
I’m a misanthrope, and part of that is because I believe people can’t improve in terms of morality. In terms of skill, you can learn and get better at something, but actually improving as a person is basically impossible. People always take the easy way out, and it’s always easier to fall back on bad habits, to crawl back in the cave, to live in blissful ignorance.
David is probably the sole exception I’ve met. No offense meant to any other members of the Institute, but we do have a tendency to wallow. After being yelled at by dozens of people that his attitude wasn’t cool, on top of some personal tragedies that I won’t discuss for his sake, he’s one of the few people I know that has actually shown meaningful improvement over the course of his life.
The job was… it didn’t go smoothly. We were trying to contain the board by ripping it out of the machine, but I kind of smashed it in the process. Squirrel’s confident we can get it back together since the memory chip that actually contains the game was intact, but David broached a subject that many members of the Institute have questioned during our time.
“Why not just destroy it completely?”
At this point, Squirrel and their brother Matt conveniently had to make a phone call. And David and I got to talking. His reasoning was that shit like this was actively harmful, and served no purpose. A lot of the stuff we studied did; why talk about the Hemaphytes like they’re a valid art movement instead of a glorified bunch of serial killers? Why not burn every copy of Adventures in Alorane we find immediately?
I reasoned that we couldn’t realistically do that to every piece of media we find; beyond the whole bracing phenomenon, there’s all sorts of stuff that’s propagated online to the point where it would be impossible to mitigate or undo the harm. LiveLeak dying only helped so much, but the Garrison Footage has popped up on dozens of porn sites, and while we don’t think mind_the_gap$.mov is doing anything beyond giving people non-anomalous nightmares, it can’t exactly be scrubbed from the internet by a group of 200-odd people working on a budget of shoestrings and prayers.
Then he brought up an uncomfortable topic.
People in RPG circles have probably heard of Mr. Welch’s List, or as it is properly known, “(X) things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG”; the last known count was at around 2500. Copycats have popped up to the point where there’s a Tv Tropes page about them; there’s one dedicated to XCOM, one to the MCU, one dedicated to Shipgirls (I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to know)... basically if a fandom exists, assume someone has made a Welch list. (Or a Skippy’s List, apparently?)
He brought up a list that falls under our purview. “Things Mr. Drake Is Not Allowed to Do in [REDACTED]”. The redaction is there because I don’t want to call out the fandom associated with it. The Drake List is a fairly minor anomaly, all things considered; the person who wrote it somehow made it so that the entries on it are burned into your memory. Fairly harmless, all things considered.
But there was a secondary component we weren’t aware of until a couple of years ago. A second half of the list, as it were, one that the original person who wrote it would send to… to children. While it doesn’t have a name officially, we’ve termed it the “Things Mr. Drake Is Allowed To Do To You” list. It’s sickening, and I don’t want to talk about it; the man who wrote it is somehow still free, likely because he can coerce his victims to consent.
Inarguably, the world would be a better place without the list. We technically have the means to remove the first half of it from the internet, but it would be a logistical headache that would essentially be an all-hands-on-deck situation for the Institute, an expungement that would have to be approved by the Institute’s Board.
I’m for media preservation in general, no matter how harmful it is. I realize that’s not the best viewpoint to take when your job is literally to study media that can kill people, but in my eyes, it’s like studying diseases; we have to understand what’s causing it before we can make the vaccine.
It got heated after that. I barely remember what was said, but I remember it was stupid. I would like to think I told him that he was an idiot if he thought removing the public list would undo, or even mitigate, the harm that it did, but in all honesty, everything I said to him was a blur. I tried making a point about how, if we wanted to talk about harmful media, we should be destroying every copy of the Bible we find, and taking flamethrowers to Harry Potter.
I’m not very good at rhetoric. My friend Dora (not part of the Institute) says it’s a weakness of mine, and I’m hoping is a flaw in skill rather than a flaw in morals; if it isn’t, then I’m kinda fucked.
Eventually, I told him to go to hell and left. I didn’t drop below 50 until I got back into my hometown in Wisconsin.
#
Why the vent piece, you might ask? God knows why. This blog is my outlet, and I feel bad for not posting for a month. People have apparently been worried about me, so this is me just. Writing for the sake of it.
I’ve listened to music that’s gotten me hospitalized. I’ve had to help photograph paintings that have survived fires that destroyed families. I once had to read a book that told me, in excruciating fucking detail, what my fucking sociopathic redneck neighbor did to the cats he caught on his property.
This has made me feel worse than any of that. Because now, I realize he was right.
This list, this fucking list, is on the verge of being pulled down, but I can’t even express my support for it without looking like some kind of hypocrite. It’s not like it’ll accomplish that much; it’s been adapted into other forms by now (I think the monstrous son of a bitch was trying to sell individual entries on it on T-shirts for a while) and he’s still going to be able to exert control over people who read it.
David, on the off chance you read this: you were right. I’m sorry I wrecked everything over this. You know how to contact me if you don’t think I’m a complete asshole.
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