sarah zedig! 🍉🐐

I'm really sorry this keeps happening. Once or twice would be bad enough, but I can't imagine what you're going through. 💙

us?

christ i am so fucking sorry for what you two have had to go through. i said this to glip before but i'll say it to you too: as a neutral third party here, every single thing i've seen flung at you two has been obvious absolute fucking nonsense, shitstirring, kiwifarms-ass high-school-ass bullshit. neither of you deserve this

I wish you the best..

For what it's worth, my thought was similar to yours. There's this tendency now I have noticed in the culture of left/queer spaces where once someone does A Bad™ according to X, they are now themselves A Bad™ for all time and forever and everything is justified when fighting A Bad™, somehow including collaborating with actual fucking Nazis and other Actual Bads™.

Whether the original sin was ever even true never seems to enter into anyone's mind, and the constant deluge of Bad Reports itself almost feels like it adds collective credibility to this shit? Like because there's a new story about this or that Notable Person™ being a Bad Now like every half-day or so, the fatigue of pessimism and cynicism kicks in and is just like "WELP I guess that's believable, everyone fucking else is these days".

I dunno, it just fucking sucks and I don't know how to stop it, I haven't even stamped out that impulse in my own head let alone anyone else's, even after having been on the wrong side of it once or twice myself. Shit just fucking sucks, and I'm sorry. 😔

the sensory image of a brain with wasps in it is terribly unpleasant. which i guess is exactly what you were going for…

anecdotally, i have a super queer friend who has basically given up on trying to make new friends, or especially to form new partner relationships, with other people in highly queer spaces. they’ve thoroughly dealt with all their own (plentiful) abuse trauma over the course of a few years, but they find time and time again that there are simply too many other people with unprocessed trauma in these spaces, and they just can’t handle it. similar stories to yours have been regaled to me by them, like a then‐friend who one day suddenly blew up at them and their nesting partner, claiming that actually said nesting partner is deeply abusive (they’re not) without any real reasoning or provocation. and so they had to let this person go from their lives because they do not have the capacity to try and deal with that. (nesting partner tried to reason with them on their own, but without success, unsurprisingly.) they were deeply sad about losing this friend, but they’ve also learned over the course of Several such incidents that it’s easier to passively watch these people leave in a storm rather than to try and control the weather, so to speak. they’ve never “recovered” the relationships that get destroyed in this way, so they save themselves the pain and exhaustion instead. further, they question whether a feedback loop has established itself in regards to this, which they also know they cannot dispel, and so they just keep people from getting into the loop instead.

idk, fixing people is extremely difficult, and that’s when it isn’t outright impossible. but to my friend’s credit, the line of work they’re pursuing now is one to help people manage their trauma and disabilities — perhaps because it’s the only solution they see to this, so they want to do their part to help. they just have to do this from behind an employee‐client relationship, where the risks are greatly diminished and the boundaries much better‐defined, for their own sake.

as a distant observer, i’ve also seen this happen in groups of people where they’re both online friends and career collaborators, which makes these explosions publicly visible. even if the callout posts don’t make their way to your eyes, it’s hard to miss because the people on the receiving end of the blast end up shutting down their online presences for at least a lengthy spell after having their online careers and mental health completely totaled. the fallout from these cases lingers much longer because of the internet’s memory, which has tragic and wholly unnecessary professional consequences.

I don't really have anything useful to say. I don't know what could possibly be helpful to say. but, I feel for you and want to send some sense of compassion, so. here's a lobster emoji giving you a mending heart emoji 🦞 ❤️‍🩹

For whatever value it might have, hearing about the reality of your plight from a friend who was, maybe still is, in orbit of your collective sphere knocked me straight out of being one of those same folks that started out squeamish about hearing your names - yours and Glip's, I mean - and now I just wish I could yell at the people who steered me so wrong before. I'm in y'all's corner.

At my most optimistic I would suggest that this is a consequence of hurt people hurting people: folks in queer spaces get hurt by the outside world, they feel the need to protect themselves from anything else that can hurt them, and anyone in said spaces perceived as doing harm, even when they're not, has to be cast out, too - and then there's the weight that comes with maybe being wrong to have done that. The walls a person puts up to say they didn't just throw a fellow sheep to the wolves.

Maybe I'm just blowing smoke, I dunno, but it feels to me - having had a friend for a while (not anymore) who was very much in this same vein - like that's how this has all unfolded: not wanting to show weakness, vulnerability, human imperfection...even the slightest whiff of something going bad means someone has to be thrown out to make the smell go away, and if it just gets worse, well...bury them, and maybe then the problem will be solved.

i lost a nice-paying job and a promising career prospect over a situation kinda like this one. i lost my housing and was homeless for a month because of another situation kinda like this one! and every time i've ever tried to explain the events in question, i get responses ranging from "sounds like you had a rough time" to "i think you need to log off." the thing that drives me up the fucking wall is the sheer lack of interest tinged with a sting of skepticism that makes you feel like a conspiracy theorist. it's heartbreaking! especially when it feels like the only people who would hear your story are the ones who would weaponize it against you or someone you know!! the last three years especially have felt so bleak in this respect.

i dunno! shit sucks. maybe someday someone will figure out how to actually talk about it to a general audience

❤️❤️❤️ I've narrowly avoided situations like this in the past, more or less by luck, and now tend to stay away from a certain vibe of person (which sucks, bc I know I like that sort of person in general).

No advice otherwise, just love and support. Shit can get weird and fucked, but it is extremely clear that y'all are the ones in the right in every situation I've seen, and the other person is just being bafflingly cruel.

You know who else got birdfruited by those they should have been able to rely upon?

Fromsoft, the developers of Dark Souls.

Obviously it's not the same level of horrible, but I'm noting it because I fell for the birdfruiting in that instance.

Specifically, (some) hardcore Dark Souls fans will insist that the game is sneaky and deceptive, and that the only way to get anything done in it is extreme paranoia and to always do the opposite of what the game tells you (because doing what it says will kill you) but not the exact opposite because it sometimes uses reverse psychology, et cetera, et cetera. There's a part in the very beginning of Elden Ring where you have to jump down a pit to find the combat pretty-much-a-tutorial, and it's glowy and there's an NPC next to it that tells you to go there, so naturally I (and many others) assumed that it was a trick and you'd die of fall damage or something. Almost nobody attempted the basically-tutorial because of the devs' (undeserved) reputation, and many suffered for it.

I was (and I'm embarrassed to say this, but it's needed for full honesty) one of the people who kept arguing that when people posted links to wiki articles and such, and quotes from the devs saying "that's the tutorial" and so on... I went "why should I believe that? We all know the devs take pride in tricking players, so why would we assume that part is any different? If they say they're not lying, that's proof that they ARE lyi- wait a second, this line of reasoning seems familiar. EW!"

oh yeah. I've been fortunate enough to dodge most of the fallouts from these particular explosions but they are Absolutely a thing and it drives me up the wall that a lot of marginalized folks would rather shove their heads in the sand (or shove people out into the sand, rather) than confront it.

I've become hypervigilant to certain... vibes/traits in people, things that send up red or at least yellow flags for me and cause my instincts to go "keep a polite distance/do Not get involved." and what I hate is that a lot of those vibes/traits are things you would expect in trauma survivors! hell, a lot of them were things that I was working through hardly some years ago, too! and I only got better because I had a good social circle. I want nothing more than to pay that forward, to be the unconditional support and love that everyone deserves, but I just... can't. I just can't cope with the feeling that someone is a ticking time bomb, that even if I walk on eggshells around them things might suddenly blow up and all the care I've poured into our relationship will amount to nothing. (which, again, I hate because I was that person, and the same people my instincts tell me to keep a distance from are also the same people my heart tells me to reach out to.)

it's also why I ended up going into corporate hell for my career. for my sanity, I needed to have a livelihood independent of online marginalized community, even if it meant pouring ten hours a day into work that was rotting my soul from the inside out. at least I won't starve, at least the people I love won't starve, even if our communities decide to turn us out into the cold. how sad that the whims of capitalist hell feel more bearable than the whims of community.

aside from "hurt people hurt people" as others said, this whole "exaggerate regular mild situations to seem like serious crimes" phenomenon is a big cultural thread uniting everyone. like the whole "groomer" nonsense coming from conservatives is that too. :/

i'm so sorry you're going through this. you're a good person and you deserve better

It's wild to me that I have a certain set of friends who will get angry at me for supporting you and glip, where "supporting" means "not believing the same three weird bullshit things that are easily disproven." I'm supposed to be suspicious of you specifically because you've been "caught multiple times," but all of those times you've been "caught" are just more nonsense where people are begging the question (in the original meaning of the phrase) or the like.

I see this shit happen to so many people all the time. And it keeps happening to them, because everyone wants a bogeyman for everything wrong in their lives.

The saga of West Elm Caleb is a pretty good example of this exact phenomenon. Like, here's this dude who apparently had serially dated and ghosted people, and was a TERRIBLE MONSTER for doing it, but then it turns out that the original person being "called out" was just completely made up, and other people latched on to this person who had the misfortune of being named Caleb and working at West Elm, and then they got massively canceled en masse as a result. All for something that isn't even that bad, if he were even doing it, when he wasn't.

People are just really awful at trying to find the villain of the day. I think that people fundamentally feel like they need to take responsibility for righting injustice, but their sensors are a bit off and they focus on convenient targets that they can take down because they wouldn't be able to meaningfully affect actual villains.

Man, it's a small world. I had no idea who "Glitched Puppet" was, so I looked into it and hey, no, I actually interacted with this person at one point; they were in an IRC channel I had with some of my other friends for a few weeks and they made some art per commission for us. (They draw really cute Jirachies and Manaphies!) They also went by Purple Kecleon at the time, I think; that's what got me to make the connection. This was over a decade ago, for the record.

Anyway my point is I don't remember anything but positive interactions with them so the apparent hate brigade is baffling to me. I'm kind of inclined to side with ya'll because of the things other people in this comment section are saying which basically boils down to "leftists hurting leftists because leftists are the only thing other leftists can influence meaningfully". It's been a thing for a while but it's only really recently that I became cognizant of how ubiquitous it was.

...damn, did I interact with YOU a decade plus ago and forgot I did? My old username was Tatrion, or maybe just simply "Manaphy" at the time, I don't remember. Not that the latter is very helpful but the former was/is pretty unique even if I kinda hate thinking about that username now lol

Not to make this post about them about me instead, but making that connection got me pretty invested.