Promiseland

[Fetian]

So last night I was up later than I intended, because I uncovered A Mystery and wanted to find out what the hell was going on

To start with, I was messing around with a website that recommends music based on music you already like, and it recommended Robert Hallow and the Holy Men, and it was right, I did like them. 'This has Amazing Devil vibes', thought I, and then thought no more of it for an hour.

So, I'd found them on Soundcloud, and saw an indication that it was on Apple Music, but couldn't find it on Bandcamp. And there was only one album on Soundcloud but I wanted to know if there was more anywhere, because sometimes artists will start off on Soundcloud but stop using it after a while, so it'll only have their earliest stuff -- but as I was looking around, something strange was going on. I couldn't find anything on this band. Like, I found people talking about them, but no website, no twitter, no youtube, no presence on the internet from the band itself. I found links to a Bandcamp that doesn't exist anymore, and I looked around at the articles and interviews and found links to an also dead instagram account-

What the fuck happened with this band, thought I.

I eventually uncovered a couple of tumblrs, one of which the most recent post was an ask that went something like "Given everything that's happened with Robert Hallow, are you going to delete this tumblr?" and that linked to the other, which was something like "Here's everything I could find out about what happened with Robert Hallow"

What the fuck happened with this band, thought I.

So the short of it is this: Discord.

The less short of it is that there was an official Robert Hallow and the Holy Men fandom discord, and Robert Hallow himself was a member and he would interact with the fanbase. The concrete accusation is that it came out that he heavily underpaid the artist who designed his album cover and his merch, a less concrete accusation is that he was often inappropriate to underage fans, and an accusation that no one will go into details about that actually led to the Disappearance of Robert Hallow is that a fan came to the mods of the discord with something that led to them kicking Robert Hallow out of the discord and deciding to delete the discord 'in 24 hours'

"That sounds like it must have been a serious accusation" you are probably thinking -- just you wait.

Because Robert Hallow wasn't able to defend himself*, he posted a video to his instagram, which "outed" the person who came forward to the mods (there is disagreement on exactly how private this information was in the first place), so that got taken down and he made another video in which he said he was deleting the band's social media presence in its entirety (and, presumably, its bandcamp and patreon). He was visibly distressed and emotional enough in this video that the fandom was genuinely concerned for his safety, but he went through with it and no one has, as far as I know, heard from him since.

Meanwhile in all of this sleuthing, I also started digging up accusations against the Robert Hallow and the Holy Men Discord Mods.

So, to start with, you remember how I said Robert Hallow and the Holy Men has Amazing Devil Vibes? Yeah -- he was a member of Amazing Devil. He's listed as an electric guitarist on The Horror and the Wild... but he ain't on Ruin. And there was heavy, heavy overlap in the fandoms between the two bands, to the extent that when you see the one mentioned you'll pretty much always see the other mentioned, and also the mods in the two official discords are all good friends with each other. So the mods of the Robert Hallow discord would treat the mods of the Amazing Devil discord preferentially, and vice versa.

And there was, I'm gathering, a lot of preferential treatment going on. There are all kinds of accusations against these mods, of them deleting channels without warning, of them reprimanding people for doing the same things they do (being horny, mostly, from what I gather), of them deleting comments. When I was first digging into it, I was thinking people were probably complaining about nothing -- but no, these fandom discords are apparently the worst sort of fandom discords out there and the mods are awful, power-hungry hypocrites.

So, there's a smoking crater now where the band once was, aside from soundcloud and apple music. And it's good music, so it sucks that there's not likely to be more of it, but also those accusations against Robert Hallow do hang heavy.

Meanwhile, I also found out that Daniel Kahn came out with a solo album sometime last year, so I'm going to have to get that when I can.

 
*Genuinely don't know what preferred pronouns are, here, I have gathered that he identifies as "gender mysterious" and I saw people using both "he/him" and "they/them". So, just going with "he/him" because I gotta choose one or the other to refer to him with

[Fetian]

It is @Sorcyress's birthday! And they request every year that people eat ice cream (or a reasonable replacement) to celebrate their birthday, and Lee and I wanted to go out and do something today, so we went out and did that. We took the train into the city, walked a few blocks to an ice cream place (where they have spoons that change color when you make them cold, which is extremely cool and we will definitely be going back some time), then walked a few more blocks to a park where we sat and ate ice cream and talked about whatever. And sent a selfie to Sor, per celebrations.

After that we walked around the small lake in the middle of the park, and looked at ducks and geese and dragonflies, and we probably shouldn't have because we ended up doing just a little too much walking, but it was nice. And then we walked back to the train and went home.

It's a gorgeous day and I'm really glad we were able to go out. I love living in an area that lets me do things like this, and I really want to take more advantage of it.

[Fetian]

Also we found this graffiti

0828221242.jpg

[Fetian]

I love a gay man who looks like a middle-aged aunt

[Fetian]

Last night I had A Thought, which was that it's probably possible to set Twine up to display images in a way that will display them both in testing and in an exported build, by having Twine exist in the same orientation from the image as the build exists in the same orientation as the image where the build is getting hosted -- eg "Twine" exists in a folder with "/images/image.png", the build exists on a server with "/images/image.png", possibly with a little bit more fiddling than that. I am still almost positive this would work, but-

I then spent a good chunk of today trying to get non-browser Twine to work on Linux, and this turns out to be A Nightmare of a task. For a bunch of reasons that aren't worth going into in detail, but in the end it turns out you can't run Twine offline from a Linux box? I Do Not Understand. And it's not worth it anyway because the Linux build is way behind the browser (and Windows) build. And also I'm again annoyed that they turned their support forums read-only and redirect all questions about it to a different site that is hard to navigate and also doesn't work on my out-of-date machine (I should get around to updating one of these days but I do not want to), so you can't really find questions about current builds, which is annoying. And of course of course the main site tries to push you toward discord for all your support needs ugh.

On the other hand, a couple days ago, I did find out (touch wood) how to manage continuous updates for an already-published game, which was the main block on working on eg SnowRPG, so I'm mulling that over a little, and I've poked a little at Dating Simulator

I want to complain about The State Of The Internet vis a vis website design but I do not have the energy for that, so I'm just going to say that I'm annoyed at The State Of The Internet and leave it at that for now. The internet was once so full of promise and now it's full of the same website over and over again. I just want a site that will let me drag and drop assets and export the CSS and HTML files that will make a website look like what I designed; this is apparently too much to ask.

[Fetian]

Time for a rant

I hate hate hate hate very much that "aphantasia" caught on

When I was a kid, "do you think in pictures or in words" was a common getting-to-know-you question. It turns out that people think in all kinds of different modalities! Hate extremely much that all of them except visual get treated as lesser, as lacking something, and I hate very extremely much that it's the people who ""have aphantasia"" who are doing that to themselves. What about people without an 'inner voice', why aren't they considered defective, why aren't they "without imagination".

I'm not a visual thinker, I can't picture things in my head. Call me "aphantasic" and I'll break your fucking nose.

[Fetian]

I have been having such nasty insomnia lately

[Fetian]

Tonight has been that insomnia of waiting for Something To Happen, and so I have the continual impulse to check for if the something has happened yet, which makes it difficult to sleep.

(Not a specific something, just Something, Somewhere)

[erikavonkaiser]

I have been having such nasty insomnia lately

I read this as "anosmia" and was really puzzled.

Hope your brain stops doing the thing and lets you get some proper sleep soon, though!

[knightofcups]

I hate hate hate hate very much that "aphantasia" caught on

I have been noticing this become more and more common a thing people say, and it seemed like it was fairly new?

It should be obvious I am fascinated by the way people's brains work, and how differently they do, but hearing "aphantasia" makes it sound like a disorder, so it's honestly thrown me for a loop. I had thought that the word itself was something clinical-- an actual disability that effects brain function-- as opposed to "I don't think in pictures."

Your post was helpful, b/c I didn't realize it's just the same thing (ish) with different words.

I know there's value in having names for things, and I love to label my own bullshit, but this one has been super confusing to me.

I dislike pathologizing variance in human brains.