Let me be clear, as much as I want to just respond CRY MORE, BABIES I object to the use of the word ‘doxxing’ in this case.
I have BEEN doxxed. I have been stalked online. I have had people go through my journals and my pictures to try to identify me for malicious purposes. I have had people search me on court websites to try to find the charges I filed against an ex when he stole from me, for the purposes of trying to humiliate me about an online roleplaying game. (No, really.) I’ve had people try to match up pictures of the flowers outside my synagogue and the building in the background with pictures of synagogues in the Philly area to try to fuck with my life.
So I know the kind of gut-clenching, cold down the back of your neck, hands-shaking fear that comes with being doxxed. I do. It’s happened to me more than once. It will probably happen to me again, because I’m a loud fat queer femme Jewish disabled activist, and boy does that piss people off.
But let me be clear: I was existing as a person that someone else didn’t like in those cases. I was existing as queer, I was existing as ‘someone I don’t like on a game.’ I was not showing up in public, carrying a torch, and advocating for the massacre of millions of people. When you show up in public carrying a torch, you are not being doxxed.
You are being IDENTIFIED.
This is such a fantastic distinction, THANK YOU.
When you show up in public carrying a torch, you are not being doxxed.
You are being IDENTIFIED.
This is a very useful distinction from the “so-and-so’s a Nazi, here’s their address” sort of thing that can be so easily thrown at non-Nazis just as easily as Nazis.
Remember, if you got spotted in the mob, and you lost your fucking job: you’re a nazi and you’re fired. Its your fault.
Seeing John Mulaney do his ‘Robot Test’ bit has given me a strong desire to see him play a live action Riddler.
But not like, as any character other than John Mulaney? Like, let’s make a John Mulaney version of Edward Nigma. Just this socially awkward disaster man who somehow becomes a supervillain because of a misunderstanding he couldn’t correct without ‘seeming rude’. And now supposedly he’s committed to killing Batman but he doesn’t actually want to be the cause of a man’s death so he just obfuscates things with ‘clues’ and ‘riddles’ and ‘battles of wits’ until Batman inevitably defeats him and he’s just like ‘oh thank god please don’t hit me’.
Batman’s like ‘you need help Nigma’ and he’s just like ‘yeah that’s fair, I should probably look into seeing somebody at this point, I became a supervillain because of social anxiety and that might just be a red flag you know?’
“Hey, Batman, think you’ve seen everything, huh? Well, figure out how to deal with this! You know Gotham General Hospital? Yeah? Well you’ll never guess what I let loose in there!”
“Riddle me this, what has four hooves and presents a massive health and safety violation?”
I think a lot of misplaced skepticism about plausible anecdotes on the Internet comes down to the fact that some people basically think of everyone they don’t know as the same person. They’re like “how could anybody have all this mildly unlikely stuff happen to them?”, and they’re implicitly picturing it all happening in one person’s life, rather than being spread across 7.6 billion individual lives.
Okay, sure, for the sake of argument let’s restrict that figure to people over the age of fourteen who have Internet access – that’s still three billion days per day. If you do anything three billion times, even very unlikely outcomes are going to crop up with non-zero frequency.
The question at hand is not “how likely is this anecdote, in isolation?”; it’s “how likely is any happenstance at least as weird as this anecdote, given three billion chances for it to happen in the last 24 hours alone?”
Also, there has to be some credit for the writer, surely, because often the experience isn’t that interesting – it’s just presented for an audience, and the narrator has simply made some funny commentary or added a ‘moral’ that people respond to. They’ve taken something perfectly ordinary and presented it as A Story, but in fact, it’s a common or uninteresting experience that many people would have let pass without comment. It’s the process of telling it that makes it sound unusual, and then people complain that it doesn’t sound real. But slice-of-life stories usually boil down to something perfectly probable and only #mildlyinteresting – “I caught a wild bird,” “a man in a weird outfit came to my workplace,” “I found a weird rock,” “I spoke to a stranger in public,” “a little kid said something offbeat.” All the craft has gone into the framing.
Sometimes your internal narration stumbles over something that’s kind of funny and you notice it. Sometimes there’s a piece that can be detached from the rest of the day, polished lightly, and presented in a specific tone as a cute little anecdote. Sometimes you write down a quick sketch of an experience in a diary or a text and realize that there’s something funny or whimsical about it – change the angle slightly and you can see that it’s story-shaped. So that’s all that my anecdotes are. The Thing happened that was #mildlyinteresting, and there were some words for it, and if you turned it a certain way, it was story-shaped.
With experience, anyone would notice anecdote-shaped bits in their daily life. But really, it’s mostly in the marketing.
“Look at this great rock,” you say, bouncing excitedly up to your friends. “Okay… look… wait… okay, to be fair, it was better when it was wet.” After a certain amount of quiet and subtle licking, you hold it up again. “Isn’t it great?” you say. “Look at the little fossil! That’s the best part.”
(Next time, you’ll know not to bury the lead. You’ll bounce in with a cleverly pre-wetted rock, and say “Guess whooooo’s HERE? It’s my long-dead buddy Fossil George! I last saw him in the Cretaceous!” and people will go “Haha, okay! Sure!” – and they will think, “There’s our friend, the wild fossil person. Things Just Happen To Her. She just finds these things, we don’t know how she does it – it’s stranger than fiction, really.” And someone on the internet might say: “oh yeah, right, we’re supposed to believe you FOUND that? Fake news.”)
Obviously, some people make stuff up to get attention. (If they are good at it, they often go on to create content for a career or hobby. This impulse is perfectly natural, and is one of many ways that children separate reality from fiction.) but I see people calling bullshit in perfectly mundane stories as well, simply because the decoration was a bit too good.
But really, everyone has access to rocks. They’re on the ground! They’re free! Everyone touches them and walks on them at some point every day! It’s all in the marketing! You can polish it up and put it in a fancy setting of precious metal and sell it as a Rare Item for £50, but it’s just a rock, and everyone can get them.
It’s just. it’s just rocks. They tend to come up! They are abundant. Most people will have access to them. It is not surprising that they occasionally are sparkly, or have a fossil in them, or have a pretty stripe, because there are A LOT OF ROCKS.
Found the creature- it’s called an Oblex and it appears in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes along with art of the kid’s player character! They’re apparently the result of Mindflayer experimentation on Oozes and they’re sick as fuck, you can read about them in <a href=“https://www.google.com/amp/comicbook.com/gaming/amp/2018/05/23/dungeons-and-dragons-make-a-wish-mordenkainens-tome-of-foes/”>this article! (X)</a>
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
