Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

To set the record straight: the only media commentary YouTube channel I watch is Quinn Curio.

Her first video is a literal mic drop on general commentary videos to end all commentary videos. (Or, at least could be applied in this manner.)

Into a Literal Dumpster of Trash: Creepshow Art

That being said, I'm going to confess that I wasted too much time on this dumpster fire situation going on in YouTube drama.

By the way, did you think that Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star, and James Charles situation was bad? Who cares — that seems like an artificial Kardashian-esque gossip drama situation relative to Creepshow Art.

I know I've spent too much time watching Ethan from H3H3, iDubbbz, and Cinema Sins. At best, this commentary is explored in stupidly unnecessary detail and is flawed in the worst case (from an actual “all sides” situation).

This stuff on the internet is literal poison for your soul (if you still have any left — thanks Facebook and Twitter, I hate this 1984 dystopia you've created for all of us without our consent).

Enter: Creepshow Art.

Look — I have no intention to summarize the situation. I also have no intention of watching Emily Artful's 2 hour-long video on the situation. There seems to be a new video on Creepshow Art being “bad” nearly every single day after June 7, 2021. Most people are parroting essentially the same thing because — well — the blackboxed proprietary social media worlds thrive off of “”“controversy”“” (whether it is deserved or not, let alone “”“real”“”).

I honestly only got into the basics of this situation from Smokey Glow because my last two brain cells say the thumbnail and said something along the lines of, very good, when I saw a woman whose face clearly indicated that she was plus-sized. (Just like how I added Eleanor Neale to my YouTube watchlist, even though I don't watch her videos.)

I really should've taken what Gabriella Lascano said about the Jeffree Star debacle (even before COVID-19) — I don't go into “”“drama”“”, but I'm really not convinced people are genuinely sorry and/or know what they are dong (not even taking more than 1 second of serious thought).

At least Lascano is doing actual work being a plus size model and doing relevant work for that on YouTube...

Random Thought 1

This situation is so lurid.

This reminds me of the intersection of Susan Sontag discussing how violence is pornographic and how Cory Doctorow talks about the “shitty technology adoption curve”: oppressive dystopian technology is first used on low socioeconomic people as guinea pigs, before given to the rich. For example, Ring Doorbells from Amazon. The rich won't touch that stuff until all fatal kinks have been tested on the lowly suburbanites/“at risk” areas.

This is like how people stare at car accidents. It's stupid from my point of view, because this only slows down the traffic on any street (in the city or on the highway) — so at least I don't do this due to utilitarian reasons (because, I mean, are you going to anything about it? No?!? Then, stop staring at it and move on!).

Random Thought 2

It's interesting how somehow YouTube channel creators talk to each other... sort of like objectionably horrible cliques in infantile high school. I thought checking out some of the YouTubers that Loey Lane plays games with (basically Among Us) was sort of good, because that's how I discovered Barely Sociable and Cadabber.

However, I can't say that I like Loey Lane anymore... first she tried doing the SCP videos — which didn't vibe with me, since she never finished discussing the himmarymary YouTube channel, among other unfiction stories she never finished.

Then, she is seemingly roped into this Creepshow Art situation.

At this rate, I'm probably going to remove Loey Lane from my watch list...

I feel bad for nBurd for getting involved in this situation. He really didn't know what was coming, and he has a much smaller channel than Loey Lane.

Subthought

This is when I learned that many YouTubers don't make a lot of their own videos because they start doing post-production work for other YouTubers. For example, this what happened to Vinh Dang and Brandon Harvard (did you even attend Harvard, bro?). I guess even Quinn Curio does this?

Random Thought 3

I guess Sarah Jeong's book The Internet of Garbage is correct: the internet is full of garbage.

Do I really need to say more on this?

The Car Crash You Actually Wanted to See

So, do you want my based thoughts on this situation?

I'll only give the technical opinions on Creepshow Art/Shannon.

I think, based on what I'm about to say, the following severely incriminates Shannon (at least in the court of public opinion — which could mean anything, just recall the power of The Network in Channel 4's Utopia or the Dark Army in Mr. Robot) and indicates she is a pathological liar.

One Last Stupid Thought

I'm probably going to be flamed for saying this, but part of me wishes that there was a totalitarian society, like in The Giver by Lois Lowry, that basically enforced eugenics... but the sort of eugenics that would euthanize stupid people who can't contribute anything meaningful at all. Sort of like an inverted version of the premise of the Idiocracy film.

However, some Feynman thought in the back of my head is telling me that this is a bad idea. You see (the inner Feyman disciple in me argues), that would probably mean that Feynman probably wouldn't have met Gweneth Howarth, his third and final wife.

I know I'm not supposed to divorce eugenics from its racist/basically Nazi or fascist roots, but I guess I really should play with fire with this kind of stuff.

It's also philosophically difficult to rigorously define and/or determine who is “useful” and who is “not useful”, and that's basically going to devolve into a socialized high school popularity contest — much like traditional methods of conducting a job interview, it's going to be based on how much the dominant group in power likes the minority groups (a.k.a., power dynamics).

That's how racism becomes an unpatchable hole in all of this, which will empirically and inevitably give ways for all different forms and dilutions of white supremacy and/or genocide to enter (or, at least potentially — and given this world's track record, that almost certainly going to happen at some point... it's a matter of “when”, not “if”).

Creepshow Art Is Stupid with Internet Technology

Anyways, below is my hot take on Creepshow Art.

Creepshow Art/Shannon has absolutely no counterargument on the Lolcow situation, unless she had perfect opsec (which she didn't, since no one with such a skillset found among the elite technologist ranks of Snowden, Satoshi Nakomoto, or members of Cicada 3301 would ever dare behave like Shannon). Shannon has so badly blotched her attempt to create a sock puppet act that even Michael Bazzell should should permanently blacklist Shannon from being a potential future client of his.

She was throwing around “VPN” the way that every other scummy VPN company markets VPNs... I bet she can't even name one VPN (besides NordVPN or ExpressVPN — seeing these VPN sponsorships on YouTube doesn't count as actual knowledge).

(Also, shameless ~promotion~ recommendation for IVPN, Mullvad, or ProtonVPN.)

“Spoofing my IP address”? Please, if a cracker was using your IP address, the cracker would have pwned your home router and/or had some privilege escalation on your devices — and trust me, there are many more worse things crackers would like to try on you first than simply defaming you on Lolcow, or only hiding (but not deleting) all of your YouTube videos and changing your YouTube profile picture and banner picture to a stereotypical glitch.

A real cracker, like Elliot Alderson in Season 2 of Mr. Robot, would've sent you to jail and no one would know that it happened to you until it was too late.

I guess I also shouldn't throw mud, sticks, or stones in a glass house — but still... Shannon is so absolutely and pathetically stupid that I have to laugh, or else I'd cry.

A Lesson of Internet Etiquette

No matter how you feel about imageboards (4chan and 8chan/8kun come to mind — stupid Pizzagate, Snowden laughs at all of these absolute stupid people who are most likely Trumpers), I don't think you should even doubt that the Lolcow admins know how to detect/correlate/deduce the identities of users with bad opsec for breaking its rules.

Remember the Golden Rule on the internet: this is not your server, so you better behave and follow the server's rules or else you can get kicked off at the administrator's or administrators' discretion.

This is like how, as much as you dislike the NSA and CIA, if those agencies say that an advance persistent threat keeps trying to hack the US from North Korea or Iran (as examples), then that assessment has to have some credibility. I mean, are you going to determine that yourself? Probably not, not like you have the resources and/or skill to do so.

So, unless you're going to hack Lolcow's servers and do the investigative work yourself, you probably shouldn't believe a word from Shannon/Creepshow Art... but that's for you to decide.

TL;DR

Abide by the advice I was told for higher-level abstract mathematics:

Know what the words are and what they mean.

Or in a more expanded form:

Only throw around the words you know the definition of, what they mean, and how they are realistically used — especially in technical contexts.

So don't go claiming some technical internet oddity is happening to you when you can't even tell me 5 distinct computer programming languages.