The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.

Being a Cult Member Invited To Speak at a -Con For Other Cult Members Is Not The Flex You Think It Is

All I am going to say is that being part of a convention that is really a conference for chronically online, insufferable reply-guy cult members is not the flex that you think it is. Neither is missing a psychiatrist appointment to argue with conspiracy theorists on Reddit.

Yes, that actually happened. A person involved in that Discord really did miss a psychiatrist appointment just to argue with strangers on the internet about *checks notes* the Anunnaki. To be fair, they were arguing against the typical high strangeness, but mentally sane people are not missing medical appointments to argue against high strangeness online and then telling everyone about it on Discord, xer (I am using neopronouns because I don’t know their gender).

That’s all I have to say about the state of fuckery in occulture. If you know, you know. Missing a psychiatrist appointment to argue with strangers online is, clinically, a symptom of obsession—but whatever.

Only losers join esoteric cults—oh, excuse me, occult lodges. It’s like feeling smug about being invited to speak at a Scientology convention. No insight. None to be found. I honestly think they believe they are more than just a creepy religious fraternity, like any other creepy religious body in America.

Can We Stop With The Dadaist Memes, Please?

Spamming Dadaist cut-up techniques into memes doesn’t make you look edgy at 50. It just makes you look like someone who never outgrew 4chan. I’m browsing through a Bluesky network of chaotes going through a 50-year-old crisis, and it’s pretty much nothing but cut-up Dadaist-style memes, shitposts, and chan-style board posts—in the year of our lord 2026.

I kid you not, I just read a long thread about someone lamenting the death of bulletin boards except for 4chan. This is why. 4chan culture is able to survive because it keeps getting spread memetically. You can’t, on one hand, curse 4chan culture and then, on the other, participate in it.

Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules

So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate

A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:

“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”

— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)

I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.

ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.

Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.

Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.

What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.

Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!

On to the convo:

A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.

By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.

This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.

Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?

The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.

It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.

The Eye in the Triangle

https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/08/11/the-eye-in-the-triangle-2/

#19001999 #aleisterCrowley #AleisterCrowley18751947 #authors #AuthorsEnglish #AuthorsEnglish20thCenturyBiography #biographies #biography #book #BritishIrishLiteraryCriticism #DavidCherubim #ECrivainsAnglais20eSieCleBiographies #GreatBritain #israelRegardie #MagicStudies #OccultistesGrandeBretagneBiographies #occultists #OccultistsGreatBritainBiography #ReligiousLeaderBiographies #review #robertAntonWilson #TPolyphilus

The Legend of Aleister Crowley

https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/08/04/the-legend-of-aleister-crowley-2/

#19001999 #aleisterCrowley #AleisterCrowley18751947 #authors #AuthorsEnglish #AuthorsEnglish20thCenturyBiography #biographies #book #collectiveBiographies #ECrivainsAnglais20eSieCleBiographies #English20thCenturyBiography #EnglishAuthors #GreatBritain #israelRegardie #LonMiloDuQuette #MagicStudies #occultism #Occultistes #OccultistesGrandeBretagneBiographies #occultists #OccultistsGreatBritainBiography #Okkultist #pRStephensen #rebellion #review #TPolyphilus

Crowley’s Apprentice

https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/06/16/crowleys-apprentice-2/

#19001999 #Biografie #biographies #BodyMindSpirit #book #General #geraldSuster #GreatBritain #hermetism #HermetismGreatBritainHistory20thCentury #HermeTismeGrandeBretagneHistoire20eSieCle #history #israelRegardie #magic #MagicGreatBritainHistory20thCentury #MagicStudies #MagickStudies #occultism #OccultistesGrandeBretagneBiographies #occultists #OccultistsGreatBritainBiography #ReligionEncyclopedias #review #TPolyphilus

If anyone here plays either Over The Edge, or Unknown Armies, can you please tell me if the characters below, made in heroforge, would be or would not be typical player #characters (or npcs).

I'm reading the third edtion of OTE but currently lack any edition of UA. My knowledge of UA is second hand and I'm wondering if these seem like typical #occultists in the setting.

#Heroforge
#TTRPG
#AtlasGames
#ThirdEdition
#OverTheEdge
#UnknownArmies
#RobinDLaws
#GregStolze
#NPCs
#PlayerCharacters