we'll talk about cis men having fragile egos but tbh! patriarchal gender roles gives everyone fragile egos when it comes to gender because its inherently unhealthy. it ties the very concept of self to gender & then makes gender something one can easily fail at. cis women who feel attacked when told they hurt someone (because they feel like their role as a caretaker is being threatened) and cis women who get angry at gender neutral medical language (because the patriarchy values the idea that womanhood & pregnancy (& everything related to it) are synonymous) are behaving in the same way men who feel attacked when their masculinity is threatened. trans people will also do this too, sometimes overcompensating because we have to fight ten times as hard to not be seen as failures by default. patriarchal gender is always fragile and quick to lash out because the patriarchy survives on fear and specifically the fear of losing one's self via gender failure (& the material punishments that come with that). hope this helps

what makes cis men's gender ego fragility especially noticable is that they often have the material power to cause systemic harm to others when they feel like their ego is threatened. but that does not mean that only they have fragile gender egos or that others cannot also cause harm because of it. sometimes it's interpersonal/lateral but especially cis women in positions of power (especially over trans people but also children) can also cause systemic harm.

when I see something dated 2019 I think “oh that’s not too long ago” and then I remember that 2019 was not only five years ago but those five years have somehow contained several lifetimes

VTMB Random Scenery

replaces your white elf with wyll

Patch 6 drops next week, and we're getting new kissing scenes animations 🩷 FOREHEAD KISSES

“hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me” is the funniest phrase because it always does. it always will. from personal experience things have already started to rouse from their slumber before i even get the first three words out

something has certainly awakened. it is wide awake and loud, already. and, by god, is it an issue

'Vamily Spotlight': WoD Brand Team is Taking Art Without Permission

Recently, I was informed by a friend that some work of mine had shown up in the World of Darkness’ official ‘Vamily Spotlight’ section of their latest video. In this they talk about the gameplay reveal of Bloodlines 2 and generally drum up hype for it, which is largely what you expect from company channels when they’ve a new product out. 

There’s a problem with this: I was never informed, or asked. No consent was given to use that work, or any others.

Through some excellent efforts by friends I also found that my work was in two other videos, with the earliest being well over a year ago-- totalling three, and they were up on both Twitch and YouTube.

Now, you’ll note that I’m a professional artist with two separate art degrees and well over a decade and a half of training. I’ve also a basic understanding of copyright and fair use. 

The Vamily Spotlights are little to do with the review and news section of the video and therefore do not really have bearing on the main point of the video. To this end, I’d assume they’re there as a draw to viewers, maybe to see if their or their friends’ work has turned up in these official videos. And nominally that’s a valid tactic for engagement, if you have permission to use these pieces of work.

They do not however have permission, and certainly not from me. 

As of writing, (5th of February 2024) I’ve issued a DMCA request for all three of the videos my work shows up in on both Twitch and YouTube, and takedowns are pending but I would urge people in the WoD tag here on Tumblr to check the available videos for themselves, if they are as concerned as I am. The screenshots of art in the videos they use to spotlight seem to come from Tumblr, as well as whole TikTok videos and other social media posts. If this makes the rounds elsewhere, do check your stuff wherever you are, WoD fans. 

As the videos are also present on the Twitch VOD platform, this means they are actively charging money using our work without permission. I am unsure if their YouTube channel is monetised. Notably, on their 

If they use your work for their spotlights, they are making advertisements and revenue off of your work without any reimbursement or prior consent. 

I don’t know if other artists were asked, but I definitely wasn’t, and by now we all know the issues with ‘exposure’ and how that does not keep artists fed or housed. 

And Paradox Interactive, having artists, they should know that you do not take for free from any of us-- at any level of influence or professionalism. The WoD community is not a free for all for companies to pick and choose free art to use like a bowl of cute little multicoloured sweets, it’s a bunch of creative, inspired and crafty people who come together across any edition of the many worlds in the setting to create as is our fair right to do so. Without being taken for granted, and without being cynically harvested for ‘content’. How vampiric. 

Additionally I would like to note that all of my World of Darkness fanworks are based on legacy books; Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition, Mage the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition and Hunter: the Reckoning First Edition most often, though there are appearances from others. You’ll note that not one of these books is the territory of Paradox Interactive or their World of Darkness brand management team-- looks to me like they’ve simply trawled the tag without reading what they’re looking at, which means they certainly didn’t take the time to ask permission to use these works. Not only were these actions tantamount to theft, it was also not even their fanart to begin with. And once again, they’d have known this had they contacted me at all, which they did not. It’s a failure on their part on several levels and not only do I want the videos taken down, I think the community is sorely owed an apology for this frivolous theft of art under the banner of ‘community content’. I didn’t opt in to having my work taken, and it should not have been assumed that it was okay to take my work just because it’s using a tag they also use!

I want everyone to know I have had zero benefit from their use of my work-- no money, no notes and no dialogue. This does not help artists. This does not help the community.

I’m willing to talk about this should anyone want to ask, but this is a gross abuse of artists and creatives’ rights for the sole purpose of gain by the World of Darkness brand team, and I expected better. I know I personally deserve an apology for this at the very least, as well as the WoD team to commit to actually contacting artists and sourcing permission in future-- and to set up an opt-in or out system for whether people want to be featured. I know I don’t, and I never asked to be. My work’s lovely, and they’re right to have said so. But it’s not for Paradox, and it’s not for Outstar or any of the other Brand team.  

It’s for me, and people here on Tumblr who like it. 

I’m disappointed, in PDX and in the WoD Brand team, because they should know far better than this. 

@mekanikaltrifle A development.

@mekanikaltrifle We have a response. Tweet thread [here] or continued under the cut.

And in response to my comment (paging @mentemori)

I want to say that Lore By Night is actually not too bad a dude from my experiences, and I disagree with Outstar trying to pin this on him. It's deflection, pure and simple, to keep people from reading my original post. If she says it was him, people are gonna believe her. this isn't as much of a win as it seems, unfortunately-- this is damage control.

"Violent"? That's a turn of phrase. "Slap some sense into someone" isn't literal and I've only seen people who want to turn a tide in their favor claim it is.

But onto my point: this is why I tell people NOT to trust these " gee guys I'm just like you! Iam a fan too, tee hee!" Hirees for these corporations. Sure they wear the hoody and home styled hair cuts as any nerd on a budget, but the second the company in question gets any negative feed back or pushback, these people turn class traitor immediately , put the CORPORATE pants on and beginning droning legalese.

I've nothing to add to this, you're just 100% right on both counts!

I will add that LbN has a history of alienating those around him, using his platform to irresponsibly rant about people he takes issue / has fallen out with to his many followers, lashing out when people disagree with him (even when they were previously friends) and generally being volatile and angry. There is a not insignificant number of people who take issue with the way he conducts himself. Frankly I'm surprised he hasn't come under more criticism before now.

HOWEVER, paradox are almost certainly using this incident as an excuse to distract from their own long history of misusing fandom work. They love throwing their followers at critics just as much as LbN does, and they've got more of them.

And as @mekanikaltrifle pointed out, Outstar got the context entirely wrong! It's an act of deflection.

Paradox is a company that's trying to head and manage a fandom while using cutesy language like "vamily" to make people more endeared to their corporate BS. It's something to be examined very carefully and given a healthy dose of skepticism. As @saturnineaqua rightly pointed out, they're a corporation and they're always so quick to use that the second there's anything negative coming their way.

I think so much of the "vamily" keeps forgetting that companies aren't our friends, no matter how much their community managers try to dress it up to look cosy and welcoming. It's still a toxic, capitalist machine under the surface.

Lady Furbcina Dimitrescu and her daughters

Prints

Ricardo Pestana

Are you happy now?

Of course you have they/them pronouns and the blood of innocents on your hands

These info graphs are by flatbushgirl in Instagram

I thought these were some important facts to share since a lot of people don’t know any of this

I think a lot of people on Tumblr really need to think hard about the fourth one.

Image transcript: six images

Image 1: from May 7-May 14 2020 over 17,000 tweets said “H*tler [Hitler] was right. *preliminary ADL data reveals uptick in anti-Semitic incidents linked to recent mideast violence image 2:Jews are the most persecuted religion: 60.2% Jews 13.2% Muslim 3.8% Catholic 3.8% Christian 3.5% Sikh 15.5% other * FBI 2019 religious hate crime statistics. Jews make up 2.6% of the US, yet 60.2% of religious hate crimes are against them.

Image 3:ADL H.E.A.T. map 2014-2020 anti Semitic incidents are up 19,242% since 2014. 2014:36, 2015:63, 2016: 1324, 2017: 2491, 2018: 3053, 2019: 4703, 2020: 6963

Image 4: most people deny Jews the right to determine what is anti-Semitic, 65% don’t care what Jews consider anti-Semitic, 7% disagree with what Jews consider anti-Semitic, *AJC, the state of anti-Semitism in America 2020: insights and analysis

image 5: victims of anti-Semitism: almost every Jewish person has been the victim of a hate crime or has immediate friends and family who have been victimized *AJC, the state of anti-Semitism in America 2020: insights and analysis

Image 6: 55% of orthodox Jews live in fear. orthodox Jews – who are often more identifiably Jewish and who have been target by recent attacks in New York and elsewhere – say they avoid places or situations at least some of the time*AJC, the state of antisemitism in America 2020: insights and analysis. End transcript.

@a-captions-blog @can-i-make-image-descriptions

To give you guys an idea of how common this shit is, I’ve long since lost count of the number of anonymous death threats I’ve received for being a Jew.