@insomniac7809 Not the same thing, either. Someone individually deciding 'naw, you peed on a guy in an alley, I didn't know that when we became friends, I can't get past that' is one thing.
This is a crowd broadcasting 'no one is ever allowed to associate with this person, hire them, be their friend, or view their work again without getting harassed about it by we broadcasters'.
ETA: I don't support the 4chan trollstorm approach. Not even when it's 'my team' doing it.
@insomniac7809 No one is making or has made the case that doing something crappy shouldn't come with consequences. It's the suggestion that everything else that person does cannot have value because of those things that is an issue. These are not the same thing.
Using the example you've given, it would be like saying: "Not only did you deserve to lose those friends/etc., but you should never get to have any more again, even if you have changed or evolved in some way."
That is where and how it becomes problematic.
Also, this is just... all people do good and bad things. That's how the world works. You don't only deserve recognition for the good things you do if you're without flaw, and you don't deserve to be exempt from the consequences of bad things if you have good qualities as well. This just seems utterly elementary to me.
I mean, how hard is 'reward the good acts, punish the bad acts'? (Massively simplified, obviously.)
@insomniac7809 You've also got the case of the woman in our own back yard, more or less. Kate Smith. "Nope, no more recognition for the good thing you did because damn, this other stuff nobody'd heard about in almost 100 years is gross." (And the gross stuff is gross and totally, even if it was typical of the time, when it should have also been gross and uncool but tragically wasn't.) It's a case of 'ignore the good, define by the bad by the definition of bad made decades later'.
The work that ages like milk behind a radiator -- I am so stealing that analogy, it's great -- should go the way of the dodo. I don't think anyone believes otherwise. The same can happen to something that just sucks from the jump, which is a risk all creators face and deal with every day. This part? Not an issue. Not even a little bit.
It's 'and now the rest of this person's body of work must go, too' that's happened, happens, and is of concern. It's not a concern for no reason, and it's not a small one for reasons that should be obvious.
People are entirely accustomed to specific works falling out of favor or never finding acceptance at all. There's nothing at all new or unusual about that; that's how things have always been in the arts.
@Ghost said in Separating Art From Artist:
I will pre-pen an apology to anyone whose home is inadvertently stormed by the FBI and rounded up to be placed in people who disagreed with me jail as a result of the opinions in said paragraph. It was not my intent to drive the FBI to, without evidence, arrest people for behavior they are not partaking in based on my opinions alone.
Tell you what... when you can find where I said that's the potential problem, I'll stop believing this is the second instance of putting words in other people's mouths in this brief conversation. I will otherwise maintain my stance that doing that is Not Cool.
@Ghost I took everybody off that was on it for the new year. On the whole it's going relatively well, seems like a viable reset point.
Seriously, though. There's no better way to get an angry mob riled to action than 'people are harming children'. That's not a bad thing, obviously... unless the people in question are not engaging in those things. Most people here aren't, and want nothing to do with it, but also do not have time, know-how, or energy to harry the FBI into shutting those games down as a personal crusade. Claims that anyone not doing this is 'wanting to protect their kiddie porn they love doing' is not OK, and it's not OK to take people's accounts of being in the hobby period before they were 18 as 'we were all involved so we could play on hardcore sex games' unless this is what they explicitly said (don't think anyone has).
@Ghost I got the point of it.
It's a point that's buried under the broad swath of accusation that could impact everyone in the hobby, regardless of their views of the content. That's a life-ruining accusation to make even outside the conversation about cancel culture, and it shouldn't be made lightly or as hyperbole.
@nyctophiliac said in Separating Art From Artist:
People change every day. I'm definitely always actively trying to improve and progress in a way that's positive and healthy.
I think this is true of most people.
I also think it will become less true of people if no one cares about that compared to something they said or did in 1965 that might have been 100% in line with the social mores of 1965, but is not at all cool today, and there are so many things like that.
Another movie reference: pretty sure we all remember Monster Squad for "Wolfman's got nards!"
...and not the dozens of times people throw gay slurs at each other, or that someone takes peeper pictures of a girl getting changed in it.
Watching it recently since it popped up on Shudder, those things stand out. If someone hasn't seen it recently and just remembers it from being a kid? We remember "Wolfman's got nards!" and that's probably about it.
@nyctophiliac I honestly fear the point that people are so intensely policed on 'oh this must insinuate <thing>' or 'when some people use the phrase <blah> it might be a dogwhistle!' or 'thirty years ago you said <crap> therefore anything you say now should be discounted immediately, even if you believe totally different things now!' that the backlash turns more people into the 4chan and 8chan crowd out of sheer exhaustion at and frustration with it all.
I believed Santa was real when I was five. I do not think I need to explain to a therapist that I no longer believe in Santa before my perceptions of reality as an adult are not dismissed out of hand because of it. This is the sort of problem society is presently having re: 'things people did at a different point in their lives' or 'during a completely different era in history'; we're essentially demanding that people explain their childhood belief in Santa and affirm they no longer believe in him before we'll take their adult perspective seriously.
A prime example: Sixteen Candles may as well be a horror film today. It absolutely wasn't when it came out, which was not exactly back in the ancient days of yore.
@insomniac7809 said in Separating Art From Artist:
In terms of what you, @Pandora and @Ghost are decrying as "censorship" in this thread, that the Millennial/Zoomer Outrage Machine is going to banish someone's work to the outer dark over a minor infraction? Nah. Not a thing.
...except as someone working in the arts community, I can tell you, it's a thing. It's a thing people are talking about, are actively being threatened about (mostly older artists, yes, mostly boomers, but the point stands).
@Ghost said in Separating Art From Artist:
There's a hobby out there on the internet that hand-waves the existence of people roleplaying hardcore sex as-or-with minors and don't fight against it because doing so might result in their own ability to play on those games put in jeopardy. So despite the ABUNDANCE of people with stories about being minors on these hardcore sex games, Why rock the boat? Age is just a number and who are we to interrupt any of this? Be cool, bro.
Dude, you're still on about this?
If you have an issue with the places that allow it, report them to the FBI.
Making the claim that the reason everyone isn't rushing off to do exactly that is behaving that way because they are playing those subjects on those games is part of what got that thread shut down, because it's a major -- and patently absurd -- accusation that you're now touting as fact again.
Do you even begin to understand how and why this accusation is not even the tiniest bit OK?
People were not coming forward en masse to say they were playing on Shang/Akashat/hardcore sex games as teenagers. They were talking about MUs, period, most of which are 18+, and this includes TR, FC, just about every other WoD game, plenty of MUDs, and so on, none of which are classified as hardcore sex games.
18+ game != hardcore sex game by default.
Don't put words in their mouths to try to make your point. That is also beyond uncool.
@Auspice That is neat. I've seen some things like that printed onto needlework fabrics, so I had wondered if you'd found something like that! I haven't seen a good source and I am iffy about trying it myself. Dye is one thing... putting stuff through the printer feels like something that is going to cost me a printer, not just a length of fabric I got cheap on amazon or something. 
@Auspice Ha! That's priceless. I like the fabric, too.
@Auspice I ran across the stitch in the second one at the Antique Pattern Library. It was in a French language writeup of Bulgarian stitch patterns, of all things. It looks like it's a tilted/upright version of 'Italian Cross-Stitch', which I wasted a lot of time finding out on google today while the arm of my chair was invaded. It reminded me a lot of some of the sashiko stitches, and I think a more open version of it is one I've seen for it.
@Pandora Yeah, we've managed to fuck that up pretty badly, too, though...
Not much progress today, but:
Both are experiments in gradients. The bigger one is the pattern I'm testing before I dye things and do it in more than 12 colors (so it will be much more gradual and less cheesy rainbow). The smaller one is the stitch pattern I stumbled over and kinda fell in love with.
But seriously, all day:
"Am I interrupting something?"
Yes, flouf. Yes, but... like anybody could be mad. Gawd.
"Izzat black fabric you're working with? Let me white cat all over it!"
It's mostly a case of 'just about anybody can have stuff dug up about them here'. People can get invasive about someone's views and more is on display than might be imagined. You don't need to be posting racist screeds all over the internet for there to be something people find objectionable to be available info about you, and get you 'canceled'.
@Tinuviel It's party registration, yep, any changes to such, etc.
ETA: It doesn't account for the flukes of 'crossed the lines this year', but those tend to be fairly rare. There's a REASON I registered as 'other/independent'.
@Tinuviel Just one example of how ridiculous it is: https://qz.com/1449789/votewithme-app-shows-if-friends-and-family-voted/