Apparently, people still do things for April Fools’ Day. I don’t know why, because all it ends up being is a headache thanks to people being terrible at practical joking, or because of people using the ‘holiday’ as an excuse to be their true assholian selves for a twenty-four hour period. I wish we would just drop the occasion because when you celebrate a day for practical jokes and pranks, then people are expecting them, which ruins them since the entire point of a practical joke or a prank is the element of surprise. It’s hard to laugh at a whoopee cushion when the first thing you did while walking in the room was rapid-survey every chair to make sure you weren’t about to get got.

This shit is always worse on the Internet, because the web is full of people who are massively unfunny, and while you could simply ignore them in real life because you never had to interact with them, the digital landscape removes that barrier. Crazy, right, that the physical distance that is plentiful in real life is a boon on occasion? While I do love the Internet, every day dipshits become more vocal and emboldened, so much so that I frequently miss the halcyon days when ‘lol’ was an actual acronym and not a conversation filler spoken wholesale, and you had to make sure someone in the house wasn’t on the goddamn phone, lest you lose that song you were trying to download for the past two hours. Sure, everything was fuckin’ slow, but it was much quieter, and stupid shit usually stayed in random corners of the net, rather than on the most trafficked pages. It also had the decency to own its stupidity instead of trying to hand-wave it away, like that Men in Black pen thing.

Anyways, some nonsense went down on Reddit, which surprised nobody because that website is cancer incarnate, and metastization is inevitable when everyone on it is trying to one-up each other in a race to see who can be the loudest moron. The white noise in question involved BlackPeopleTwitter shutting out people who weren’t ‘people of color’, i.e. white folks. This would be funny if anything on the board was funny, or the people who ran it were funny, but they aren’t and it isn’t; you can tell this because people on BlackPeopleTwitter use the term ‘people of color’ unironically, while completely missing how absurdly fucking racist that term is, as it’s just a paraphrasing of ‘colored people’, only this time it includes everyone who isn’t white and isn’t just a euphemism for blacks. Thanks for pulling me into your knuckle-dragging chimp-outs, dicks.

Before I get into the incident, aftermath, and typical dumpster-fire song & dance, I need to bitch more about Reddit itself. I don’t know who designs this place, but it’s so fucking obtuse, and that’s using the old layout. The new layout is an abomination that nobody should ever use on the grounds of it framing its advertisements as actual goddamn posts. That’s slimier than those websites that utilize pop-up scripts where closing one just opens another. At least I can make a game out of the latter; the former is completely useless, deceptive, and it hogs more browser memory while providing less content. What a fucking turbo-dump. And, for those of you like me who will rightfully die on the hill of ‘I will go out of my goddamn way to turn on the old layout, so fuck you’, you now get to be bombarded by this shit:

What a fucking hog.

Look at this shit. Reddit’s layout designers could’ve dragged this flaming heap of a banner ad into a more manageable size that flows with the page, but they instead went with a massive box not unlike those banners you see planes dragging across the sky when you go to the beach or some other gigantic open area. You know why they did this? It’s because they know the average simp will click the ‘Try the Redesign’ button over the close-out X because the X is light-years away. What, was forcing the bullshit redesign on every new account not enough, you cock-monglers? And infinite scroll? Oh yeah, just what this society needs: more incentive to never get up from their chairs or look up from their screens. I love when I’m working and I have to slam on the breaks for a jaywalker who just assumes that life stops for them because whatever is on their screen is more important than their fucking life. Fuck you, Reddit. I can’t wait until the dirty laundry/closet full of skeletons that everyone knows the owners & administrators are hiding spill out onto the front lawn and it has to close up shop; the old phpBB boards can’t come back quick enough.

With that tangent over, the big question on all of y’alls minds is probably, ‘Sahltines, what in tarnation is BlackPeopleTwitter’. In their own words:

Screenshots of Black people being hilarious or insightful on social media, it doesn’t need to just be twitter but obviously that is best.

Black culture has a unique way of examining the everyday and we are here to showcase that.

In layman’s terms: reposted content. In more accurate terms: stolen content that is only mildly insightful, mildly chuckle-worthy, or contains the word ‘nigga’ because racial epithets make everything more comical, provided you have the brain of a teenager, of course.

Now, I could fill some time with some of the atrocious posts on this board, but I’m tired as fuck, and the diatribe from the original thread explaining the ‘rationale’ for the April Fools’ Day joke is entertaining enough on its own.

That rationalization, though.

You know things are gonna be good when the first sentence isn’t even one, and your second is so stilted, it belongs in the circus. Linguistic issues aside, the whole point of a day of pranking is for laughs. If you have some actual serious motive or intent behind it, then you’re not doing it in the spirit of the occasion, you’re using the occasion to sail your true motive under the radar. That is Scum Tactics 101, and the fact so many people missed this/willingly glossed over this is disturbing. Not only that, but using a day for supposed irreverence to make a statement about racial politicking that will never have a solution nor will ever truly disappear through what could be easily framed & argued as actual racism is top-tier shit-house behavior. Again, a joke like this would’ve been a joke if the people making it were either funny or owned up to it being an attempt at humor, albeit it unsuccessful. Instead, they would rather rationalize, which implies they would condone their awful behavior on any normal day, too.

And nothing of value was lost.

I had no idea the Games sub-board closed, but I can guarantee it wasn’t due to toxicity. It was most likely due to non-gamers who like ‘games’ like Gone Home or Life is Strange, which function as exposition machines with very little/no interactivity (thus not being games by the proper definition of the term) coming in, taking over, and then screaming ‘EVIL PEOPLE’ when banter occurred. I say it time and again: if you have to call yourself something, you aren’t that. It obviously doesn’t pertain to actually earned titles, like scholastic degrees or conferred monikers, just to flippant labels like ‘hard worker’ or ‘bookworm’ or ‘gamer’. These fucks, which you’re included in, BlackPeopleTwitter, are people who revel in not being fun to be around. They’re the stuffy librarian character archetype brought into all aspects of life, and they’re a mask for people who love having power and using said power to control others. They’re tiny dictators, and we should be blessed that they’re too stupid to grasp that winning on such a minuscule level is basically a loss.

Also, racism cannot be casual. Anyone who says this does not understand real racism. This is part of the new mental state of society in general, where phrases such as, ‘Like, oh my god, I hate that so much’ are commonly used to describe mild distaste. When you give a generation of people the ability to communicate endlessly and with zero boundaries, the natural progression is the dilution of vocabulary, thanks to everyone wanting to get that leg of fame up on everyone else.

Most importantly, a place like BlackPeopleTwitter, which was made to selectively recycle content posted elsewhere by black people and laugh at/with, is actually racist. Most of the posts involve laughing at African American Vernacular English, a ‘sub-set’ of English that reads as unintelligent and sounds unintelligent when heard, leading to the joke being ‘darkie talk funny, it sound dumb, me laugh’. You could also come from the whole modus operandi of the sub, which is to supposedly elevate these nuggets of wisdom to a higher platform, implying that if a white person or an Asian chum said the same thing, it would be blasé, but because a black person is saying it, we need the utmost attention to it simply on the grounds of them being black. What a bunch of degenerate hypocrites.

Second side tangent: places like BlackPeopleTwitter keep posting up AAVE (African American Vernacular English) as if it’s a proper off-shoot/dialect:

Oh, you mean that shit that makes an entire section of the population sound low class and stupid?

Life hack: it isn’t. AAVE is the black equivalent to how white, backwoods hicks speak. It sounds unintelligent and reads unintelligent because it was taught to slaves via indentured servants who trained and worked with them back when slavery existed. If you were an indentured servant, you were either previously a slave who worked their way out of it, or were purchased as such. It was not a position of educated people, and thus logic dictates that a lack of formal education would likely result in poor speech patterns, among other things. Even the great Wikipedia agrees with me:

Get dunked on.

For reference, John McWhorter is a big name in the linguistics research community, and is also a black dude. The only thing from what I’ve read about him we don’t agree on is that AAVE is a coherent and fully-fleshed out variant of English. I’d change my tune of phrases like ‘done been’ and ‘been done’ didn’t mean radically different things despite sounding nearly the same, effectively meaning there is no corollary to foundational English and the only way to decipher the code is having lived in it. That’d be fair if it was just a regional/area dialect, but propping it up to an actual language is ridiculous; that’s like trying to build a cantilevered room off the side of your house with material that won’t hold the cantilever properly.

Excuse me, what?

You post recycled content. What part of any of that could you even charitably call a ‘discussion’? How can these so-called black voices be drowned out when the entire point of the board is about black people saying things? Why are people still using the term ‘victim blaming’ when it’s a known term of bullshittery that gives morons an out for the consequences of their actions? Who fucking cares if people feel unwelcome? What is the point of any of this?

It’s that way because of people like YOU.

SubForWhitePeopleOnly is an obvious joke. It’s so fucking on the nose that you’d have to be blind or willfully ignorant to not notice it, and it’s clearly the latter because BPT sees it as ‘white supremacy’, ignoring, of course, that the sub wouldn’t even exist had the April Fools’ Day joke not only been funny, but hadn’t been backed up by an agenda and a subscriber-base that doesn’t like white people because they’re white and finally got a day to openly say so. That’s unfortunately speculation, and I say unfortunately because I hate speculating, but I can’t do anything else when I can’t seem to find any of this ‘racist ass shit’ people on BPT keep saying exists (god forbid we, again, address the point of the board). None of this means that the April Fools’ Day joke on BPT or the existence of SubForWhitePeopleOnly is funny. In fact, it’s painfully unfunny. It’s so unfunny that a professionally unfunny person like me will never revisit these boards after I finish writing this, despite the fact I could steal their material and actually be comical for once.

Are you for real?

I love when black people who have been born since the 80s, and white people pretending to be black people online (because that’s probably part of what’s really going on here), act like it isn’t fucking illegal to be discriminated against past a personal level, or that you actually have to keep a constant eye over your shoulder, lest you get ‘arrested for being black’. Man, that shit pisses me off. I used to have a black friend when I was in undergrad who I’d hang out with and we’d got to the store at the same time to save money and gas. The fool constantly got pulled over for doing shit like running stop signs and speeding on back roads, and always had the nerve to say to the cops ‘because I’m black’ unironically. We aren’t friends anymore, partially because of that, and because I caught him stealing out of my wallet once.

‘Wow, Sahltines, you’re so racist! I bet you think all black people steal!’ No, I don’t. That kind of behavior is shitty person behavior and, surprise, shitty people are everywhere. They’re at your local deli, in your classrooms, and even online, running a garbage forum that skirts around its actual racist undertones in favor of claiming that when they walk outside, they engage in massive paranoia just to ‘live their everyday lives’. The average age on the Internet is between twelve and thirty, meaning your typical browser is a pimply-faced high school kid with no worries in his/her life, and puts on a mega-rad-ultra-tough-super-edgy persona because he/she hasn’t matured and learned to validate themselves through themselves rather than entirely on the perception of other. You fucks don’t have problems, so you invent them, and that’s exactly what this new wave of racsim hunting is. If you think racism, which is at an all time low and gets lower every year, is at the same levels it was in the 1960s, then you are actively looking for things to decry as racist, meaning you can’t see past skin color and stereotypical behaviors, thus making you the biggest racist of all. I bet that feels good, huh?

So, where are they?

I know some people would call this ‘sealioning’, but I frankly don’t give a damn. If you’re going to make a claim, then provide evidence to support it. It’s paramount to not getting caught with your pants down later, especially in the middle of a debacle where you’re trying to justify your awful joke-that-really-wasn’t-a-joke and you totally have the stuff, for real, you guys, you just have to believe what’s being said, even though all doubt could be washed away with a simple fucking screen capture. It also isn’t a ‘positive response’ when it caused a fairly large pointless controversy. I know ‘fairly large’ is not well-defined, but if I know about it, then it’s a sizable event considering how much shit I’m not privy to/outright miss because I refuse to lift the rock I reside under.

The worst part of this is that these online nobodies now have pictures of other nobodies that contain identifying information, like things that they bought, personal affects, and pictures of their skin and faces and residences or places they’re currently at. Idiots, did you learn nothing from the news that China utilizes a social points system to rate its people and outright ban them from doing basic shit like buying groceries if they don’t kowtow to the almighty ‘republic’? You never, ever put yourself or information about yourself out there if you can help it; that is fucking Internet Browsing 101 from the 90s. Hell, even my old-ass parents know not to do that, though I’d be willing to be it’s less to do with being savvy web people and, instead, having some goddamn common sense.

I also love how smarmy this entire paragraph reads. ‘Oh, it’s so wonderful to know we have people who just want to be part of our community where we simultaneously steal content, make fun of black people, and elevate black people for no reasons other than being black and occasionally shitting on other races or people!’ Yeah, that’s a community I totally want to be a part of. Gag unto me with a spoon.

A-plus level decision-making right there.

Oh man, giving people who are verified as being black a special mark to set them apart from the rest of the user-base, which is apparently full of neo-Nazi racists that hate blacks? This couldn’t possibly a horrible situation waiting to happen that is also historically and socially tone deaf! Also, grumble grumble, obvious grammar errors and shitty sentence structure, what else is new from a generation that’s grown up with auto-spellcheck/auto-replace? Double also, woe is to those who have to add people to a specific rule-list; hitting those shift-clicks and those copy-pastes are so difficult, how do these people do it?

Uhh, h-what?

The entire point of your board is shitty memes. It is not any deeper than that. Injecting politics into a place where they never were has, time and again, proven to destroy the community that was once built around the core content, leaving only a dried husk of socio-political garbage that the human incarnation of vultures come to pick at in an attempt to find fame, attention, and/or validation. Consider this the start of the countdown to this board officially going up in digital flames, which I personally consider a boon because it’s already a trash fire.

Micro-aggressions are made up by people who love being passive aggressive, but do not like being passively aggressed, i.e. weak, beta losers. Inclusivity always leads to exclusivity through removal of ‘wrongthink’ in favor of feels. People of Color is a racist term, and the only people use it are supremely racist fucks who missed the whole point of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s activism and the idea of ‘looking beyond color’. Reddit is not full of mostly white sub-boards, and I know this because Reddit doesn’t post racial demographics because they don’t ask for them on account creation, so any numbers would be made-up bullshit, plus the fact that Indian and Chinese populations individually outnumber the entirety of the global Caucasian (you know, the geographically & historically proper term for white people) population, so those countries’ user-bases would also logically outnumber the Caucasian user-base, thus meaning Reddit is definitively not a ‘white’ website. Safe spaces are for pussies who have zero problems with their life and thus need to invent bullshit to solve, effectively being the personification of infomercials.

From a person who is a certifiable minority within the borders of the United States, is a by-definition Person of Color, and a card-carrying member of the patriarchy, I sincerely hope I offended anyone who is prone to taking offense as much as possible, i.e. the good people running the BlackPeopleTwitter board. As a free life tip, instead of getting ‘triggered’ over a faceless mook on the Internet, nut up and learn to to be responsible and mature, because then you won’t have to go ‘WHOOPS’ followed by a wall of excuses when you fuck up.