the korean fandom on twitter is, understandably, going scorched earth on project moon due to this. there’s a lot currently going on to protest the decision, so i’m posting a list here of what’s going on for those who want to limit their time on elon musk’s $44 billion midlife crisis impulse purchase website (if you are on twitter, domuk is a good person to follow, as they translate important updates to english). a lot of the links are in korean, but generally they play nicely with machine translators. this should be current as of 8/2.
A press conference at the Gyeonggido Assembly will occur on 8/3, with lawmakers of the Gyeonggi province (where Project Moon is based) in attendance. This appears driven by the leader of the Gyeonggi Youth Union.
The vice chairman of the IT union–who has a good amount of experience with labor negotiations like these–has expressed strong support for the artist and is working to get media coverage due to the ongoing feminist witch hunts in the gaming industry. Project Moon isn’t union to my knowledge, but he’s noted that he’s taken on nonunion companies such as Netmarble (largest mobile game dev in South Korea) by getting the issue in front of the National Assembly (Korea’s congress).
A full boycott of the Limbus Company app, on both mobile and PC (steam) platforms. Overseas fans are highly encouraged to participate, regardless if whether they’re F2P or not. Not opening the app at all is arguably the biggest thing any one person can do to protest the decision, as the app logs the number of accounts that log on daily. For a new gacha such as Limbus, a high number of F2P daily active users, but a small number of paying users is often preferable to having a smaller userbase but more paying users. If the company sees the number of daily users remain stable, they will likely decide to wait out any backlash rather than apologize.
Due to the firing, the Leviathan artist has posted about poor working conditions when making the story. As per a bilingual speaker, they were working on a storyboard revision, and thought ‘if I ran into the street right now and got hit by a car and died, I wouldn’t have to keep working.’ They contacted Project Moon because they didn’t want their work to be like that, and proposed changes to serialization/reduction in amount of work per picture/to build up a buffer of finished images (they did not have any buffer while working on Leviathan to my knowledge). They were shut out, and had to suck it up and accept the situation.
Hamhampangpang has a 'shrine’ section of the restaurant for fans to leave fan-created merch and other items. They also allow the fans to take this merch back if they can prove it’s theirs. Fans are now doing just that.
To boost all of the above, a large number of Korean fanartists with thousands of followers have deleted their works and/or converted their accounts from fanart accounts to accounts supporting the protests. Many of them are bilingual, and they’re where I got the majority of this information.
[note 1: there’s a targeted english-language disinformation campaign by the website that started the hate mob. i have read the artist’s tweets with machine translation, and they’re talked about in the second hankyoreh article linked above: nowhere does she express any transphobic or similarly awful beliefs. likewise, be wary of any claims that she supported anything whose description makes you raise eyebrows–those claims are likely in reference to megalia, a korean feminist movement. for information on that, i’d recommend the NPR/BBC articles below and this google drive link of english-language scholarly papers on them. for the love of god don’t get your information about a feminist movement from guys going on witch hunts for feminists.]
[note 2: i’ve seen a couple people argue that the firing was for the physical safety of the employees, citing the kyoani incident in japan. as per this korean fan, most fans there strongly do not believe this was the case. we have english-translated transcripts of the meeting between the mob and project moon; the threats the mob was making were to……brand project moon as a feminist company online. yes, really. male korean gamers aren’t normal about feminism, and there’s been an ongoing witch hunt for feminists in the industry since about 2016, something you see noted in both the labor union statements. both NPR and the BBC this phenomenon to gamergate, and i’d say it’s a pretty apt comparison.]
let me know if anything needs correction or if anything should be added.
alrighty so this broke containment so i’m going to add a bit of context: project moon is an indie game company that made lobotomy corporation (SCP management type game), library of ruina (deckbuilding RPG), and most recently limbus company (gacha).
here’s what’s happened as of 8/3:
I said yesterday that Project Moon filed a complaint against the protest truck—this turned out to be incorrect. Somebody filed a complaint, but who it was is unclear. Since the truck schedule and details are public, and the truck protest organizer noted that multiple complaints about the truck came in, it’s more likely to be from the forum that started the hate mob rather than Project Moon. Apologies; the correction was tweeted out while I was sleeping.
The provincial meeting happened, and the Youth Union put out a press statement more or less summing up what they said. They promised to get to the bottom of the issue via auditing.
This statement is hard to parse in English, but it makes more sense if you read a lot of translated Korean protest posts. A large part of the Korean reporting and protests invoke two phrases that pop up over and over again: ideological verification (firing based on personal beliefs) and unfair dismissal (firing that is in violation of Korean labor laws). Those two claims are central to many of the signage truck slogans and hashtag campaigns, are found in the various union condemnations, and are mentioned in several of the news articles. Those two terms, and those two terms only, are specifically called out in the statement.
The statement uses weasel words to say that they don’t technically meet the definition of unfair dismissal because they never served her a dismissal. It’s not clear to me whether they’re trying to play lawyer with the exact definition of what a dismissal is, or if they haven’t actually given her paper documents saying she’ll be fired yet (Korean law requires documentation in writing, not over the phone).
Similarly, they claim that they didn’t fire her for her ideological beliefs, but “legal judgement and advice“. Note that the illustrator was fired in 3 hours at 11 pm at night, but took a whole 9 days of radio silence before responding to mass backlash against this, but then cited ‘needing legal consultation’ as the excuse for taking so long. I’m very doubtful that a lawyer was even consulted during the initial decision to fire the artist, given the timeframe and the fact the CEO was in Japan on a business trip.
They also warned against legal action to ‘disregarding the NDA’, which might be targeted towards either the Leviathan artist for speaking on unfair working conditions, or the fired artist herself, for speaking to Hankyoreh.
Let’s make this post even longer because I have even more images saved. Next up, we got:
Tsutsumagushi Disease
Chikungunya Fever!
MERS
Pertussis (whooping cough) with a horrifying (almost body horror) headpiece and flute
Dengue Fever, the image of which literally made me stop breathing for a moment when I first saw it
Japanese Encephalitis (as… idols, maybe?)
And Zika Virus (so pretty! and for what???)
And some higher res images of the ones from the video (Legionnaires’ Disease, Viral Gastroenteritis, and Rubella). Unfortunately, I could not fit Rabies because of the image limit.
The lime disease mech is definitely supposed to be a tick
A mysterious fairy who just showed up in town one day. Helpful to a fault, she almost can’t seem to resist sticking her nose in everyone’s business and trying to assist them whether they want her to or not. Oddly, though she bears an uncanny resemblance to Tulita and even claims to be her twin sister, her counterpart doesn’t seem to have ever met her before…..
Was discussing the idea of alternate versions of our OCs with @verseno due to the same conversation subject that led to the creation of that edgy Ruby and i felt like repaying the favor with an alternate version of their funny fairy from a while back.
I sent a letter today - something I haven’t done for years
It’s full of plastic bread clips
It’s for Science
At the risk of loosing some mystery, I think I should add some context:
There’s this website-I mean, scientific organization called the Holotypic Occlupanid Reasurch Group.
They are a group of abiologists who study and classify Bread clips.
I found a species that has not yet been described:
Yay for citizen science 👍
wtf?
Update:
Apparently HORG is widely appreciated by pediatricians since knowing exactly what kind of Occlupanid a child may have swallowed makes removing it safely much easier
IIRC this is actually part of the reason HORG was started. A man swallowed a breadclip and the clip closed around part of his tissue linings (in his intestines I think?). The specific shape and flexibility of the clip were significant determining factors in the removal process, as some bread clips have spikes and prongs that would have made extraction more complicated. They started the taxonomy so they could work out extraction techniques for each type.
are you fucking kidding me occlu like oculus or close and panid like bread. its a fancy word for breadcloser
the garden i tend at work is getting overrun with snails so i thought about a world where we acquired a domesticated a “working dog” breed of hammerhead worm (they eat snails and slugs and worms) that is also. a puppy. Bred to clear vegetation of common slimy garden pests. click under readmore if u wanna see the worm theyre based off of i think theyre really cute
Thank u guys for all the wormdog love T_T i did more
The top one is if the wormdog from the og post (that me and my irl coworker have nicknamed Mug) if he ate all the damn snails terrorizing the garden and grew big and strong. the second one shows how wormdogs come in all sorts of shapes and colors :) bc i wanted to draw more. which one would u adopt
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