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Under the GOP’s health plan, sexual assault would be considered a preexisting condition

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Any Republicans that sign the AHCA with these set down as “preexisting conditions” are fucking monsters. I know, I know, we’ve already understood how utterly depraved and inhumane it is to repeal the Affordable Care Act and how the GOP wants to break it, but this is a whole new level of trash fire demonstrating what utterly soulless bastards all who vote for this are.

Domestic abuse and rape are insidious. They worm inside a person’s soul and leech away at them. People who survive such horrific moments in their lives already struggle with how they see themselves. Survivors already have trouble not seeing themselves as broken, ruined, damaged goods.

Republicans are being fucking monsters and saying they want to make such persistent and damaging thoughts into something backed by preexisting conditions. They want to turn the trauma and pain of it all into something that an insurance company can look at a person, see some heartless dickwad attacked them, and say “Hey, sorry we can’t provide you with health insurance, but you’re damaged goods.”

FUCK ANYONE THAT SUPPORTS THIS. I don’t care who you are or whatever else you do or have done. Going along with this, and especially being a politician that votes in favor of this, means you are complete garbage.

Under the GOP’s health plan, sexual assault would be considered a preexisting condition

Marvel Turns Jim Lee’s Old X-Men Trading Cards Into Variant Covers For July – Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movie, TV News

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Relayed to me by @lordtimeblogposts. Quoting all of them, highlighting the one mentioning Polaris specifically.

ALL-NEW WOLVERINE #22 (Archangel)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #30 (Bishop)
AVENGERS #9 (Mystique)
BLACK PANTHER #16 (Storm)
CABLE #3 (Cable)
CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #19 (Gambit)
CHAMPIONS #10 (Cyclops)
DAREDEVIL #23 (Domino)
DEADPOOL #33 (Deadpool)
DEFENDERS #3 (Shadow King)
DOCTOR STRANGE #23 (Mr. Sinister)
GENERATION X #4 (Jubilee)
GWENPOOL, THE UNBELIEVABLE #18 (White Queen)
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #9 (Colossus)
IRON FIST #5 (Sabretooth)
JEAN GREY #4 (Dark Phoenix)
MIGHTY THOR #21 (Sentinel)
MS. MARVEL #20 (Lady Deathstrike)
OLD MAN LOGAN #26 (Professor X)
PETER PARKER: THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #2 (Psylocke)
THE PUNISHER #14 (Forge)
ROYALS #5 (Magneto)
SPIDER-MAN #18 (Shadowcat)
THANOS #9 (Strong Guy)
UNCANNY AVENGERS #25 (Rogue)
VENOM #152 (Polaris)
WEAPON X #5 (Warpath)
X-MEN BLUE #7 (Jean Grey)
X-MEN GOLD #7 (Mojo)

This is explicitly about recreating and using Jim Lee’s card art as covers. As far as I can tell, this is the only Polaris card Jim Lee ever did.

Now for some thoughts. Ignore after the cut if you wish.

It’s good that she’s on any cards at all. I fully expected Marvel to ignore her existence entirely given the company’s recent track record. Also, the covers have a theme, and it can’t be helped for Marvel’s part that for her to be included (requiring her to fit this theme), they don’t have any options other than this card. What I’m saying is: Marvel can’t be faulted for “choice of costume” here, a normal complaint of mine. It’s not like Jim Lee provided alternatives.

The Venom book is selling pretty good at the moment, with issue #4 having sold 38,337 copies in February. It started at around 90,000 for issue #1 in November, then down to that 38k in December, then jumped back up to around 55k in January before dropping back down for February. Its sales are unpredictable but may stabilize around 38k. Meaning at least by current appearances, Lorna wasn’t slapped on a low-selling book that Marvel knows isn’t going to sell well. Marvel’s done stuff like that in the past – technically put her in or on things, but ensured her presence was sabotaged on one way or another.

Which is what I expected to find when I started writing these thoughts. I’m so used to Marvel screwing her over that I fully expected to find a red flag if I looked deep enough.

So far, I haven’t found that red flag. Not saying Marvel hasn’t done something that’ll sabotage and undermine this for her. I’m saying that so far, I haven’t seen any such red flags, and certain things I would normally see as such (e.g. Lorna in her X-Factor costume instead of her iconic costume) don’t count as red flags and can’t be held against Marvel due to context of how these covers were selected.

But I’ll just say: please note that my looking for red flags like this is a sign of how bad Marvel has been with regard to Lorna over the past decade. When I started, I looked at everything Marvel did involving Polaris with optimism. Today, everything they do that actually does involve her, my kneejerk response is “Okay, how are they going to deliberately ruin it for her this time?” That didn’t happen out of nowhere. It happened due to how Marvel’s treated her. For nearly a decade. It’s going to take more than one or two good acts for me to start trusting Marvel again.

That, and allowing one or two good acts by Marvel to “make up for” decades worth of Lorna getting treated poorly is how Lorna ended up not getting her origin story or leading a team in her own right for over 40 years, as well as how Marvel has so casually excluded her from important events. Especially ones she objectively should’ve taken part in, like Children’s Crusade, Avengers vs X-Men, and Axis.

If you allow one or two good acts to make up for a decades worth of bad ones, you just reinforce the mentality that they can keep deliberately screwing the character over so long as they do a couple token things once in a blue moon. 

Anyway, it’s also important to highlight that these covers are all X-Men franchise covers. In the past few years, Marvel (really Perlmutter at the top) has been so pissy about Fox owning the film rights to the X-Men franchise that they never would’ve done something like this. Doing this alone is an unexpected development. Nobody demanded Marvel do this, and unlike Avengers vs X-Men, Axis, Inhumans vs X-Men, etc, this isn’t being done to promote other franchises while eroding the X-Men franchise and trying to make it look bad.

Well, perhaps aside from Magneto on the Royals cover. It stands out hard that the father of the Magnus family, the royal family of Genosha that Marvel destroyed via forced retcon during Axis, and one of the more popular X-Men characters at Marvel, is being used on the cover of a book meant to promote the Inhumans royal family. Which the promotion of has been a clear attempt to “replace” the X-Men franchise over the past few years.

That’s a lot of text. tl;dr version: good that Lorna is included in this variant initiative, I see no red flags to suggest her inclusion will be deliberately undermined in the process, but there may be something I didn’t catch and we’ll just have to wait and see.

Marvel Turns Jim Lee’s Old X-Men Trading Cards Into Variant Covers For July – Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movie, TV News

io9 on Twitter

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You know why I hound @marvelentertainment and take them to task so often about how awful their executives and upper level editorial tend to be? This is fucking why.

There’s a lot of history behind how awful Marvel can be that offsets the moments of genuine good it sometimes offers. My personal interest in Polaris and how Marvel has screwed her over for decades, and especially undermined her for the past decade, gave me a lot of insight into how Marvel really functions beyond its PR machinations.

And I want to stress as I continue: this is not applicable to people like G. Willow Wilson, Cullen Bunn, Mark Paniccia, etc. They’re great as far as I’ve seen, but they have much less authority compared to the people I’m complaining about here.

Axel Alonso and Nick Spencer are here, trying to pretend that what they’re doing has nothing to do with politics. It’s bullshit. We know it’s bullshit because Marvel’s entire schtick for a while now has been about superheroes in a politicized atmosphere.

Fucking Civil War was about politics. Superheroes needing to register, rebellion against registration, Captain America opposing the policies of the U.S. government to resist forced registration as a matter of protecting the values and freedoms of the U.S., that was all political.

Marvel’s entire history is about politics. Captain America was created to push back against the evils of Hitler, the Nazis and fascism, and encourage the U.S. to be part of the World War II war effort. The X-Men were created as an allegory to the civil rights movement. This is Marvel’s roots. To suddenly say this shitty event that’s clearly political somehow isn’t political is a betrayal of those roots.

Let me put it this way: either Marvel is lying when they say this isn’t political, or their decision to continue the event with all its political trappings even if unintended makes them grossly ignorant both of the socio-political landscape and Marvel’s history. There is literally no scenario where continuing Secret Empire as presently established and put forth by Marvel can make Marvel look good.

The refusal of Marvel to listen to feedback and change things if not cancel the event entirely is also incredibly damning. In the past, Marvel was perfectly willing to retroactively explain away things that pissed their readers off and abandon plans they had in mind. In one such case, in the 90s, Susan Storm-Richards started wearing a skimpy outfit with a number 4 boob window after she’d given birth to one of her children. In response to backlash from readers, Marvel explained it away as Malice possessing her.

Marvel’s hands aren’t tied by “the big machine” of publishing either. Yes, they do plan years in advance, but it’s not like that means they have every issue written and printed in warehouses for the next two years just waiting to be released. 

But, all of this is assuming Marvel doesn’t know what it’s doing. I think they do.

If you don’t pay a lot of attention to shit Marvel execs and upper level editors say and do, here’s an incredibly common philosophy they repeat everywhere: “outrage is good for sales.” They take the attitude that any time they piss readers off, that actually helps them make more money, because it spreads word of mouth and makes SOME readers buy the issues just so they can see how bad it is and complain about specific problems.

Which is also an ignorant as hell philosophy. It’s short-sighted and narrow-minded. It ignores POTENTIAL audiences and how such actions can dissuade people that aren’t reading Marvel comics from ever wanting to read them in the future. If this philosophy had its way throughout the entire company, Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel wouldn’t exist.

Secret Empire is just the natural end point of this horribly misinformed train of thought. “Hey, let’s do a comic book event that’ll REALLY piss people off! Make Captain America a Nazi! Make it so that he was ALWAYS a Nazi! No, why stop there, let’s do Magneto – a Jewish man, survivor of the Holocaust who lost his family in the genocide – too! People will line up around the block to read how we fucked it all up just so they can yell at us on the internet!”

For fuck sakes, Marvel.

Ultimately, if the backlash gets REALLY bad, they start making half-assed excuses – like they did here. “It’s not political,” Axel Alonso and Nick Spencer say, as the comic advocates for fascism and turns long-time anti-fascist heroes into the very thing they were created to oppose. “Trust us and wait until you see what we have in store for Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver before you complain, it’ll all pay off,” Tom Brevoort says after that forced retcon in Axis that made the Maximoff twins suddenly not Magneto’s kids anymore. Followed by years plodding useless bullshit that hasn’t once provided any kind of pay-off for fans of those characters.

Marvel’s chronic problem is this: they do shitty things for shitty reasons, and when they’re called on it, they provide shitty excuses that literally anyone can see through if they take five seconds to think about it. Marvel doesn’t know how to own its mistakes anymore. Marvel doesn’t know how to make amends for its mistakes. Marvel only knows how to lie and bullshit its way along during controversies, following their egos to the bitter end.

I learned this years ago as I saw Polaris excluded from events she should’ve been a part of, or how her first book as a full-fledged leader in her own right got canceled for “lack of sales” when it received zero support from Marvel (while other books selling much worse got to last longer), and so much else. In every case, Marvel had a poor excuse.

“Polaris can’t be in Avengers vs X-Men because events are only for A-listers and B-listers, and she’s not one of them!”

“Polaris can’t be Magneto’s daughter because of genetics breeding true, but Siryn can be Banshee’s daughter because reasons!”

At Marvel, for the people at the top, it’s never about putting their best foot forward and listening to their readers. It’s always, always about doing whatever the fuck they want and then making up excuses for why that should be the case. They don’t work for the fictional universe they’re supposed to curate, and they don’t work for their readers either. They work exclusively for themselves.

Before I end this rant, I want to remind anyone reading this of one very important point: Ike Perlmutter is the current CEO at Marvel, with control over the comic books. He was kicked out of involvement in the Marvel films because of how he meddles with things. It’s an open secret that he’s responsible for the past decade of Marvel doing things to undermine the Fantastic Four and X-men entirely because Fox owns the film rights to those franchises.

Why does this matter in this specific instance? Because Ike Perlmutter supported Donald Trump’s campaign last year, and works with Trump on veterans affairs. Trump even explicitly cited Perlmutter as THE name he talks with on the subject, in a brief interview last month where he said he was going to have a meeting about it at Mar-a-Lago (which got canceled).

That’s who’s running Marvel. Given everything else I just said, what are the chances Perlmutter isn’t partly responsible either directly or by reputation for Marvel suddenly putting out this “non-political” event that turns heroes into Nazis and claims they were Nazis all along?

io9 on Twitter

Watch As Darpa’s Fire Suppression Wand Magically Extinguishes These Flames

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Hi. I know I’ve been a bit quieter on Tumblr for the past week or so. That means it’s time to make a new post! This one will be for my series:

What Can Polaris Do?

For those of you unfamiliar, in this series, I point out things Polaris could do with her powers if Marvel were willing to make real use of her. Marvel tends to treat her powers like a cheaper imitation of what her father Magneto can do, and rarely allows anything more creative than tossing metal objects around. This shows the wide variety of options to her powers.

Marvel is aware that Lorna’s magnetic manipulation abilities can be used to create defensive shields. However, to my knowledge, Marvel isn’t aware that Lorna could use her powers to directly put out fires. She doesn’t need to find some type of material like water or dirt to snuff out flames. She can use electromagnetic fields themselves to block gas flow that would normally feed a fire.

Why does this matter? Well, here’s a pretty damn big reason.

image

For those of you not deeply familiar with Magneto’s character history: this is Magneto’s first daughter, Anya. She died in a fire. Magneto wanted to rush in and rescue her, but a mob kept him from doing so. Anya burned to death, and there was nothing Magneto could do.

Except there WAS.

Magneto had his powers at the time. If he had used those powers to starve the fire of oxygen at least around Anya, she could have survived. Localized electromagnetic fields could have completely changed the outcome and made Magneto into a very different man.

But wait. If Magneto didn’t know he could do this, and he’s widely considered the Master of Magnetism, then how could Lorna be expected to know?

Four words: Masters Degree in Geophysics.

Lorna has a graduate education, where she would have learned all sorts of applications for her powers. Magneto is a very clever person, but being clever isn’t enough. He would’ve needed to understand intricate scientific details about the potential applications of his powers that Lorna would have discovered as routine portions of her education regimen.

As a freebie, here’s a scientific article on the effects of magnetic fields on flames and gas flow. This is the sort of academic study Lorna would have immersed herself in that Magneto never would have seen.

With the article above, we also come to learn that electromagnetic fields could even be used to direct the course of a fire. Got an enemy or a whole group of them that’s immune to magnetics, immune to blunt force attacks, but vulnerable to fire? Start or redirect a fire right at them. Control the burn. Focus it on where they’re weakest. Perhaps even use the flames to divide their forces, making battles with them a lot easier to manage.

So concludes another example of something Lorna could do with her powers.

Watch As Darpa’s Fire Suppression Wand Magically Extinguishes These Flames

Click here to support Peter David needs your help organized by Peter David

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I already put this up on Twitter (where a majority of my spread and activity is), but throwing it up on here too.

I also said some things on Twitter, but I’ll share here too.

First, one detail about Peter David some people may not know: he had a stroke back in 2012. That probably ate up a lot of his funds as it was. I remember there was a donation drive for him at the time, but he only did it through paypal and asking people to buy his work if they wished, not through a gofundme or anything similar.

In any case and regardless of that, money’s a big messy issue, and I think this is worth pitching in for that simple fact alone. Our world is, unfortunately, set up in a way where money issues could easily ruin someone’s life. All for avoiding that outcome.

Outside that, I do think it’s worth giving a little bit of my personal POV since a) I’m a Polaris fan and b) I’ve talked about Peter David in the past. Go into the cutoff below if you want to read that.

I’ve had mixed feelings about him. In the beginning, I was very pessimistic about him, because I was (and still am) so used to veteran writers who previously worked with a character deciding to undo that character’s development and revert them back to the way the character was when the writer left off with them.

And my attitude toward Peter David has been… a bit of a journey. He’s done things that are good, and other things that I strongly think were bad.

He wrote Lorna’s origin story, which turned out much better than I was expecting from him at the time. He got Lorna interacting with her brother Quicksilver again, and got an issue with her sister Scarlet Witch in there. She was team leader for All-New X-Factor. And there were tiny pieces of Lorna acknowledging her Jewish ancestry.

That’s the good. There was also some bad.

ANXF #2-6 was terrible, IMO. ANXF #7 on after was good and got better over time, but 2-6 ignored her past leadership experience and seemed increasingly focused on making her look bad, either for Gambit’s sake or so Peter David could take full credit for leadership traits in Lorna (or possibly both). Peter David’s refusal to be involved in major comic book events gave Marvel an easy excuse to exclude her from events and crossovers and shrug off any blame for it. He was always quick to ditch her iconic costume entirely, which undermined her ability to spread.

And most importantly, Peter David didn’t want to explore her relationship with her father Magneto at all. Even if he had done so, I think he would’ve focused on trying to make it look like a bad thing. That’s essentially how he wrapped up her origin story arc: having Lorna say she never wanted to see her father again, which provided Marvel with an excuse to keep them apart.

So like I said, mixed bag. The length of my text may make it look like there was more bad than good, but that’s deceptive. In spite of his bad points, he hit important character and relationship milestones for her – and he did them in a way that doesn’t make anyone wish he hadn’t written them. With the exceptions of how he wrote her dynamic with Gambit in ANXF #2-6 and his avoidance of Magneto (and Lorna’s dark side by extension), of course. As always, credit where credit’s due.

Click here to support Peter David needs your help organized by Peter David

Axis And Allies: Using The Enemies Strategy In Marvel’s Secret Empire – Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movie, TV News

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In our previous article, we told how it is revealed that Captain America, Steve Rogers, was always Hydra…because originally Hydra (and thus, the Nazis) won World War II. The Allies, in a last ditch attempt, use a Cosmic Cube to alter reality so that Hydra and the Nazis lose, and that is the Marvel Universe we know. A world that was artificially fabricated by the Allies, including a truly Allies-loyal Cap (possibly because the Allies never learned of his deception?). And thus, when Kobik turned Cap to Hydra, she was actually awakening his true self from the original timeline before the Allies changed everything, and thus allowing Rogers to restore Hydra to its ‘rightful’ position.

Yeeeeah, I’m not surprised by this.

There was a time long, long ago when things like this would have surprised me. Back before Metroid: Federation Force, before the sabotage of everything Polaris starred in, before Polaris’ exclusion from things like Children’s Crusade, before 3rd Birthday, before FFX-2, I used to be very naive. I used to think companies and the people running them knew where to draw the line on certain things, and that there was consensus within companies to try to put the best effort forward.

I’ve learned a lot over a decade and a half.

Marvel has always been slow to trends. This one is part of the “ruin heroic figures for shitty reasons or no reason at all” trend. Some person with control over a character perceived as a bastion of good decides “Hey, let’s make them the opposite of what they are, that’ll be exciting.”

That’s the generous interpretation. The not so generous one? That they aren’t just doing it for “buzz,” but because they genuinely loathe heroic icons and want to see them destroyed.

Marvel pulling this “Hydra Cap” thing was already bad. This is akin to Marvel storylines in the 80s and 90s where the company thought it was a good idea, it got backlash one way or another, and the company had to make up an excuse to set things right. Only this time, Marvel’s going even further instead of fixing their mistakes.

Before, the shittiness of “Hydra Cap” could’ve been presented as “Okay, this is unnatural, the cosmic cube made him that way, but he’ll be fixed soon.” Or it could’ve been a fake.

Now? Now Marvel’s basically saying that Captain America was never a bastion of good, that he was always part of Hydra and the cosmic cube is what made him good.

This storyline might, might have been fascinating as a What If? storyline. The kind of storyline that has no real validity, that acts as a fun tangent for how things could’ve been. But when Marvel messes with the 616 versions of these characters, they’re messing with what is considered to be the “real,” “defining” versions of them.

All in all, Marvel sucks. I’ve known that for years as I’ve seen them screw Polaris over while pretending to be open to her, but now it’s becoming even more obvious.

I also wonder how much of this is directly the work of Nick Spencer and Tom Brevoort, and how much of it is a demand from Ike Perlmutter. Given Perlmutter is supportive of Trump and was recently cited as THE major player in veteran affairs with Trump. Perlmutter’s a man who is willing to screw over the X-Men and Fantastic Four just cause Fox owns their film rights. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch that he’d go out of his way to ruin the most iconic representation of America in comics to get in good with Trump and his people.

Axis And Allies: Using The Enemies Strategy In Marvel’s Secret Empire – Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movie, TV News

Lorna Dane on Twitter

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nuevolordtme:

salarta:

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

HELP I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING MY ASS OFF AT THIS VIDEO. FOLLOW THE LINK OR OPEN ON MY TUMBLR TO SEE THE VID. DO IIIIIIT.

Okay, I think the dressing down of Havok in-universe with this video is hilarious. But in all honesty, if it were a view of the character out-of-universe (or reader view), I don’t think it’d be fair. Most of his shittiness over the past few years has been Brevoort and other people at Marvel shoving their words into his mouth, not any genuine development focused on trying to make the most of who the character actually is.

And I say that as someone that doesn’t really like Havok because of how efforts by Marvel to promote him have hurt Polaris over the past decades.

Still, I find the video funny for what it is.

Delete Twitter
Lorna Dane (@MissMagnetism)

??

Looks to me like either they deleted their account or changed the name. I’m disappointed the vid is inaccessible now, and I hope they weren’t harassed into it.

Lorna Dane on Twitter

Lorna Dane on Twitter

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//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

HELP I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING MY ASS OFF AT THIS VIDEO. FOLLOW THE LINK OR OPEN ON MY TUMBLR TO SEE THE VID. DO IIIIIIT.

Okay, I think the dressing down of Havok in-universe with this video is hilarious. But in all honesty, if it were a view of the character out-of-universe (or reader view), I don’t think it’d be fair. Most of his shittiness over the past few years has been Brevoort and other people at Marvel shoving their words into his mouth, not any genuine development focused on trying to make the most of who the character actually is.

And I say that as someone that doesn’t really like Havok because of how efforts by Marvel to promote him have hurt Polaris over the past decades.

Still, I find the video funny for what it is.

Lorna Dane on Twitter

Parks And Cons on Twitter

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I’ve noted in the past how Marvel (likely really Brevoort) tried to mess with casual readers by a) undermining All-New X-Factor #14 where Polaris and Scarlet Witch would actually spend time as sisters, while b) putting out the following Axis variant cover where they tried to make Enchantress look more like Polaris (instead of actually using Polaris in addition to Enchantress).

As I’ve noted many times before, that attempt to screw with Polaris fans and casual readers backfired. People keep mistaking Enchantress for Polaris on that cover (like, for example, this ebay listing for an art print).

The tweet behind this post demonstrates, to me, the continuing impact of that decision.

Polaris, due to being new and very low supply compared to high demand, can go for around $30 right now. By contrast, Enchantress can be bought for $10. This combo means that if a scammer wants to do it, they could buy both figures, put Enchantress in the Polaris box, “return” it, and save themselves about $20. Or alternately, reap a $15-20 profit.

This scheme relies on the average employee not knowing both Polaris and Enchantress exist, and not knowing their physical differences.

A problem that wouldn’t exist, or barely exist, if Marvel promoted both characters heavily. Instead of trying to undermine one of them to promote the other.

For example, with that Axis cover above, Enchantress’ body language doesn’t match Polaris’ personality. But Marvel (again, really Brevoort) refusing to promote Polaris means they won’t pick up on that body language cue. They’ll just assume it’s Polaris.

The solution to this ongoing problem is simple: acknowledging Polaris, and using her enough for people to know when a character isn’t her. Something Marvel apparently doesn’t know how to do.

Parks And Cons on Twitter