Hi, I knew Aella IRL:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CZeTKUQOtMb/
(I am in the center. Huge Last Supper energy here.)
I am, past this post, probably not going to use this forum as a way to reveal information. If you want information, you can DM me on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/a.macdonald.iv/ — I am extremely transparent about who I am and have no desire to conceal my identity. My ethos is best described by the quote "anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be" and I try my best to live that. (note: I will not use Twitter.)
She got me cancelled from the local Austin LW community. We had beefed previously over two things:
1. A post where she thought the field of philosophy was a waste of time because it was "namedropping." (This is citation.)
2. A post where she disparaged the field of philosophy because she was working at a library, and so was her coworker who had completed a major in philosophy, which led her to do the "haha no economic value --> useless" reasoning; nevermind that MIRI relies entirely on donations and is not profitable outside of that, or that much of theoretical math is... you get the idea.
2.a. She described the library job as "a physically intensive job shelving books." I had ratio'd her here, because I said it was "the most bourgeois job description I've heard lately, perhaps ever." A man spent the course of several days arguing with me that I was wrong because library work requires you to occasionally squat, and the squat is an intense exercise, and therefore it was indeed an intense job. (I
wouldn't know!) After asking why he spent so much effort doing this, it was because he "liked her for her mind." As I've found, this is a very common euphemism.
This happened a while ago so I already have a pre-written summary:
https://app.simplenote.com/p/c70Nb5
She moved here in May 2021; I helped her move, both to sincerely try to make amends and selfishly because she paid for the food of whoever did. (The restaurant we went to had a plate of 30 chicken wings and she makes more than four of my parents. Come on.)
One point of note is that I also used to be a sex worker — gay escorting, specifically. (And guys, "escorting" just means you arrange a place to meet up in advance. "Prostitute" is just the general term. It's not a fancy version of the other. You can call me either.)
An ex of mine also had brief experience with the porn industry, and Aella had never been to a strip club while one of my exes
was a stripper. This meant that whenever we discussed sex work, she was never truly the center of attention because she had no experience with Homoworld or Real Porn or strip clubs and consulting my opinion was necesssary to have a complete view on sex work. I enjoyed doing this considerably.
I figured I had until October until she had found some way to remove me — I exceeded my expectations and lasted until December.
There are two traits about Aella stand out that persist in real life that I think more people should be aware of:
1. She is one of the most self-centered people I have ever met, and the closest thing I have known to a lizard (i.e. person who seems to lack some basic humanity). I don't mean she is selfish or that she hogs things or that she is narcissistic; my wording is precise here. She is self-centered; there is a Copernicaellan view where she is much more at the center of her own universe than most people are at the center of their own universe. (We all are, of course, but it's a matter of degrees.) Specifically,
she will not talk about anything unless it is related to her or she started the conversation. Once on the local Discord she got drunk and didn't do this — the reactions among many of us were like "dude, Aella is being cool. This is weird."
One of her most lizard moments was describing love as a "status transaction", which is just absurd — is it a "status transaction" if a mother holds her baby with unconditional love?
Finally, and this is more my subjective call, but: Aella does not laugh at jokes. You can tell bangers and she will either be blank or kind of chuckle, unless she's aware she's "supposed" to. I
do not trust people who have a horrible sense of humor.
2. She will deliberately center the conversation around herself at the expense of the conversation or others. (The card game "AskHole" is ulteriorly designed to do this; there are a disproportionate amount of questions about sex work.) During the 2021 Astral Codex Ten Megameetup, she advertised it on her page and it was derided as "the Aella meetup" because she occupied a central table and this was described by one guest as "holding court." One person who showed up to see Aella asked a pregnant wife holding her baby if she was a sex worker. She was described as "a goddess." To test my hypothesis that she will be unable to handle a conversation sufficiently not about her, I sat next to her for about ten minutes and talked with some friends about nothing related to her. At some point she petulantly said "I'm moving" and relocated to a spot where she would get more attention. During the dinner, she spent about a third of the time looking at the ceiling — like a child would do to over-advertise to their parents that they were bored. Once, when she felt a concept was socially important (this is key; she does not care about its real importance) she petulantly said "I DON'T UNDERSTAND" and either turned her head away or outright walked away, my memory fails me here. But the expectation was that we were supposed to care, and go out of our way to make it friendly to her.
3. I need you to really burn this one into your brain, because this is something you will forget, and you will need to constantly remind yourself about:
a great majority of what Aella writes or creates is produced by someone else. Many of her edgy tweets are grabbed from parties, and the person who said it is too paranoid about losing their job to be tagged, so she reposts it as if it was hers. She does not seem to have a good sense of what plagiarism is, or when you should cite someone or give proper credit. So, as I said,
a great deal of Aella's stuff is not actually Aella. For example, I doubt she produced any of the graphics or charts on her data work. She is, in my view, shameless about taking credit for what other people have done, which goes back to why she thinks philosophy is a lot of "namedropping."
Seriously: write that last one down, or somehow create a reminder that appears everytime you read her stuff. It cannot be said enough.
As it is, I feel like this is more than enough to occupy your headspace for now.
If you want to go deeper, there are countlesss things that annoy me about Aella that we can discuss over
Facebook DM or
Instagram. It is an infinite well.
xsrus.com
