Watching the latest episode of the troon reality TV show I Wish I Were a Camera, Vol. 9: September (2024) - Elaine: "If you do anything to hurt Jane again, or Aziel again, or Aziel now, I'm gonna rip your fucking head off."... Is this about Vivian Strange again?! - Vivian responds to Jane claiming he made him feel "uncomfortable" (spoiler: he's not apologizing) - Vivian becomes Jane Brown's self-appointed troon co-habitation broker: "Move in with me, don't talk to Aziel. You don't really want to go to California."
So the new monthly episode of the popular troon reality TV show I Wish I Were A Camera was just released... and I think this one too has several scenes that I personally suspect are about Vivian:
I Wish I Were a Camera, Vol. 9: September (2024)
Each day of September 2024 is represented by one minute of footage. As the summer comes to close, so too does Jane and Elaine's distress, from the pain of the past to the yearning for old friends. Elaine grows closer to the cis women in her life. Jane's mental health improves significantly. The two showcase the art of loved ones.
This is the first segment I want to highlight. And I ask: Is this about Vivian, or is this about Vivian? I obviously think this is about him, but feel free to disagree:
Jane: The last time I got high, I started thinking more in depth about this. Wait a moment. A "certain somebody" started... enabling this... and I talked about moving in with Aziel. And the first thing that this bitch does is call me and be like, "Do not talk to Aziel! Talk to me. Talk to me. Talk to me. Move in with me. Move in with me. Move in with me.", Right as I'm being kicked out of my mom's house. It was existentially horrifying... realizing that this person was gaslighting me. And they admitted that they were gaslighting. Because they were like, "you don't really want to go to California. You don't want to move there.". And I'm thinking, "What? When did I ever say that?". She's not gonna fucking learn anything. You were lecturing her about finances when you were nineteen. Back in April. In April, you told her that she was emotionally manipulating me.
This is followed by a shot of Elaine playbacking to the song
Traitor by Nails, with him concluding:
"And I'll do my best to swallow my pride and bury these feelings of anger I have towards you... and only take them out in therapy. I'll try to pretend that you don't even fucking exist unless you're mentioned. But if you do anything... to hurt Jane again... or Aziel again... or Aziel now... I'm gonna rip your fucking head off."
This is really bizarre. I am now starting to think there's a whole backstory to the demise of the GenderWeird podcast, and whatever was going on between Jane and Vivian had literally been happening for months and also eventually involved Elaine and Aziel because they were all talking to one another, together and in private. The segment where Jane is talking is obviously just a small piece from what looks like a much longer Livestream or private video chat conversation, but here's what I got from this tiny sliver: Jane apparently got kicked out of his mother's house - due to trooning out or because he was doing drugs? He doesn't say - and he decided to move in with Aziel instead. Presumably this means Jane was gonna move to Florida to be with Aziel, or that they were all gonna end up in LA with Elaine, as did eventually happen. But then Jane claims that (the person I assume was) Vivian was telling him to "not talk to Aziel" and to instead move in with him and Serafina in Portland. Then Jane alludes to someone not learning their lesson and alludes to Elaine telling them how to do their personal finances when Elaine was still 19. This definitely sounds like Vivian, because Vivian was always complaining in his videos about how he doesn't have any money (but somehow he always has money for drugs) and how much he hates working for a living. Again, I don't know if this is about Vivian but in the context of everything that has happened over the last year, it definitely sounds to me like this is about him. I could be wrong of course, but too many things align here for me to assume it's about anyone else. Also in the context of some of the other segments in this latest episode of
I Wish I Were A Camera, which are direct references to things Vivian has actually said
on paper, and which I will discuss below.
If this is about Vivian, and the story about Elaine talking to Vivian at 19 about personal finances is true, then this segment also suggests that Vivian got on Letterboxd and Youtube with the intent of finding "barely legal" 18-19 year old troons that he befriended under the guise of supporting their online film careers as young DIY filmmakers, but in reality because he was grooming them just wanted to bang them for his OF.
Again, I don't and cannot know if this is about Vivian, but just to make myself feel better, I'll tell myself that it is, because I kinda like the idea of Vivian being so clueless about personal finances that he blew through $11k in GFM donos in a matter of weeks, and had to be lectured on personal finances by a nineteen year old who has their shit together better than him. That certainly fits my perception of Vivian, so I declare this is about him, death of the author, etc.
The second part I want to highlight is this, where Elaine appears to be talking to someone who is already familiar with Vivian, and already doesn't have a high opinion of him, updating him on Vivian's summer GoFundMeScam, the one where he lied about being on the verge of imminent
eviction and homelessness, only to come out and admit he had spent all the money on bills and a new bedframe for himself and Serafina.
Elaine tells the guy, seemingly quoting from Vivian's GoFundMe page:
"'So if you donate to my GoFundMe, you'll be donating to Palestinian liberation", I swear the God! It said that.". The other guy replies:
"Fuck off! She's doing the equivalent of a retweet, what fucking work is she doing?", "At least she's smoking cigarettes, she'll probably die of cancer"... hmmm, I think I know which GFM this was about.
I now see that Vivian went and took down the original text of the GFM to cover up the fact that he really did scam people into donating with the claim that he was on the verge of imminent eviction and homelessness. I have an archived mirror of the original GFM page in this thread, if anyone wants to see the original text:
"If that kind of support for Palestine is something you believe to be important, then donating to this fundraiser is a small part to the cause of Palestinian liberation".
So, again, was Elaine talking to the other guy about Vivian, or was he talking about Vivian. Geez Vivi, it must really suq to have your Ghaza Diaries dismissed as
"the equivalent of a retweet.", with this guy thinking you're so toxic that they wish you would just die from lung cancer. To be fair (and I don't see why I should be fair to this lying scumbag but then again, I am a normal human being, I am not a sociopath like him), I don't think Vivian's Ghaza gore compilations are
"the equivalent of a retweet", I think he puts a little more work into them than that. I suspect the original impetus for these Ghaza gore compilations is in this Letterboxd list, titled
"My Cinemasochist Endurance Watchlist". Vivian says in the description of this Letterboxd list that he likes to "endure" multiple hours-long documentaries and films. This bragging about "enduring" film and getting a dopamine burst at the end of it, this
is the result of a pornsick mind who sees everything as an endless scrolling feed of content:
In addition to the how good the films themselves are, I LOVE watching really really long movies as endurance exercises. Despite how soul-crushing and miserable it is, one gets a little dopamine burst of accomplishment upon finishing Satantango, whcih is a relief because such a film would be utterly unbearable if it were merely 3-4 hours long.
Some of these I've seen before, many I have not. Personally, I am dreading repeating Shoah, easily the most difficult cinematic experience of my life, but damn it, I must persevere. That is the cinephile's obligation to history: it is our responsibility to REMEMBER the stories that the rest of the world would rather forget. No one will voluntarily watch a nine hour documentary like that out of pleasure, but if someone wants to make light of the Holocaust or loses historical perspective on it, then we need to be there to say, "Oh boy, I have something you need to see. You won't be alone though."
In addition to the how good the films themselves are, I LOVE watching really really long movies as endurance exercises. Despite how soul-crushing and miserable it is, one gets a little dopamine burst of accomplishment upon finishing Satantango, whcih is a relief because such a film would be...
letterboxd.com
One of the films in Vivian's list is
Shoah, which is a 9+ hour "durational documentary" about the Holocaust from 1985. I suspect this is what Vivian Strange thought he was doing with the
Ghaza Diaries. But of course, the
Ghaza Diaries are nothing like
Shoah, if only because because the guy who made
Shoah actually visited and interviewed both survivors
and perpetrators of the Holocaust, and did so long after the fact. Everyone who's in
Shoah presumably consented to being in there. In contrast, Vivian Strange is only interested in the stories of Palestinians, and Vivian is not reaching out to Palestinians to get their testimony after the fact. Instead, Vivian is just taking their most tragic moments, collecting them straight off of their feeds, assembling them in an endless unwatchable compilations of war gore videos, and dumping these assemblages wholesale onto his Youtube channels with no permission given or obtained from any of the people involved. The result of Vivian doing this, trauma-dumping his gore folders onto Youtube, might be a "durational documentary" in a technical sense, but no way in hell does Vivian's process meet the same ethical standards as Claud Lanzmann's documentary. So, no, you're not being Claud Lanzmann and the
Ghaza Diaries are not
Shoah, Vivian. You just want people to pat
you on the head for doing such a "heroic" job enduring all this gore, and you want to pay the Secondary PTSD forward, because that's what all you groomer troons do, you just pass on the self-abuse that made you into the violent extremist monster you are today.
I primarily have a problem with the lack of consent obtained, especially when much of the social media content that Vivian has appropriated for his Ghaza Diaries wasn't just Palestinians uploading their own smartphone footage, but was rather footage professionally shot and edited for Al Jazeera and other ME mainstream media. More importantly, I don't think that this specific wording from his fundraiser is the worst thing about this fundraiser, but the fact that
the crowdfunding itself is based on a lie and therefore a scam and a fraud. It's a straight up scam for someone to lie about being on the verge of homelessness and eviction, telling people you need money to move out ASAP, telling them you found a new place to move to, only to later come out and admit that was all bullshit and you just needed money for drugs, drugs, drugs and bills. People donated to this fundraiser because they were sincerely under the impression that Vivian and Serafina were being kicked out and needed to move to a new place fast. Lying to create that kind of urgency in your donors is a scam and frankly, GFM should've just shut down the page and redistributed the funds. I suspect this is the main reason Vivian took down the original text, to cover up exactly how he mislead his donors with intentionally deceitful and misleading wording.
The third part from
I Wish I Were A Camera I want to highlight is this:
Jane is talking to Elaine on a Livestream and says:
"Our issues... can be pinpointed on a few people, and one in particular. But now that we kind of got rid of that tumor... I feel so much better... with you.", imagine being so fucking toxic and nauseous that people who once knew you think back at you as a literal tumor they had to remove out of their lives to feel better.
Remember that part from Jane Brown's Community Tab update, where he said that he decided to quit the GenderWeird podcast, stop posting Youtube videos and go offline for a while because certain unnamed people were making him feel uncomfortable?
Here's what Vivian had to say on his last Livestream about
"making people uncomfortable":
In other words, Vivian is definitely not going to apologize to Jane for making him feel uncomfortable. Vivian is literally weaponizing the war in Ghaza to justify being a creep and a jerk towards his former friend and podcast co-host.