This is also why when you do alt text, if the text in the original image is all caps, it's necessary to convert it to sentence case for alt text.

Marcus Freeman basically subtweeting a local reporter from the podium and everyone doing the thing where they try to figure out who he means.

Exactly! Listen when I was a kid we had a horror Barbie where you could take off her whole damn abdomen to get a baby out, so. This is better.

Yeah, no, I mean I'm always surprised when people come/stay here for athletics given the politics of Indiana itself.

I would leave if I could and I've lived here (Elkhart/Goshen) almost my whole life. I'm an IUSB grad ffs.

Do I think it might be even more representative if Autistic Barbie were also trans and had her hair dyed a fun color and had entirely eschewed clothing for sensory reasons? Yeah but like... this is still pretty good.

Meanwhile I'm looking at Autistic Barbie like "they gave this woman brown skin and she's A Woman and that's frankly pretty awesome."

I mean she has an AAC board! Like... it's pretty awesome in terms of rep.

Yeah, although I think the local community, especially having seen the evidence, is backing Marcus Freeman. Or that's the vibe I get around here.

I don't think he'll go for it. I could be wrong but I really don't think he will.

He said two weeks ago that he's staying at ND. He's got a huge extension and his kids are integrated into the schools around here.

And he wants revenge.

And I never did clarify and this group of friends are people who are still local and I still run into from time to time but we are not friends anymore.

Anyway. I dunno. It's a thing that comes into my head when I don't want it to.

What made it a bit worse was that a few weeks later we were stuck together in another country for a two-week course and around the end of that time it was just the two of us for a bit which would have been a perfect opportunity to explain and clarify but for some reason I didn't try.

At this point I give us both some grace because it was over 20 years ago and in some ways a very different time and in a lot of ways I was a different person. There are things I wish we had both done differently.

I mean, yes, and we were 19 and TBH I still didn't even know about consent and that kind of thing so there was a lot of language I just didn't have.

Yeah. But this was 2005 and there wasn't a lot of room for nuance in these conversations. And I suspect he honestly read it as me saying he had violated me, regardless of how carefully I worded it.

After that went so badly, I tried to set up a conversation in-person with another mutual friend there to be, like, I dunno, a sort of... I just felt so uncomfortable around the first friend at the time but I wanted a chance to clarify. But the person I asked didn't want to help, which, their choice.

So I sent him a letter in the campus mail. And the thing is, again, there was a lot I didn't know how to talk about or explain or even that it was a thing. If I did it again now, I wouldn't have said I felt "violated". That was the wrong word.

But yeah.