Posted by Xiamara…
Alpha… That deceitful paragon of honesty! Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, would it now? Those endlessly “self-critical” personal assessments on that nasty little blog of hers! And what’s more people fell for it, hook line and sinker? Like wonderful Cyberloom for instance? When she wrote this?
!!!
However, such are the workings of the universe that in the end everything does tend to come out in the wash and her Highness is now totally disgraced. And, much as it is not in my nature to do so, I still feel compelled to share this with tout le monde, if for no other reason than for the overall welfare of alpha.tribe: We need to preserve our integrity. One of us may be a liar and a cheat but our prospective clientele should know that we are not all cut out of the same cloth over here. True, it seems like as if Grapho too has been somewhat implicated in what happened, but Furry and I are completely in the clear and besides ourselves with anger.
It all became revealed when Alpha found about tumblr., a blogging domain which enables you to link very large sized photos from Flickr directly into the post stream and has really beautiful, minimalistic themes which are fully customizable in terms of color. So, of course, Madame Designer Extraordinaire immediately rushed over, created an account and started a photo gallery on all of the output of alpha.tribe there. All good and well. Granted, it looks quite nice too what she did…
I have to admit that I have had my suspicions for quite a while now: To be more precise it is that seashell outfit which she had told us that she had made which made me somewhat uneasy. Alpha is the sort of person who will get out of bed to align things and that outfit (aside from the spur boots) is loose to a degree where it is practically falling apart. In fact that is the point of the whole thing. So, from the first minute that the photos made their appearance on Flickr I wondered but decided to keep my own counsel on the matter and just closely follow how things would develop from there.
And then last night presented an opportunity which was simply to good to pass up and I finally raised the point: We were all giving her keywords which would define our particular output, to insert under the images of the outfits on tumblr. She decided that hers would be things like “Geometric” and “dark”. Geometric is quite appropriate when it comes to describing something like vector.tribe and even Red Ammonite, with its exactly segmented spherical skirts and headdress. And both outfits are essentially dark as well. So, after she put those in, she started on “She sells seashells”. And that is when I asked her how exactly that disjointed skirt and that blurry textured vest, not to even mention the leotard which meanders all over the place, could possibly be described as geometric? And as for dark? What about all that glow effect I wanted to know?
“Oh, but look at the boots” she said. But I persisted and said, “no no no – look at the rest Alpha”. So we had quite a bit of evasion and humming and hawing, and going back and forth from her side, at which point I could feel Furry getting distinctly restless as well (she twitches ears and tail, as you know) and then Grapho finally said “I think you should tell them Alpha”. And after that all hell broke loose…
Apparently there has been a 5th alt!
Can you believe this? Amina Diavolo her name is! And she is the one who is flowy and unstructured and uses glow effects and such! And apparently Alpha, if I hadn’t smartened up to the situation and raked her over the coals last night, would have continued to keep her existence under wraps and have her work secretly for herself – but also for Grapho!!! Making his and her own output more substantial and diverse. Creating a situation where she and Grapho appear to be the actual creative muscle in this enterprise, with me and Furry being relegated to being “niche creators”. So, not only has this Amina Diavolo person created all of that seashell outfit – except the boots (those are in fact Alpha’s), apparently she has also made this not yet released “body parts” avatar for an art installation and that has been appropriated by Grapho – with Alpha’s approval. So, between the two of them they have been using secret slave labor!
Plagiarists! Thieves! Not one moral fiber between the two of them!
Ah well, the cat is now out of the bag, of course. I immediately wanted us to vote for a change of management. I mean I am perfectly happy to take on the burden. And Xia.tribe sounds much better than alpha.tribe, don’t you think? But here something strange happened: Outraged or not, in the end, when the chips were down, Furry wanted to continue with Alpha as CEO! And Grapho? Well, he was in cahoots with her from the get go anyway, so not much to be expected from that quarter to begin with. But, I did manage to convince everybody that this Amina person will need to be brought out into the sunlight and given her rightful due as a shareholding partner. That the sales boxes of her creations need to be rezed by her so that she is the recipient of the sales proceedings and not those two underhanded clowns over there.
…
In the end it is the woman I feel sorry for in all of this. That she has to live with so much Alpha inside herself.
And today she is wandering around the house in this nasty old grey t-shirt demoted to nightshirt, with hair going in every which direction (it is growing into something curly/weird at this point), looking quite disconsolate. Not to mention that she has had three solid days of teaching and meetings since the beginning of the week and is feeling like a complete turnip-head at this point. Ended up forgetting half of what she was supposed to say during the last lecture yesterday, which admittedly was the 9th hour of a solid teaching day. So she will probably be crawling back to bed with a decent crime book for the rest of today. Try to forget about this whole sordid affair, which Alpha has wreaked upon her, if she possibly can.
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