Brianna Wu / John Flynt - Original Thread

[Florence]

We should check the 2001-2005 Ole Miss Yearbooks, that should confirm when he gets back to Ole Miss because at this point, he didn't seem to last too long at the second college either (gee, I wonder fucking why)

Found him; he was a sophomore in the 2003-2004 yearbook.

 

[AnOminous]

Found him; he was a sophomore in the 2003-2004 yearbook.
View attachment 46451

What is the fucking timeline here, though? This makes no sense to me. There's shit from 1998, from 2004, when the fuck did whatever happened happen? Also, did this bitch ever get a degree?

 

[Poptart Pissbaby]

What is the fucking timeline here, though? This makes no sense to me. There's shit from 1998, from 2004, when the fuck did whatever happened happen? Also, did this bitch ever get a degree?

Someone can call and find out, from the FTC:

Here’s how to verify academic credentials:

1. Contact the school. Most college registrars will confirm dates of attendance and graduation, as well as degrees awarded and majors, upon request. If the applicant gives permission, they may provide a certified academic transcript. If you aren’t familiar with the school, don’t stop your research just because someone answers your questions on the phone or responds with a letter. Some diploma mills offer a “verification service” that will send a phony transcript to a prospective employer who calls

There's also DegreeVerify, but it costs $22.50 for records from Ole Miss.

 

[zedkissed60]

What is the fucking timeline here, though? This makes no sense to me. There's shit from 1998, from 2004, when the fuck did whatever happened happen? Also, did this bitch ever get a degree?

Ole Miss ---> quit
Millsaps ---> quit
???
Ole Miss ---> graduate?

 

[Jaimas]

Not sure if this is new or not but here's John Flynt's resume from 2005. He worked for segregationist senator Trent Lott
http://web.archive.org/web/20020206005350/http://www2.netdoor.com/~jwflynt/

Hahaha, holy shit. Color me unsurprised.

Okay, now that I've got a little more time, let's really dissect this resume piece by piece.

Cover Page

Design-wise, this looks like the cover for an early 90s computer manual. The letters are all fuzzy and blend in with the background image. Speaking of, what's the deal with the boxes?

Contact Information

Uh, pretty sure all the relevant contact information required was on the cover page. The "Just the Facts" section is all stuff that should be wrapped into the resume proper and nothing there is unique enough to warrant the extra attention given. The "Frequently Asked Questions" shouldn't be in your resume at all considering each and every one of those questions will be covered through a company's standard application process. I have no idea why there is a Socially Unconscious mini section in the middle of it all. If you want to discuss your work further, it's best to include it in a sample portfolio and not in the middle of a document that's meant to provide a summary of your skills and abilities. This page is completely useless.

Introduction & Education

Where do I even begin? I guess let's talk again about the design. The background is too busy and should be lightened significantly. Plus, I still don't get why there are boxes all over the place. Why are there two different colored margins? Hell, why does the right margin even exist in the first place except to take up room and make this thing longer? Is it for that generic quote just randomly floating out there? I feel like Brianna recently learned how to do design layouts in Word and threw it all in there without any consideration for whether or not it's necessary.

The capitalization for the objective statement header looks awkward which is kind of fitting given the phrasing on display. "Computer skills" is awfully generic and doesn't actually tell me anything. It would have been better to say something like "Business Major with Strong Media Production Skills" or "Media Production Specialist with Technical Background". Or, you know, just wrap all that together into an objective statement. First sentence is just a straight up fragment. Actually, it looks like the whole page is riddled with grammar mistakes. I guess those "computer skills" don't cover being able to find the spelling and grammar check function.

@zedkissed60 already highlighted it but I'm still kind of baffled by the statement that her "eclectic mix of skills" comes from her being goal-oriented. One does not support the other. Having a bunch of random skills listed with no context kind of leaves me with the impression that you haven't settled on what you want to do yet. Another funny statement here for oh-so-many reasons:


Let's just ignore the odd phrasing (again) for a moment and focus on how passive this statement feels. She's willing to learn the skills but there's nothing that directly states that she will actually accomplish what she sets out to do. Huh. That certainly does seem like the Brianna Wu we know.

She goes on to discuss her skills with digital media but doesn't state what these skill are or how she's applied them. Rather, it's just a list of various areas where she's worked. Same goes with the technical skills that follows where she gives vague examples but doesn't talk about what she did, what process she followed, what knowledge she drew on, what the equipment was, etc. However, she did feel the need to mention outsourcing for some reason.

She (finally) closes her introduction by attempting to tell us what sets her apart from other candidates. Naturally, she fails to say anything that wouldn't fall under the "I majored in business at college" umbrella and babbles about her experiences without saying anything in particular. If you are going to dedicate a paragraph to your education background on your resume, you had better be a Rhodes Scholar PhD candidate with multiple published works from one of the top 10 schools in the country. It can be worth noting academic accomplishments if you actually have any but usually it can all be discussed in one line. Doesn't seem like Brianna had any real academic accomplishments otherwise she would have thrown together another paragraph just for it.


----

And that's all I've got for now. Unlike Wu, I have to actually do my job.

Going on the Wiki after a minor series of updates~

This is exactly what happened. He dropped out of college to start his animation company, and when that failed he went and "found himself" in DC "working for the bush reelection campaign". Him coming back to college also jives with his parents selling the DC home they bought him and forcing him into rehab in his home state.

Rehab? Elaborate, Smutley. I'm curious now.

 

[zedkissed60]

Found him; he was a sophomore in the 2003-2004 yearbook.
View attachment 46451

Nice find.

Larger version:

 

[Cynical]

https://archive.is/DKXa3

 

[Smutley]

,
Rehab? Elaborate, Smutley. I'm curious now.

You really never heard that? John Flynt had a prescription pill addiction. I want to say it was a sleep aid like ambien but his folks bought him a house in their town and sent him to a rehab clinic for it. That's how he got back from DC, because they sold the house they bought him and forced him to come back home to deal with it.

 

[AnOminous]

Found him; he was a sophomore in the 2003-2004 yearbook.
View attachment 46451

How the fuck is this possible? Sophomore is the year after freshman. And wasn't John W. Flynt in this school in the '90s?

So wait.

How does this work?

I'm just not getting it.

Does this bitch ever graduate?

 

[TheMonkeyMan]

You really never heard that? John Flynt had a prescription pill addiction. I want to say it was a sleep aid like ambien but his folks bought him a house in their town and sent him to a rehab clinic for it. That's how he got back from DC, because they sold the house they bought him and forced him to come back home to deal with it.

Where did you get this information?

 

[zedkissed60]

Rehab? Elaborate, Smutley. I'm curious now.

"The only thing that's gotten me higher than drugs(1) is running until I thought I'd die of something akin to auto-erotic asphyxiation....
(1) Prescription drugs. Specifically Ambien and Xanax."

"I've talked about this on Isometric, but I'm also someone that seriously struggled with depression - all through my early 20s....
It's not an quick fix. A lot of people want to take a pill and want a quick fix. For me, it took a decade of therapy and daily exercise....
Getting a lot of feedback about medication. For me, personally, taking medication was a disaster. My weight exploded, health plummeted."

 

[Hodor]

You really never heard that? John Flynt had a prescription pill addiction. I want to say it was a sleep aid like ambien but his folks bought him a house in their town and sent him to a rehab clinic for it. That's how he got back from DC, because they sold the house they bought him and forced him to come back home to deal with it.

Yeah, story goes that it's ambien or pain killers. I'm not sure if there was any verification of it, though.

EDIT: And the source ends up right above me.

 

[Poptart Pissbaby]

Also, from https://archive.is/zTq7q

When I think of all the things that I we had to overcome together, it’s quite a list. The five year crippling Ambien addiction, the splatter-movie mugging of 2002, and the 12 years of religious indoctrination in the guise of schooling – thinking through that alone is an impressive accomplishment. We are tough as nails, Space cat – and no one can take that from us.

I also found this sourced to a MySpace page that Wu apparently had which no longer exists.

 

[wheat pasta]

Has anyone ever shooped Wu to look pretty? I know that's a fairly common thing with "lady" lolcows but I haven't heard anything about similar efforts here. Is she just too far gone..?


Edit:
Ok, ok, everyone else has provided some truly delicious content so now I'll do my part. My Google searches yielded nothing, so I had to try and put something together myself. I don't have Photoshop or anything like that at my disposal, but I think I managed pretty well all the same.

Spoiler

 

[zedkissed60]

[MEDIA=twitter]639189542591967232[/MEDIA]
https://archive.is/DKXa3

"thousands" <--- bullshit
"angry" <--- bullshit
"transphobic" <--- bullshit

Lie. Demonize. Repeat.

 

[Florence]

How the fuck is this possible? Sophomore is the year after freshman. And wasn't John W. Flynt in this school in the '90s?

So wait.

How does this work?

I'm just not getting it.

Does this bitch ever graduate?

He got kicked out, went to another college, got kicked out of that, went to live in DC, and then came back to college no. 1

 

[Francis York Morgan]

Alright. Let's get the rest of this shit out of the way.

Introduction & Education (cont.)

So yeah. I was so distracted by how terrible those introduction paragraphs that I didn't even get to comment on her education. As others such as @Optimus Prime and @zedkissed60, this section has some serious problems not the least of which is the timeline we have for Brianna's education is inconsistent. However, I'll leave that to someone else to analyze. What I want to focus on is how Brianna spends half a page talking about her education while saying jack shit. At least she managed to tell us what her major was but that's about it. She doesn't tell us if it's an associate's or a bachelor's nor does she bother stating a minor or even an area of concentration. Just that whatever she was working on, it was business.

As others have said already, her write-ups on the colleges she attended read like advertisements. More problematic is that these are completely unnecessary. Why is she spending all this time selling her college(s) to me, the hypothetical employer? It feels like she's insecure about her college choices and needs to make excuses for it. Oh, and let's not overlook the "subtle", smug way she clumsily attempts to put down Ole Miss. I'd ask why she even felt the need to put that in there but everything about this section is unnecessary save for the college names, dates attended, and major.

One final problem to discuss and I can finally get away from this awful section. In her college write-ups, she never once talks about anything she did. The Millsaps College section implies that she took courses in subjects like economics or accounting but it never outright says what courses. All of this writing and I still don't have a clue what the hell Brianna Wu has done, what she wants to do, what she's good at, where she wants to work, or what abilities she has. This page is somehow even more pointless than the contact info/FAQ because at least there I learned something definitive about her.

Business Skills

The smallest section of Brianna's resume. I'll refrain from making the obvious joke.

Once again, we have a pointless border that takes up a third of the page. The colors have changed as well to a blue/grey scheme that at least looks slightly better than the purple/grey or the yellow/blue monstrosity of a contact info page but why are these even here to begin with? If it's a demonstration of her artistic talent or design abilities then this fucking sucks. It's bland, dated, and lacks cohesion.

As for the "business skills" themselves, we get yet another couple of sentences that look like they were ripped straight from a Millsaps College recruitment flyer. Why? Each skill she lists is accompanied by what I assume is a picture of one of her textbooks. Why? I'm asking that question a lot reviewing this resume. Sure wish Brianna had asked it herself when writing it.

And oh my freaking God, take a look at how these skills are described:

Else School Students are given a most challenging curriculum.

Within the Business Major, my specialty is Economics.

Advanced classes put the emphasis on consumer psychology.

Classes are taught in small groups that solve business problems.

I plan to continue my study of this challenging language.

Is. . . is this a joke? Why do 3/5 read like course advertisements (again)? At least we learned something about Wu here and even then, it's super vague. What did she specifically study in regards to economics? Did she focus on macro or micro? What's her degree of proficiency with Japanese? There is so much here left unstated, including actual business skills. I'm getting tired of trying to read between the lines to have some semblance of a clue as to what Brianna Wu did in college and I can only imagine what an HR person would feel trying to slog through this waste.

Work Experience

For some reason, this is listed as a separate page on the website despite being on the same page as her business skills. Fuck off, Wu. Your resume doesn't need more padding.

God help me but I'm going to say something positive about this part. I like the icon she uses for her bullets. It stands out but not in an obnoxious way like everything else she did making this resume. Plus, at least she formatted her work experience correctly so there's another piece of positivity.

Now for what should be the meat and potatoes of a proper resume but who knows what I'll get with Brianna at this point. First thing that stands out to me how brief her tenure is with all these positions save for her current one and the ones with her own studio. The internship being short makes sense but the rest only lasting a few months would definitely raise a red flag with any hiring manager.

Also on the subject of standing out is that internship with a senator's office. Why is this even here other than I guess Brianna wanted to brag about it? It makes no sense within the context of the rest of her positions and I'd say it makes no sense with what she's trying to apply for only I have no idea what that might be. In fact, the more I look at this the more I confused I get. Brianna spends most of this "resume" talking about her business skills and experience but then proceeds to list a bunch of journalism positions. I understand that people change careers and fields, but they at least try to tailor their listed skills on their work experience to match whatever they are trying to go for. With Brianna, it's more like she's throwing everything she has done out there and hoping that something gets a company's attention.

Speaking of those skills, I guess I should say something about them. Once again, everything is so passive. She "worked on" or "managed" things but there are no examples given, no significant accomplishments stated. Plus, all of it so ambiguous that I am back to having to guess what she actually did instead of her telling me. I really don't like how off-putting a couple of her bullet points are, like making sure to note that the staff she assisted were "less experienced" or that she did hundreds of takes for her voice acting. Besides, isn't the second one a given since it's almost unheard of for anything to be nailed in one take?

More writing issues of note include her changing narrative voice a few times. She jumps from third to first a lot. Maybe that's why she can't keep the Twitter assistant thing going for long? Additionally, she's real fond of stating that she "personally" did something. Saying it once wouldn't be a big deal on most resumes, but Brianna uses it three times to describe her job duties. Ego much? I don't get why there appears to be random hyperlinks throughout the points unless she copy/pasted from somewhere else.

I'm not even going to touch the patents bit because you guys covered that one well. I will add as my final note that consistency in your formatting is important and is something Brianna doesn't understand. What I like to tell people when it comes to writing a resume is to find 2-3 key points or accomplishments that best summarize your most recent experience and stick to that number of bullets throughout the rest of your resume. I think Brianna was aiming for three bullets per position but either couldn't come up with enough material for some of the jobs or shaved points off for the sake of conserving space (lol).

CONCLUSION (tl;dr)

This is now my go-to example of how NOT to write a resume. It's astoundingly incompetent. Eventually, I'll write a better conclusion but I have to get going.

 

[littlebird]

Good lord. I thought I knew pretty much everything I needed to know about Briana Wu from #gamergate twitter drama and an old /cow/ thread, but this thread is a goldmine. Those shitty cartoons and opinion pieces and atrocious resumés? Amazing.

Also, I don't think I'll be able to get the image of their teeth in the headphones photo out of my head for a while, so thanks for that.

 

[NegaCWC]

Ole Miss ---> quit
Millsaps ---> quit
???
Ole Miss ---> graduate?

How the fuck is this possible? Sophomore is the year after freshman. And wasn't John W. Flynt in this school in the '90s?

So wait.

How does this work?

I'm just not getting it.

Does this bitch ever graduate?

I think I've figured out what happened. Her resume mentions that she was at Ole Miss between 1996-1998, and that she studied engineering at the time. Remember this last detail, it will become important later on. Next her resume says she transferred to Millsaps for a business administration degree. The resume indicates that when it was written Brianna was still studying for that degree. How did her studies at Millsaps end is a mystery.

According to Wu, between 2003-2008 she pursued a degree in journalism and political science. Now I never trust Brianna, meaning that before accepting this claim it should be verified with an external source, which luckily we have. Ole Miss alumni testify to having studied with Bri in journalism and political science classes. They also confirm Brianna's presence at Ole Miss around the time of 2003 and 2006. I'm presuming that Briana is listed as a sophomore at the 2003-2004 yearbook because she was starting a totally different degree than the one she studied for at Ole Miss during the 90's (journalism/Poli Sci vs. engineering). As for whether she really studied for this degree for five years... A post of hers from Susans indicates that she was living at Colorado in 2006, suggesting she was out of Ole Miss by then.

Now did she graduate? This is where it gets interesting. According to a relatively recent hagiography of St. Wu, her last and final attempt at higher education ended in 2001, even though both Wu's own linkedin and students who knew her indicate her presence at Ole Miss continued into later years. I have no clue as to why did she lie like that and whether or not this means we should also reject her claim of having droppoed out of Universtiy. I don't see why anyone would lie about this but then again why would Wu lie about the years in which she studied at Ole Miss? As I noted previously, Brianna Wu is not a trustworthy source.

EDIT: I now realize that I said that I don't trust Brianna at all, and yet and I'm using her resume as source for what she did in the 90's. But still, the fact that Brianna wrote and illustrated for a Millsaps student newspaper in 1998 and 2000 show that she did study there at the time. I would like to see her in a 90's Ole Miss yearbook to be sure that she studied there during that time as well.

 

[Smutley]

Where did you get this information?

I hope @Yellow Yam Scam doesn't mind me posting an excerpt from a PM I had with him. I gave him a quick run-down on Wu months ago, but it's relevant to the topic at hand. Others before this have posted the relevant addiction posts, which tie in to this overview.

She's done a much better job at hiding herself than most, but this is what I've been able find over the past year

• Brianna Wu, also known as John Walker Flynt
• 37 years old
• Originally from Oxford, MS.
• Adopted Parents are Laura Flynt and Dr. Joel Flynt
• Apparently has 1 or 2 siblings that were born after his the adoption
• Moved to Washington DC, Hattiesburg MS, and then Massachusetts
• Attended Ole Miss twice - once in the late 90's before dropping out, and again in the mid 2000's.
• Received the $200k for her animation studio, and then bailed to DC to work on the "bush campaign"
• According to documentations, Socially Unconscious was co-owned by Sara E Champagne (20%) and Stephen G. Phillips (10%) with principle funding supplied by Flynt's parents.
• Address in DC appears to be 2201 N Street NW, Washington DC, 20037 which was owned by her parents
• Left DC due to an addiction to prescription medication
• Joel Flynt bought her a house in Hattiesburg and forced her to go to rehab. This is one of the last things that happened before getting disowned.

And that is where the trail runs dry.

edit: and more directly, just combing through forum posts and owership records, plus connecting dots. Nothing is completely 100% provable but it paints a stark picture of a drug addicted lunatic who's parents tried to reign them in.