dracoling

[dracoling]

its rude to reblog things from people you arent mutuals with fyi. :/

💀 my brother in christopher

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@staff our identities aren’t nsfw and we will not stand for them to be treated as such

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I love this shit so much.

WARNING. A BOLD HEADLINE TYPEFACE INSPIRED BY A FLASH OF 1.5 SECONDS FROM THE ORIGINAL NEON GENESIS EVANGELION TV SERIES, A CREATIVE REBUILD OF AN ENTIRE TYPESET, INSPIRATION SPARKED FROM A MONTAGE OF ‘BLINK & YOU’LL MISS IT’ CRITICAL UI/GUI SYSTEM-ERROR ALERTS.  

FREE DOWNLOAD

[dracoling]

"If Tumblr goes down I'll quit social media for good" pal, before this I successfully cultivated a presence on Usenet, IRC, Livejoural, and two successive generations of decentralised web forums, and I watched them all go to shit. This is my sixth turn on the merry-go-round, and it surely won't be the last.

[dracoling]

*Is this too "Mastodon" to be popular on Tumblr

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These Hungarian postage stamps from 1978 really strongly remind me of Terran Trade Federation artwork.

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you’re doomed, there’s nothing I can do 

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The thing neurotypicals tend not to understand about the ADHD brain is that it really only has two gears

I turn to the chalkboard and carefully write out

WORKIN' HARD

HARDLY WORKIN'

[dracoling]

My "For You" page today is made up of the following:

- Arcane art

- ads

- blogs I've never heard of who are quitting forever.

[dracoling]

A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

[dracoling]

I don't know what booping is, but I'm sure someone will teach me... Right?

[dracoling]

Honestly, "high art" of any kind isn't really any more or less incomprehensible or unapproachable than Tumblr meme culture. It's basically the same kind of thing, really, but with a longer time span and more reading to catch up to - things making references to things that were a thing earlier, and everyone kind of supposes that everyone who sees the work also has some background knowledge of the previous work being referred. Just imagine an art history teacher breaking down a tumblr post like

"...And here we see the next poster replying with this image. Here, this image of a statue has a very exact symbolic meaning. The figure of the statue is the Greek god Apollo, here in his role as a prophetic deity, which you may have concluded from the original post referring to future events that may or may not come to pass. In his hand, he is holding a dodgeball, raised on the level of his head, as if ready to throw it. The threatening aura of the image is multiplied by the way the statue's eyes have been edited to gleam omniously - the poster replying to the Original Post is expressing a symbolic, indirect threat, that the future that the Original Post's author described might come to pass, as if the patron deity of oracles had personally cursed the Original Poster to a fleeting gift of prophecy, as swift and brutal as being slammed with a dodgeball."

[scrolling down powerpoint presentation]

"...The second reply, here, has an image of a smiling woman wearing a helmet, standing in a row of people in similar uniforms. This reply requires some slightly deeper konwledge of Tumblr meme lore to understand - the image is a fragmet of a larger whole: a single frame of a gif, of a clip from the movie Starship Troopers. What is important here is the omitted context, which is the line that this nameless character famously says in the scene: 'I'm doing my part!' By posting this image, instead of the entire captioned gif, the replier highlights the implied obvious meaning behind it: They are not merely announcing their intention to actively work to see that the future that the Original Poster foresaw will come to pass, but wordlessly taunt them by implying 'you already know what I mean to do.' It is - in joking - a threat."

"And as you see here, the Original Poster has replied to these comments with a gif, which depicts an encounter between two robotic arms. The swift and dynamic action of the gif serves to express the OP's emotions, as the first robot represents the author themselves, and the second one is a stand-in for the two previous repliers. The way the first robot arm grabs the second one and starts beating it against the floor represents the author's anger. As surrogates for the two parties engaged in the conversation, the author is expressing their personal desire to grab the two previous posters and violently beat them against the floor."

[dracoling]

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"

[dracoling]

You can just be a girl

You can just be a girl. Or a boy, or something else; those aren’t my areas of expertise, though I imagine the process is roughly similar. But you can just be a girl. If you want to. If you’re not already.

You can grow out your hair. You can try on new clothes. You can take that stumbling first step into something new. You can have your awkward teen years in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, and on. You can never arrive late, as long as you still arrive.

You can throw away all the things you were told were gifts but which never brought you any joy. You can finally give yourself what you actually wanted but were told to never ask for.

You can drop the act. You can dismantle the walls you were taught to build. You can pick at the callous you formed around yourself to protect from the friction of the world, peel it away to find yourself soft beneath, and discover the relief of being tender. You can find sisterhood, and feel it fill all the empty promises brotherhood made before. You can have love, and you can finally give it too. You can delight in how the world seems frictionless now that you don’t have to pretend anymore.

You can melt your flesh down and recast your body into a home instead of just a tool. You can listen to every stitch pop as you rip yourself from the social fabric, free to weave yourself anew. You can rend yourself open, reach in, and gently raise the girl you could have been before you were taught to be a man. You can shed the false self you hid inside, claw your way out sticky and bloody and gasping for air, and you can finally start living. With freshly soft hands you can seize the hammer of your will, and with it — day by day, blow by screaming blow — you can beat your fate into a shape of your choosing.

You can just be a girl.

[dracoling]

I'm curious. Reblog this if you know how to cook

I don’t even care if it’s macaroni, ramen or those little bowls you stick in the microwave. Please, I need reassurance that most of the population on tumblr WOULDN’T STARVE TO DEATH if their parents couldn’t fix them food or they couldn’t go out to eat.