jkpetrie

[jkpetrie]

they don’t realize it bc…these are the same people who read books based on what tropes are in it instead of. a blurb ab the actual plot. 

it has gotten to a point that the lit industry itself will often prioritize tropes over plot. “oh it’s gay. it’s cozy fantasy. it has enemies to lovers.” what Happens In It

what many "dont like, dont read" warriors dont seem to realize is that sometimes you have to try to read something before realizing you dont like it

[jkpetrie]

How to Make a Deviantart Account: A Ten-Step Guide

Pick a username.

Don’t pick anything like your real name. You never liked it because it is what they call you when they’re yelling. And because it is always said as if it is hideous. Your mom says it first-middle-last, your teachers get it wrong, and your classmates say it like a punchline.

Pick something you’ve never heard spoken aloud in your house (and hopefully never will.) It has to hurt when you whisper it. You could pick something from your library book about wolves (or cats or dragons.) You never returned it before you moved out of state, so everything inside it is all yours.

All the cool names like xXLunaWolfXx are already taken, so you can either add more X’s or just pick something else. Something with the word tears, or raven, or blood, or midnight, or twisted.

Change it as many times as you need. It’s camouflage.

2. Shape your backstory.

Yours isn’t good enough as is. Getting grounded from showering for two weeks is just gross and weird. You can say your mom beat you, but leave out how it was because she caught you touching yourself.

Rewrite all of it. Say your dad’s in jail. Say you have a heart condition. Say your mom makes you eat dog food. Say your brother overdosed and killed himself on your birthday. Even if you don’t have a brother. Especially if you don’t have a brother. Say you have cancer and only a year left to live.

Say you cut yourself, say you’re suicidal, say you’re psychotic, then make it real.

3. Create your first character.

She’s older than you, so she doesn’t have a mom that keeps her from dying her hair purple. She smokes backwards cigarettes with backwards hands. Or paws. Trench coats look cool on her.

Give her the scars you don’t have yet. Give her wings like the ones you wish would burst through your back while you’re running in gym class, that way you can fly far away and never come back. 

Obsess over her. Draw her bleeding. Draw her chained. Draw her crying black tears. Draw her with missing limbs or missing eyes. Draw her naked and maniacal and covered in blood. Post it under a content filter you’re too young to use.

Draw her kissing girls. Draw her kissing your friend’s character even if they don’t want you to. 

4. Stay hidden.

You’ve learned your lesson before. Always keep one earbud out. Keep CoolMathGames bookmarked. It makes it easier to exit the page. Keep your head underneath the covers so you feel safer. Learn to differentiate what your family members’ footsteps sound like. Get good at memorizing.

Clear out your search history every single night, don’t forget it. But not all of it. That’s suspicious.

Just delete your searches for how to die painlessly. And am I gay. And the weird art references. And the porn. And the fanfiction. And anything they might not really get, because that makes them suspicious, too. And, of course, every time you clicked on your own profile. 

Blast your music so loud you can’t hear your own thoughts, but only when your parents aren’t home. Don’t cry too loud at night. The pillow doesn’t muffle well and your parents’ room is right next door. When you all moved there, they insisted that you should take the room next to theirs.

Keep your diary under the mattress. And the art with the nooses.

Don’t draw in class unless there’s a substitute. If you draw on your worksheet, erase it well before you turn it in.

5. Be seen.

Steal someone’s character. Trace someone’s art. Post a journal that says you’re leaving DeviantArt, then say it was just a prank. Message someone and tell them you want to die, then wait for them to beg you not to. Cut yourself and post pictures. When your parents aren’t home, pour a handful of ibuprofen on your bathroom counter, take a black-and-white picture, and post it. Post a suicide note. Get banned.

Make another account. Add more X’s to your new username. Say your little sister did it. Or your cousin. Or your friend. Pretend to be your own friend on an alt account. Pretend to be your own girlfriend on an alt account. That way, when you finally pretend to kill yourself for real, you can still be somebody else. You can still see someone grieve for you.

And if you do kill yourself for real, none of it will matter.

6. Disappear.

Let’s say someone made a warning post about you, or noticed your cancer story doesn’t line up, or made your roleplays with them public, or your mom caught you crying and told you to grow the fuck up.

Log out.

Change your icon to black.

Post “i’m really doing it. bye forever.”

Check it. Nothing. Check it. Nothing. Check it. Still nothing.

Try not to really do it.

7. Restart.

Loop back to step one until you are ready to proceed to steps eight through ten. If you ever are.

8. Outlive it.

When you wrote “14 forever” in your signature, you meant it. Yet you’re still here.

This is when you stop logging in. It isn’t all at once, though you’d tried that so many times before. What was once addiction becomes a chore. School gets in the way. Not just academically. You’re tired of the bullying, so your priorities change. You ask your mom for Baby Lips and Uggs and whatever else you overhear classmates chatting about. 

When your boobs grow in, your classmates treat you differently. You’re no longer just weird. Now you’re a weird slut. You get better at masking over time, and eventually, you graduate to quiet slut. By then, your DeviantArt account is very far away.

You don’t draw her anymore. But sometimes when you’re supposed to be asleep, you think about her, winged and beautiful and far away.

She is the abyss that stares back at you. And she remembers you. Even if nobody else does. 

Remember her.

9. Search yourself.

By now you’ve probably forgotten your password. You can only get so good at memorizing. This is why you must dig deep when you search your username. You should do this when you are at your lowest. It should be when you’re reminded what it feels like to be in middle school.

Find the MAP part you posted to YouTube. Find half of an art trade you did with a friend. You won’t find your own half. That was posted on a banned account. Find the comments you left on your favorite animators’ videos. i wish i could animate like you. what program do u use?

Use the Wayback Machine. Most of the links on your old profiles’ archives are broken. You can see your journal titles, though.

Wince at how obvious your lies were. Save all the old art you can scavenge– most of the images will only exist through low-res thumbnails, and it will make them look even more far-away. Keep them all in a folder you never open.

10. Let it all go.

That website brought out the worst in you. You owe the most important parts of your being to it. It’s where you learned that you could kill yourself if you wanted. It’s where you learned to cut and burn and make yourself puke. And it kept you alive.

As much as you owe to it, you are older now. You have moved on, but your favorite original character is still stuck on the white void of a sketchbook page. She is not made to heal. You love her, but you have to grow the fuck up. It is sink or swim.

This is where you forget. This is where you acknowledge that it all meant something to you, but you cannot remember what. The media you consume doesn’t choke you anymore, the smell of a school library means nothing, DeviantArt’s user base is dead, and summer is just another season.

Instead of following your dreams of becoming an animator with a CalArts degree, you went with something more practical. Maybe you’re a student teacher. Or a bus driver. Maybe you took a camp counseling gig. Make you work at the Boys and Girls club.

Regardless, the most important thing is to remember what it did to you, even if you can’t remember how it all felt.

Because someday– maybe someday soon– you will meet a kid with wide eyes and an awkward gait. They will be clutching the same library book you got your old username from. You will remind them to return it, even if your own copy ended up in a yard sale somewhere. 

You might catch them drawing wolves or cats or dragons or girls with backwards hands and backwards cigarettes.

You’ll tell them, “Cool drawings. Keep at it.” You’ll mean it and you’ll feel sick for it.

But when you turn and walk away, your heart will be pounding out of your chest. That’s only natural when you’ve seen a ghost.

And just for a second, you will get to feel fourteen again.

[jkpetrie]

it is now november. i’m happy to report despite everything it got much better. 🩵

[jkpetrie]

honestly i want to say my favorite part of writing cyber litfic is that i can make important commentary on tech’s role in american individualism in many ways. but i’d be lying because my favorite part by far is actually making up terrible usernames and insane forum posts

[jkpetrie]

wait actually i think im wrong for this post and i apologize guys. the barefoot bandit is way fuckin cooler than elon musk could ever be and they should not be compared not even as a joke

how is anyone going to be surprised that i don’t think billionaires should exist. i wrote a whole series that satirizes and makes a horror show out of the rick and morty barefoot bandit himself

[jkpetrie]

this is what im referencing

don’t ask me what i had to sift through on google to find this.

how is anyone going to be surprised that i don’t think billionaires should exist. i wrote a whole series that satirizes and makes a horror show out of the rick and morty barefoot bandit himself

[jkpetrie]

how is anyone going to be surprised that i don’t think billionaires should exist. i wrote a whole series that satirizes and makes a horror show out of the rick and morty barefoot bandit himself

[jkpetrie]

[jkpetrie]

i don’t want to write off every bad review i get on my book because people have their preferences and that’s fine. not everyone will love what i make. that said i can’t help but notice that some of the bad ratings i get on my book are from people who have dark romance as a top genre and i think a not insignificant portion leave bad ratings because my book acts as a critique on dark romance and maybe could be confused w dark romance from the description (as much as i tried to make it obvious it’s not from the tags + search terms + description, the things people romanticize will shock you.) they go in expecting a twisted billionaire love story and come out with something feminist, horrific, and literary. or maybe they simply didn’t like it for any number of reasons. like my flowery prose. my prose is pretty flowery and full of itself. idk. i’m pompous for this entire post probably

[jkpetrie]

This is Eman a Biotechnologist from Gaza. Asking for help is not easy. It's not easy at all. You have no idea how mentally and emotionally tiring this is. But when thinking that the price is my family's life, getting out of here safely and achieve my doctoral degree dream, it just pushes me more and more to do this until we reach our goal. I'm here as I try to reach out to more people asking for their help to support our family's campaign so we can survive while all you have to do is literally donating even by just the price of your morning coffee or maybe a simple breakfast, So I think I'm not asking for so much. We're really tired of living under these catastrophic conditions for a whole 10 months. We live a life you cannot bear watch it behind screens. Your generosity will not only change our lives but also remind us that even in our darkest hour, we are not alone. https://gofund.me/d597b8e2

sorry for the late response. i’m not very active here.

this donation post has already been vetted by another user. please donate what you can. i don’t have many followers at all but i hope this helps.

[jkpetrie]

some loser: humans are innately selfish creatures

my psych book:

[jkpetrie]

born to be an idgafer forced to notice too much

[jkpetrie]

Not every piece of media needs to be a deep and profound philosophical masterpiece but I think it is kind of a tragedy to spend millions of dollars and thousands of labor hours to produce a piece of art that has nothing to say, something which only reflects the conditions under which it was produced without even thinking about them

[jkpetrie]

fans of characters that hate vulnerability will be like “i cant wait until they cry 😍 cant wait until the weight of their emotions breaks them 😍”

[jkpetrie]

my beautiful wife, severe thunderstorm warning, is texting me 😌😚😍😍

[jkpetrie]

video essays on horror be like "there's something viscerally unsettling about being put in scary situation..."

[jkpetrie]

this sucks so bad i need to [remembers suicide jokes only worsen my mental health] put on the best talent show this towns ever seen