#AND GET THE FUCK OFF THE INTERNET

[spectral-honey]

AU where Jason gets his revenge by becoming a lawyer and getting joker sentenced to the death penalty

Bruce is conflicted about it but any time he tries to say anything on the subject Alfred just talks over him like "oh we're so proud of you master Jason you finished college and you didn't even use your father's extensive resources that could've easily gotten someone in this family a degree aren't we so proud master Bruce that Jason got himself a respectable profession--"

[petricorah]

scenes i loved from Real Enough to Get Me Through by @marriedzukka <333 [ids in alt]

[die-rosastrasse]

I love you bad art, I love you amateur art, I love you self learning, I love you cheap art supplies, I love you journals, I love you crafts, I love you art available for everyone, I love you second hand art and objects, I love you free museums, I love you handmade gifts, I love you childish drawings, I love you art that nobody ever saw except for the artist, I love you taking time to learn a skill, I love you art history, I love you free tutorials, I love you art as a school subject, I love you things that took a long time to make, I love you art studies that are considered useless, I love you the human need to create and change the world around you to be more beautiful and more meaningful.

I hate you AI art, I hate you generated content, I hate you singe-use images, I hate you mindless consumption, I hate you stealing from artists, I hate you reposting without sources, I hate you lying about using AI, I hate you pretending like art is something unachievable and reserved only for the chosen ones.

Make art!! Make "bad" art that is actually special because you took the time to make it. Make art for yourself that you show no one. Make art for others that they'll cherish forever. See how your whole world changes, see how you start noticing beautiful and inspiring things all around you. Make things with love and devotion. Fuck AI.

[plulp]

IM NOT A DOCTOR BUT I THINK I MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP

[veliseraptor]

out with redemption arcs, in with rehabilitation arcs

[lottieratworld]

its kind of pissing me off that more and more the internets punishment for being kind of cringe and annoying online is death threats, weird packages in the mail, making it impossible to show yourself online without being harassed by hundreds of both straight up bigots and online leftists who wanna start shit with anyone

[ceilidho]

hey guys this should be completely fucking obvious but like. don't send fucking death threats or worse to people, especially over online discourse and fanfiction. jesus christ. literally the whole point of every post i've made on this subject has been about how harmful getting those kinds of messages has been to me so don't think that it's suddenly fine to send them to someone else.

[cryptid-condor]

pose practice with everyone’s favorite guy

[leverage-ot3]

no one:

me: let’s check the vibe of the leverage facebook group

(blurred out my name for privacy)

at first people passed the vibe check with heart/care reacts, thumbs up… and then the boomers came

a lot of people settled on it’s some configuration of parker/eliot or hardison/eliot give off sibling vibes and hardison is dating parker, but a fair amount of folks said they would accept or would like the ot3. one based guy was like ‘if it drives the story then power to them’. someone else just commented ‘till my dying day’, another said ‘I mean… they already measured his head for the robot bodies’. someone else said they like brother sister eliot and parker but queerplatonic with parker and hardison dating is still good to them.

and then there was one woman who basically said if you don’t want honest answers you shouldn’t ask the questions and then said eliot is a good friend/brother to them and love does not need to be romantic or sexual to be strong (girlie what do you think queerplatonic means 😭💀)

also JUST got this gem (and am going to report them)

edit with my response:

last edit: she was kicked out of the group after 💀

[front-facing-pokemon]

[very-lost-hobbit]

"US proxy war in Ukraine" Beating u with lead pipes

[genericpuff]

on the closure of MochaJump, and why we're our own worst enemies in this industry.

"MochaJump? What was that?" is probably your first question, and I'm gonna simply respond with, "Exactly."

MochaJump was a small startup platform made by /u/nunojay2 and a second site engineer (whose name I am not informed of) on reddit. It wasn't anything extraordinary, just a startup site that aimed to offer a more viable alternative to Webtoons and Tapas, with a focus on offering equal visibility to creators, focused recommendation algorithms, loosened restrictions on NSFW content, and bigger cuts for creators on their generated revenue.

Of course, such promises are a tall order, but the creator did their best to host regular discussions with creators in art and webtoon communities to get feedback on what creators really wanted out of their platforms, and they researched what they would need to make in order to keep the site afloat (it came out pretty low at $2 per user per month). Hopes were high and the site launched with a small but eager userbase.

It stayed small. The site shut down in November 2022, just 6 months after launching in May 2022.

Now, I'm not gonna sit here on some soapbox and blame anyone for the site closing down. I unfortunately didn't get much chance to use the site myself so there's surely more I could have done on my own part to help it gain traction. But this is a regular occurrence for start-ups like this, especially in an industry that's as notoriously unprofitable as webcomics. We've seen titans such as SmackJeeves and Inkblazers fall, and MochaJump was merely an infant by comparison.

But it makes me think of how we view and treat these startups as a whole. How we as readers and creators alike have become so trained to exclusively use corporate platforms like Webtoons and Tapas on the promise of "bigger gains". Unlike these bigger companies, platforms like MochaJump depend on building a strong userbase as quickly as possible, and need to find ways to generate revenue to keep things running, otherwise it's only a matter of time before they close down. They don't have a massive conglomerate like Naver or Kakao to pad their pockets through their failures. They don't have the money or reach to inject themselves into society through bus terminal ads and convention sponsorships. They don't have the investors to sink money into their platform until it becomes profitable in return.

So we don't use them. Readers don't use them because we don't see the point in using a platform that has no content... and thus creators don't use them because we don't see the point in publishing our content on a platform with no userbase. Creators seek a place that's "tight knit" and "easy to get seen", but will only post to places that come pre-loaded with massive audiences; because it's not enough anymore to have a couple hundred followers, we're in 2023 now, in the year of consumer bloat, where we expect to now pull in thousands if not millions to be considered a "success". And readers seek a place that offers high-quality high-amount content at the tip of their fingertips, but don't want to pay for the access to these works, and in the case of apps like WT, have given up in trying to support these creators through the platforms themselves because they know that those artists they want to support will likely never see a dime.

The fact of this problem is simple, yet many people seem to ignore it - we cannot expect to have a platform that is tight knit, profitable, and sustainable. These places do not exist, not so long as we continue to raise the bar on what makes a "successful" subscriber count, not so long as we continue to patronize platforms that exploit their artists and writers, and not so long as we keep chasing the dragon of "what these websites used to be". These platforms never used to 'be' anything, they merely existed in one point of time that is now long gone, when owning a smartphone was a luxury and not a need, when online video content wasn't being tethered together by ads, and when the Internet wasn't owned and entirely managed by the same three corporations, the likes of which we haven't seen since cable TV.

Platforms like Tapas and Webtoons are - besides unsustainable - unable to exist and profit in the way they do without undercutting someone along the way. Whether it's underpaying their creators, undercutting their communities, or underexposing the works that have been buried, someone will get the shit hand in the deal and that someone is usually ALWAYS someone who will rarely ever stand to gain anything in the long run from using these platforms despite their issues. The 1% got theirs, and the 10% are barely getting by, while the remaining 89% are pushing onwards, because they have faith in the systemic online enshittification that demands conformity to a single formula for "success".

We are our own worst enemies in this industry. Webcomics are one of the few online mediums that still truly belong to the people - anyone can make them, anyone can find joy in them, but we're letting platforms like Webtoons and Tapas and all the other massive corporate apps rob us of that joy and accessibility in the pursuit of "success" and profiting. Webtoons was never the sole way to profit off this medium and yet I still see people every day who underestimate the existence of legitimate publishing houses and self-publishing, who think that publishing on Webtoons and landing an Originals deal is the only way to find success in this industry. This is meant to be the era of creators, of self-starting and self-actualization, and yet we're still handing all of that control over to corporations that only seek to exploit our art, bodies, and labor, while convincing ourselves that this will somehow all be worth it. We stick with Webtoons, despite the numerous controversies it's been involved in and the lack of support it's given even its own hired creators. We stick with Tapas, despite the undercutting of its most core components such as its community and the outlier genres it used to be known for hosting. We find new ways to justify using platforms that are steadily going downhill - Patreon, Twitter/X, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook - because we've been convinced that these are the routes to success, so if we acknowledge their failures, then "success" can no longer exist.

Because we need to pay rent. Because we need to eat. Because we need to survive. Because it's a lot more complicated than just "stepping away". Because the startups just don't have any of the surface level potential for us to immediately identify and get on board with, so we don't give them a chance.

I realize this post got very existential and depressing. I've been creating comics for well over a decade now, largely unnoticed, and I've fallen victim to these same limiting mindsets that we have to stick to one way, one "formula" for success - a formula that changes with the wind and only works for those who get in on the ground floor. It's been slowly killing me from the very beginning, robbing me of my joy to create, of my reason to even do this in the first place - to tell and share stories with others, to express myself creatively, to live my life surrounded by art and stories and creations made by and for others. It's made me tired and miserable, and I can tell it's done the same to those who have shared that boat with me.

But there's one silver lining I can always be sure of, and it's one I was reminded of after realizing I was still in the MochaJump Discord, with one announcement post that I hadn't yet read.

Webcomics are one of the few online mediums that still truly belong to the people. Corporations are trying their hardest to take that power away. Let's not continue to let them.

If you want to help sustain, patronize, and contribute to the growth of sites that are still being operated by small teams (or even one man armies), please, consider checking out the following websites, some of which serve as platforms or publishers, others which operate as link directories for independent sites run by creators.

ComicFury GlobalComix TopWebcomics The Webcomic List The Webcomic Library Hiveworks SpiderForest SmackJeeves Archive Inkblot.art And whoever wants to use the GitHub source code used for MochaJump (RIP)

Let's do our part to decentralize webcomics again. We may not be able to leave the platforms that weakly sustain us, but we can still support those that strengthen and support us.

[wibble-wobbegong]

shaking a metal bowl full of treats to attract my old mutuals to this post so they will give me life updates

[sirenium]

'If you're doom scrolling this tag-' shut up. Get out of the tag that you, yourself detest, block it, and move on. You're helping nobody with these corny ass posts; if anything you're exposing yourself to the very thing you hate. You're triggering yourself. And if you doom scroll, get out of the tag and block it. It's that simple.

[demodraws0606]

All i'll say is

Believing that Dr*am is a groomer does not mean you have any moral high ground to judge people who don't think he is.

This situation is complex and both side have pretty damning evidence on the other. You can't blame either side for believing what they believe.

You are ALLOWED to hate Dream, you are allowed to not feel comfortable around people who are fans of him. You are allowed to think he is a groomer without being attacked for it.

You are NOT allowed to tell people to end their own life or that they're a "pedo defender". Holding moral judgement about people you dont even fucking know personally in a situation like this is not helping anyone.

I'm not gonna say what I personally believe because no one's fucking buiseness. All I want to say is that the trend of judging people's morality in situation like this is just purely a way to make yourself feel better.

We live in the real world, sometimes situations aren't black and white.

Idc make assumptions about this if you want, internet genuinely has been fucking vile recently and my hope in people's critical thinking skills have sunk to an all time low.

This isn't even about Dream I'm gonna be honest although the issue is especially worse with him. You could replace him with a piece of fucking cheese and I would say the same thing.

It's not just Twitter, the internet from the beginning has instilled into people such a chronic fear of being a bad person, it's rotted people's brains.

Leading to shit like policing queer identities and supporting people's horrid behavior for the sake of feeling superior, of feeling like you're the one in the right.

I'm so sick of people constantly fighting eachother, it's disheartening to see the internet has just become like this now. I've had panic attacks thinking of how people would perceive me for opinions I DIDNT EVEN SHARE on the internet back in the day. For fucking enjoying content people saw as problematic.

People act like they're doing this to help people or a cause but let's be honest what good are you fucking doing beefing with random people on social media ? What are you acheiving ? You can't tell me people don't find personal satisfaction in feeling morally superior to someone.

Btw if you take anything in this post out of context or look into my other posts to try and assume shit about me, you are what this post is about. Fuck off and don't ever fucking interact with me.

Anyways, probably gonna take a break from social media outside of discord and youtube (idk if they count as social media but idc). Might change dependent on if I get hate for this post or not and if I something to brainrot about.

This rant was ruminating in my brain for a long time I'd argue even before the Green Bitch was in the picture but it definitely became the tipping point for me to realise that the majority of people on the Internet are just Awful.

[noritaro]

the moment internet "activists" realize you're an activist in order to help and support others in need and NOT to be seen as a "good person" for their ego

there would be a lot less performative activism but alas we haven't reached that yet