#Go Live Digital Platform

[britneyshakespeare]

james somerton is just one of those people who wants to do whatever he wants and cannot stand the consequences of their own actions, which they willingly chose to do. entitled and self-absorbed motherfuckers. and that's the only way you can think to do the things he's done in the first place. having no base respect for the people you steal from and your audience, of course you think you can somehow do something to win them back. you can't. no one but an egomaniac would do what he's done in the first place, and only an egomaniac would think they can come back from that and still deserve to be praised and respected and have your cozy career like you did before you were exposed for what you've done. people like this cannot be worked with in the public eye.

[techsrenterprise]

[thebibliosphere]

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm one of those people who priates books. But only because I've bought so many books that disappointed me! I need to flip through a bit of it before buying.

Sometimes, if the author has kofi or patreon or something, I like to just give them the full price of the book. That way they get it all. But I also know that this isn't the perfect answer because it messes with stats and actual readership and therefore advertising and the platform they are selling on promoting it....

It's complicated. Maybe I should buy the book normally and tip the author what the publishers/printers/distributors take? But that can get really pricey fast. Ugh.

Books are often a luxury when you have no money. I’m very familiar with that. I've saved up for several months sometimes because I wanted a $5.99 ebook and didn't want to steal from the author. That’s just what being poor is. Wanting something doesn't entitle me to it.

That said, most books these days have a reading sample on purchasing sites so you can see if you like the style. Most sites also offer refunds, at least on digital books, before you reach a certain point. (please be sparing with refunds if you can. The refund is taken from the author/publisher, not Amazon. Same with audible. My audible funds are often close to zero or negative because people just return and reuse their monthly credit.)

You can also check and see if the books are available at your library, and if not, request them. Honestly, library sales are so, so, so good for authors. Libraries pay higher lending license rates to authors, and also, depending on the country, every time someone checks out my book via Libby or the local equivalent, I get a little tiny amount of money (we’re talking literal pennies, but it can add up), and it increases the library’s likelihood of re-purchasing the library lending license the following year.

You can alsp sign up to be an ARC (advanced reader copy) reader through places like NetGalley or by checking if the author offers ARCs as well. In a world of algorithms, books live and die by reviews. Some of us are quite happy to give out ARCs for new and upcoming titles.

Failing that and you have absolutely no other option... Yeah. Ko-fi or whatever is an option. Even if I wish they didn't do it because it fucks my sales metrics, I still appreciate when I get a little ding on ko-fi for the exact amount of the book. It's always telling. I even sometimes get little anon messages going “sorry for pirating your book it was really good.”

Like thank you. Please buy the next one properly, lol.

[orangeocelotmartyn]

Martyn raids Ren after revealing he’d accidentally not replied to him and Ren is Dramatic about it.

I cut out a lot of dead air (read: all of the moments of Ren waiting for his sounds to end) to trim this down, and the transcription is under the cut:

Martyn: We should go um, raid, uhm...actually, my boy Ren-Diggity-Dawg's on. Let's go raid Ren. Ren-Diggity-Dawg. Actually I got a message the other day from Ren that I still need to reply to, I just, I saw it before I went live...today, and I was like, ''oop, don't know how that one slipped past me." Is it RenDogTV? It is, right, sweet! Uh, right, enjoy Ren's stream--

Ren: Welcome to all the Marteens, that have arrived in the chat. Martyn, bro. You and--listen. You and me need to have words, Martyn. (three seconds of silence) You know what, cut the music. Cut the music, this is-this is getting serious business now. Zoom in a little bit for dramatic effect. (five seconds of silence)

Ren: Martyn. Bro. (two seconds of silence) I-Why you do me dirty, bro? Eh? What's up? Why you do me dirty like this, bro? (deep inhale) Dear viewers, let me tell you a story. A few days ago. Approximately--you know what, give me one moment, Imma figure out exactly how many days ago. I'm gonna rub the salt in this wound. Mm-mm-mm.

Ren: We're gonna-we're gonna cook this one. Let's see, the twentieth. That's four days ago. Approximately four days ago, I sent a message to Mister Marteen. An important message. A message from the heart. What do I get in return, from Mister Marteen? Crickets. Crickets.

Ren: Give me one second, I need to find a cricket noise. I-I'm not as professional as Martyn, you see. Martyn's got instant access to sound effects because he's a professional. And uh, broadcasting genius. I am uh, you know. A little bit more amateur. Give me one second, guys, I gotta log into Epidemic Sound and everything. It's gonna take a while. Can't remember my password. (keyboard clicking, deep inhale, laughs) Okay, here we go. (keyboard clicking)

(soft cricket noises that sound almost like a fire alarm in the distance play for ten seconds, uninterrupted. In the actual video, this sound plays for twenty-one seconds)

Ren: This is quite a long sample guys, it's two minutes long. Sorry about that. (cricket noises for thirteen seconds. In the actual stream this clip was thirty-five seconds long, and he turned the sound of the crickets up to be louder)

Ren: It's only halfway, guys, you still-still got a while to go. (cricket noises for twelve seconds. In the actual stream this clip was twenty-three seconds long. He then pauses the crickets for four seconds, zooms in on his cubito)

Ren: Pause for dramatic effect. (he starts the crickets again for thirty-five seconds [the full time here and in-stream] before pausing it again)

Ren: That is all I have to say about this matter. Thanks for the raid, Martyn. W-welcome everybody. You joined us right at the start of a trial chamber run. (four seconds of silence, then a fond laugh) And as an update, t-to Marteen-gate. I have received a reply! Hold on, I gotta find another sound effect real quick, one second. One second guys, uh, (keyboard clicking, then the sound of scattered applause and indistinct voices for thirteen seconds)

Ren: I have received a reply from Marteen! (the clip is still going, just indistinct voices) This-this sample is not working for me. (a clip of a motorcycle revving begins to play instead) (flustered laughing) That's n-that sample is not working for me either. Wait, I've got a sample on the stream deck! (applause begins, including happy yelling) I received a reply! (the sample continues to play) (Ren singing) Joy to the world / Marteen has replied! / He has finally / Replied! (deeper voice) After four days. (laughter, normal voice) Thank you for the reply, Marteen. I am very excited. We shall, uh, continue our correspondence, digitally. Upon another platform (laughing under his breath)

Ren: --X-Fandom is here with a gifted sub to Marteen! Ya weren't even subbed?! (silence for four seconds, then decisive keyboard clicking. Then the sound of a cat yowling, which is swiftly replaced by a baby crying for seven seconds, uninterrupted. In the actual stream it is twenty seconds long.) It's quite a long sample, too. Sorry guys. (In the actual clip, the baby continues crying for ten seconds uninterrupted, before Ren laughs over the baby crying, and then pauses it, while this video has only one second pause between baby crying and Ren's laughter) Oh, goodness gracious, I'm having too much fun.

[delusional-day-dreamer]

First. Love. Part¹ - p.b

playlist. next part.

‣ paige bueckers x oc (reader?, tbh i'm not sure how it works!)

‣ wc: 1790

‣‣ synopsis: people say in life, you have your FIRST love and your first LOVE, but what if paige was both?

‣‣‣ a/n: y'all i'm SO SORRY for my inactivity, summer classes and morning practices are awful. i promise i will try to release more fics on a more regular basis. For the sake of the FICTIONAL story, pazzi simply does not exist, they are best friends but denied the rumors during azzi's freshmen year and she has a boyfriend. Songs that are underlined are linked to tiktok covers just because I love them!

Us Weekly : Tuesday June 13th, 2023

Just this friday, upcoming singer-songwriter Jenna Smyths performs her own song, Means Something and an instrumental cover of Holy Ground by Taylor Swift at BBC Live Lounge to introduce her soon to be released debut album, Eternal Us (not my most creative moment I know 😔). The young singer has just graduated from UCLA after completing her three-year Bachelor's Degree with a double major, her focus being Business Economics with a minor in Film, Television, and Digital Media.

This Friday was Jenna's first televised performance, and her constantly sold out small-venue concerts have been applauded all over social media and by celebrities for her vocal maturity, depth and intricacy within her song lyrics, and her ability to convey raw emotion through her performances. However, this song cover was announced by the singer-songwriter to be particularly special to her, as she mentions that this song "brings back specific memories".

The twenty-one year old kept her composure throughout both songs, yet fans on various media platforms have pointed out Jenna's seemingly tear filled eyes during Holy Ground. The artist addresses the emotions she felt during the song during her first appearance on the Jimmy Fallon Show after performing her first released single, Promise, which is prominently featured as it’s one of her most popular singles.

The Tonight Show: Monday June 12th, 2023 "Please welcome to The Tonight Show, Jenna Smyths," Jimmy introduced you as you walked onto the set of the show, the live audience cheering loudly as you took your seat on the couch.

"Thank you so much Jimmy, it's such an honor to be here, sitting on this sacred couch," you joked, bringing some of your recently curled hair over your shoulder in hopes of disguising any traces of anxiety the crowd or camera may pick up. Thankfully, it worked as you heard the stir of laughter on set, allowing you to relax further into the couch, it actually was quite comfortable.

"It's incredible that we have you sitting here, I mean almost two years ago you blew up on TikTok for your incredible song covers, and then you started playing live in a bunch of LA venues, then you started releasing your own music, and now you're a UCLA Alumni sitting here," as he summed up your rise to fame, the audience began another round of applause.

"Oh my gosh I know right," you giggled, overjoyed that the audience was showing so much support towards you and that your first big interview was going so well. "I swear it was like two weeks ago I was singing on TikTok and then freaking out about my notifications and somehow I just teleported here," you laughed off the slight tinge you felt in your heart.

College had gone by far too quickly, and you were constantly consumed with stress regarding your future. Up until a few weeks ago, you had no idea what you were going to do with your life. What if your album flopped? What if you never made it big? How would you move on and get a regular job from there?

"Yes yes, I remember seeing some of your earliest covers on tiktok. In fact," a smirk appeared on his face, he clearly had something hiding up his sleeve. "We just so happen to have a little video edited together of your old covers, for old times' sake just to show how far you've come," he laughed at the nervous expression on your face and the crowd's enthusiasm.

"Oh god, some of those are from questionable times," you mumbled, raising your right hand to slightly cover your mouth as the video played.

Clips of you singing in your old college apartment bedroom appeared, switching in between guitar covers and piano while singing Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, We Can't Be Friends by Ariana Grande (yes pretend it was out at the time), Bags by Clairo, to the Man Who Can't Be Moved, and a few others. You watched your younger self, heartbroken and healing, singing songs to post on the internet just for your friends to watch, and yet somehow your voice had reached millions of people.

"Well you can see it here clear as day folks, Jenna has clearly always had a knack for those gut-wrenching songs, the ones that make you wonder if you're depressed or the artist is just incredibly good at what they do," you knew he was introducing your live performance with this, sneakily rubbing your sweaty palms over your jeans. You weren't nearly as scared as your BBC performance, but the combination of fear and adrenaline before any performance was overwhelming compared to logic at times.

"So what do you guys say, because I think we need to hear it live to determine which one it truly is," the small crowd erupted at Jimmy's rhetoric, eager to watch your performance.

"Well when you ask so nicely how could I ever refuse Jimmy?" You grinned, standing up to make your way over to the performance area with the live band.

With your guitar in your hands, you let the unique sense of calmness and security wash over you as you adjusted the mic in front of you. Music had always been one of the biggest parts in your life, and even know it never failed you. Not in your best moments, and not even in your worse.

"This is Promise from my new album, Eternal Us, out June 30th"

***Post-performance part of the interview***

"Jenna, you know I have to ask you this, because so far the songs on your album, your covers, and even your performance at the BBC Live Lounge were all fairly depressing songs," Jimmy insists. The two of you had been joking and answering the interview questions with a sense of ease after the performance aspect of the show. The audience was eating up the playful energy the two of you seemed to have, despite the twenty-seven year age gap.

"Please, ask away Jimmy," you quipped, enjoying your time on the show. The steady laughter from the live audience had long soothed any remaining nerves. Growing up, you always felt as if you were born to perform, and this type of live interview was right up your alley.

"And I swear I'm being serious with this, but does the emotion in your music affect you the same it affects your listeners? Because after your cover of Holy Ground aired, you blew up on social media even more then you were before. But one of the things your fans noticed was that it looked like you were gonna cry?" Jimmy inquired, you could hear small murmurs from the audience section at his question, no doubt intrigued to hear your answer.

"You know Jimmy," you began, "Honestly it was just a heat of the moment kinda thing. Like obviously I changed the song in a different key and sang it that way intentionally you know? Taylor is known for her ability to write the most gut-wrenching lyrics and then syncing them up to a catchy beat in a pop song and boom, it's a hit," you explained to both him and the crowd.

"But when I was offered the opportunity to go on BBC Live Lounge and I was trying to decide what song to cover, the lyrics of the song just really stuck out to me in a personal way and I wanted to convey to my listeners the emotions I felt reading and experiencing the lyrics, not listening to it as an upbeat pop song. But don't get me wrong, it's an incredible song just the way it is!" You ended your ramble enthusiastically, trying your best to not delve into the deeper emotions laced within your statement.

"Of course, I mean it was your first televised performance and to a Taylor Swift song no less, but this song has a very meaning to it, unlike some of Taylor's other doctorate-level essay worthy songs you could spend hours analyzing," Jimmy jokes, lightening the mood as always before asking the hard hitting question you had been dreading the entire interview.

"Why did you choose to sing a song about reminiscing of a past relationship, an ex lover if you will. I mean, a good majority of your songs follow the heartbroken post-breakup theme, but the media isn't aware of any relationships you may or may not have had during your time at UCLA, was there someone before?" He questions.

"You're right, I didn't have any actual relationships while at UCLA. My only serious relationship was during my last two years of high school, and a lot of my songs I'm releasing now were written during that time or even earlier, I've just polished them a lot. And of course, my earliest covers are from my freshman year of college, so the wound was still pretty fresh you know?" You skimmed over the topic, keeping the discussion as light-hearted as possible.

"Oh my god, all of that was from one person?" Jimmy jokes, unaware of how hard his statement hits home for you.

"Yeah I mean, I guess your first love will just do that to you, you know?" You joked back. You refused, refused, to let Paige Bueckers affect you in this way on national television. It had been three years for god's sake, you needed to get a grip of yourself.

"Well, they must have been one heck of a first love to be such a long-lasting muse for you," Jimmy pried, and you could tell he was waiting for you to give more details about your relationship.

"Nah nah, cut the cameras, I think we're out of time for tonight right," you nervously laughed, jokingly leaning over to gesture in an over the top manner to the camera crew to stop filming, which roused hefty laughter around set at your antics.

"Don't worry Jenna, we'll leave that topic for next time yeah?" Jimmy chuckled at your immediate refusal, using his perfected charm to continue the interview without any bumps or awkward conversations.

Before you knew it, the interview had been long over and you were laying in your hotel's bedroom. In your opinion, the NYC suite was luxurious and was far too large for just one person to reside. But fortunately for you, you were used to the sense of loneliness you felt in the empty room. To think that you were only a few hours away from Paige, your first love, your first everything, and yet you had never felt more separated from a person you used to love with your whole being.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Part 2 of So High School will be out soon I promise, this series just happened to randomly inspire me and I want to finish it asap before I lose motivation or hit writer's block!

[celeste444spacey]

Why be private and why celebrities chose to be private

thanks to kpop anon for the beautiful post rec

Hello loves, i know we are here and we are manifesting that fame and all that shit. The fame and noticeability is certain. Is the way you can handle it certain too?

We all know branding is so freaking important, not just as a person but as a celebrity??? You HIRE people for it. It's undeniable at this point that socials are practically key promoter of brand for famous people. But in the era of oversharing and overposting, even the most A-list of celebrities can quickly lose their allure. Plus, it's not cute if your whole life is on show just for everyone to know.

I will be the first to say (don't quote me), the statement "if it's not on social media, it didn't happen" is not true.

WHY?

Literally each and every thought of a person lately is somewhere on social media. And it's kind of bad. Cause like where's the mystery of an individual now??? And people are forgetting about digital footprint (god knows some of y'all need to remember it exists).

WHY WOULD A CELEBRITY CHOSE TO BE PRIVATE

Simple. It's not anyone else's business.

Why the fuck would Beyonce want the world to know that she had eggs for breakfast? Or that Blue Ivy did something funny? It's not the public's business.

That adds to the allure of Beyonce as well. Why do you think she's the celebrity for celebrities??? Let me explain with the word

UNATTAINABILITY

That woman is not available to just anyone. She doesn't go to every party there is, isn't posting all the freaking time, not letting us know every move she makes; just the ones we need to know.

And that adds to her charm. Humans like unattainability. Mystery draws people in. Proof? Why do you get excited when someone is telling you a secret? Nobody else knows it, so you feel exclusive. The exclusivity makes you feel connected and stuff, and humans crave connection.

And where do you get that connection with Bey? Through her music. That's where relatability comes in. Her feelings, her raw emotions, her struggles and her vulnerability.

WHY RELATABILITY AFTER A CERTAIN POINT LOSES ITS CHARM

Fans love relatable celebrities. But there should also be a line to that. Why? after a certain point, it's pretentious

Yes okay you binge watched that show and reacted the same way to the plot twists like other people. But you don't have to constantly remind us that you do embarassing things like normal people. YES WE GET IT YOU'RE HUMAN AND JUST LIKE US- wait but you're NOT JUST LIKE US!

At the end of the day you are still famous. You're wealthy and privileged to a certain extent. You're living a better life in many ways than the general population.

Do not confuse being humble with downplaying your pedestal.

Being humble is recognizing where you come from and being grounded and grateful for your oppurtunities and platform and still acknowledging your success. Not reminding your 11 million followers that you have chips everyday.

AND YOU SHOULD BE PRIVATE TOO

It's fucking alluring. that's why we love Alexa Demie. Do you know anything about her??? Exactly. And it's hot.

Don't make your life so available to people, it's exclusive xx

LOVES AGAIN TO KPOP ANON

i could make a part 2 or "spin off" of this post, it was so fun

[mariacallous]

A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Meta argues that US law requires the company to let people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds.

It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has tussled with researchers and developers over tools that give users extra privacy options or that collect research data. It could clear the way for researchers to release add-ons that aid research into how the algorithms on social platforms affect their users, and it could give people more control over the algorithms that shape their lives.

The suit was filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of researcher Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. It attempts to take a federal law that has generally shielded social networks and use it as a tool forcing transparency.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is best known for allowing social media companies to evade legal liability for content on their platforms. Zuckerman’s suit argues that one of its subsections gives users the right to control how they access the internet, and the tools they use to do so.

“Section 230 (c) (2) (b) is quite explicit about libraries, parents, and others having the ability to control obscene or other unwanted content on the internet,” says Zuckerman. “I actually think that anticipates having control over a social network like Facebook, having this ability to sort of say, ‘We want to be able to opt out of the algorithm.’”

Zuckerman’s suit is aimed at preventing Facebook from blocking a new browser extension for Facebook that he is working on called Unfollow Everything 2.0. It would allow users to easily “unfollow” friends, groups, and pages on the service, meaning that updates from them no longer appear in the user’s newsfeed.

Zuckerman says that this would provide users the power to tune or effectively disable Facebook’s engagement-driven feed. Users can technically do this without the tool, but only by unfollowing each friend, group, and page individually.

There’s good reason to think Meta might make changes to Facebook to block Zuckerman’s tool after it is released. He says he won’t launch it without a ruling on his suit. In 2020, the company argued that the browser Friendly, which had let users search and reorder their Facebook news feeds as well as block ads and trackers, violated its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Meta permanently banned Louis Barclay, a British developer who had created a tool called Unfollow Everything, which Zuckerman’s add-on is named after.

“I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly,” Barclay wrote for Slate at the time. “But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically.”

The same year, Meta kicked off from its platform some New York University researchers who had created a tool that monitored the political ads people saw on Facebook. Zuckerman is adding a feature to Unfollow Everything 2.0 that allows people to donate data from their use of the tool to his research project. He hopes to use the data to investigate whether users of his add-on who cleanse their feeds end up, like Barclay, using Facebook less.

Sophia Cope, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, says that the core parts of Section 230 related to platforms’ liability for content posted by users have been clarified through potentially thousands of cases. But few have specifically dealt with the part of the law Zuckerman’s suit seeks to leverage.

“There isn’t that much case law on that section of the law, so it will be interesting to see how a judge breaks it down,” says Cope. Zuckerman is a member of the EFF’s board of advisers.

John Morris, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes open development of the internet, says that, to his knowledge, Zuckerman’s strategy “hasn’t been used before, in terms of using Section 230 to grant affirmative rights to users,” noting that a judge would likely take that claim seriously.

Meta has previously suggested that allowing add-ons that modify how people use its services raises security and privacy concerns. But Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, says that Zuckerman’s tool may be able to fairly push back on such an accusation.“The main problem with tools that give users more control over content moderation on existing platforms often has to do with privacy,” she says. “But if all this does is unfollow specified accounts, I would not expect that problem to arise here."

Even if a tool like Unfollow Everything 2.0 didn’t compromise users’ privacy, Meta might still be able to argue that it violates the company’s terms of service, as it did in Barclay’s case.

“Given Meta’s history, I could see why he would want a preemptive judgment,” says Cope. “He’d be immunized against any civil claim brought against him by Meta.”

And though Zuckerman says he would not be surprised if it takes years for his case to wind its way through the courts, he believes it’s important. “This feels like a particularly compelling case to do at a moment where people are really concerned about the power of algorithms,” he says.

[feminist-space]

Article by Fortesa Latifi:

"Being the child of an influencer, Vanessa tells me, was the equivalent of having a full-time job—and then some. She remembers late nights in which the family recorded and rerecorded videos until her mother considered them perfect and days when creating content for the blog stretched into her homeschooling time. If she expressed her unease, she was told the family needed her. “It was like after this next campaign, maybe we could have more time to relax. And then it would never happen,” she says. She was around 10 years old when she realized her life was different from that of other children. When she went to other kids’ houses, she was surprised by how they lived. “I felt strange that they didn’t have to work on social media or blog posts, or constantly pose for pictures or videos,” she says. “I realized they didn’t have to worry about their family's financial situation or contribute to it.”

Vanessa, who requested anonymity to speak freely about her family dynamics, says she helped create content for huge companies like Huggies and Hasbro when her mom landed endorsement deals. When she reached puberty and began menstruating, her mother had her do sponsored posts for sanitary pads. “It was so mortifying,” she says. “I just felt like I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out.”

Being part of an influencer family changed everything about her life, Vanessa says. “Sometimes I didn’t know where the separation was between what was real and what was curated for social media.” And her mother’s online presence indelibly warped their relationship. “Being an influencer kid turned my relationship with my mom into more of an employer-employee relationship than a parent-child one,” she says. “Once you cross the line from being family to being coworkers, you can’t really go back.”

...

Khanbalinov has had zero new offers since he took his kids offline. “When we were showing our kids, brands were rolling in left and right—clothing companies, apps, paper towel companies, food brands. They all wanted us to work with them,” he says. “Once we stopped, we reached out to the brands we had lined up and 99 percent of them dropped out because they wanted kids to showcase their products. And I fought back, like, you guys are a paper towel company—why do you need a kid selling your stuff?”

The law has woefully lagged behind the culture here, but there’s signs that policymakers might finally be catching up. In 2023, in addition to Illinois, three other states—New York, Washington State, and New Jersey—proposed bills to protect influencer kids. Contrast that with the flurry of legislative activity in just the first two months of 2024. Seven more states—Maryland, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, California, Arizona, Minnesota—have introduced similar legislation. Some of the bills are going one step further to protect the privacy of the kids featured in this content. In some states, proposed legislation would include a clause that borrows from a European legal doctrine known as the “right to be forgotten”—it would allow someone who was featured in content when they were a child to request that platforms permanently delete those posts. None of the current legislation introduced, however, would outright bar the practice of featuring minors in monetized content.

...

The movement on this issue was glacial for years, but it finally feels like the ice has thawed. Much of that progress is thanks to activists like Cam Barrett (she/they), a 25-year-old creator (@softscorpio) who uses TikTok to talk about her experience of being overshared in their childhood and adolescence. Barrett doesn’t go by her legal name anymore because of the online history it’s tied to. “I love my legal name,” Barrett tells me. “I just don’t love the digital footprint attached to it.” Last year, Barrett testified in front of the Washington State legislature as a proponent of a bill to protect influencer kids. This year, they testified again—this time, in front of the Maryland legislature.

“As a former content kid myself, I know what it’s like to grow up with a digital footprint I never asked for,” Barrett told the Maryland House of Delegates Economic Matters Committee in February. “As my mom posted to the world my first-ever menstrual cycle, as she posted to the world the intimate details about me being adopted, her platform grew and I had no say in what was posted.” And yet, Cam says her activism has been healing.

For Cam and other influencer children, getting a paycheck won’t give them back what they lost—a normal childhood unobstructed by the cameras pushed into their faces. But it could be the beginning of some version of restitution. “My friends say I’m fighting for little Cam,” she tells me. “It feels very healing because I didn’t have anyone to fight for me as a kid.”"

Read the full article here: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a60125272/sharenting-parenting-influencer-cost-children/

[genericpuff]

no stop this article is too funny

this is from 2020 and while it talks about webtoons in general as a platform and medium, there's an excerpt from Rachel that's ironically and hilariously telling on herself when it comes to her priorities as a creator and how her work has aged incredibly poorly in the past 4 years:

She may as well just be saying, "I like Webtoon because they don't have any quality control" and "the trad publishing market had standards that I couldn't live up to, so instead of actually trying to live up to them, I went with a platform that has zero standards and was willing to make me into the standard regardless of my own qualifications and lack thereof."

Like y'all, take this as advice from someone who's had their fair share of rejection letters... the print industry dumping your unsolicited portfolio in the bin isn't gatekeeping, it's the nature of the business. The way Rachel describes it here - albeit I'm sure it's simplified for the sake of being an interview answer, but still - makes it sound like she was just expecting to walk right into the trad publishing market without an agent, without a completed manuscript or pitch, without any professional representation, and just slam her portfolio of mid-2000's art on the desk expecting them to hire her on the spot.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of barriers that prevent people from getting into the trad market, hurdles that can often be outright unfair (lacking the funds, lacking the connections, etc.) but... there's also a reason many of those barriers are there in practice.

First of all, fun fact: the reason why many publishers don't take unsolicited manuscripts isn't just to help them filter out the spam and low-effort submissions and prevent an overload of submissions (because if they took submissions from anyone and everyone, the overviewing system would break entirely), but it's also for legal purposes so that they don't get sued. Because if Joe Chucklefuck sends in an unsolicited manuscript that just so happens to include a plot point about the multiverse, and then a new book series or movie comes out that is about the multiverse, Joe Chucklefuck might get the sense they're being stolen from and attempt to sue them for plagiarism. This is why it's stressed so much by publishers that any unsolicited manuscripts will not just go unread, but will be thrown straight into the bin.

But second, many publishers simply don't want to take the financial risks on random start-up creators whose only experience is running their own personal projects on Tumblr, much less personal projects like Rachel's, half of which are fetish-content and all of which are unfinished. Of course they weren't gonna take Rachel seriously back then, she hadn't done anything to build up her presence in the industry.

In that sense, yes, self-publishing or pursuing a platform gig like Webtoons probably was Rachel's next best option which would be perfectly acceptable on its own, but it's just so, so telling that she thinks it's a "perk" for Webtoons to lack so much in the way of quality control, and we would ironically see the glaring evidence of that "perk" 3-4 years later in LO's final season when every single element of it as a "professional" piece of work turned to shit. It's no wonder she liked Webtoons in 2020 for letting her do anything she wanted, because what she wanted absolutely would not fly with an actual editor and publishing agency that cared about putting out a polished piece of work. The only way she was able to get "in" with a professional publisher was through Del Rey after Webtoons brokered a deal for her to have LO put into print, and even that level of prestige can't hide the fact that LO sucks ass in print. It's almost like under normal circumstances and without Webtoons carrying her on their shoulders above every other creator on the platform - many of whom actually do have experience in both tradpub and self-publishing - Del Rey wouldn't have paid her any attention. Without Webtoons, no one would take her seriously because she doesn't take what she does seriously, and it shows in her priorities as a creator who simply wants to just do whatever she wants without any sort of reasonable oversight like research or editing which are, again, necessary expectations within the tradpub industry, because it's not just about being a free-thinking self-expressive artist anymore in that industry - it's a business.

Of course, Rachel is probably now laughing from her soapbox over the fact that she now technically helps run an imprint, so haha "poo on the meanie trad market", but considering that imprint has still not launched and has been put on the same "coming soon" track that the LO television show has been on for the past 4+ years on a loop, I'm not holding my breath that it's actually going to amount to anything substantial.

(gotta love how they asked if Rachel was gonna create any more stories and her answer was RSP, which will help other creators bring their stories to life. so at best she didn't answer the question which is nothing new for her, at worst she gave away the fact that she's gonna be acting as some kind of producer who will be given all the credit and praise for other creator's works and efforts lmao no thankssss)

And god knows what the quality control of this imprint is gonna be like if Rachel's attitude toward the trad market overall is, "Nooo they won't let me do what I wantttt :((((" when she admittedly never even broke into the trad market to begin with and had zero experience working within that industry prior to LO.

And even then, Webtoons still doesn't give her as much freedom of choice as she claims to have. I mean ffs, this is the same person whose moderators stated that the Swarovski crystal dress from the finale was done as a "fuck you" to Webtoons for not letting her draw Persephone nude all the time.

She's obviously still being prevented from doing what she wants to do, when a lot of what she wants to do is better off not passing the vibe check and making it into the comic.

Quality control exists for a reason, Rachel. And "letting you do what you want" isn't necessarily a "flex" that Webtoons can claim over trad publishing when that "flex" is forgoing the traditional barriers that would usually prevent someone like you from failing upwards into manufactured fame the way that you have.

And that's my big bag of cents on that.

[engineering]

Tumblr Hack Week, September 2023 Edition

Once again it was Hack Week (more than just a day!) at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on scratching a personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Day in March made it all the way to production: redesigning how direct messaging looks on Tumblr! Pretty cool!

Here are some of the projects that got made for this most recent Hack Week in September. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…

Tumblr Patio

Maybe this will look familiar to you, but we love this idea of being able to organize Tumblr feeds into many “columns” side-by-side, creating a very dense but lively view of Tumblr. Lenny, Kelly, and Paul hacked this together, and we’re pretty excited to see where it’ll go. Each column can be a different feed on Tumblr, like For You, Following, your Activity, a specific blog, a search, Trending, even a Collection, so many possibilities!

Tumblr Booths

Meanwhile, a separate team of @autoplanes, Katie, @lex, Shaun, and Eve dug into the idea of selling digital and physical goods through blogs on Tumblr, leveraging our sibling platform WooCommerce! Blogs could put whatever they’d like for sale here, and have a dedicated space for it. We know there are so many amazing artists and artisans here who could use this to more easily sell their creations on Tumblr!

Avatar Frames/Hats

This one is a golden oldie, it keeps coming back hack day after hack day, and each time it gets even better. Santi and Maxime hacked together some example avatar “frames” and “hats” that folks on Tumblr could purchase for their blog. Maybe eventually people could create these and sell them or gift them to each other!

As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!

[m4sonn]

✧*̥˚ The outsiders Modern AU Headcanons *̥˚✧

- Credits to @stevelovbot on Tumblr for the inspo for this post! And also credits to my friend @peachyponyboyy who I collaborate with for these!! :3

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Ponyboy

• Is a big fan of the Simpsons and can quote almost any episode word by word.

• Says that The Godfather is his favorite movie ever but it’s actually Mamma Mia. He secretly loves musicals.

• Is the only one with a Tumblr account and he’s pretty active in there.

• Definitely writes fan fiction or character studies in AO3.

•The only person that knows about that and gets to read them is Johnny.

• His pfp always matches Johnny’s in any social media platform.

• When he feels annoyed/pissed by his brothers, he likes signing them up for random ass newsletters and whatnot, making sure they get spammed constantly.

• He loves digital books and owns a Kindle but he feels like nothing compares to real books.

• His bi awakening was watching hunger games with dally and seeing peeta, made things worse when he saw the fnaf movie, he’s just a wh0re for josh hutcherson. (He would’ve made the whistle baby edit /j 😣😣🔥🔥)

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Sodapop

• Is the only one who can actually use TikTok and he’s pretty popular. He loves doing trends with the gang, probably forcing them to do the cinnamon challenge. (they agree bc they're all stupid)

• Loves avocados a lot and gets teased for posting pictures of his meals.

• His favorite game is Assassins Creed but isn’t a big fan of the community and fandom around the game. He just wants to play it and have fun.

•Facetimes the rest of the group whenever he wants, specially Ponyboy and Darry.

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Darry

•He’s the owner of the only Netflix and/or any other streaming accounts of the group and is the one who pays for it. The rest of the gang add their own profiles and watch everything they want. (Or they share one account, there is no inbetween)

• Likes to keep up with the news and current affairs, so he follows a lot of reporters and activists on Twitter and Facebook. He’s subscribed to lots of newsletters for sure.

• Was the biggest football star of his school and got a scholarship thanks to it. He went to college but had to stop playing football eventually due to a freak accident on the field. However, this didn’t sadden him, since he got his diploma and works in things related to football anyways, he works as a coach for the local youth football team.

• His phone password is Ponyboy and soda’s birthdays mixed together.

• He is a big fan of No Doubt, when he found out that they were performing at Coachella, he absolutely lost it and started saving for a ticket immediately. When he went and saw them in the front row he cried, absolutely WEEPED.

• Constant listener of destiny’s child and connects with survivor on a personal level and he’s not scared to admit, you’ll sometimes hear him singing it while he’s doing stuff around the house while listening to music

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Dally

•Has been blocked by multiple celebrities on Twitter AND instagram, on various occasions.

•Is a very big fan of The Hunger Games and one of his favorite characters is Peeta.

•Makes sure to be the first one to text Johnny on his birthday, even if they’re standing next to each other.

•Loves crime/serial killer podcasts and has good knowledge about these topics.

•Hates going to the dentist. There is a very embarrassing video of him being out of it after getting one of his wisdom teeth removed that Johnny recorded (Dally forced Johnny to take him since he was scared).

•Is always listening to music and doesn’t like sharing his earphones unless it’s Johnny.

•Has practiced a lot of sports during his life and his favorite one so far is boxing.

•Got drunk one New Year’s Eve and confessed that Darry was like the brother he wished he had had, and that his New Years Resolution was to make it up to Darry (He never did, since he had forgotten). and nobody has ever let him live it down.

•Secret fanboy of the neighborhood, one time he thought nobody was home and started singing daddy issues at the top of his lungs, two-bit has it on video and never lets him hear the end of it about it.

• Still enjoys stealing and robbing old ladies and young children and still enjoys annoying random pretty girls on the street (so basically still and ahole)

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Johnny

• Wears denim overalls with cute sweaters and loves jackets with lots of pockets.

• Loves spicy food and is the only one in the group who can actually eat it without any problem.

• Has always wanted a puppy or any kind of pet but his situation at home always made it impossible. Because of this, Pony gifted him a goldfish one Christmas and they set the fish tank at the Curtis’ so Johnny could visit it as much as he wanted without risking getting his parents angry.

• He gets really attached to that fish pretty fast and treasures the gesture behind it. Pony and him name is Frost.

• Pony and him use Twitter DM’s just to send memes to each other and store them.

• He has a private Twitter account that only Pony gets to follow.

• Can speak Spanish and French.

•Owns a leather jacket that had been Dally’s a couple of years ago and takes care of it as if it was made of gold.

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Two-Bit

• He’s the reason why Darry had to get a Disney+ account.

• Knows all the songs from Frozen I.

• Wanted to have a mouse as a pet (since…mickey mouse, duh.) for a while but Darry refused.

• He doesn’t admit it, but he loves sweet drinks made of fruits and cocktails more than beer.

• His socks never match and they all have at least one hole in them.

• Is the one that gets the most excited about Christmas. He’s not particularly religious but he loves the decorations, and the lights, and the whole mood in general. He’s the one that always makes sure the rest of the boys have presents, even if it’s something small.

• His first time going to disney world he bawled his eyes out, like full on mental breakdown inside the park, Ponyboy and Sodapop saved up all their birthday money, allowance, and paycheck money for about a year and a half to buy the tickets. (they wanted to get a fast pass and like the entire deluxe trip for him, that's why it took so long.) Ponyboy was SO embarrassed from two-bits crying, “You’re 22, Stop. Crying. Over. Mickey.” but still was happy for him.

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : Steve

• He tells everyone his top artist is Limp Bizkit but it's actually Queen, his top song was good old fashioned lover boy.

• Wakes up early to watch the F1 races and has never missed a season of Top Gear since he was little. His favorite was Hamilton, but ever since he saw that race with verstappen vs hamilton, his opinions have changed…

• He’s the best at playing video games, and he especially likes horror ones like Resident Evil. (absolute wh0re for Leon Kennedy, i am too tho so no shame)

• Sodapop and him are always playing online together and they sometimes let Ponyboy join them. Him and Sodapop gave ponyboy an unplugged controller once and said it was wireless (for the shitz and giggles and to see how long it took for him to notice), he realized half way through the game and told Darry who then yelled at them for 5 minutes.

• Doesn’t like TikTok and is always going about how Vine was just much better. (He’s stuck in 2014..)

• Gets angry when his texts go unanswered in the group chat (they do it on purpose since they know it pisses him off.)

• He listens to cotton eye joe on repeat, change my mind.

[toskarin]

hey rin, a friend of mine enjoys composing music digitally and has a lot of respect for you as someone with more experience with that sort of thing. he has a hard time convincing the people around him to listen to the things he makes, in both the "finding an audience" way and "getting the people around him to give him their opinion on something he's working on way," and he wanted me to ask you if you could speak on your own experiences with those problems and how you've dealt with them. less related, he was also curious about your inspirations for the music that you make. i know this is a lot to cover, so if it would be easier for you to speak with him directly then please let me know

so I'll open by saying that, as far as people who can give good advice on this go, I'm probably not one of those. a lot of what I do only works because of some specific problems with my brain that are oddly adaptive to this sort of thing

that being said, this is a bit of the "tough love" kind of advice for surviving as an artist, so I'll make a second reblog for the second half of the question

this is either advice that will work or a ramble that will lead your friend to making his life unbearable, so look before you leap

-

The Easy Section, or "You've Gotta Be a Bit of a Tradie"

let's go over the business stuff quickly before I start rambling at length about the boring stuff

learn to love the work itself. "find a job you enjoy and you'll never work a day in your life" is garbage, but creative work really is the one area where you should double down on this. kick back and bump your own album on release day, thinking about how every second of it is something that didn't exist before you put it together. this is what's gonna keep you above water when the wind is dead

get on bandcamp. there is nowhere better for small musicians right now. bandcamp is basically the last remaining website with an effective suggestion algorithm that caters to people who want to actively engage with music and buy it

consider getting on instagram. in the majority of places you're likely to live if you're reading this, the local music scene is on instagram. probably don't use your personal instagram for this

consider getting on soundcloud. you won't make sales through soundcloud, because it's a streaming-focused site (more on that in a moment) with a focus on passive listening, but it's pretty decent for networking, especially with digital music production. soundcloud is linkedin for deadbeats

stay off spotify. streaming generally isn't worth the trouble these days unless you're playing concerts or are otherwise already established. if you aren't uttering the words "you can find me on..." more than once a month, it's probably not worth pursuing a spotify presence to end that sentence with

self-promote. if you have platforms, use them. find the subreddit for your genre and post yourself on the self-promo day. consider posting some bandcamp album codes when you do this, not just so you can get word of mouth, but because someone having an album in their collection means you effectively have a permanent zero-cost advertisement for your music which will only show itself to people who are verifiably looking at something similar. companies pay dizzying sums for ads that couldn't dream of being this targetted. this is a big reason why bandcamp is THE place to be for small musicians

cross-promote and collab. work with your friends. if you don't have musician friends, go make some and then help each other out. "independent" music is a misnomer

blind yourself to the metrics. do not look at engagement metrics. pay them no mind at all. don't look at them unless you're trying to see how effective a specific, deliberate course of action was and already know what you want to find

remember that strangers are unknowable. people do things for arbitrary reasons. if you don't have someone giving you written feedback, don't make any assumptions at all about why they did something. skipped tracks and minimum-price pwyws mean nothing at all

present your stuff in a way that gives it context. why should someone care about your stuff? give them a reason. carve out an hour to really work on a nice album cover, go the extra mile and include track-by-track narrative with your dungeon synth album, or just describe what you're expecting people to buy. I firmly believe that NOMAD/VIRTUE was successful in large part because of its presentation

gimmick. gimmick gimmick gimmick. discount codes are more fun than automatic discounts, free album codes are more fun than free albums, contests are more fun than giveaways, so on so forth. lacking any physical goodies to bundle in, you should still endeavour to give people Something To Do that makes them feel like they're really engaging with your music

zero expectations, zero overhead. do not rely on the whims of complete strangers to justify whether or not you end up in the red. if you ever find yourself saying something like "I can afford to pay for a session musician because I'll just make it back" you can't afford to pay for a session musician. you're probably never getting bailed out if you eat a loss, so try not to put yourself in a situation where you can eat a loss to begin with

someone else's expectations, someone else's overhead. if someone else is paying you to make this music for a soundtrack or something, if (and ONLY if) you have the money in your hand and know you have it, you're no longer gambling. at this point, you can start to look at expenses as investment

now onto the less fun stuff. here's where I ramble for like an hour at you.

-

if there's one thing I've really had hammered in over my decade-odd as a somewhat commercial artist (in all the disciplines I've worked with, which is most of them), it's that you have to be a bit of a bitch about it sometimes

that nagging fear in the back of your head that you're annoying? it's stopping you from doing what you need to do: annoy people

with that being said, this next section is kind of...

The Rough Section, or "You've Gotta Be a Little Hard-headed"

at the end of the day, you'll often find that you are your only advocate, and that means you kinda have to get your foot slammed in a few doors if that means holding them open. this also unfortunately means that you've gotta convince yourself you're pretty good. you don't have to think you're great, but confidence is a trade skill

the last opinion people see before the first time consciously engaging with your work (which here means "the thing that primes them for how they feel about it") is yours

which brings us to the first uncomfy rule

absolutely no cutting yourself down before anyone else even gets a swing

you can be modest if you want (you don't have to), but you absolutely cannot prime people to see the flaws in your work. if 50% of people are discerning enough to notice a flaw, why make that number 100%? what do you gain from that?

if something isn't as finished as you'd have liked it to be, but you've pushed it out the door anyway (which you will sometimes have to do), you absolutely cannot prime people to consider it unfinished

if the thing is still being worked on, there's nothing wrong with being forthcoming about that, but the fastest way to make someone think of something as "inferior product" when they otherwise would never have reached that conclusion is by telling them it is

and that, of course, leads us into a bit of an inversion of the previous rule

absolutely do not take the majority of your validation from strangers

doing this is bad for a million reasons, but I see the worst of this in visual arts, where artists double down on what gets them the most engagements and lay themselves at the mercy of complete strangers who have no actual investment in them

of course, it's normal to desire validation and approval from people you respect, but if you put yourself in a position where it's possible to enter a negative feedback loop that crystallises into you no longer making art from the default response of neutral apathy from strangers, it's not a matter of when: it's going to happen to you one day

so what's the move here? spend 8 years making music you don't release like you're in a compressed time chamber? probably not. I did it that way, but I didn't get much out of it, so you probably won't either

the actual answer is that you've gotta network. you need an inner circle. you need people with shared interests so that you can gas each other's stuff up

just like everyone else, you need your friends

you need to have friends who care about you, about what you're doing, and you need to care about them and what they're doing

this is because, while self-confidence is important...

the majority of your external validation as an artist should come from your friends and peers, not strangers

it's important to have artist friends, because then you can encourage each other in ways that are personally meaningful, but having your friends behind you, whether or not they're musicians, is so incredibly important

if you're motivated exclusively by success, however you're choosing to measure that, what you're actually doing is forming a nightmarish parasocial relationship with the concept of a crowd. not even a real crowd! a fictional group that materialises when you've created "the conditions for success"

there is no such thing as a truly independent artist. if your understanding of artistic success requires competition against others, you're going to lose that competition and then explode (unfortunately common)

finding your audience as an artist (and mind you, art is a social field) is very much a process of networking, but it feels gross to say it that way, so I'll just leave that at "if you want to be known by others, you need to be willing to know others"

anyway, this doesn't really terminate in a complete sentiment. I was just transcribing a train of though

if I were to boil this down to a shorter, snappier answer that I could read comfortably read out, it'd be...

TL;DR

the process of finding an audience is so much less about actually finding one than it is about learning to create happily whether or not you have an audience. developing an audience is the largely incidental byproduct of long-term creative efforts coupled with self-advocacy and interpersonal networking

if you want to be found by a scene, you have to participate in a scene, and if you want to participate in a scene, you need to be in the scene. so on so forth

as stupid as it might sound when I put it into words, the truth is that you can't build any kind of audience in isolation. someone has to find you somehow, and it's a lot easier to be found if you're actually somewhere that people might look

[heich0e]

wouldn't it be nice? - suna rintarou/f!reader (haikyuu!): fluff but suggestive at times, established relationship, talk of babies/families/pregnancy, committing to the bit is all fun and games until the bit commits to you, tw: light miscommunication since some of u guys hate that, let the record show this was NOT written for his birthday, i didn't even KNOW it was today ok, i will not be taking questions at this time (or ever)

You know exactly what started it.

The problem.

It was some sappy commercial you saw on TV one lazy Sunday afternoon.

You rarely even watch television—not proper cable television anyway—preferring the simplicity of streaming services in this modern day and age. It's a complete fluke that you happen across it at all while you and Rintarou rest sprawled across his couch in the afternoon sun, your feet tucked underneath his thigh. You wouldn't even go on to remember what the commercial was for; all you remember is the perfect, cherubic little baby at the centre of it, and the way that it made your heart melt.

You let out a long, wistful sigh once the advertisement transitions into the next. "I want to hold a baby."

It piques his interest. That stupid, completely unremarkable comment that you'd come soon to regret.

Rintarou pulls himself a little more upright at his end of the sofa, shooting you a mischievous look. His expression might seem placid to most people, impassive even, but you know it, and him, and all his minute eccentricities too well to be fooled.

"I'll give you a baby," he muses, angling his body over yours on the sofa with his arms caging your waist. You draw your legs back instinctively—hips perpendicular to your thighs and heels to the bottom of your bum—at the first sign of trouble.

Your lip curls, and you lift your sock-clad feet so they press flat against his chest, pushing him back with all the strength you can. He hardly budges, but you expect as much.

"Ew, Rin," you snort, head lolling to the side to idly watch the next useless commercial on TV as it unfolds, “gross."

Suna pauses, a hand loosely circling your ankle, and you glance at him from the corner of your eye. There's a look that you don't recognize that flitters across his face. His grip tightens a little, his thumb sweeping down over the round protrusion of your joint and back again.

"Gross?" he asks softly.

"Yeah, gross," you say, pulling your foot out of his hold. It takes a bit of effort, because he doesn’t seem to want to move, but you roll over onto your side and wiggle out from under him to rise up off the sofa. You shuffle into the kitchen for a snack, and you feel his eyes on you as you go.

But that was just the start.

You’re not sure if you just never noticed, or if the universe has a deeply perverse sense of cosmic humour, but after that Sunday afternoon, it seems like there are babies everywhere you go. 

And if not actual living, breathing babies, then it's all matter of things that are decidedly baby-adjacent. Itty bitty onesies on display at the store you two are shopping at. Sweet souvenir plushies at the Aquarium that are meant for little ones to hold. Diapers, formula, and various other baby necessities are advertised in the posters mounted on bus stops, on train stations platforms, and on flashing digital billboards. 

And every single time, without fail, you see them when you’re with Suna. 

And every single time, without fail, he looks at you and waits for you to meet his gaze. 

You’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding it, honestly. But then he’ll always make some comment. Point it out. Make it obvious.

“Look at that baby’s tiny hand. I bet our baby will have my hands.”

“Can you believe that babies are really this little? Do you think ours will be this small?” 

“If you were buying these for our baby would you get the yellow or the—“

“Trick question,” you cut Suna off, snagging the yellow pair of training chopsticks (complete with a little ducky on top) out from his hands and shoving them back onto the display he’d just plucked them off of. You don’t allow yourself to linger for too long on how cute they really are. “Babies don’t use chopsticks, and also we’re not having a baby.”

You continue down the aisle of the market, a familiar pain throbbing just behind your eyes that Rintarou seems so uniquely skilled at eliciting. Your face is hot too, but that’s probably just from the frustration. After a moment you hear his feet shuffling along after you, and the two of you finish your grocery shopping in relative silence.

You’re used to putting up with all of your boyfriend’s other annoyances and oddities, so this is just another one to add to the ever-growing list. But this time, something feels a bit… different. 

The two of you stop at a vending machine for coffee on your walk home since it’s cold out. Suna has the largest of your two reusable grocery bags looped over one of his arms, and somehow while you’re digging for change in your wallet he manages to weasel the other one off of your arm and onto his own, too. 

“There’s a coffee shop right around the corner, why are you stopping here?” he asks, watching as you carefully make your selection from the humming machine in front of you. You press the button of your choice, and a can of cafe au lait clunks down into the waiting chute below. 

“The metal can keeps my hands warmer,” you explain, sticking a few more yen into the machine and choosing Rintarou’s favourite, too. His choice makes the same descent yours had, and you crouch down to retrieve it for him, holding it out to him in offering as you stand. 

He blinks at you.

“Nah, I’m good,” he says, shaking his head a little. “Hands are full, anyway.”

You balk at him soundlessly for a moment. “Give the other bag back, then!”

“Nope,” he replies, making a point to enunciate it clearly in a way that you know he knows drives you crazy. He takes a step in the direction of your apartment, and you have no choice but to stick the can of coffee he’d declined into your coat pocket and chase after him.

It does a great job of keeping your hand—tucked into your pocket and wrapped around it—warm as you walk, though.

Nearly back at your apartment, your can of coffee drained and properly disposed of, a little ball of fluff waddles past you on the sidewalk, heading towards the entrance of a nearby park. You and Rintarou both pause, equally confused by what you’ve just spotted.

Behind the amorphous little thing is a couple, maybe a few years older than you two are, trailing not even a metre away. You watch as they coo and fawn over it as is wobbles unsteadily towards the open stretch of grass ahead. They call it pet-names, and try to convince it to turn around for mom and dad so they can take a picture.

Oh.

A baby.

Probably a little older than a baby given the whole… walking thing. But it’s still so tiny, even in its big, puffy coat, so they can’t be very old. The hood is pulled up over the child’s head, and you realize upon closer inspection that it has—

“Teddy-bear ears,” Rintarou says, cupping his fingers over his mouth and blowing warm air into his hands. “That’s so cute.”

“Yeah,” you say with a soft smile, watching as the child toddles along in their fluffy little teddy jacket.

Suna must have put the grocery bags down at his feet at some point when the two of you stopped walking, and when he pulls his hands back from his face, you see how the tip of his nose has gone pink from the cold. He dips down in front of you, his eyes narrowed, scrutinizing you up-close. 

“What?” you ask him nervously, a hand fluttering self consciously to your face. 

His breath leaves his mouth in wispy clouds as he tilts his head to the side. He’s so close that the warmth brushes against your lips like an airy, indirect kiss. You wonder if he can taste the coffee that clings to yours.

“What?” you repeat yourself again, a little more insistently this time. You reach up and pinch either of his cheeks between your thumbs and forefingers—stretching the pliable flesh outwards in an attempt to get him to back off a bit. His rosy cheeks are cool under your warm touch.

“Do you think we’d make a cute baby?” Rintarou asks, though the question is a little garbled thanks to your grip, and your stomach clenches involuntarily. His hands, and his frigid fingertips, reach up and rest over your own where you’re still pinching his cheeks—though your vice has eased slightly.

“You can barely even make an omelet,” you huff out as heat rises in your cheeks, pulling your hands out from under his and looking away. “Like I’d ever trust you to make a baby.”

“People make them all the time by accident, you know,” he remarks, rubbing at his stinging cheeks where you’d been pinching him. “I’m sure I could do it on purpose if I really set my mind to it.”

You dip down and grab the grocery bag he’d taken off your hands earlier, hiking it up onto your shoulder.

“Why are you so obsessed with this stupid baby joke?” you ask him exasperatedly, following it with a long, aggrieved sigh that you can see as you breathe it out.

He looks at you for a moment, his brow pinching in the middle. His nose is still so pink, and it makes the green in his eyes stand out more. 

You watch how Suna’s lips part, like he’s going to say something, but then they press together in a thin line again without uttering a word. He picks up his grocery bag with one hand and sets off in the direction of home, and this time you feel a little sheepish as you follow after him.

The apartment is quiet when you return home, and it stays that way as the two of you unpack the groceries in your kitchen side by side. You bought more than you usually would on a weekly grocery trip, all because Suna’s been staying over more than he usually does. But there’s a sudden frostiness that seems to have creeped in from outside, as if clinging to your coattails, and the chill has now settled between the two of you. 

It makes a strange sort of anxiety prickle under the surface of your skin, tender like a bruise. It makes you wonder if half of these groceries are going to go to waste.

“I’ll shower first,” Rintarou mutters without turning towards you after he puts the last pantry item away and closes the cabinet.

Stress sits heavy in the pit of your stomach when he doesn’t look at you. It’s intentional, you know it is. Suna’s favourite hobby is staring at you—he’s told you that himself many, many times. But he doesn’t even spare you a glance before he shuffles off towards your bedroom. 

You stand in silence in the kitchen, as though that weight in your gut keeps you anchored in place. You can hear the rustle of Rintarou’s clothes hitting the hamper. You hear the bathroom door close. You hear the spray of the shower turn on. 

You hear your heartbeat. Loud and wet in your ears.

You’re being ridiculous. You know that. You’re all worked up over nothing. 

This was all just some stupid joke that he was being annoying about in the first place. That he found every possible opportunity to bring up. 

You aren’t even sure what’s upset him so much; uncertain as to why you being annoyed about one of his blatant attempts to annoy you seems to have caused him offence.

You curl up on your sofa as Rintarou showers, picking at the fraying cuff of your hoodie as you similarly pull apart every second of your memory from the walk home from the market in an attempt to identify what could possibly have gone wrong. You’re thinking about the can of coffee—left sitting, unopened and room-temperature now, on your kitchen counter—when you hear the shower turn off.

The seconds tick by agonizingly slowly as you wait for your sullen boyfriend to emerge, but when he does he still seems resolved to avoid you. You wait on the sofa, your fingers stilled in the motion of fiddling with your sleeve, anticipating that he’ll come ask you to blow-dry his hair, just like he always does.

He doesn’t. 

The hairdryer clicks on in the other room, and the sound makes you feel sick. 

“Rin!” your voice leaves you involuntarily, without an ounce of conscious effort. You sound panicked.

The hairdryer clicks off immediately, and Rintarou appears in the doorway to your bedroom—half-dressed and hair half-dried—in an instant. His eyes are alight with concern.

Your hand had flown to your mouth as soon as you called out for him, too late to actually muffle the sound. But it stays there as you look at him with shocked, notably-guilty eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asks you, eying you suspiciously.

“Nothing,” you murmur, your fingers still resting lightly over your lips, you avert your eyes. “It’s nothing, sorry.”

He hesitates in the doorway for a moment, and then turns to head back to the hairdryer.

“It’s just—“

He pauses when you speak again, one of his hands resting on the doorframe he’s lingering beneath—neither in nor fully out. 

“—you’re mad at me.”

You watch his shoulder blades as your words hang in the air between the two of you. The chill in your apartment, unlike it had been outside, is only proverbial—but you half expect to see wisps of vapour slipping out on the edge of your breaths.

“I can’t figure out what I did wrong.”

Suna looks at you over his shoulder, his already vulpine eyes narrowing a little further. Not in irritation, but consideration. For all the strangeness between the two of you today, you can still recognize that much in his expression. 

“I’m not mad at you,” he finally says, and you hate how relieved you feel at so few words. Hate even more how him turning back to face you makes the weight in your stomach lessen. That as he approaches you on the sofa you feel the air warm with every step.

Rintarou perches on the edge of your couch, a full cushion between the two of you as you sit there quietly. Both of his feet are on the ground, but yours are drawn up onto the sofa with you, facing him. Slowly your feet creep forward, slipping your toes under his sweat-pant clad thigh.

Suna’s head droops forward, and he lets out a breathy, wry laugh.

“What are your theories so far?” he asks quietly. 

Your head tilts to the side in confusion.

He peeks over at you, peering up at you from the corner of his eye.

“What do you think you might have done wrong?”

You hum quietly, pursing your lips slightly.

“Well, I… I thought maybe I got you the wrong coffee. I didn’t ask, but you always choose that one, so I just thought…”

Suna clicks his tongue.

“Nope.”

You huff a bit, staring at your hands in your lap. “Well… there was that baby at the park.”

You feel Suna’s eyes on you, but you’re suddenly too wary to meet them. He doesn’t tell you you’re wrong though, so you continue. 

“And I said you can’t make an omelet.”

He laughs a bit again, and you know that wasn’t it either.

“Are you upset because I said that I didn’t think you could make a baby?” you ask, peeking up at him. “Rin, I’m borderline militant about taking my birth control. I obviously don’t think you’re impo—“

Rintarou tips his head up a little further, meeting your gaze. Caught in his stare, it’s suddenly like your words die before you can get them off the tip of your tongue. Slowly, he reaches out towards you, taking one of your fidgeting hands and holding it in his. His touch is warm now, in contrast to what it had been at the park. He lifts your hand up to his mouth.

Delicately, he kisses your fingertips. His lips brush against the digits, over your knuckles and up to your palms. He presses your hand to his cheek and looks at you with the most pitiful gaze. It makes your chest ache. 

“I don’t like it when you say that,” he says reticently. And for all Rintarou’s height and weight and sheer breadth, he sounds so impossibly small.

“Say what?” you ask him, and your voice is quiet too. Vulnerable.

He leans his flushing cheek into your hand, holding it to his face and closing his eyes as he nuzzles into your touch.

“That you wouldn’t have my baby,” he whispers, “that you don’t want it.”

You resist the urge to pull away. It’s an instinct you can’t explain: a desire to keep him at a distance, to always laugh things off, to make a joke out of very real feelings. 

“Because I do.”

You blink.

Suna opens his eyes and looks at you, and for the first time you see the very real, very not joking pain in his eyes.

“I want that with you.”

Your mouth is dry and you’re frozen. You stare at him, completely still, stunned by his sincere confession.

“What?” you manage to squeak out. 

Rintarou closes his eyes again, breathing out a little sigh. He pulls your hand from his cheek, folding your fingers down so they’re hooked in a loose fist around his thumb. He brings your hand to his lips, not quite a kiss but close enough to call it that anyway. 

“Not right now,” he murmurs into your knuckles, lips brushing against you as he speaks the words. “But someday.”

You’re still so shocked that you don’t know how to respond. He peers at you, hand still held to his lips, his eyes more resolved than they are wounded now. 

“And I want you to want that. But I don’t know how to make you want it too.”

Your heartbeat thumps in your chest, resonant and palpable. Heat has crawled all the way up your face now, and you’re fairly certain your hand has gone clammy, but Rintatou passes no comment even if it has.

“Do you think you could?” he asks you quietly. Sheepishly. Earnestly. “Could you want that? With me?” 

You pitch yourself forward suddenly, and Rintarou lets out a little grunt of surprise as the two of you topple back into the sofa. You hide your burning face in the crook of his neck, that smells like your body wash and shampoo but somehow so much better, clutching onto him like your life depends on it. Suna seems shocked for a moment as he finds himself flat on his back with your weight on top of him, and his body is stiff as he processes it. After a few beats of your too-loud, too-telling heart pass, he finally eases. He wraps his arms around your waist and holds you tightly to him.

“You’re so stupid,” you grumble, your eyes squeezing shut tightly.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and you can hear the smile in his voice. The genuine laughter that’s hiding just behind the words. He hugs you a little tighter. “Probably.”

You stay like that for a while, basking in the warmth of Rintarou’s body and the rhythm of his breath.

“You love me though,” he says quietly, “so that reflects pretty badly on you.”

You lift your head to meet his gaze, and find him barely holding in a laugh. You can’t help but laugh with him. Can’t help but enjoy your favourite sound.

Rintarou scoops you up in his arms again, tugging you into his lap. He presses featherlight kisses to the corner of your jaw, and you fiddle with his long, lithe fingers. He sighs, but this time the sound is at ease. His damp hair tickles your face as he rests his forehead against your temple, nosing at your cheek.

“Hey, Rin?” you murmur as you run your thumb over the space between his first and second knuckle on his ring finger. You think about the kid you saw at the park in the fluffy jacket, and the besotted parents trailing along behind it.

He answers you with a content, if not slightly curious, hum. 

You turn your face towards him, and your noses brush. Rintarou’s lashes flutter as his gaze turns a little heavy-lidded. You can feel his breath on your lips, that’s how close he is. You inch forward until the space between you is almost completely gone.

And just before your lips meet, you smile.

“I do think we’ll make a cute baby.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Meatspace twiddling

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!

"Enshittification" isn't just a way of describing the symptoms of platform decay: it's also a theory of the mechanism of decay – the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.

I call that mechanism "twiddling": this is the ability of digital services to alter their business-logic – the prices they charge, the payouts they offer, the particulars of the deal – from instant to instant, for each user, continuously:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Contrary to Big Tech's own boasting about its operations, the tricks that tech firms play to siphon value away from business customers and end-users aren't very sophisticated. They're crude gimmicks, like offering a higher per-hour wage to Uber drivers whom the algorithm judges to be picky about which rides they'll clock in for, and then lowering the wage by small increments as a way of lulling the driver into gradually accepting a permanent lower rate:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is a simple trick. The difference is that tech platforms like Uber can play it over and over, and very quickly. There's plenty of wage-stealing scumbag bosses who'd have loved to have shaved pennies off their workers' paychecks, then added a few cents back in if a worker cried foul, then started shaving the pennies again. The thing that stopped those bosses was the bottleneck of payroll clerks, who couldn't make the changes fast enough.

Uber plays crude tricks – like claiming that a driver isn't an employee because the control is mediated through an app – and then piles more crude tricks on top – this algorithmic wage discrimination gambit.

Have you ever watched a shell-game performed very slowly?

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-do-penn-tellers-famous-cups-and-balls-trick-in-12-steps

It's a series of very simple gimmicks, performed very quickly and smoothly. Computers are very quick and very smooth. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: do crude tricks with superhuman speed and they'll seem sophisticated.

The one bright spot in the Great Enshittening that we're living through is that many firms are not sufficiently digitized to to these crude tricks very quickly. Take grocery stores: they can get up to a lot of the same tricks as Amazon – for example, they can charge suppliers for placement on the most prominent, easiest-to-reach shelves, reorganizing your shopping based on which companies pay the biggest bribes, rather than offering the best products and prices.

But Amazon takes this to a whole different level – beyond simply organizing their product pages based on payola, they do this for search. You ask Amazon, "What's your cheapest batteries?" and it lies to you. If you click the first link in a search-results page, you'll pay 29% more than you would if you got the best product – a product that is, on average, 17 places down on the results page. Amazon makes $38b/year taking bribes to lie to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Amazon can do more than that. Thanks to its digital nature, it can continuously reprice its offerings – indeed, it can simply make up each price displayed on every product at the instant you look at it – based on its surveillance data about you, estimating your willingness to pay. For sellers, Amazon can continuously re-weight the likelihood that a given product will be shown to a customer based on the seller's willingness to discount their products, even to the point where they go out of business:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

Twiddling, in other words, lets digital services honeycomb their servers with sneaky wormholes that let them siphon value away from one kind of platform user and give it to another (as when Apple silently began spying on Iphone owners to create profiles for advertisers), or to themselves.

But hard-goods businesses struggle to do this kind of twiddling. Not for lack of desire – but for lack of capacity. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon Fresh – an online grocery store – can change prices and layout millions of times per day, at effectively zero cost. Jeff Bezos, owner of Whole Foods – a brick-and-mortar grocer – needs a army of teenagers on rollerskates with pricing guns to achieve a fraction of this agility.

So hard-goods businesses are somewhat enshittification-resistant. It's not that their owners are more interested in the welfare of their customers, workers and suppliers – they merely lack the capacity to continuously rejigger the way their business runs.

Well, about that.

Grocers have been experimenting with "electronic shelf labels" in order to do "dynamic pricing" – that means that prices change quickly, in response to circumstances:

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-grocery-supermarkets

This doesn't have to be bad! As @planetmoney points out, it's a little weird that grocers don't discount milk whose sell-by date is drawing near. That milk is worth less to shoppers, because they have to use it more quickly lest it expire. Instead of marking down the price of perishable goods – day-old lettuce, yesterday's bread, etc – grocers put them on the shelves next to fresher, more valuable products, leading to billions of dollars' worth of food-waste and and unimaginable quantities of methane-producing, planet-cooking landfill.

In Norway, ESLs are pretty well established and – at least according to Planet Money's reporting – they are used exclusively to offer discounts in order to reduce waste. They make everyone better off.

But towards the end of the story, they note that Norway's grocery sector – which alters prices up to 2,000 times per day – has been accused of using ESLs to rig prices, hiking them and blaming them on pandemic supply-chain problems and loose monetary policy. Greedflation, in other words.

Greedflation is rampant in the grocery sector, all around the world. Remember when the price of eggs doubled and they blamed in on bird-flu, even as the CEO of the one company that owns every egg brand you've ever heard of boasted about how he could hike prices and suckers would just pay it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

In Canada, grocers rigged the price of bread, the most Les-Mis-ass form of corporate crime you can imagine (do you want guillotines, Galen Weston? Because this is how you get guillotines):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada

EU grocers – another highly concentrated industry – also collude to rig prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Which is all to say that while these companies don't have to use the twiddling capabilities that come with ESLs to enshittify their stores, we'd be pretty fucking naive to assume that they won't.

And here's the bad news: US grocers like Whole Foods (owned by Amazon, the company that wrote the enshittification playbook) are already experimenting with ESLs. So is Alberstons/Safeway, the massive, inbred conglomerate that has already demonstrated its passion for using twiddling to fuck over their workers:

https://knock-la.com/vons-fires-delivery-drivers-prop-22-e899ee24ffd0/

Economists love "price discrimination" – where prices change based on circumstance, trying to match the perfect price with the perfect customer. On paper, that sounds plausible: if I need a quart of milk for a recipe I'm making tonight and I get a 50% discount on some about-to-expire 2%, then everyone's better off. I get a discount and the grocer gets some money for milk they'd have to throw away at the end of the day.

But these elegant, self-licking ice-cream cones only emerge if the corporation offering the deal is constrained. Perhaps they're constrained by competition – the fear that you'll go elsewhere. Or perhaps they're constrained by regulation – the fear that they'll be punished if they use twiddling-tech to cheat you.

The grocery sector, dominated by a cartel of massive companies that routinely collude to rip us off, is not constrained by competition. And for years, regulators let them get away with ripping us off (though finally that might be changing):

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/grocery-prices-pandemic-ftc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ek0.t2Pr.g4n2usbxEcoa

For neoclassical economists, the answer to all this is "caveat emptor" – let the buyer beware. If you want to make sure that ESLs are only used to offer you discounts and not to gouge prices, all you need to do is note the price of everything you buy, every time you buy it, and triple-check it every time you go back to the grocery store. Just be eternally vigilant!

Thing is, the one thing computers are much better at than humans is vigilance. With ESLs and other twiddling mechanisms, you're a fish on a hook, and the seller is tireless in giving you a little more slack, then a little less, until you finally drop your guard.

Economists desperately want these elegant models to work, but "efficient market hypothesis" is a brain-worm that always turns into apologetics for fraud. Dynamic markets sound like a good idea, but they are catnip for cheaters. "Just be eternally vigilant" is miserable advice, and no way to live your life:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

In his brilliant novel Spook Country, @GreatDismal describes augmented reality as "cyberspace everting" – that is, turning inside-out:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/07/31/william-gibsons-spook-country/

The extrusion of twiddling technology from digital platforms into the physical world isn't cyberspace everting so much as it is cyberspace prolapsing.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

[dingodoodles]

🎉 CONTEST ANNOUNCEMENT!🎉 Hey! Soooo To celebrate the Fool's Gold: Into the Bellowing Wilds campaign setting arriving in people’s hands

We got a contest to make some Post cards advertising the Bellowing Wilds A hard sell, I know lmao😬 You win cool shit too from us and Hit Point Press! So this is what we got going on: The Bellowing Wilds needs your help! Many adventurers are soon to experience our…..EXCITING (and very questionable) creatures and locals, and may not live to tell the tale. Let’s tell it for them!

ENTRY 📩 Using your powers of persuasion, create a postcard promoting a visit to the Bellowing Wilds. Come up with a slogan, or draw an adventurer’s picture, or write a small excerpt from an adventurer’s point of view on the postcard. Either way, it should try to convince the reader to visit in any way possible! Then either:

1) Post it in our Discord in ⁠postcard-contest , to enter for the community award. Winner will be determined by most ❤️ reactions. or 2) Post it on social media with #VisitFoolsGold (Twitter/Insta/Tumblr/Bluesky), to enter for the crew choice award. Winner will be randomly chosen from eligible posts. or Both! (But you can only win one)

REWARDS FOR EACH WINNER 🏅 - 1 copy of the "Heckna! Box Set"!! 🤡 (Provided by Hit Point Press!) - The winning postcards will also be PRINTED and SIGNED by Dingo, Felix, and Avery - A chosen sticker sheet of Fool's Gold stickers!

RULES ✅ Using and/or reformatting provided images from the digital Bellowing Wilds PDF (The one given is just 1 example of what can be. Feel free to use it if you wanna) ✅ Drawing your own artwork ✅ Using clip art text ✅ You may submit to both discord & social media. Your choice. ✅ Maximum of 3 entries per person (On either/both platforms) ❌ No AI art

IMPORTANT Discord: Upvote your favorite submission with a ❤️ emoji (No other emoji / heart colors count) Social Media: You have to include the hashtag and like the contest post. Contest will end Sept 26 @ 11pm PST 🗓️ Kickstarter Backers: It's arriving! 👀 For those who have pre-ordered the Fool's Gold campaign setting, make sure you keep an eye on your mailboxes! Orders have been shipping out for a few weeks now, so if you haven't received yours yet, you should very soon! For help or tracking info, you can contact Hit Point Press at kickstarter@hitpointpress.com

I apologies for the big wall of text :'3

[the-lion-guard-88]

A message about TADC airing on Netflix

So if you saw the latest news by GLITCH, The Amazing Digital Circus is coming to Netflix on October 4th

“Honestly feel that this is a HUGE step for indie animation” -GLITCH

I’m not stating a negative opinion on it airing to Netflix, I personally find it very unexpected but I just wanted to say the following

This proves that Indie Animation can become something much bigger, this was proved for Hazbin Hotel. If you have an indie animated series you want to make then go on and make it! It could turn to something huge like Digital Circus, there are so many creative Indie Animated series ideas out there such as

“Ramshackle” by @zeddyzi

“Social Life” by @lego-man75 (in development)

“Epithet Erased” by @jelloapocalypse

“Lackadaisy” by @lackadaisycats

and so much more!

Indie Animation has a special place in my heart for being one of the only types of shows I watch now due to all the good shows I’ve watched being over or cancelled for dumb reasons, Indie Animation expresses creative minds without a company to push you around and tell you “This will be an 8 episode season” or “The show will be cancelled due to not fitting our brand” when you have had that same story on your mind for ages just for your plans to be flushed down the toilet because of some companies bossing you around, not all companies are like that but I know a few who are

Indie Animation has improved and grown since Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss’ (by @vivziepop) success and has continued to inspire a lot of people to make creative, outstanding, astonishing and stupendous material

If you have an Indie Animated series idea and are ready to make one, go on and make it! It could turn to something big like Digital Circus did, I’ve been involved in Digital Circus ever since it was teased by GLITCH and seeing the show grow into something big makes my heart warm. For everyone’s creativity is coming to life

So what’s my advice?

Don’t give up, good things are coming your way!

Congratulations @gooseworx for your show being a popular hit and having The Amazing Digital Circus be the second Indie Animated series to hit a streaming platform!

Long Live Indie Animation!